How carbon and wellness principles are driving office design

Workplace locations, needs and demands have been shaken up over the past two years thanks to coronavirus – but how have office fit-outs evolved? Office design experts Martin Kellett and Ian Heunis take a look at why carbon and wellness principles, rather than coronavirus, may prove to be the biggest drivers of innovation in office design.

Coronavirus is not fundamentally changing office design. Home working, hybrid models, hub-and-spoke offices, ‘resimercial’ design – all of these concepts were in existence long before early 2020. The pandemic has merely acted as a catalyst for their growth, propelling them from trends to established norms.

What has changed is employee expectations of what constitutes a ‘good’, healthy, productive workplace. The balance of power has shifted towards the employee, and their needs are now influencing office design just as much, if not more, than their employers. Working three days at home and two days in the office is no longer a benefit that must be ‘earnt’ or negotiated. Instead, it’s an expectation.

After two years spent working largely from home, employees are now more educated and engaged in hybrid alternatives to the fixed-desk office than ever before – and are willing to leave or join companies if they cannot offer working patterns and office spaces that fit their lifestyles, as seen in the ongoing ‘Great Resignation’. So how can office design attract and retain talent?

Standards are emerging to support decision-making

There is no one-size-fits-all solution, trend or model that will define what makes an effective, future-proofed office that promotes the wellbeing of its users. However, standards are emerging to help give developers a sense of what is important to consider at the design stage.

The WELL Building Institute’s WELLNESS scoring criteria offers 10 concepts to consider when building with wellness in mind from air quality and light to materials and mind. Achieving specific, defined targets within the above concepts means a building is awarded points which can be used to achieve the WELL standard. Accreditation is evidence based and must be verifiable and presented for outside input.

Furthermore, AECOM’s Strategy+ design consultancy studio equips clients with a proprietary wellness audit, which assesses the wellbeing of an organisation with metrics that go beyond tangible elements and physical assets before designing a fit-out. Some of the factors that influence office wellbeing are objective: achieving a building certification, for example. Others are subjective, such as the presence of support networks and access to mental and physical health resources.

Factors such as employee absenteeism and attrition, staff autonomy, the presence or absence of reward systems, strong CSR and ESG strategies, the promotion of positive behaviours towards colleagues and KPIs related to wellbeing are just a handful of the metrics we measure in order to gain a picture of the ‘wellbeing maturity’ of a business. From there, we can design offices which meet the specific well-being needs of the organisation. 

Designing for the future

Rather than instigating new office models, coronavirus galvanised existing trends such as hybrid and agile working, pushing them into the mainstream. Instead, we think it is wellness, sustainability, and the legal challenge to achieve net zero by 2050, that will be the overarching drivers of innovation in office fit-out design, costs and materials moving forwards.

For the industry at large, delivering office fit-outs that consistently achieve these high standards of wellbeing on both new-build and refurbishment schemes will require a radical overhaul of the way we plan, commission, design and build projects. Here are just two examples:

1/ Is fit-out Category A still fit for purpose? In an era of low waste and sustainability, is the Category A model still fit for purpose? For some office builds, arguably it is. For open-plan office spaces with a simple design, a lot of the principles of Category A fit-outs still work well, with the majority of the materials and design used being able to be retained. But the more bespoke an office is, the less Category A is suitable. Offices of the future will need to accommodate hybrid and agile working practices, and these models require bespoke fit-out solutions.

A better option may be increased uptake of the ‘landlord contribution’ model, where the landlord gives a fixed amount of funding towards the tenant fit-out as part of the lease agreement, to create a fit-out that meets a tenant’s own specifications.

2/ Circularity: beginning with the end in mind. At present, there are few examples of fit-outs that truly embody the principles of low carbon sustainability, wellness and circularity. However, the WELL standard is making wellness easier to benchmark, offering a glimpse of what could become the norm.

As an example of an office project with wellness designed in, one Manchester office with a WELL Platinum rating incorporates air-quality monitoring and filtering to achieve a constant Excellent VOC rating, at least 50 per cent of the furniture is second hand — including reclaimed desk chairs that had been earmarked for landfill. The lobby’s welcome desk appears to be made of marble but was produced from recycled yoghurt pots. Such choices helped cut the fit-out’s embodied carbon to 120 kilograms of embodied carbon per metre squared, compared with the 180 to 220 kilograms estimated for a standard fit-out.

As employees decide how they want to work, and who they want to work for, employers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re-assess and reset what their office spaces represent and stand for. We advocate a holistic, individualised approach to office design. This ethos encompasses not just the fixed physical assets of an office, but prioritises active carbon reduction principles, makes use of behavioural science and building data, and quite simply, delivers a workplace that people feel safe, motivated and excited to come back to.

Furthermore, smart businesses should take advantage of this unique moment in time and work to future-proof their company against perhaps the biggest risk facing us all right now – climate change.

Office fit-out cost model

We have developed a cost model based on a notional fit-out for a space for 1,000 full-time equivalent staff, using a sharing ratio of 50 per cent.

You can read the full article and download the cost model here.

This is an abridged version of an article that was first published in Building magazine.