Why a beautiful office can still solve the wrong problem

Why a beautiful office can still solve the wrong problem

A newly refurbished workplace can look fantastic.  New furniture, carefully coordinated colours, planting, feature lighting and collaboration areas can transform the appearance of an office.

But is it actually helping people work better?  That is a rather different question.

Businesses understandably want workplaces that look good. The physical environment communicates something about an organisation to employees, clients and prospective recruits. But appearance alone tells us surprisingly little about whether a workplace is doing its job.

A beautiful office can still be noisy. A stylish collaboration area can sit empty. Meeting rooms can be permanently occupied by individuals looking for somewhere quiet to make a Teams call. Rows of immaculate desks can remain unused while employees choose to work elsewhere.

Before reaching for a new floor plan or furniture catalogue, there is a more fundamental question worth asking: What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Start with the problem, not the furniture

Hybrid working has changed the relationship many organisations have with their workplaces. That does not necessarily make the office less important. It may make getting it right more important.

A six-month randomised controlled trial involving 1,612 employees, published in Nature in 2024, found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one-third without evidence of damage to performance.

Rather than simply asking, “How do we get people back into the office?”, perhaps we should ask: “What should bringing people together enable them to do particularly well?”

That changes the design conversation. Instead of starting with how many desks we can accommodate, we can focus on what people actually need to do: concentrate, collaborate, learn, meet clients, hold confidential conversations, make video calls, exchange ideas, and spend informal time with colleagues.

Then we can ask whether the environment supports those activities.

Listen to the contradictions

Talk to people about their workplace, and you are unlikely to receive one consistent answer. One person wants more interaction. Someone else wants fewer distractions. One employee enjoys the energy of an open-plan environment. Their colleague cannot concentrate in it. Some want more meeting spaces. Others see rooms sitting empty.

Rather than being a problem, these contradictions are useful information.

They may tell us that we are expecting one environment to support too many different activities.

Research into activity-based workplaces has examined the relationship between people, activities, and their surroundings, including factors such as task privacy, opportunities for interaction, and person-environment fit. Instead of asking what the ideal office looks like, perhaps we should ask what different people need to be able to do there.

A beautiful workplace can still be a bad workplace

Interior design inevitably has an aesthetic dimension. Colour, materials, furniture, lighting, artwork, and planting all contribute to how we experience a place.

But good design cannot stop there.

Imagine a beautifully designed open-plan office where conversations make concentrated work difficult. Or an impressive collaboration area immediately beside employees trying to focus. Or an expensive ergonomic chair that nobody knows how to adjust. Or an abundance of informal seating when employees actually need surfaces, screens, and accessible power. Each could look successful in a photograph. Using the space could tell a different story. A successful workplace needs to create somewhere people want to be and help them do what they came there to do.

Ask the people who already understand the problems

There is an obvious source of workplace intelligence that can sometimes be overlooked: the people using it. Employees know which meeting room nobody chooses. They know where video calls become disruptive. They know where it is difficult to concentrate and which parts of the office work particularly well.

Yet employee engagement can happen late in the design process, after many significant decisions have already been made.

Research by workplace psychologist Dr Craig Knight and Professor S. Alexander Haslam provides an interesting perspective. Their experimental research compared lean, enriched, and empowered workplaces and found better outcomes in enriched environments, with further benefits when participants had influence over their surroundings. Related research examined relationships between managerial control of workspace, organisational identification, comfort, satisfaction and wellbeing.

The lesson is not that employees should become interior designers. They are experts in something equally important: their own experience of work.

So instead of starting by asking:

“What colour would you like the office to be?”

Try asking:

“What helps you do your best work here?”

“What gets in your way?”

“What do you currently do to work around the problem?”

The answers can be considerably more useful.

From consultation to experimentation: WNW Digital

I saw this approach put into practice while working with Exeter-based digital marketing agency WNW Digital. The business was considering how to make better use of its existing workplace. Rather than beginning with a predetermined design solution, employees participated in workshops exploring space planning, relationships between teams, furniture choices, and the character of the office.

Crucially, the ideas did not immediately become a fixed final design.

Different arrangements were explored, a preferred layout was developed, and the plan was tested for several weeks. It could then be adjusted in response to how people actually experienced it. The employees also contributed to the character of their workplace. Photographs of Devon scenery taken by staff were enlarged and incorporated into the interior, helping personalise the environment.

The project demonstrated something important. You do not necessarily have to know the final answer before you start. Sometimes the best way to understand what a workplace needs is to allow the people using it to help explore the possibilities.

Look for the workarounds

You can apply the same principle without undertaking a formal workplace project.

Walk around an office and look for evidence of people adapting their surroundings.

Has someone moved a chair into a quiet corner?

Are employees taking video calls in corridors?

Are small meeting rooms being occupied by individuals who simply need somewhere quiet?

Has a team rearranged its furniture?

Are people choosing to work in the café because the main office is too distracting?

These behaviours can be interpreted as people using a workplace incorrectly.

Try turning that assumption around. Perhaps people are showing you that the workplace is not supporting the way they actually work. The adaptations people make can reveal needs that were not anticipated when the space was designed.

Test before you transform

Once you understand the problem, the answer does not necessarily need to be a major refurbishment. Sometimes relatively modest interventions allow you to test an idea. Move furniture. Create a temporary quiet area. Change the function of an underused room. Test different seating. Improve acoustic separation. Introduce a space somewhere appropriate for video calls. Reconfigure a collaboration area. Then observe what happens.

Do people use it?

Has the original problem improved?

Has the change created an unexpected problem somewhere else?

The WNW Digital project followed this principle: ideas were developed collaboratively, put into practice and refined after employees had experienced them in everyday use. Testing allows businesses to learn before committing significant budgets. It can also provide better evidence for where substantial investment really is needed.

Five questions to ask before changing your workplace

Take a walk around your workplace and ask:

1. What are people actually doing here?

2. What appears to be frustrating them?

3. Which spaces are consistently busy and which are consistently empty?

4. What have employees moved, adapted or improvised for themselves?

5. What do we want people to be able to do better than they can today?

These are simple questions. But the answers may completely change your design brief.

Spend when you understand why

None of this is an argument against investing in workplace design. Quite the opposite. The workplace can influence how people concentrate, collaborate, communicate, and experience the organisation they work for. Decisions about space, furniture and the working environment deserve serious consideration.

But investment should follow understanding.

The next time somebody suggests that your office needs redesigning, resist beginning with what it should look like. Start with people.

Look at what they are trying to accomplish, where the environment helps them and where it gets in their way. Try things. Observe what happens. Keep what works and change what does not. The answer might eventually be new furniture, a different layout, better acoustics, more choice, or a larger refurbishment.

And yes, the finished workplace should look good. But a successful workplace needs to do considerably more than look beautiful.

Sources and further reading

Knight, C. and Haslam, S. A. (2010). “Your Place or Mine? Organizational Identification and Comfort as Mediators of Relationships between the Managerial Control of Workspace and Employees’ Satisfaction and Well-being.” British Journal of Management, 21(3), 717–735.

Knight, C. and Haslam, S. A. (2010). “The Relative Merits of Lean, Enriched, and Empowered Offices: An Experimental Examination of the Impact of Workspace Management Strategies on Well-Being and Productivity.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 16(2), 158–172.

Bloom, N. et al. (2024). “Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance.” Nature.