"If you ask Ray Yuen, office managing director at the design and architecture firm Gensler, the answer is food. A recent Gensler survey asked employees to rank the office spaces that were most important to them. The top three? The office food hall, cafe, or lounge. "It's really about food and wellness," Yuen said onstage. "They didn't even mention anything about work. Everybody just picked the stuff that we really want as human beings.""
"Flexibility is also key. In the past, Yuen said he used to heavily design about 80% of a company's headquarters with built in furniture and modules like cubicles, and leave about 20% as "flexible space." Now, the balance is more 50/50, so companies can transform their office spaces easily when needs arise, such as an office happy hour, he says."
"One of the biggest successes was a lo-fi vinyl listening bar, where no tech or talking was allowed, he said. "We're no longer just designing workplaces. We're actually designing experiences. Because [employees may] think, 'Well, if I can work anywhere, why do I want to go to work? I can do it at home,' Yuen said. 'You've really got to make the campus or the workplace be more than work, and that's the fun part of it.'"
Food and wellness rank highest in employee preferences for office spaces, with food halls, cafes, and lounges at the top. Low-tech sensory amenities like a lo-fi vinyl listening bar helped bring remote employees back by offering a shared, nonwork experience. Office design is shifting from predominantly built-in furniture to a roughly even split with flexible space to enable rapid transformations for events and informal uses. Workplaces are being designed as experience-driven campuses that combine social, sensory, and wellness amenities to entice in-person attendance and meet basic human desires beyond tasks.
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