How to Make the Office a High-Performance Space: Online Panel Event

Oktra’s latest virtual event tackled one of the key challenges businesses are facing with the future workplace in mind, how do you make the office a high-performance space? The panel of industry-leading experts discussed post-pandemic changes to office design, what high performance actually means, and the increasingly prevalent role of the emerging generations in shaping new workplace trends.

We’re at the very beginning of a new journey for the workplace, and understanding the needs of Gen Z and young millennials is paramount to shaping what will come next. The discussion brought together insights from Oktra’s Future Workplace Report and insights from the world of workplace design to tackle some of the challenges currently facing businesses, including:

• What do we mean by a high-performance space?
• How do the emerging generations play a role in what that looks like?
• How can we create these types of spaces?
• What obstacles are there to overcome, and how can we overcome them?

The panel was hosted by Tom Hitch, Head of Content at Oktra, and featured David Bruno, Executive Creative Director at YouTube Creative Studio, alongside Oktra’s Dominic Dugan and Simen Osman, Creative Director, and Project Director respectively.

If you couldn’t join the live panel discussion or would like to listen back to it, you can access an on-demand version to find out more about creating high-performance spaces.

WATCH HERE

Key takeaways from the panel

High performance means different things to different businesses, but one thing the panel agreed on was that the future workplace must foster a sense of belonging and purpose to be a success. To achieve that, there are a number of key points that our industry experts suggest leaders should consider. Here are our key takeaways:

Don’t overlook onboarding

The onboarding of a space is often overlooked but can play a key role in engaging employees. Businesses need to talk to their teams about why a space has been designed a certain way from day one, which not only enables people to use the space in the way it was intended but also helps bring the brand through and adds that layer of personalisation.

Meeting the individual needs of the emerging generations is crucial

The emerging generation is one of the most vocal to date; they understand their value and they’re clear on what they want. They have distinctly different working habits from the generations that came before them, owing to the age of connectivity and the pandemic being their first experience of the working world.

Businesses need to find a way of understanding individual needs because workspace design must now be about the people who use it. If this is the focus, and the goal is building employee happiness and productivity, it will ultimately drive culture and performance.

Wellbeing is at the heart of the high-performance office

Of those individual needs, wellbeing is taking centre stage in the new world of work. People have adapted to working in a very different way through remote and hybrid adjustments, and they are seeking a space that mirrors the comfort they have in their own homes. We need to begin thinking about how we can cater to employee wellbeing through office design now more than ever.

Make, test, break and go again

It’s day one for this new approach to the workplace, and so businesses need to be prepared to fail hard and fail fast. A high-performance space must be 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 companies need to be comfortable with experimenting. It’s a work in progress.

For more information, take a look at The Future Workplace Resource Page which collates insights from our latest report to show businesses how their workplace can be optimised to drive performance in the future.