The Ideal Office
Alex McCulloch, Director of CACI, reviews the ingredients needed for the ideal office.
First published in CoStar on 1 March 2022
The office-based world has been taken over by ‘middle-weekers’, or, if you prefer, an acronym that I probably shouldn’t spell out. The “Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday” office-based working pattern is emerging at an unprecedented level. With over 10 million sq ft of prime office space in central London moving to hybrid contracts, worker footfall has dropped by up to 40%. Responding to this mass upheaval, businesses, office providers and landlords must take this new worker behaviour seriously when reimagining their blueprints for the ideal office.
Step one is to consider the wider ecosystem that office workers inhabit. With hybrid workers taking up most of this space, the city centre has been particularly impacted. The negative of a reduced worker footfall is obvious, but while workers visit the area local to the office less often, they are much more engaged, with the average spend per visit up 15%. The motivation for being in work is to spend time with colleagues in a professional and social sense, pubs and bars saw their share of increased customer spending rise from a 3.8% lift in the 12-week period ending 18 April to 12.5% by 11 July while the rise in spend at restaurants went from 9.7% to 11.5% respectively, makes clear there is still consumer spend to leverage. (Lumina Intelligence UK Eating Out Market Report 2021)
The office-worker ecosystem certainly transforms office spaces, but has its biggest impact on the ground floor. Street-level units can expect increased demand for lunch time sit-down dining, more post-work leisure options and less grab and go. When you are in town three days a week but able to pick the kids up the other two, then an evening out with colleagues becomes more achievable, as does post-work shopping.
Our new work patterns are reinforcing the change we’ve seen in consumer values. Rather than telling people to ditch the Pelotons and get back into the office though, we need to recognise the newfound importance of having both a regular and stationary bike. They represent the new online-offline world quite nicely.
So, with the ground plane more in-tune with changing habits, what does the actual office space need to deliver? The following description might sound like a load of slogans in a car advert, but bear with me. The office space itself has to be part of the incentive for commuting to work: it needs to be effortlessly cool, yet not pretentious; connected, forward-thinking and tailored to the new consumer. The days of a small dingy office, poorly lit and with little desk cubicles are surely in the past, and I for one am not disappointed.
There are plenty of companies trying their hand at creating the ideal blueprint, picking up on the popularity of WeWork, but on a more manageable scale. Flexible workspace provider, Fora, aims to ‘reimagine the working day’; their Fitzrovia location features hydroponic, self-watering ‘Farm Towers’ in the kitchens, growing fresh produce that office workers can use in their lunches or take home.
Another new kid on the block is Shaftesbury’s plug-and-play Assemble concept, implemented across the West End landlord’s office locations in Seven Dials and Carnaby. Created in response to the evolving market and occupier requirements, Assemble provides tenants with a flexible and hassle-free solution to occupy fully fitted, high-quality office spaces.
Taking Fora and Assemble as examples of the what the future office needs, you can see just how hard dedicated operators and traditional landlords are working to improve their spaces. For many, this is a response to the growing recognition of wellness at work – and rightly so – but many of the principles are just as applicable because of pandemic-led changes to worker movements.
There is no one size fits all when it comes to creating the blueprint for the ideal office. However, the aim is clear: the spaces themselves must encourage connection, collaboration and worker wellbeing. They cannot exist in isolation. ‘An effortless component of the ecosystem that workers interact with’ is now a long-winded and convoluted definition of the modern office. More simply put, an office that people want to travel to work for is the best way to keep staff happy.