In the past, conventional wisdom held that offices were critical to productivity, culture, and winning the war for talent. Companies competed fiercely for prime office space in built-up urban areas, investing in prestigious properties as a means of attracting top talent.

Recent events havesince permanently altered how we look at the workspace. Research from McKinsey suggests that in April 2020, 62 percent of employed Americans worked at home during the Covid-19 crisis, compared with 25 percent in 2018, whilst 80 percent of people questioned reported that they enjoy working from home.

As the appetite for remote work increases,we are seeing a paradigm shift in what constitutes a competitive workplace. Increasingly, organisations are turning to a Hybrid Workspace Model which prioritises the experience of people, empowering them with the flexibility to choose a blend of office and remote working.

According to workplace design experts Gensler, “if we refocus our workplaces to create experience-centric environments we also need to change how we think of the workplace as a whole.”

Traditional workplace planning is based on capacity, emphasising the number of workstations for individual focus work. Collaboration spaces, community amenities and supports areas have been detached from the number of desks. In the new Hybrid Workspace, a new approach to office planning is required. More than just an office, physical spaces must become a vital part in a comprehensive support system for a dispersed hybrid workforce.

 

Give Workers Limitless Space, to Capture their Best ideas

A Study from Oxford Economics found that 49% of employees ranked having space to collaborate with co-workers easily and effectively as the most important feature for a productive work environment. Designing spaces that promotes collaboration is essential to ensuring that your team feel content and productive and are adequately equipped to share their ideas without compromising on concision or scale.

The ideal solution gives you the infinite space you need to seamlessly articulate complex concepts and thoughts and allows you to feel unconstrained in your ability to share and develop ideas; driving your businesses shared vision forward. To achieve this, it needs to allow you to draw and write on infinite screen real estate, from all your devices simultaneously. This freedom of expression facilitates a culture of innovation and inspires individuals to capture their best ideas.

Humanise Collaboration Experiences

Flexibility has become a top priority for young professionals. To be competitive in attracting the widest pool of talent, you must not only offer but optimise the ability to work anytime, anywhere without compromising on the quality or dynamism of interactions. To achieve this, the ability to authentically interact with one and other in a human way must be enhanced. The better the solution is at accurately mirroring an intuitive, human experience, the less need for in-person meetings, saving on travel costs.

The ideal solution does not compromise in connecting teams, it creates multi-functional feature-rich meeting environments giving individuals the autonomy to collaborate freely, wherever they are. It allows meeting participants to draw on a whiteboard, share documents and converse through video in real-time, from anywhere in the world.

 

Hybrid Workspace Experts

At Laduma, we believe that the new breed of Hybrid Workforce needs a new breed of Hybrid Workspace. One singular platform where you can bring all your favourite applications and tools with you to do your best work together. Teams need to work fast, efficiently and with freedom, harnessing each tool’s individual benefit together in one place. With the help of Laduma, you can optimise this entire process by pulling meetings, notes, and reminders into one central location and knitting together applications into one cohesive collaboration ecosystem.

Adaptive Digital Workspaces provide an effective blueprint for the Hybrid Workspace from which to master the Hybrid Working model of the New Normal. We know that empowering your team and optimising your assets is the key to doing this.

To find out more about how our digital workspaces could benefit your organisation, request a demo.