The Importance of Designing for Workplace Experience

Workplace experience has become one of the most important conversations in the office design conversation. Employees want better experiences and crave the need for getting the best possible value for spending time in the office. As a result of this increased awareness about improving the quality of experience at work, businesses are increasingly focusing on designing workplaces that do more than just provide a place for people to work. Modern workplaces are now designed to support staff wellbeing, enable greater collaboration and assist productivity. All of these things combined help to deliver a level of experience within the workplace.

But what does that experience actually look like? According to recent research from Gensler, a report found that only 14% of employees want a ‘traditional workplace experience’, highlighting just how dramatically workplace expectations have evolved. Employees are making conscious decisions about where and how they work, which means the workplace experience itself now matters more than ever.
This shift is forcing businesses to think differently about office design and it also means that the once acceptable provision of cool and visually exciting design features no longer cuts it. The secret to designing great workplace experiences is all about curation, and designing a space that employees actively want to spend time in.

What is workplace experience?

Workplace experience is about tapping into the emotional aspects of spatial design. Workplace experience is the way an employee feels about the space(s) they work in and this is connected to the broader sentiment of employees and how they feel when they spend time in the office.

One of the really challenging aspects of workplace experience is that everyone has their own understanding and impression of what a good experience is. It can be shaped by a number of things like the furniture in an office, the way the office is lit, the company culture and also the access to technology. Workplace experience goes way beyond just trendy office design and that makes it essential to learn about the types of things people deem to be important to delivering a great workplace experience.

Establishing a great workplace experience requires companies to look beyond just the ‘work’ elements of being in the office. There is a lot more attention to making workplaces feel more human and support employees physically, emotionally and socially as much as possible.

Why does workplace experience matter so much?

The reason workplace experience has gained so much attention from organisations and has become an integral part of office design strategies is that remote and flexible work has shown us new ways of working.

Working from the comfort of your own home where you can control every element of your surroundings adds a huge amount of satisfaction to your working day. On top of that, having the ability to move to different locations to complete specific tasks also gives you freedom and choice that you wouldn’t always find in an office.

The most successful modern offices are successful because they are designed to adapt to people’s emotions and energy levels which naturally fluctuate throughout the day. While some employees require focus and privacy, others benefit from collaboration and social interaction. Designing an office that supports these different modes of working is now a key part of workplace strategy and is an expectation of most modern workers.

At the centre of workplace experience is the needs and wants of individual workers. It is notoriously difficult to design large scale environments for individuals but where workplace experience has become so important, businesses are now seeking ways to understand what people want. Workplace experience is not necessarily linked to a physical design feature and organisations need to understand this. Experience is about how to support people in a way that enables them to work more effectively. This is a simple premise that underpins the most successful workplace strategies around the world.

Should you measure workplace experience?

To get a true reflection of how your staff feel and what their experience of the office is, you have to collect insights and metrics that allow you to benchmark and monitor workplace experience.

Understanding that the workplace should support employees on multiple levels is now quite well established or at least more common than it was 10-15 years ago. Where the real challenge lies today is how to capture the sentiment towards a workplace and measuring the levels of workplace experience within an organisation.

One of the most common issues with designing workplaces arises from decisions being made on assumptions rather than data and insight. The employees of a business are the ones that utilise the office on a daily basis and therefore know the positives and negatives of how a space works and where it fails. If you are not properly engaging with your workforce to understand how to improve your workplace experience, your office will not reach its potential.
While leadership teams can have a good general overview of how their staff work, there is often a disconnect between what staff really feel and how they interact within the work environment. As we know, employees have their own preferences within the office and the only way to learn about those is to engage, ask questions and listen to feedback.

How can you measure workplace experience?

Traditionally workplace experience has been measured and monitored through lengthy surveys and in-person observation. When done properly, it works but your measurements are only as good as the data you’ve collected. With employees experiencing ‘survey fatigue’ and a lack of incentivisation to engage, it can be difficult to capture data on what’s really happening.

At Rhino, this is something we have been exploring through Rhino Edge. Rather than relying on lengthy consultancy processes or generic surveys, Edge helps businesses gather meaningful employee insight quickly and clearly to better understand how people actually experience their workplace.

Speed is really important to employees and the way Edge analyses and breaks down the data it’s gathered means that key information can be captured in minutes. The process also doesn’t solely rely on data captured through surveys as we understand these don’t always tell the full story. Through our innovative system, Edge can analyse input captured through HR insights, IT & Tech tickets and even internal feedback loops. This is all with the goal of getting a true understanding of what employees genuinely value within the workplace.

These insights allow us to create office environments based on real employee behaviour rather than assumptions or design trends. Building up a picture of the way the business works also gives us a lot of confidence that the ideas we develop and present are responding directly to the priorities of the business.

The future of workplace experience

With the awareness of how ways of working have shifted and the knowledge we have developed on what people need to feel supported throughout the working day, the future of workplace design is unlikely to be defined by a single trend. In fact, it would be almost impossible for one singular trend to come into fashion that responds to people across different sectors, personality types and working styles.

Workplace experience has fundamentally changed the way we look at the office environment. In the past we have looked for new technology and products to be developed that would help make the workplace more efficient. The highest performing workplaces feel intuitive and are designed to be genuinely useful for the people using them every day. It is a lot more nuanced than it used to be as cool and innovative features don’t always equal good design.

Designing a better workplace experience is about understanding how employees work and collaborate throughout the day. The businesses that recognise this shift early will be far better positioned to create workplaces people genuinely want to use and in many ways, the future of workplace experience sits with employees using offices today.