According to the technology research and consulting company Gartner, workplace trends for 2024 are set to encompass 4 key themes for businesses to navigate: considering the value proposition of employees, evolving with career assumptions, implementing and working with AI and creating greater critical skills within managerial levels. All of which can have great impact on how you design and tailor your office design and fit out build for your workforce.

Skills are set to become the golden ticket, AI is set to create and not diminish workforce opportunity, the working week is predicted to change with the ‘4-day working week’ normalising as a preferred standard, career stereotypes changing alongside workforce evolution, climate change is becoming an employee demand as a benefit impacting the buildings your workspaces are designed within and the cost of getting to work (a knock on affect from the cost of living) could seek further change and rearrange expectations and shift patterns of your people’s behaviour.

Let’s take a look at the themes arising for employers and how your workplace fit out can reflect the trends within your workspaces interior design as well as space planning for your square footage that is set to rise across multiple industries...

1) Agile Central Office Hubs & 4-Day Working Weeks

With candidates ranking a ‘four-day workweek’ as an attractive offer within a workplace, organisations that are looking to attract and retain talent may need to look how they set up their office design and space plan for hybrid and agile working patterns. Flexible zones and multi-use furniture can be successfully used to accommodate different working styles, working times and days that are as flexible as your workforce.

2) Hybrid Working to Assist in Rising Return Workforce Costs

With employees continuing to be encouraged to return to the workplace but with many now having the costs of travelling back to their place of work, adaptive travel start times, working day finish hours and days in the office versus those spent working from home can assist in taking the initial sting out of having to travel whilst also listening to what works best for your people and business too.

Hot desks, sit-stand-desks, kitchenettes, privacy booths and collaborative zones are popular choices that offer your people a space for the days they are in the office and a switch from focused to group work with options such as acoustic furniture in quiet and open areas that along with purposely placed breakout spaces provide areas for those informal & creative conversations.

3) Climate Change, ESGs & Our Buildings 

Considering the health and safety of your buildings be it as a tenant or developer/landlord and considering your environmental impact that looks at your carbon footprint in terms of materials used, life cycles and the cost of running your commercial spaces can make for attractive places to work if you can demonstrate not only your stance as a company and the actions you take but those you promote in the workspace you offer too. You can see our sustainability and ESG principles here.

4) Championing Every Worker and Every Worker Has a Place to Work

With Gartner stating that “71% of millennial workers say the pandemic made them rethink the place that work should have on their lives,” it makes sense to heed the statement and to incorporate work and play into your working zones, allowing for breaks, relaxing spaces, bringing the outdoors in with living walls that combine as storage and allowing for as much natural light as you can to cater for the health and wellbeing of your workforce. Considering what every individual needs and how planning for your available space can carefully tailor to the expectations of your people and also what you need as a business too --- contemplating the changing attitudes towards balancing work and life outside of it shows that you care as an employer but also demonstrates that you understand what your people want. Satisfied individuals are more likely to be successful, loyal, content and show greater productivity than those that aren’t.

Listening to your people makes for good business sense and creating a space for your people enables them to be at their best which is win for them and a win for business too. Making for an attractive place of work and commercial office space.

5) Using AI to Reshape Your Place of Work

Using AI to streamline processes and to assist people in their jobs will enhance opportunity as much as it will exude proficiencies and reductions in time taken to complete certain tasks. Data governance and quality control is still very much a people’s role and skilled workforces will continue to ensure regulatory and legal requirements set upon businesses are met.

Your design and build and interior design can be crafted around your people and the technology that assists them and your business. Flexible planning at the design/space planning stage can allow for changes as your company grows and as technology develops.

Partitions and moving walls can build spaces that are driven and as adaptive as your people to enable conference calls that reduce noise and distraction for other workers, that can double up as storage (especially handy in smaller working spaces) as well as practical zones that drive the need of your people and organisation.

Fit Out’s to Understand Your Workspace Impact

Recognising the workforce trends and understanding how they can impact your workplace and commercial spaces allows for rapid and adaptive change in an evolving climate where technology is a driving factor but where people power is still the capital of steering how we change. Valuing skills, people and how AI can assist and build opportunity.

Transforming your workspace to match the demands of your people and in how you attract and retain the right talent is in listening and planning for the changing landscape of work. At TB Fit Out we know how competitive industry is and we partner with companies to promote thriving hybrid workspaces that strategise to best highlight their business and their people within their working spaces. We offer fully project managed design and build, space planning, fit out and commercial refurbishment services for businesses, organisations and educational bodies. Putting you at the forefront of every change.

What change are you seeing in your workplace need and how are you steering it from within?

 Transforming Your Workspaces