Activity-based working (ABW) empowers your team to work when, where, and how they want.
Countless studies suggest that flexibility is the future. Data compiled by CBRE shows that before COVID-19 only 37% of employees wanted a flexible work experience; that number is now 56%.
But flexible work isn’t only allowing employees to work from home. Flexiblity as a concept must become a part of your workplace design as well. In the post-pandemic hybrid work era, employees aren't coming to the office because they have to. They're coming for a specific purpose — and that purpose can vary greatly. They may want to collaborate with teammates, collaborate with colleagues from across the org, or may want to reserve a space for heads-down work.
As a result, ideas like an agile workplace are getting broad mindshare among executives across every industry. It's the best of both worlds — the office remains relevant, and employees get the flexibility and and out of the office that they desire.
Productivity is personal. Your employees perform their best work when you empower them to work when, where, and how they want. The traditional office, with rows and rows of assigned desks, is often no longer sufficient for the many workstyles of the modern employee.
Activity-based working, or an agile work environment, encourages a shared variety of space types that support the task at hand, whether that's group work, collaborating, brainstorming meetings, or heads-down work. 70% of U.S. office workers report wanting to return to office for three days a week or more and support a hybrid work schedule.
An agile office design often comprises soft-seating, reservable hot desking, meeting rooms, breakout spaces, and quiet spaces (like phone booths or cubicles), collaborative spaces, and cafes.
While these are standard space types of an agile or activity-based workplace, they're not mandated. You choose which agile space (and how much of each space) is best for your team. And an agile workspace that's best for your team today may not be the case six months from now, which is why informed agility is a critical component of an activity-based workplace.
Informed agility means using data to make real-time decisions. At the foundation of this informed agility is the feedback loop.
You should create a workplace feedback loop through both qualitative and quantitative data.
Qualitative data provides context from the employee perspective. Atlassian, for example, holds quarterly employee focus groups and uses feedback from these sessions to inform space decisions.
"If people understand that you're actually listening to them, there is a trust that is formed," says Omar Ramirez (formerly the Senior Program Manager of Workplace R&D at Atlassian). "Then, they are more likely to give you more feedback — and that creates more data for you to work with."
But qualitative data can be unreliable or misleading — particularly following something so cataclysmal as a pandemic. The emotions you feel when taking any survey don't often correlate with the behavior patterns you unknowingly showcase. For example, remote work has proven both popular and effective. But many employees appreciate the office for a healthy boundary between work and home. If you were to survey your employees in Q2 of 2021, many might say they'll spend more time at the office than at home.
That might not be the case in Q3 when these same team members tire of the commute and office distractions. No matter what they say on an employee survey, people will always vote with their feet for the spaces they prefer.
Successful activity-based workplaces find a balance between these different data points. They gather clear and indisputable space utilization metrics and add context through employee feedback. They then implement those findings to improve the workspace based on how space is actually used.
A perk of the agile workplace is it can look and feel however is best for your team. That said, agile spaces can be categorized into three workspace types:
Below, we break down the elements of an agile work environment to help you understand what answers you need to ensure each space — and your workplace as a whole — is designed to:
Soft-seating, cafes, kitchens
Huddles, brainstorms, and quick syncs. Casual collisions and cross-department collaboration
Conference and meeting rooms
Group work, presentations, and detailed planning
That's a thing we've been trying to solve recently by working with Density. Who is physically present for meetings vs. who is shown on the calendar invite?" — Omar Ramirez, Atlassian
Reservable pods, phone booths, and quiet-zone workstations
Focused work, admin work
Here are 4 ways you can measure an agile workplace, though not all are created equally.
For decades, calculating square foot per employee seemed to accurately measure the average space employees use (and need). But in an agile workplace, employees from the same teams may work remotely and collaborate across departments. Many employees don't come into the office every day — if they come into the office at all.
Some employees spend their days in and out of various buildings connecting with numerous teams. Others visit clients and track down sales prospects in the field. Employee behavior is unpredictable.
A simple calculation is insufficient for agile work — even for companies with an office-first culture. One customer we work with had an office-first culture pre-COVID. They've always used square footage to make space decisions and were in the process of reducing their space demand from 175 square feet to 125 square feet per employee.
But the pandemic shifted their office-first company culture. The CEO now realizes his workforce can work remotely — calculations using headcount can no longer identify their actual space needs.
We've asked hundreds of workplace strategists over the years how they use data to assess space needs. Many say they use badge data.
On the surface, this makes sense. Many companies already have a badge system set up to restrict access to spaces. So, they choose to use it to count people as well. But things get interesting when we ask these strategists to explain their process for getting this data. It’s painful.
By the time the workplace team gets usable data, it's 30-60 days in arrears. The data is no longer relevant or trustworthy. Yet time after time, workplace managers admit they go through these steps — to say they're doing something.
Even if the process was less painful, badge data is incomplete. Badge data doesn't tell you how long an employee stayed in your space or what they did when inside. It doesn't discern from the engineer who's there for 8 hours and the salesperson who stopped in for a quick call. This has always been a problem with badge data.
That problem is even more profound in an agile workplace. It's no longer just salespeople using offices as pitstops. A bulk of work can and will be done at home. Employees are more likely to visit the office for meetings and social purposes only.
Badge data is best for what it’s designed to do: Restrict access. Most companies know this, which is why many have historically commissioned manual workplace studies to triangulate the badge data. But not even workplace studies can keep up with the flexible future of our industry.
A globally recognizable company we work with spends $750,000 yearly to conduct quarterly workplace studies at just one location — and they have nearly two dozen locations worldwide.
Despite this investment, our client knows the data from these studies is faulty — it doesn’t age well.
Don't get us wrong — there is value to these reports. They provide qualitative insights hard to acquire elsewhere (example: “Three individuals stayed in a conference room for approximately 15 minutes after a meeting had concluded to socialize and finish their coffee”). But in an agile workplace, data from these workplace studies can be inaccurate and outdated.
This snapshot in time doesn't capture the versatility of the new workplace. Workplace study observers witness a small amount of activity at a given time. Static observations don't offer comprehensive insights into how buildings, floors, rooms, and areas are used and adapted over time.
The accuracy of this data can also be affected by human behavior. People act differently when they are watched. It's human nature and has a name — The Hawthorne effect.
The Hawthorne effect occurs when people behave differently because they know they are being watched. A study of hand-washing among medical staff found that when the staff knew they were being watched, compliance with hand-washing was 55% greater than when they were not being watched5.
Now imagine if you know your dedicated space is at stake. Would you act differently? Clients have told us stories of how employees show up early in the morning or sit at their desks more than usual during these studies. The employee who usually takes up a 12-person conference room for an hour opts not to for fear of retribution.
This ability to manipulate perception is a flaw in manual studies. Manual studies rely on human observations. Humans literally walk through your workspace, counting the number of occupants and jotting down activities people are doing during the observation. But what does occupied mean? Does a jacket on a desk mean that someone's using that desk? Or could the owner of the jacket be at meetings for most of the day?
When it comes to making million-dollar decisions, getting this data right matters. Employees are less likely to alter their natural behavior patterns if they know the data you capture is anonymous.
The office is evolving into a social hub for in depth-collaboration and learning opportunities. At the same time, many employees still want the choice of using private workspaces when needed. How do you know what your employees want and need? You observe how they interact with your space and adjust accordingly.
Continuous utilization data is the keystone to enabling an agile workplace. When it comes to data, the longer you can capture it, the more accurate it is. Continuous data makes it easy to not only identify trends but to justify decisions. Employees will be less likely to think office politics is behind a workplace decision.
Capturing data over the long-term leads to better long-term company-wide decisions, like do you need more conference rooms? Do you need a bigger kitchen? Do you need less space?
One of our customers has over 30 offices worldwide and employs more than 6,000 people globally. They initially deployed Density to help them reopen safely in response to COVID-19. But the continuous data Density sensors capture have helped various teams across their organization make better-informed decisions.
The real estate team uses Density's historical data to evaluate space monthly and quarterly and validate their investments. Density helps them measure the success of these spaces by providing reliable aggregate usage data in easy-to-digest reports over time.
The workplace team uses Density data to ensure offices don't exceed safe capacities, food doesn't get wasted, and cleaning crews know where to service.
Their security teams rely on Density's data for emergency preparedness. In case of an emergency, Density's platform (Atlas) can identify exactly where people are so the security team can dispatch personnel appropriately. This feature removes the guesswork in moments when every second counts.
Another customer, Envoy, deployed Density long before the pandemic as a way to gather data that would predict employee needs. Initially, Matt Harris, the Head of Workplace Technology at Envoy at the time, was drawn to Density because of its design.
“You can really imagine it in your space,” he explained. But what he loved most about Density is our sensors are easy to install and don't capture PII.
Harris and his team were so impressed with the accuracy of Density's data that they moved our sensors into smaller spaces (like conference rooms) so they could A/B test space designs for better optimization.
Regardless of whether you employ an agile methodology in your offices, there's no denying that the purpose of the workplace is changing. Employees don't have to come to the office to be productive. Workplace managers need to be agile with their workplace designs to maintain efficiency and a positive workplace experience.
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