After nearly three years of a global pandemic and months, if not years, of working from home, the main thing drawing workers back to their offices is the desire to simply focus on their work. But at the same time, offices in the U.S. have hit a 15-year low when it comes to how effective they are for enabling focused work.
This troubling mismatch is one of the top takeaways from the 2022 U.S. Workplace Survey from the Gensler Research Institute, the research arm of the global architecture and design firm Gensler.
“As designers, we know those are the two areas where we really have to focus,” says Janet Pogue McLaurin, Gensler’s global director of workplace research.
These findings are somewhat counterintuitive, especially through the lens of the pandemic, when workers placed a higher priority on returning to the office so they could collaborate with others. In 2022, collaboration is still luring people back in—with meetings, teamwork, and team socializing ranking 3rd, 5th, and 8th among the most important reasons to come to the office. But teamwork is no longer the main reason workers are there.
Gensler has conducted the survey periodically since 2008, and the latest report is based on responses from 2,000 workers in 10 industries across the U.S. Collected through a third party, the anonymous respondents are not Gensler clients.
Comparing the 2022 results to years past, Pogue McLaurin says it’s not shocking that “focusing on work” nabbed the survey’s top ranking. But it is striking that, while people say they want to come back to the office to get their work done, they also report that their offices are not well suited or conducive to actually doing that. Workers continue to have trouble focusing on solo work in offices as they’re currently designed. When asked how well the office environment shields them from noisy interruptions or distractions, workers rated offices poorly. In fact, while being able to work alone without interruption in the typical workspace has declined over time, the 2022 results put that concept at an all-time low.
“We dug into it a little bit deeper and we found that 69% of working alone requires deep concentration. To us, that’s the big nugget,” Pogue McLaurin says. “We have to solve for that. We have to create spaces that help people, particularly, for that deep focus work.”
From a design perspective, Pogue McLaurin says there are things Gensler and other office designers can do to improve the workspace, including providing more semi-enclosed areas for quieter work, and building more private-focus rooms, where people can duck away from the noise and interruptions of the general office space. According to the survey, the most valuable and most effective office amenity is a “quiet/tech-free zone.”
If companies want to see more of their employees coming back to work, they may want to consider implementing the kinds of quiet, focus-centric spaces people actually want.
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