What Makes a Workplace Irresistible? Three Design Strategies to Attract and Elevate Talent
This article is based on a presentation given at the ULI Fall Meeting in Los Angeles.
It’s a truism, but the workplace is changing—whether it’s the unprecedented five generations currently in the workplace, the ongoing debate over return to office policies, or the emerging role of AI. But one thing that remains constant is the challenge to attract and elevate talent. Talent is what drives leading organizations, and it’s a critical—arguably the most critical—part of the workplace equation. So what role can design play in supporting talent in today’s evolving workplace?
Recently, NBBJ partnered with noted workplace expert Prof. Raj Choudhury of Harvard Business School to explore this and related questions. One insight from this partnership was the idea that since the upper echelon of talent can have their pick of employers, organizations have an underappreciated opportunity to leverage their office as a differentiator—to make their workplace irresistible. But the typical office today is anything but that—the starkest illustration of this being the fact that leased office space sits roughly two-thirds empty on any given workday.
With this in mind, we’ve developed three scalable design strategies that can help organizations shift their workplace from a place people are obligated to go, to a true destination that can help attract, retain and elevate talent:
Move From Desks to Workpoints
One trend we’ve seen with our corporate clients is that they are leasing less space overall, but investing more in the space they do have. This shift involves thoughtfully reevaluating how space is configured as people in hybrid settings can better use their time in the office for collaboration, learning and relationship building rather than focus work, which Prof. Choudhury’s research suggests can be done more effectively from home.
The result is fewer workstations, but a greater range of workpoints—versatile, comfortable spaces that can be shared and used for multiple work modes. Work in these types of office can, and does, happen everywhere, not just at the desk. This opens the door to new types of hospitality-driven spaces that people naturally gravitate toward—not a single-purpose workplace, but a place where work is layered with engaging human experiences.
LinkedIn's new headquarters, for example, features a diverse range of spaces, with some desks, but also collaborative areas, social spaces and amenities that give people a broad variety of ways to navigate their workday. The design of the headquarters cut the number of desks by half compared to what was originally planned prior to the pandemic. Most of the spaces do not resemble an office in any conventional sense. They are more like cafes or lounges–the types of places people would seek out when not at work. As one measure of its draw, 63% of employees assigned to other areas find their way to the new building each day.
Rethink the HQ
Talent is more mobile with the advance of remote work, and being where the talent is is critical for organizations. While consolidated headquarters play a valuable role in many companies, for others the increasingly distributed nature of work might be better supported by a different type of HQ.
Rather than a single one-location-does-it-all HQ, some companies might need a network of complementary workplaces that offer shorter commutes, and more flexibility and workspace options. This approach frees the headquarters to serve a more targeted, purposeful role—it can be more like a cultural or brand hub, an interface with the community, or a truly magnetic space for coming together.
Hana Bank, one of Korea’s largest financial institutions, has taken this approach with their footprint in the greater Seoul area. Hana’s headquarters is actually on the small side for an organization of its scale and located outside the city center, but it serves as a cultural hub and anchor of the organization’s brand, connecting it with the community. The headquarters features a public park that weaves up and through the building, creating an engagingly green workplace experience unlike any other. At the same time, Hana has a network of convenient regional trading centers and offices throughout the city which serve as extensions of the headquarters through their branding and workplace design.
The Hana Bank Headquarters makes connections with the community by integrating publicly accessible parks and open space.
Design for Delight
When it comes to assessing the value of where people work, cost per square foot and square foot per person are the gold standard. While there are valid reasons for this, what gets lost in this approach is how a space impacts people—how a workplace makes them feel is ultimately what’s important to talent. What if developers and organizations also focused on measuring delight per square foot, evaluating spaces based on how well they support the people working in them?
Through our work with NBBJ Applied Research Fellow Dr. John Medina, we’ve identified four critical factors that impact people’s wellbeing and performance in the workplace—variety and choice, ability to socialize, prevalence of daylight and access to nature. Each factor plays an important role in enhancing creativity and productivity, improving engagement and reducing stress. But just as importantly, like traditional metrics, these factors are measurable—meaning a building's effect on performance can be quantifiably evaluated. We call this critical assessment the Delight Factor.
Looking at the workplace through this lens opens up new possibilities. One is that it gives a framework for assessing existing buildings and identifying interventions which can make a workplace more attractive to talent. For both economic and environmental reasons, renovation and adaptive reuse will be a critically important aspect of the workplace going forward, so a metric like The Delight Factor can go hand-in-hand with organizations’ efforts to make the most out of their existing footprint. Since older spaces often have the authentic character that people gravitate to, they have the potential to be exactly the types of spaces that can be a differentiator for talent.
The office is many things, but at a baseline it has to be a place where people fundamentally want to be. Where they feel engaged, comfortable and connected. What that looks like may be different for each company, but the underlying advantage, from a talent perspective, of creating spaces with this kind of innate draw is almost universal. The design strategies outlined here are some of the steps organizations can consider taking in order to realize this advantage.
