The work-hotels we call offices need to go! Loads of organizations go back to have their teams working from the office as much as possible, but they have forgotten the one brilliant thing about working from the office: all the tools, space, time and people to do your work are there and your work, or project is also ready to go. And for most ‘work-hotels’ that is just not the case.
Click here to discover more about Peet Sneekes and his work as a work space designer
I create workplaces where people feel welcome and can get straight to meaningful work. At Mirabeau, I helped shape an innovation lab for making, experimenting and learning together. For Cognizant’s Kauwgomballenfabriek studio, I translated stakeholder research into core principles and spatial concepts for working together in a post-Covid world. My approach connects human needs, practical tools and the character of a place, making room for collaboration, curiosity and a sense of belonging.
Most offices are not a workplace, but a space role-playing productivity and usability with furniture and machine cappuccinos. Every day people carry over two kilos of electronics to and from their work. The tools (laptop, table, chair, notes, prints) need to be installed, ordered, opened, started, stuck up a wall, and after a ‘day’ of work, meeting, or workshop, it all needs to be closed, collated, put down, cleaned, all to keep the ‘clean desk policy’ alive. A proper place, a proper mind. I agree, but proper does not mean sterile, and void of any evidence of work being done.
Such clean desk places are not a workplace, that’s just a work-hotel, a place that will never be your work-home, because it’s not meant to be. It’s not a place you welcome your guests, it’s not a place you like to return to. Offices now a days are place to stay away from, to leave as quickly as possible, to be interchangeable to just another liminal space with just another logo on top of the building.
Heck! Even the office software, like room-allocation-tools are build to make people feel unwelcome! People are always anxiously waiting until the others leave the room. Popping in 5 minutes before you’re ready: “I reserved this space”. No time to linger, no time to freeform work on your common task. Always with the next meeting in mind, rather than finishing your thought, process, task, social interaction.
Not to mention ‘clean desk policies’ and other things that make people go away, rather than work together. Nowadays offices, workspaces and everyone in it are psychologically distracting with their core message: go away, don’t touch, leave. The offices optimized and automated away the reason to stay.
So, if employers ask of their employees to return to the office, they probably need to wonder why cramped, noisy home offices in the laundry, or bed room are better than their work-hotel. It’s because they feel at home. It’s because they don’t need to carry their entire office to and from an uninspiring location with people they don’t connect with.
And to those employers I like to say: don’t fix this with mandates and furniture. Ask yourself how ‘being connected’ at a workplace looks like and make your office a work-place, a workshop, a place that’s build to feel productive, rather than a place to feel unwelcome.
First fix the offices, pay office managers to help people feel at home again, stop optimizing people away. Then provide a place where people can work from the moment they walk in. Provide a place where the work is, rather than a random place to do the work. Create a place where all the tools are available and ready to go, rather than creating the numb masses of digital nomads, lugging their window to their work to an from a random work-hotel.