Is your office feeling outdated?
At this year’s NeoCon event, the new theme in office design was “Immersive Planning.” It's a natural progression for contemporary offices that have been eliminating boundaries and focusing on collaborative spaces over the past few years. The overall goal is to create workspaces that allow isolation, but are adaptable for team endeavors.
If you’re looking to redesign your office this coming year, these are the trends to look for in 2017.
Transparent Dividers
Completely isolated workspaces or conference rooms can cut off the flow and energy from the rest of the office. Transparent walls can establish defined work zones without isolation. Of course, the walls will do nothing to fight the sounds of the sales team next door.
Amphitheater-Style Gathering Spaces
The average conference room tends to limit seating options to a small amount of chairs. But as anyone at a burgeoning startup can attest to: many meetings tend to reach a point where a handful of people have no better option than the ground. The amphitheater approach provides multi-use seating as well as padded step-seating to give your next all-hands meeting a stadium feel.
Floor-by-Floor Video Streams
People are cliquey by nature. And placing them on different floors only amplifies the problem. Austin's Modernize found a solution to their divided workforce — connected live-streams.
“Ideally we’d love to have everyone work on the same floor," said Christina Wells, Director of Recruiting at Modernize. "Since we are getting so big, that isn’t realistic. To get a similar effect, each floor has a huge screen with a live feed from the other floor. It gives a sense of connection.”
Personal Partitions
As much as the typical startup office promotes open working, sometimes you need to toss on the headphones and throw on the blinders to get work done. To fight peripheral distractions, companies can utilize stand-alone or table-top partitions (as pictured above). It’s also a surefire way of signaling to your office neighbor that you don’t want to hear about the weekend’s bachelorette festivities.
"Employers should provide a balance of both collaboration areas and focused work areas to meet the different work styles and preferences of their employees," said Amanda Brawner of Knoll.
Nap Pods
Speaking of isolation, there is perhaps nothing that compares to an office-sanctioned nap pod (as pictured above at RideScout) It’s an invention that older generations may sneer at, but let’s not act like they never took midday naps (we’ve seen Mad Men).
For more information on this year's top trends, check out Knoll's presentation at NeoCon 2016.
