In our Office Futures survey we asked London office employees what office features were most important to them, allowing a selection of up to three choices.
What we found was that despite a lot of today’s discussion around the office centred on co-working and technology, the reality was that for most employees ‘personal workspace’ was far and away the most important office feature.
This tallies well with another part of our survey results, where we found ‘private desk-based work’ to be easily the most common task performed in the office.
The data underlines the extent to which employers shouldn’t lose sight of what their staff are actually doing in the office, when thinking about the workspace provided to them.
Of course, the idea that personal space (or personal workspace in this instance) is important is not new. The American anthropologist Edward Hall coined the term Proxemics in 1963 to describe the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction. In his foundational work on proxemics, The Hidden Dimension, Hall described personal space as the area surrounding a personal that they considered psychologically theirs, and noted that they would feel discomfort, anger, or anxiety when that personal space was encroached, depending on their relationship with the encroacher.
From a real estate standpoint, what this means is that someone’s personal workspace is not defined by their desk, but by distance. For example, you could have your own dedicated desk in an office, but if packed in too tight with other employees, the impact on your perception of your personal space could still be negative. Conversely, an employee sitting in a more relaxed, or informal, setting without a dedicated desk may have a good perception of their personal space if said workspace is designed in an effective way, and not overpopulated.
Although the march of the high density open-plan office has felt unstoppable over the past decade or so, we are seeing signs that employers are beginning to reconsider amid concerns over the impact on employee productivity. Indeed, with employees constituting a far greater proportion of businesses’ costs than their office space, it would seem illogical if this rather cheap asset was not reoriented to get the most out of staff.
Read the full Office Futures survey and take a look through Strutt & Parker's commercial property listings.