In 20 years, the typical workplace may look less like “The Office” and more like your own living room.
Today’s offices are noticeably different from a decade ago. Many companies have jettisoned corner offices and tightly packed cubicles in favor of open floor plans, which feature sprawling rooms packed with row after row of desks and few dividing walls. At the same time, more employees are choosing to work from home. But both trends have limitations: The former has been shown to hinder workplace productivity, among other complaints, while the latter can stifle collaboration.
It’s up to the office of the future to fix these issues, says Steve Gale, London head of workplace strategy at M Moser Associates, a Hong Kong-based architecture firm specializing in designing and building offices for global businesses. Gale has a solution he calls the “convivial workplace,” an office that promotes social interaction between employees. When workers socialize, Gale told The Huffington Post, they begin to swap ideas and develop a greater sense of shared purpose.
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Even HuffPost’s New York City office — with its open floor plan, small huddle rooms and mechanized standing desks — may one day be thought of as arcane and unproductive.
“Everyone wants to be open and wants to be collaborative, but when you really do the research, a lot of workers are struggling with being effective and productive in totally open workspaces,” said Meister, digging at modern-day office setups. “How do you enable collaboration without sacrificing a worker’s ability to really focus on the job at hand?”
