4 Pillars for Designing a High-Performance Workplace

What is a high-performance workplace?

Different people have different views about what a ‘high-performance workplace’ means. Some believe it’s about talent attraction and retention, others think of it in terms of value creation and financial return.

We believe that high-performance workplaces emerge at the intersection of people, technology, and innovative design. They are characterised by involvement that ensure employees feel connected to their workplace, and cater to a diverse spectrum of work styles to create environments that not only meet today’s demands but are adaptable to tomorrow’s challenges.

1. The Context

To enable high performance in the workplace, office design needs to be grounded in context, and context is best understood and established via a detailed design brief. This part of the process is vital, because without a proper brief an office may end up looking great aesthetically, but be wholly unsuited to the needs and objectives of a business and its employees.

First and foremost, a design brief has to address the key challenges or problems the business is trying to resolve. And this is achieved by asking the right questions at the outset. Such questions might include:

• What are the key drivers for this office move/redesign?
• Are there any problems with your current space? If so, what?
• What are the current barriers to productivity?
• How do you want employees to benefit from your new workspace?
• How do your teams tend to use available office space?
• Are you planning any major changes in terms of recruitment or ways of working?

By defining the contextual drivers for a project, design teams can devise informed interventions that will help to maximise workplace performance and productivity. They can also establish clarity of direction and alignment with a client’s vision and goals. Above all, a rigorous briefing process enables designers to identify critical workplace requirements. For example, occupancy numbers, workstation volume and type (fixed, flexible), storage needs and planned use of space.

3. The Programme of Events

A company’s programme of events can be critical to productivity. Those events that happen on a regular basis, such as lunch-and-learns, town halls, brainstorms or end-of-week wrap-ups, are essential for keeping employees informed and equipped to perform.

But the surrounding workspace needs to be right. Whether it’s dedicated and additional space, or areas that enable dual use, businesses need to consider how interior design can support their internal events programme. Increasingly, businesses are opting for informal overflow spaces that can support company-wide events, or centralised kitchen or coffee areas that double up as meeting venues. Internal spaces can also flex through the use of sliding partitions, with rooms being expanded for large events, or contracted for more intimate engagements.

Moorhouse’s London office is a great example of how this pillar can be supported by innovative workplace design. Moorhouse’s core agile space, which is utilised by the whole business during monthly townhalls and social activities, was designed to facilitate six different configurations. The standard layout features casual seating areas near the teapoint, with additional configurations enabled through the modularity of the furniture used. ‘Dine’ is a setting for hosted gatherings, ‘Move’ transforms the area into a vast open space for physical activities, and ‘Craft’ prioritises concentrated tasks.

4. The Education Piece

An office is only as effective as its users, and the education piece is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of the high-performance workplace. This doesn’t just mean ‘onboarding’ employees in a new space or with a new design, but continuously updating and reinforcing knowledge about the workspace’s design features, etiquette, and evolving practices. Well-informed employees are much more likely to utilise the space efficiently, fostering a culture of productivity and collaboration.

Educating employees about the design nuances, technological tools and collaborative spaces ensures that they can leverage the environment to its fullest potential. This ongoing education is crucial, especially in the context of hybrid working models, where employees may have varying levels of physical presence in the office. In practice, this could be as simple as informative materials or as detailed as regular onboarding programmes that extend beyond traditional orientation to include detailed insights into the design of the office.

Iteration and evolution

As Oktra’s Creative Director, Dominic Dugan, suggested in our high-performance workplace discussion with YouTube Creative Studio, high performance is about learning, iteration and evolution. What’s new now won’t be new in two years’ time; users and demographics are going to change, so businesses need to be comfortable with experimenting.

Trial and error will be key to developing successful design strategies that get the very the best from employees and the work environment. These pillars of high-performance design are the foundations on which to build an environment capable of driving productivity, engagement and success.