Spacestor recently took part in Workplace Week , an exciting week-long event in the design industry highlighting the UK’S most innovative and creative workspaces. Companies across the UK showcased their new workspace designs, to inspire and encourage positive workspace change whilst raising money for Children in Need.
From 14 th - 18 th November, Spacestor visited several of these offices including Lloyds of London, JellyFish, RBS Digital, Jones Lang Lasalle and PwC. Each of these offices showcased unique workspace designs to suit each industry from traditional layouts to open plan and creative environments.
When it comes to workspace design, we understand that aesthetic appeal plays a key role in employee retention and hiring, this event was the perfect opportunity to explore a variety of industry workplace designs and find out how each office has introduced collaborative spaces, how they have created areas to use as recruitment tools and adapted to the workspace and tech trends of today. There were recurring key trends throughout the week, many of them perfectly aligned with Spacestor’s core values and beliefs.
Here are our observations of the event, some of the offices visited and the prevalent themes influencing the future of workplaces.
JLL offices focused on employee and visitor experience following their decrease in office space reducing their footprint per person from 76 sq.ft to 59 sq.ft. Their office includes a concierge service to greet and look after employees and customers and a genius bar for employees to take their equipment to be fixed or gain extra training. When it comes to their main aim of attracting top talent, JLL highlighted how their workspace can be used as a recruitment tool by showing their most collaborative workspace on the fifth floor of the office. This floor also featured furniture and spaces throughout the building, to encourage group meetings and teamwork in the very popular booth seating areas. Since the workspace improvements, JLL estimate an additional 3-8% extra revenue from their dynamic working areas, increasing productivity within their workspace and improving employee happiness.
Another company that has been able to attract better high-quality employees since their move into a creative office in a prime location is Jellyfish – the first digital agency in The Shard. JellyFish’s aim for their new office was to design the best work-life environment and the team were involved in the entire process of the re-design creating an office that expressed individuality in the Shard. As the world’s biggest boutique digital agency, JellFfish created an environment that employees would be proud of – flexible, movable and modular by nature that could easily be adapted to suit the needs of the employee or task. e design and space that JellyFish has created for it’s staff also reflects the brands aim of investing in people, allowing all employees to work to the best of their ability with the space and resources available. “Giving our staff room to grow sounds like a cliché, but here, it is true. We want the team here at Jellyfish to flourish, and they can only do this by having the space and resources to do so”. Jellyfish.co.uk/about-us The visit to RBS was very interesting and drew on some key themes such as attracting quality employees with a digital studio designed to enhance collaborative working in a creative environment for a range of teams to use.
The RBS Digital Studio is an innovative digital space amongst traditional banking offices that allows staff to network in an open and vibrant environment with bench desk seating areas, demo zones and more. This space offers a new way of working within a more traditional environment at a designated desk, allowing employees to utilize the studio for collaborative meetings, or for independent work too. Employees were sent a workplace survey after the completion of the digital floor, the results showed that environment and culture within the workplace came out on top whilst leadership and technology in the office was rated low. To cater for a variety of personalities and working styles, RBS introduced meet and greets to encourage interaction and a games room with a studio manager ensuring that a variety of teams play together.
Their Studio has effectively enhanced their digital working within a traditional banking environment at RBS. Lloyds of London have noticed the expansion of tech sectors and from debating the risks and rewards of technological disruption, they understand the importance of evolving and introducing tech into the financial services industry. "We have a unique and world-beating combination of a globally dominant financial services and insurance industry, sitting alongside a rapidly expanding tech sector rivalling Silicon Valley. For Lloyd’s and other London insurers and reinsurers to maintain growth in the global specialist market over the next few years, we have to evolve and adapt.
If we stand still, we will all get left behind.” John Nelson, Chairman, Lloyds of London It’s evident that companies in all industries are competing for the same pool of talent and are using their workspaces as a recruiting tool with tech being the main focus in workspace trends. We know that the key to success is to not only understand the traits of next generation, but also how our workspaces can be configured to attract, support and retain them too. Enhancing workspaces with the right furniture, tech and design will attract high-quality employees - creating a space that is adaptable to the ever-changing workspace trends.
Click here to see our range of modular, future proof furniture designed to win the war for talent of the next generation and get in touch with us to collaborate on your workspace.
