Spec Finish

Feature www.thefis.org 21 opportunity to do things differently, because behaviours have changed.” With this though, comes uncertainty, Geoff said: “ We’re having to be quite reactive and set out what we think is right for the client – but there isn’t a one size fits all. “Workplaces have become too uniform and almost standard in their design – but every business and every individual in that business is different.” What drives the return to the office? We have been led to believe in the notion that it is young people that want to go back to the office, but anecdotally, that idea has been upended as it tends to be the older generation instead that are going back while younger ones are digging their heels in. We need to develop a better understanding of the key drivers, initiatives and incentives in order to bring people back. Geoff said: “The office may change to become more than just a place of work, to one where owners and employers bolt on additional facilities like wellbeing centres or gyms and it becomes a multi-disciplinary environment.” Helen Tapper, Operations Director at Tapper Interiors and FIS President, completely agreed that the return to the office is an incredibly polarising subject and for a small business, it’s pretty difficult to provide appropriate facilities to accommodate hybrid working. Many simply find it doesn’t work. Helen Bartlett, Design Director at Paramount Interiors, picked up on Geoff’s comment about designing workplaces to become more than just the office, saying: “It’s very difficult to determine exactly what this new landscape is, and clients are looking to us for advice. “We therefore go through a consultancy exercise to find out what their staff want and to really engage them in the process. This helps them to feel valued and consequently, more likely to want to come back to the office.” The consensus was that while we often use age as a driving demographic, it is less about age and more about ‘stage of life’. Working patterns The faff and expense of a daily commute also has to be factored in, as well as the continuing risk of catching Covid, especially when using public transport, so there has to be a real pull to get workers back to the office. Sulli Gardner, Business Development Manager at Paramount Interiors in Bristol, said: “The office can’t say the same as it was, because it didn’t work for different abilities and needs and companies have realised that they must make their offices accessible to all, to produce a level playing field for all.” Sustainability Phil Taylor, Corporate Business Development Manager at SAS International, has noticed an increased interest in sustainability from clients. They readily understand the increased networking and socialising benefits of working from the office, but have concerns about the sustainability of travelling to and from meetings when Teams/Zoom is perfectly adequate. The expense (from a financial and a sustainability perspective) of going to the office and attending in-person meetings has to be justified and balanced with the fact that people working from home could be using more energy (heating, lighting etc), however, data shows that this comparison is a close run thing and is not absolutely clear. Working and learning styles Other considerations that employers have to take into account are learning styles, working styles and neuro styles, as there is growing understanding of the need and value in recognising neural diversity. The conversation has moved on from ‘inclusive’ to ‘universal’, ensuring that everybody can use the workplace consistently. With this in mind, organisations are trying and piloting lots of ideas because they don’t quite know what the answer is. The trouble is, we generally keep adding and adding without taking anything away, this is a sure fire way of just ‘hoping for the best that something will work’. We need a better understanding of employees and this leads us to the next buzz words; ‘human centre’, meaning that people are given what they need, rather than just what they want. Staff retention Carolin Bakowski, Marketing Specialist at SAS International, said that the consultancy exercise is picking up new concepts and, in her experience, offices have to change and adapt to becomemore like a service space that will satisfy different needs for different projects. Consultancies Mark talked about the ‘great re-set’ or the ‘great resignation’, as workers leave to work in the gig economy or as freelancers. And as Iain McIlwee, FIS CEO, noted, the skills shortage continues to make itself felt and recruiting new people is hard, particularly in construction where jobs are location dependent. He said: “All the data trends at the moment are useless as the world has completely shifted on its axis, so are workplace consultancies actually working? “We know lease times are getting shorter and so we will see an increase in fit outs, but are the consultants analysing the workforce well enough to understand what is round the corner?” Most major projects have a workplace strategist as part of the design team, which now often involves HR, IT, real estate, marketing and branding, so, in theory, consultations should be constructive. This brings us to following up on designs to see if they work – good consultants will carry out post occupancy evaluations, partly as a way of staying in touch with client but also, if something is not working for them, a consultant can help to put it right. “It takes a lot of courage to do post occupancy evaluation because consultants might find out things they don’t want to hear,” said Mark. Future One of the most important lessons we have learned from the past two years is that we must make our workplaces fully inclusive. If we don’t, we are setting ourselves up to fail. Sully has been working with a company in Bath recently that surveyed its employees to see what they enjoyed about working from home and what they didn’t like. The point is, that survey results have to be acted upon, they are no good filed away in a drawer. Something that becomes blindingly obvious fromdoing a survey is just how incredibly diverse any workforce is. This is where looking to how the hospitality industry designs its spaces reaps benefits, because it pre-empts people’s needs. (Remembering that not every office has to look to the Ritz though when the Premier Inn works perfectly well.) Re-use As the health of the economy improves, the consensus fromthe panel was that clients will then start to demand demonstrable sustainability in their projects, prompted as well by legislation. At themoment, it’smore expensive to be sustainable, so it tends to get value engineered out of a scheme, unless the client has deep pockets, butMatt Butchard, Research andDevelopmentManager at SAS International, said that “sustainability is at the heart of almost every newconcept that we’ve got for newproduct development and there is the potential for sustainable products to be cost equivalent, even cheaper potentially in the future aswe look to have products and systems that are easy to put up and take down to re-use. “This provides flexible spaces that that lets employers change and tailor the environment to suit employees’ needs.” It will be interesting to re-read this report in a couple of years’ time to see how these predictions actually panned out.