The pandemic changed how we work.
And while some companies are reverting to a pre-pandemic workweek, 81% of executives say they are adopting a
more flexible workplace.
But getting employees to return to the office hasn't been easy.
You can't insist anymore that employees come in for a five day week.
Clive Wilkinson is one of the architects being called on by the tech sector and others to help build workplaces that
accommodate the changes of a post-pandemic world.
They'll come in because they want to, not because they're told to or that they have to.
They'll come in because they want the benefits that the workplace will give them.
People are going in to the office for different reasons than they were pre-pandemic.
There's always going to be a need for the office.
It just might not be for everyone all day long, the way it was pre-pandemic.
Wilkinson is no stranger to thinking outside the box.
He's designed and built offices for some of the biggest names in tech.
We were lucky enough to win the job to do the Google headquarters back in 2004.
The Googleplex.
Sergey Brin once walked into the meeting and said, I would like a forest in the middle of the building.
And just as Google and Silicon Valley influence common trends in the modern workplace, it is once again reinventing
the office for hybrid work.
We're in a different model where employees are going to be much more purpose driven.
And so we're unwinding that idea of a worker being attached to a very specific spot of real
estate within the company.
Pre-Covid, there was a lot of emphasis on individual space.
We're really pivoting that to make sure that we're building in more collaboration spaces.
With these changes, employees are having a bigger say in what their offices look like.
We surveyed a lot of our employees about what they're looking for in the next collab office.
It's really important that we understood what our employees wanted most in the next office, and we built that into the
design.
The employers of the world are really having to listen to what makes a great workplace.
It has to fill the gaps that work from home can't fill.
Remote work introduced more flexibility to people's lives.
Working from home saved an average of 40 minutes daily from commuting, and 77% of workers say they were more productive.
But the need for in-person business has remained unchanged.
There was a lot of benefit and a lot of goodness that came from working from home.
But there was a lot of things that were missing, too, right?
People missed their colleagues.
We don't have that spark of innovation from meeting someone face-to-face.
The tax and accounting software giant Intuit is one of Clive Wilkinson's clients and it is going all in on the hybrid
model. Employees come in between two to three days in person, but that amount is up to each team.
On days where you might be doing a lot of individual work or heads-down work, working from home may be the right answer.
But when teams need to come together to collaborate, build that relationship, to innovate and move faster, we
think those are what really will draw people back to the campuses.
Wilkinson has designed two buildings for Intuit.
One was completed in 2016 and the other is expected to be finished next year.
Did the first building with them.
A lot of kind of great collaboration space, town hall space, really kind of a well-evolved working
environment. We were about to repeat that more or less in a new building when the pandemic
hit.
With the second project under construction during the pandemic, Wilkinson and his firm redesigned the interior to
reflect into its new hybrid model.
The initial plans for Intuit were very workstation centric.
Coming through the pandemic, there was an acknowledgment that people are going to be working differently.
And so the architecture needs to change functionally to better suit the wide variety of new
reasons why people are actually going into the office.
We needed to kind of selectively reconfigure that space and create environments like, there's a
library, there's more collaborative hubs.
Clive, what we wanted to review with you today was the progress on the Intuit blended neighborhoods.
So, if you recall, previously we had all workstations throughout the entire open office space and what we have
moved forward towards is indicating certain locations for open collab.
We're in a time period where buildings have to be super flexible.
They have to be able to expand and contract.
Through redesign of this building, this was actually an open office environment, so it looked just like this, but it was
really siloed. And so we thought that this really lended itself to a quiet life or a program.
But Intuit is asking that we really future-proof this space and consider what this could be day two, if
they need to max out the building, remove that library, and then bring back those workstations.
I like how these different pieces can act as testing grounds, little beta testing
pieces, and then they can see how that works over a period of time and adjust the rest of the building.
Intuit'd new office layouts revolve around regions it calls neighborhoods.
The neighborhood concept is one where you take an entire floor plate, which can serve hundreds of people, but then
it's broken down into smaller compartments.
Putting teams together, but with a variety of space types, some seated, some conference rooms, some bookable,
some non-bookable, but all in service to the way the groups are going to need to work, especially in a
hybrid world where not everybody may be there.
Just come in and check in to the desk.
It's surrounded by other support spaces.
So there's some two team rooms down at the end, as well as different drop-in rooms along the side.
And those are really for focus work.
So this is an example of what we're calling our library.
The concept was really to ensure that our employees had choices, particularly the engineers who
needed some additional spaces to do the heads-down and focus work.
This is an area that we've actually already set up, and one of the things we know that we needed to incorporate is
lockers.
Video conferencing tech is everywhere, helping bring remote and in-person workers together.
I am talking to you today from our Mountain View campus.
Mountain View is our headquarters and we have upwards of 1000 videoconferencing spaces on campus.
You can Zoom. It has a couple of presets.
The upgraded rooms that we're working on have what we call auto framing.
And we heard really loud from our employees that their their concern is they want to be seen and be able to be
seen in the room, whether they're joining virtually or in the room.
This is an example of one of the experiments that we're doing in collaboration spaces to really look at when people
are coming back and they're not constantly looking at their laptop.
The visuals and the content that might be shared in a Zoom call is close enough so that you can see
it.
Another one of Wilkinson's clients is Collab, which is a social media creator tech company.
Even though about half of our team is in LA and we're expecting them to come in to the new space 1 to 3 times a
week, but the majority of the team is going to continue to work remotely.
So it's really important that the new space that we design really works well for both
in-office team members and remote team members.
It has also taken learnings from hybrid work to influence the design of its new headquarters in Los Angeles.
Having employees come back to the office, we're competing with the comforts of home, so we have to make the space
really inviting and comfortable and fun to visit.
And thinking about an office for them, it really was all about visitors and the opportunities of having
multiple settings for photo ops and shooting video and things like that.
We have a whole number of different collaboration settings and it's mostly around collaboration and a little bit
proportionally about actual focus work by their staff or their visitors.
These days, of course, Zoom and video conferencing is a huge thing.
So you'll see multiple dotted around the place, little smaller Zoom rooms, but also more
collaborative, larger ones so that bigger groups can actually connect digitally.
Most of the furniture is reconfigurable and all you've really got are these kind of sets, and they do
feel a little theatrical and they are intended as being a little theatrical.
And I do think also over time they're going to be able to change and evolve those sets.
There is no workstations necessarily.
It's really open collab space.
There's some enclosed meeting rooms.
And the idea is that it is truly just a co-working space where creators can come in, but also employees, and they can
work together.
It was about creating a space that the creators and the employees wanted to come to every day.
To see the workplace having to transform, if you really just think of the big picture, it's super exciting.
Like, we don't know what it's going to be like in five years time.
I personally find that incredibly exciting.
This is really a very simple equation.
Make spaces that people want to be in and work in and collaborate in.
We're starting to gain a deeper understanding of what people are looking for in their workplaces and
what are the things that are missing about working from home that the office can fill in the gaps for.
And companies aren't just rethinking how to organize their physical offices.
We are definitely in discussion with clients about having a physical community and a digital community
and devoting equal energy to the digital community.
The hope is that all of these changes should empower workers and help make the office a better resource for productivity.
We've found that our employees are just as productive, if not more, working from home.
I think the future is this hybrid experience, both in person and work from home.
There's just so many benefits to it.
People have more diversity and choice in where they work.
But we're missing some things about working in the office the way we were pre-pandemic.
And as we move forward and design for the future, let's not lose either of those.
Let's take the best of both of those worlds and bring them together into the future.
We certainly were working on the last model of a creative workplace, and I think it's going to go to the
next step. And the next step mostly is going to be about empowering employees.
It's going to be making people's lives so much better.