Agile Office

What Makes an Agile Office

An agile office is a thoughtfully designed and flexible workspace that offers employees various seating and work style options. Its purpose is to enhance productivity, foster collaboration, and ignite creativity while maintaining flexibility for future reconfigurations.

By combining open floor plan concepts with private areas and smaller social spaces, the agile office caters to the diverse needs of a multigenerational workforce, providing them with a work environment that suits them best.

However, the agile office goes beyond physical design. It also considers the psychological aspects of work, including emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. This approach shifts the focus from a building-centric design to a people-centric one, prioritizing employee health and well-being. The agile office creates a functional space and celebrates aesthetically pleasing environments that engage all senses.

Ultimately, it aims to positively influence behavior, address individual needs, and enhance the way people work while maintaining flexibility for future changes.

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The New Agile Office Transformation Handbook

To help ease your company’s transition into a balanced workplace, we’ve compiled best practices and references to case studies to simplify your process.

Components of an Agile Office

What features make up an agile office? To be a balanced office, the workplace needs to make use of collaborative, community-oriented spaces as well as private areas. Additionally, the agile office needs to lead with a human-centric design, focused on employee physical and psychological wellbeing. It’s not enough for an agile office to function efficiently, it also must perform effectively. 

In order to optimize workplace efficacy, the agile office should contain a mix of the these five components: 

Open Areas

Designed to increase collaboration and employee interaction, these spaces are the backbone of an agile office design. They offer endless seating options and cater to a multigenerational staff by seating people near each other, regardless of rank, experience or department. 

  1. Open Plan
    The open plan concept has been gaining popularity for years. A staple in the tech sector, this floor plan model makes use of large, open spaces, creating one big room where employees complete most of their work. Based on the premise of physically and metaphorically breaking down walls and silos, the open space contains rows of bench seating, minimizing the use of private and enclosed spaces. Employees are seated out in the open, in view of each other, with the ability to talk across desks and easily share ideas and thoughts.  An extremely space-efficient design, the open concept allows for more seats per square foot than other office design format, providing companies a cost-savings. Additionally, the open concept provides a sense of egalitarianism, omitting the often rigid hierarchical seating charts of a traditional office floor plan.
  2. Free Address
    A subset of the open office is the free address seating plan.  As the name implies, employees are free to sit at any unoccupied desk they would like. Based on a first come, first served basis, these non-assigned seats resemble an open office, featuring rows of bench seating or a series of workstations. The underlying concept is the same as the open plan — provide employees with a collaborative work environment that exposes them to different departments and organizational components of a business. Free address allows employees to sit wherever they want, giving them the ability to change their work station daily or weekly. Designed to untether employees from an assigned desk, these work areas offer ample seating to a roving staff, and provide a change in office scenery to legacy employees.  One day an employee can be seated amongst his peers, and the next, he can be seated adjacent to a different department head, exposing him to the many levels of a company.
Quiet Zones
Meeting Rooms
Community Centers
Utility Rooms

The Design Element of an Agile Office

The agile office goes beyond the functional layout and dedicated work areas of an office environment. It encompasses the entire look and feel of a space.  While the layout sets the framework, the design elements and aesthetics create ambiance and character. In general, a modern-day office takes into consideration a design concept, furniture choice, lighting, and acoustics.

Concept

Once you’ve determined the office framework and how much space will be used as an open plan, private, and communal area, the design concept will further showcase your narrative. Two popular concepts in office design are resimercial and corportality — designing spaces to reflect either a residential space or a hotel property. Another concept gaining traction is biophilia. That is, designing an office to reconnect employees to nature by using passive systems and elements, such as daylighting and natural ventilation, living plants, organic forms, and natural materials. The concept will guide design choices including color and material palette, forms and structures, furniture silhouettes, and lighting choices. 

Furniture
Lighting
Acoustics

The Benefits of an Agile Office

The benefits of the agile office are numerous. This concept delivers unmatched, flexible functionality, designed to optimize space and employee comfort. Agile offices can positively impact how employees feel about their work and improve how they work together. Moreover, it is a platform to express corporate culture and an opportunity to communicate your company’s values and mission to prospective employees and clients.

Optimize Workplace

The agile office gives designers the ability to turn underutilized work areas into flourishing pockets of innovation. By putting the emphasis on quality over quantity of square footage, agile office designers are able to optimize the workplace, putting every square inch to good use.

Increase Employee Satisfaction and Productivity
Improved Teamwork
Convey Corporate Culture
Attract, Retain and Appeal to Talent