The Workplace Reset

A new minimum viable office

What
employees
want

The Workplace Reset is a call to arms. A challenge to re-establish the ‘why’ of the workplace. What is the office ultimately there to achieve? What is its supreme purpose?

Our reset does not call for office attendance to be mandated or in any way contest the notion that greater location autonomy is a good thing. We are merely fighting for recognition that workplaces must better understand the nature of the work that will be done there.

This investigation focused on employee workplace experience data collected over the 18 months up to the end of 2022:

157880

Unique responses

1315

Workplaces

114

Organisations

Countries

The process

Our research has identified a process that aims to answer a set of key questions that will support you in ensuring the workplace does not continue to fail its user.

Purpose

What value does the workplace add for the organisation?

Owner: Employer

Function

Why do employees use the workplace?

Owner: Employee

Form

What essential features do they need?

Owner: Supply partner

Purpose

The reasons why an organisation has workplaces: what they want employees to achieve when they are there.

To design and operate an outstanding workplace, employers must be clear on its overarching purpose. With employees demonstrating that they can fulfil much of their role remotely, organisations must be clear in stating their reasons for wanting employees back into offices.

Function

The range of activities that employees look for the workplace to brilliantly support when they are there.

Employees are more ‘planful’ than ever on where they work, focusing on the functional work activities they’ll carry out. These can be superbly supported by an organisation understanding which activities they expect or prefer employees to be doing in-person.

Form

The features and services that buildings and spaces offer to superbly support what employees do.

Having established why you will have workplaces and what exactly your teams will be doing in those spaces, you can now determine the types of infrastructure needed to support them carrying out those activities. Our research has established 23 physical and service features seen as mission critical in delivering a minimum viable office.

The minimum viable office

With 80% or more of knowledge workers completing much of their work from a location other than the office, we have been able to understand the essential elements needed to create an appealing, supportive, and efficient corporate workplace: the new minimum viable office.

Understanding the matrix

The findings map out the statistical relationships between your workplace purpose, function, and form. They reveal the inter-relationships that different features have with multiple activities. Each tick represents a statistically significant relationship.

Download the matrix

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Our latest research aims to reset this post-pandemic workplace operating system. It has uncovered those hygiene factors critical for the post-pandemic knowledge economy workplace.

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