The workplace of the future is set to look vastly different to that of today, with hybrid models of work, home and leisure blurring completely and leading to a new golden age of work, experts have predicted.
In coming years, some of us might find ourselves working in fabulous spots specifically set aside in art galleries, botanic gardens, swimming pools and shopping centres, only occasionally visiting the office or taking work home.
It’s a forecast that could confound – or guide – the efforts of companies to bring workers back into their offices, during this current fourth wave of the pandemic, to safeguard corporate culture.
“We’ll only go into the office if it ‘earns’ the time we spend commuting,” said Adele Winteridge, director at spatial design practice Foolscap Studios. “At the moment, there are two ideas around this.
“The first is that the office will mimic more and more the things we have at home – like, for instance, having a really good kitchen, being able to wander out into the garden, being family-friendly and having quiet spaces where we can do heads-down work. And the second is around having things we don’t have at home, like great communal and social spaces, flexible gathering spaces and advanced technology.”
Yet today’s binary model of working from either the office or home is only the first step in the progression to a time of multi-location working, believes Dhiren Das, director of Relative Projects, which works on major projects with developers, governments and other organisations.
He said he foresaw a huge range of spaces opening up for people to work in. “We will rethink environments like the shopping mall to become mixed-use retail, commercial and cultural spaces which invite the community in without the obligation to transact,” Das said. “Precincts will diversify to become places where work, socialising, food, cultural experiences and public spaces truly overlap in a more deliberate way.
“We also spend time working closer to nature, like an hour working at an ocean pool in Sydney, having a meeting in the botanic gardens in Melbourne, or having a week-long workathon from a remote Airbnb. Each of these is experiential, benefits health and opens up creativity.”
These ideas are all part of an Open House Melbourne series of public talks and tours on July 30 and 31. They will bring together the country’s brightest minds in workplace design, with Foolscap Studios running a public talk, Neo Nomads: Beyond Hybrid Work.
It says the new norm, moving forward, is definitely going to be a decentralisation of where, and how, we work. Work time and leisure time will increasingly mix and meld, with work embedded or blended into more environments.
The company was recently part of the bidding process for Melbourne’s new art museum, the NGV Contemporary, part of the $1.7 billion redevelopment of the Melbourne Arts Precinct at Southbank. Workspaces within that gallery were a major part of its proposal.
“It’s about having the potential to work in nice places … with embedded wellness,” Winteridge said. “COVID brought to light the importance of having a healthy environment, with cleaner and more filtered air, and operability, like being able to open windows, and having gyms or yoga rooms available.
“But the challenging of work environments is going to continue. Businesses will have to work harder to get people into their offices and we’re seeing some now having communal lunches to bring people in for the day, and events to entice them in to encourage the sense of community and for corporate culture to flourish.
“This will be a golden age for work. We’ll see that shift from workplaces to places to work.”
Some companies are already working hard to embrace the change. Developer Mirvac, for instance, with $26.6 billion in total assets under management and a further $12.9 billion in commercial and mixed use development in the pipeline, has set up a dedicated 22-person customer insights and strategy team, to focus on what end-users want from their commercial offices.
“The vast range of our portfolio gives us a 360-degree view of customers across asset classes,” said Paul Edwards, Mirvac’s general manager of strategy & customer. “So we’re able to look at their needs, values, beliefs and aspirations to enable us to work out what they would like, and create and curate and deliver extraordinary places for people to work, shop and play.
“We have a vision of human-centred design and we use both our qualitative data from observational studies, interviews and workshops, and quantitative data that we collect, to help us draw up demographic and psychographic profiles of our customers to understand them now and into the future.”
Many property firms are now also investing heavily in technology to better track how people use workplaces, and then plan for how they’re changing. For example, Australian workplace occupancy sensor and analytics technology firm XY Sense, which powers workplaces in 14 countries for brands like Mirvac, CBRE, Fidelity International and Xero – and saw a 300 per cent increase in revenue over 2021 – has just raised $14.25 million in funds to deliver services on demand.
“We’re extremely proud to already be partnering with some of the world’s most forward-thinking organisations to give them the insights they need to make the best space planning decisions for both their businesses and their people,” said chief executive Alex Birch.
They’re all elements in preparing for a future of work in which concerns about work-life balance give way to the much more complete, and positive, integration of the two, Das predicted.
“We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far in how work is becoming more integral to our personal and social spaces, as well as to our lives,” he said. “We’ll be segmenting those two spaces less and less. At the moment, we’re still focused on the immediate disruption of COVID-19 but, looking forward, how does a city transform to accommodate these new ways and modes of interacting?
“Work used to be the machine to allow us to enjoy our lives, but now we see work as an integral part of being fulfilled and happy. We’re now seeing a mixing of the two mindsets, and want to see open, enriching spaces. Real estate and property will be responding to that and seeing how to add another dimension to the experience.”