The pandemic has taught us a lot over the past year—technology is our friend, work can happen anywhere, and many things will never return to “normal.” Another truth that I, as an architect, have come to know? The modern office will not survive the pandemic. Let me explain.

While working from home certainly has merits, the long view is that organizations prosper from the hard-won social captial of connections among people.

Work design and real estate professionals (along with everyone else) have fervently dissected the pandemic along with possible responses for corporate real estate post-COVID-19 and presumptive return to workplace scenarios over the last two months. Not surprisingly, questions beget questions. Practical recommendations have been delivered alongside fanciful gimmicks. It is tough to discern the difference, […]

BHDP brought 60+ corporate real estate executives together to formulate strategic and high-level recommendations for leading the reintegration of the workforce into the physical workplace post the COVID-19 pandemic.

The workplace design community has facilitated the transition from a workplace as a fixed destination to a workplace as a fluid experience. Always on and burnt out. That’s the current state of the workplace. Ubiquitous Wi-Fi, cloud-computing, smartphones, thin clients, high-powered laptops, and video-conferencing software connect people the world over. In great numbers, the workforce […]

As the conversation about the employee experience balloons, the time has come to harness that hot air. Why not add a Chief Employee Experience Officer to give employees a voice? Who hasn’t been to a workshop, focus group, or executive seminar where someone proposes that CRE, IT, and HR should function like a three-legged stool? […]

Burolandschaft

Design is not binary. We do not subscribe to a simplistic reduction of ‘open’ vs. ‘closed.’ People are more complicated than that, and human systems – more complex.

  Balancing Individual preferences and team priorities The core challenge in almost all workplace renovation projects is to strike the right balance among individual preferences, team priorities, and the constraints presented by the building. Individuals are habitual. They resolve uncertainty and complexity in their work by seeking out the harbor of predictability, wherever they can […]

Behavior is not a linear equation Space is a tool that can be used subtly and successfully to shift the behaviors of individuals, alter the cultures of organizations, and beneficially impact the bottom line. It’s trickle-up economics—the notion that organizational performance is the collective product of individual experiences. That said, people are complex creatures and […]

“Buildings are easy – some steel, some concrete, some glass… but, then you add people…”  — Jim Donnelly, Principal Emeritus, BHDP For the past two decades, organizations have embraced a community-oriented approach to workplace design. Conventional offices from the 1960s to the dawn of the Millennium placed a premium on the periphery of the building, while […]