What’s an office good for, anyway?
Office space—its design and the concepts that drive that design—are a major contributor to company culture, employee satisfaction, and productivity. The ideal hybrid work office for your company is yet to be fully determined, but what we do know is that it’s the place where employees get what they can’t get at home.
One little-appreciated fact about working from home (WFH) and remote work is that everybody’s workspace is different:
- Family members, children, roommates, visitors, neighbors, and others may cause constant interruptions for some employees. An office can provide an oasis where those workers can work in silence without interruption.
- Some remote workers have slow consumer connectivity options. An office can offer high-speed fiber access to the internet.
- Home offices can make employees feel disconnected, isolated, insecure, and depressed. Occasional days in an office can erase those feelings.
- Home offices are almost never great places for business meetings. Restaurants and coffee shops may be less than ideal, too—especially when discussing sensitive topics like mergers, intellectual property, business secrets, and competitive analyses. A physical office can provide a professional, provisioned, and acoustically secure space for proper business meetings.
Central offices can provide all the things that home offices cannot for most employees, without provisioning individual office space for every employee.