The world has been staring at U.S. electoral maps, trying to first predict or now interpret the presidential election results. Familiar shapes, lines, and colors enable productive debate about how it feels to live here. This common understanding does not, unfortunately, extend to evaluating how it feels to work here, because floor plans are much harder to interpret than maps.
Over four million degrees are awarded in the U.S. every year, less than one percent of which are for professions (e.g., architecture, real estate) that study floor plans. This means very few people have been taught the skills necessary to analyze even basic metrics of the built environment from a 2D visualization.
We’ve all had to figure it out when buying or renting a home, but residential plans are relatively simple and we need only consider our own personal needs. By contrast, offices are larger and must accomodate a complex and incresingly dynamic set of organizational requirements.
Floor plans impacting workers’ experiences are being reviewed daily by executives who may be ill-equipped to evaluate their options despite thinking they can. In other words, remodeling a bathroom at home does not make you a workplace expert.
Large corporations can hire workplace experts to design fit-for-the-future office spaces, but unexpected real estate opportunities might require quick decisions based on floor plans alone. Better understanding the story told by a company’s current floor plan may also help leaders understand employees’ resistance to increased presence.
What Can You Learn From Office Floor Plans?
Here are four examples of what a floor plan can reveal about what it might feel like to work in a given place or about the culture of the company within.
Private Offices: Power And Privilege
When examining office floor plans, workplace experts will first notice the number of private offices. Historically sized and allocated for managers of various ranks,pro offices tell a story of entitlement culture.
In the world of elite professional services, like law firms and investment banks, seeing half of all seats on a floor in a private office was not uncommon years ago. Executive offices might be larger than a studio apartment, complete with conference tables or couches.
Modern designs limit the number of offices no matter who gets promoted, and all offices are the same (smaller) size. Gone are the ancillary meeting settings that were unusable when the office occupant works alone. The “donut” plan with offices along all windows has been inverted, providing access to natural light for more workers on the floor.
For post-pandemic workplaces, some companies grant private offices as an incentive for presence. However, this could be viewed as a failure to address the changing nature of work or training managers to be an amenity for junior employees.
Workstations: How Open Is Your Open Plan?
As the number of private offices wanes, workplace experts next examine the desks. What used to be generous cubicles with full-height walls—effectively a private office without a door—are now more commonly “workstations” or long work tables. These smaller workstations may have few dividers, creating a “bullpen” or “trading floor” fueling the longstanding campaign against “open-plan” workplaces.
As with private offices, multiple sizes of workstations say a lot about different departments’ work styles. The distribution of desks relative to other work areas may indicate neighborhood-based sharing concepts. Lining desks (as opposed to offices) against the window line says the employer values the experience of more junior staff, or at least believes in equitable access to light.
The number of both offices and workstations is decreasing in the post-pandemic era as the purpose of the office becomes more group-based and social; these activities are harder to replicate effectively at home. This means more plannable space is being allocated collaborative settings, which is the next place we look on the plan.
Conference Rooms: Not The Only Place To Meet Anymore
In traditional office environments, spaces designed for individual work (i.e., private offices and desks) would represent approximately two-thirds of the area available on a given floor. The remaining third would be mostly conference rooms.
Most conference rooms are spacious, with eight seats around the table, if not twice that number. However, incremental shifts in collaborative work patterns led to a realization that fewer rooms were needed with fewer seats in each. This same trend also led to the explosion in single-occupancy phone booths for collaborative but virtual activities.
As offices become more oriented towards social activities (e.g., training, mentoring, connection-building), the number of smaller and higher-tech rooms continues to increase, as does the diversity and distribution of open and informal collaborative settings. Seeing small booths, café tables, semi-private team rooms, and scrappy innovation spaces on a plan may signify an agile and dynamic workplace.
The ratio of collaborative to individual settings is also increasing dramatically as offices begin feeling more like event centers than assembly lines.
But collaborative is not always vibrant, which brings us to our final category.
Community Spaces: The Best Office Has A Hotel Feel
The monotonous, energy-draining pantries of the past—complete with terrible, fill-it-yourself coffee and day-old pastries—have been replaced with more engaging places to meet and eat. Breakroom layouts and social settings say a lot about a company, but the overall size and positioning of community spaces indicate the level of hospitality one can expect in that environment.
A common feature of almost any hotel or restaurant is the feeling of encountering the most buzzy, energetic, and beautiful space as soon as you walk through the door. Mixed-use, flexible spaces with music, smiling staff members, and the smell of fresh coffee act as a powerful magnet. It’s extremely rare to find this kind of feature on a plan for a traditional office, but it’s almost a default in coworking sites thanks to WeWork having made their community spaces famous.
Once you have seen a floor plan with this kind of super-feature, it’s impossible to notice the absence of one when looking at other traditional plans. And the absence of one in a post-pandemic workplace is even more obvious to employees.
Bringing It All Together: Floor Plans Tell Stories
In addition to the latest gossip about which executive is mandating what level of presence in the office, much of the media attention about the office of the future is focused on advanced technologies. Intelligent buildings are adjusting temperatures based on personal preferences. Immersive video conference systems make us feel like we’re right next to someone hundreds of miles away. Tiny sensors monitor everything from room presence to air quality and even posture.
But leading-edge technologies don’t guarantee the best-in-class experiences that provide employees with a “return on commute.” Workplace design alone cannot create the perfect experience and much depends on how an office is activated and how leaders physically and figuratively “show up.” However, bad design can make a magnetic environment almost impossible.
AI is making it easier to generate 3D renderings from 2D floor plans, making it easier to tour them virtually, but this still does not provide at-scale assessment of an entire environment’s experience.
Like a fortune teller reading the tea leaves, a qualified workplace expert can diagnose current problems or predict a company’s future culture by examining its floor plans. Leaders would be wise to seek their counsel to prevent taking steps backward into an era of design that will almost certainly keep employees sitting happily in their home offices.