You’ve worked hard to make your offices attractive to millennials – open sight lines, “water cooler” collaborative centers, glass-box conference rooms, and hot-desking. Now Gen Z is about to move into the business world in large numbers. Will the wide-open constant-collaboration millennial style help to recruit and retain the top Gen Z employees?
Gen Z-ers are accustomed to living online – learning, socializing, shopping, communicating with parents. They are team players, but their teams rarely have face-to-face conversations. In BizNow.com, HOK’s Director of Workplace Practice Kay Sargent states that these new workers are overloaded with information. To function at their best, their work environment should be visually uncluttered and should be structured for working individually as well as collaboratively.
The shift toward balancing collaborative spaces with individual workspaces has already begun in some offices where staff were frustrated with the distractions of their open office plans. That’s good news for Gen Z, but bad news for business owners and facilities managers. Open office plans require less square footage per employee compared to traditional office designs, and increasing the number of individual workspaces also increases real estate costs. That’s not a welcome prospect.
However, there are several steps office and facilities managers can take now to prepare their workplace designs for the coming influx of Gen Z workers, and simultaneously keep their real estate costs stable.
- Use modular casework to increase spatial flexibility. These “building blocks” of high-quality cabinetry can be re-configured and re-used when open spaces are changed to enclosed spaces, lowering build-out costs while increasing sustainability ratings – something Gen Z appreciates.
- Add high-density mobile shelving systems for files, media, and inventory. These space-saving storage systems reduce storage area by 50%, creating the extra room needed for individual workspaces without expanding the existing footprint.
- Plan and execute a comprehensive document conversion program. Although we live in a digital age, paper documents still seem to accumulate in the workplace and take up valuable (and expensive) space. Creating digital versions of documents preserves the information and makes it accessible to tech-savvy Gen Z staff while freeing up useful work space.
Age diversity is standard now in the 21stcentury, with Baby Boomers to Gen Z-ers each bringing their unique perspectives to the workplace. Organizations stand to gain greatly from the combination of wise experience and youthful new ways of thinking, and the cost savings of efficient storage systems make it possible and practical to accommodate everyone.
Photo © aletia2011 / AdobeStock
Remember those carefree college days, hanging out in the stairwells, meeting on the quad, studying in the library, the cafeteria, the student lounge, wherever? Then you began your career and all that spatial freedom was suddenly gone, and you had to be in one place. At one desk. All day. Every day. Five days a week. It was a tough transition.
And now that newly-graduated millennials are driving the hiring market, campus-style spatial freedom is being incorporated into offices designed to attract the recent graduates. NCR’s new Atlanta headquarters is one example; it touts its “technology and tools to support the changing nature of how, when and where work is done.” Located adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus, NCR hopes to use the headquarters’ college-like environment to capture the brightest and best new graduates, with such familiar features as dining options, coffee bar, gym, informal spaces, and a large lecture hall.
Formaspace discusses how office designers and facilities managers can learn a few lessons from college campuses, including:
- Natural light and outdoor work areas – Large windows and park-like campuses are features of colleges that enhance mental health and performance; businesses too can benefit.
- “Work neighborhoods” – Colleges offer a range of options, from lounge chairs to lab workbenches to library carrels to coffeehouse tables; these can be emulated within corporate settings.
- Serendipity – College campuses provide countless opportunities to run into people who share common interests; offices with casual collaboration areas can profit from the synergy of serendipity.
- Quiet zones – College libraries are famous for their inviolable quiet; the notoriously loud open office plan should incorporate quiet spaces for focused tasks.
We would add a fifth lesson: Flexible space utilization. Colleges have perfected the concept of flex spaces that are a classroom one day, a lab the next day, and a meeting room the day after that. As businesses start to incorporate collegiate design into the workplace, the ability to experiment with space utilization is essential; what may have worked as a lounge now needs to be a quiet area, or vice versa.
Adaptive furniture and modular cabinetry make this kind of flexibility possibility. For example, adaptive-furnishings manufacturer Swiftspace offers desks that combine into semi-private “huddle spaces” or change into extended tables or workbenches.
Empowering staff to adapt the workspace as needed is another holdover from college days, and it’s one more feature that can attract sought-after millennial employees. No hiring manager wants to hear this quote, reported by design researchers speaking to a newly-hired graduate: “The thing that keeps me up at night is going to sit in my cubicle farm on Monday.”
Of course not every business workstyle can incorporate college campus features into the workplace. But for those in a competitive hiring market, a collegiate environment could be the perfect recruitment tool. Consult with your design professional about bringing some college spirit to your offices.
Photo © elnariz / Adobe Stock
“We’re gonna need to go ahead and move you downstairs into Storage B. We have some new people coming in, and we need all the space we can get.” These lines from the movie “Office Space” drew big guffaws in theaters, but facilities managers cringed through their laughter. As the economy improves and hiring increases, they are hard-pressed to wedge new hires into the traditional offices-and-cubicles space plan.
The newly-hired millennials themselves may provide the solution. This generation seems to have a strong preference for an open, mobile, collaborative workplace. Private enclosed offices and high-walled cubicles are shunned in favor of large open floor plans and low-rise workspaces that can be moved around and reconfigured as work teams change. A recent story in IndyStar shows an interactive before-and-after graphic of an open-plan makeover for one company seeking to attract tech-savvy millennials: http://indy.st/1qe5C9f
As major corporations such as Rolls-Royce and Eli Lilly shift to open-plan workplaces to recruit millennial workers, smart space planners are now specifying office furniture that is modular, mobile, and easy to set up or store as needs fluctuate. And there’s a bonus – according to CoreNet Global, the space occupied per employee has dropped from 225 square feet in 2010 to 170 square feet in 2013. That’s something that will put a smile on the face of any facilities manager!
Photo © Rui Vale de Sousa – fotolia
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