The nature of work is changing around us. With the rise of remote work and the cost savings associated with moving to an open plan office (despite employees’ grumblings), companies are using less office space–and less office furniture. That poses a problem for Steelcase, which is the biggest office furniture company by revenue in the world.
While Steelcase has always focused on commercial office interiors, in recent years it’s focused its sales pitch around productivity and how design can enhance it–which echoes a common refrain in Silicon Valley and the tech industry in general. “We haven’t broken the productivity paradox–economic growth is not about more people,” says Steelcase CEO Jim Keane. “How do we help each person reach higher levels of effectiveness, not just by working harder but augmenting their performance?”
But if companies want to make workers more productive through design, there’s a big hurdle in the way: the ubiquitous open office, which makes people less productive in part because it doesn’t allow employees any privacy. Steelcase recently debuted a new collection that could alleviate some of the problems with open offices, creating spaces that are more collaborative and more productive, without sacrificing the privacy employees need to get things done.
“We’ve had people whom we prototyped this with who really want privacy, and they’ll build cocoons,” Keane says. “People sometimes look at [the cocoon of screens] and say that’s what I want, even if it’s just for an hour or so.”
As a result, Steelcase’s designers created a hyper-flexible desk on wheels, but unlike the many other desks on wheels that already exist, this one uses a clever solution that doesn’t require workers to unlock caster wheels to make it move. Instead, the desk sits on wheels that are titled at a 45-degree angle. These wheels only roll diagonally, making it stable enough that no locking mechanisms are necessary. “People can move furniture around and do it in a way that they’re not thinking about it, it just happens naturally as work changes,” Keane says.
To make it even easier to move desks around, Flex desks feature a single power cord, while all the electronics plug into an integrated power strip. These desks can also raise and lower based on how someone wants to work; privacy panels can be attached at different heights via magnets around the sides of the desks to indicate whether a worker wants to be approached or is in the middle of more intensive, individual work.
While other retailers have reacted by debuting office furniture that looks like it’s straight out of the living room, Steelcase has doubled down on hyper-flexible desks rather than sofas. But the goal is the same: make offices that make going to work better for the people inside.
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