As it is with all other cyclical aspects of life and growth, the modern workspace has morphed and adapted right before our eyes, changing at an ever-increasing pace, with greater and greater technical dependencies. Chances are high that your organization is still one or two mutations behind this climatic curve of rapid transition.
As with all evolution, many of its most dramatic changes are a result of unexpected necessity… and that is exactly what we’re about to face, very quickly. Here is a brief breakdown of three workspace evolutionary milestones, including the newcomer that is about to overwhelm the modern working world.
Traditional
The Traditional Workspace, full of its mahogany, cherry wood and oak charm is a rare species in the post information age environment. With its closed door, private spaces that could be decorated and personalized, it gave its organizational culture a sense of individual ownership and security. But it had its challenges, too. Space is expensive and the confinement it created did not accommodate the need to interact with others easily. Its lack of sustainability and its rigidness of limited scalability prevented it from moving forward with team-inspired technologies. Gone are the days of that VGA projector in the one room per floor. Now everything needed to be wired and digital and transparent… So, along came…
Open-Concept
The free flowing open, bright and airy, low-walled cube farms and fishbowl walls of the open-concept workspace have been the predominant tidal wave of the workplace model for about the past decade. With its sterile and generic feel, this fully exposed model gave its organizational culture an identity of pseudo-freedom. Keeping people tethered to the office for accountable productivity, organizations hoped their employees’ allegiance to the brand was strong enough to maintain joy and community. With its blended flexibility, assigned by hierarchal clout, this space created efficiencies, but also exposed a fatal flaw.
It is lifeless, devoid of character, and ultimately suffocating to revitalizing inspiration.
Ironically, it has taken a global pandemic to realize that this model was slowly killing companies, devouring joy from their lifeblood… their people. From the inside out, it was forcing them to be observed at all times, conforming themselves into superficial machines whose role is to meet minimum requirements for accountability; doing so at the sacrifice of mutually beneficial growth with their work.
Yes, the open concept workplace looks great in architectural renderings and streamlines the bottom line of fiduciary efficaciousness, but at what real cost over the unforeseen span ahead? Perhaps this unplanned disruption is a blessing in disguise? Maybe it has forced a new species of workplace to crawl out of the corporate swamp and into the light.
Dynamic Workplace
From the depths of the basement office, still shedding its skins of congested sardine-canned expectancy, a new creature is emerging with an omnivorous appetite for a hopeful and satisfying work-life balance. This new beast of labor has proven its ability to be productive without micromanaging oversight, finding guest rooms, dinner tables, and front porches just as accommodating to their daily tasks. Here you can have your college mascot bobble-head on your makeshift desk and still be on a Zoom meeting with your content compatriots. That said, its monotony has worn thin… You miss the office for its organic laughter, social stimulation, and added resources.
You don’t need a space to land there… You need a place to connect, in person, with dynamic tools, complete with interactive and connected display technology, adaptive shared spaces, collaboration zones and networks, and motivational empowerment through a place that values results, not timecards.
This is a place where technology allows you to personalize your temporary environment, making it home, just while you’re there, allowing corporate branding and indivualistic personality to collide in a dance of shared purpose and partnership; employee and organization working in unison toward a co-beneficial, symbiotic mission.
This new Dynamic Workplace is warm and inviting, but also highly focused and productive, inviting its patrons to participate with its tools, as a team… desiring to help people reach further, teach more; engage deeper and inspire to be greater than we are today.
This new species of workspace is coming… fast
It will not be a sheltered cage. It will not be an observational tank.
It will be fertile ground for innovation and cooperation.
So how do we get there?
Despite what you are going to see in marketing and media, the traditional gateways for this type of monumental shift are not going be the channels of such change. Going right back to stagnant architecture firms, stuck in the redundant models of form and function, will only stall and impede the progress that needs to be quickly sparked.
Despite your primordial instincts to seek such advisement from those old places of comfort, you will only uncover this dynamic fueling agent in a brain trust of consultation-minded, technology-centric, partnership-inclined organizations.
You will need a guide who can speak to the subjective experience expected from your employee and customer base. Someone who understands the topologies and nuances of network, spatial design, and human engagement, first. It will be through this shepherding process that meaningful results will come from shared conversations and a purposeful vision created… not from copycat digital modeling that is only concerned with occupancy counts and barren, infertile wastelands of life sucking joy.
We can do better.
If we want to survive this next step in the evolutionary workplace ladder, we must do better.
I believe that audio-visual, as a focused specialty, is uniquely prepared and qualified to help navigate the inevidible road of change ahead. Yes, we will need architects. Yes, we will need IT. Yes, we will need furniture, and general contractors, and facility managers…
But, if the employee is to be the center of the workplace, as they must; and that employee necessitates a transformation of the workspace to be connected by sight, touch, sound and creativity, then it is paramount to be ready and willing to adapt.
Survival depends upon it.
