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Work Smarter – Enhancing Performance Through Design
Energising and joyful spaces that cater to natural human behaviour can facilitate a culture of productivity and collaboration, emphasising interior atmosphere and flexible amenity as well as connection to the outdoors and each other. Contrastingly, poor design has been shown to negatively affect employee work outcomes and wellbeing, with bad office ergonomics exacerbating conditions such as chronic pain and stress. For commercial spaces to re-establish their value to Australian businesses, it is crucial to recentre the conversation around how design can help them become exceptional destinations for an evolving workforce.
For Cox Architecture, part of understanding how design can enhance performance and wellbeing at work involves recognising the growing diversity of the workforce, which is more dynamic than ever before with diverse perspectives arising from national origin, language, disability, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation and beyond. Cox Director Brooke Lloyd explains that “tapping into this diversity and curating a workplace that facilitates serendipitous exchange between all these varied groups is both the challenge and the key to unlocking the potential of the post-covid workplace. We strive to balance scale and intimacy, humanism and technology […] and focus spaces to facilitate connection, collaboration and retreat.”
The benefits of integrating this approach have already been seen in Cox’s new Sydney studio, which works holistically to encourage the team to find energy and potential in their surrounds. There is a ‘big family table’ that sits at the heart of the office where the team can eat, work and socialise. “Blurring the lines of work and fun is important to us,” says Brooke, and it is these junctions of programming that encourage multi-use where workplaces can invite productive evolution over time. “Driven by function, clever planning and the interplay of space, we challenge ourselves to create spaces that aren’t singular in function to enable organisations to shape their workplace as they grow,” explains Brooke.
‘Bringing the outside in’ is also widely recognised as a crucial aspect of improving mood, health and productivity in a workplace setting. This can include ensuring natural ventilation and an abundance of daylight permeating deep into a building, as well as integrating biophilic and soft elements into interior design.
As Australia’s largest privately-owned flexible workspace operator, Hub Australia understands that incorporating natural elements into workplaces can foster a higher wellbeing score and productivity. The team put well-crafted spaces at the core of their services and have found that the appeal of the office must now also rely on enhanced flexibility. Chief Property Officer at Hub Australia John Preece and National Design and New Build Manager Lina Chew explain that “the space provides a template, but it is the programming that creates the value. As such, multi-functional spaces that can adapt to a range of curated programming and events are beneficial.”
For Hub, hospitality-led services, amenities and employee experience must be front of mind to allow workers to edit their environments as they need. When imagining the workplace of the future, they see a space for employees and clients to immerse themselves in an organisation’s brand and help reinforce its culture, as well as spaces for a range of collaboration types that are important as the purpose of the office changes.
Meaningfully conceived workspaces can substantially improve performance by fostering wellbeing, collaboration, flexibility and comfort. As the role of the traditional office continues to shift in the post-pandemic world, the physical workplace is increasingly reliant on a well-designed calculation of space to demonstrate its value to employees, employers and society at large.
