David Stenbeck explores the role traditional workplaces have for knowledge workers in the new world.

The pandemic has created a massive move to working from home, with a worldwide experiment that has demonstrated offices are no longer the only primary place of work. However, lack of physical interaction hinders connection, learning and collaboration that ultimately will lead to disconnected organisations and ineffective staff.

As the world moves back into our old places of work, or indeed hybrid working (a combination of office and remote working) how can we gain the benefits of working from anywhere whilst overcoming the challenges?

In essence we need to achieve the following:

  • Offices of the future need to move from workplaces to culture spaces, in order to meet core human needs and build powerful sustainable organisations
  • They need to become social anchors, schoolhouses and places of collaboration
  • We must accelerate this by designing offices for human moments, established to drive connection whilst supporting the needs of the remote worker

This article summarises three key challenges people face when working from home. It looks at three core roles of the physical office, and key approaches to supporting remotely.

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