Why Quiet Zones and Collaborative Spaces Are Essential for Hybrid-Era Offices

Engaging your employees in our new office culture will require both a well-planned strategy and cross-departmental cooperation.

These were just a few of the impactful conclusions presented during “Rebooting Office Culture: Delivering Better Business Outcomes Through a Focus on the Employee and Community Building,” a June 22 custom event hosted online by Commercial Observer Partner Insights and presented by HqO.

The discussion featured insights from Matthew Folsom, director and head of real estate for the global workplace at Spotify; Anthony Marroney, executive director and head of property for the U.S. and the Americas at standard chartered bank; Suzanne Puccino, senior vice president and director of global workplace strategy for WSP; and the event’s host, Jess Johnson, global head of enterprise partnerships at HqO. 

Marroney kicked off the discussion by noting some of the key ways in which office culture and real estate are intertwined.

“We’re providing a home and an operations center for our people to do their best work to support our clients,” said Marroney. “It’s really important to make sure that our people have that collaboration space that’s needed to build social connection and make people feel like they’re welcome, and that they belong in the institution.”

Folsom notes that heads of real estate are in a unique position within the office culture conversation in that they are both inside and outside of the process. 

“We serve as a conduit for the facilitation of that for everyone internally,” said Folsom. “At the same time, we actually are our own constituents. We are delivering services that we will also end up using.”

He notes that as they seek to deliver better business outcomes for people-first organizations, that process exists “within the coordination, collaboration and connection points we are actually delivering for.”

Puccino said that creating or rebooting an office’s culture can be very different between when an office is full and when it’s filled with empty desks. But noting that much of WSP’s staff has been hired since the start of the pandemic, Puccino talked about the importance of what she refers to as a real estate EKG. 

“That’s a big part of our strategy,” said Puccino, whose company generally acquires five to eight other companies per year. “We have a platform, we have a portfolio, and then we buy a company. That shifts your numbers — your numbers go up. But the goal is to get people together. When people work together, they become one company a whole lot sooner than when they’re in disparate offices. So that’s a big key for us, to get all the acquired companies together so they can start to think and feel as one WSP.”

Johnson reinforced her statement by noting that “on the M&A side, real estate ends up being one of the most tangible ways that you feel the company coming together.” 

Puccino, noting that it’s essential when dealing with multiple offices to understand where the synergies lie, shared an anecdote about how, thanks to multiple acquisitions, she woke up one morning with eight locations in Houston. 

“The strategic view is, what do those offices need for the people and how quickly can we bring them together?” said Puccino. “We are always listening to our businesses. Sometimes you acquire a piece of business that needs to stand on its own for regulatory reasons for awhile, but eight offices in Houston really needs to become one or two pretty quickly.”

Folsom then talked about how in order to determine the essential factors for end users, it’s important to think in a hyperlocal fashion. 

“It’s about making sure we are providing the appropriate service levels that are aligned with our corporate model, the governance structure as it exists within the workplace, and within Spotify at large,” said Folsom. “But also it’s about making sure that there is support at the very local level, that all the team members that are accessing that office are incentivized to come in.”

Folsom said that Spotify has a “work-from-anywhere” program, which means that some people may choose to work out of the office most of the time while others might be more homebound. Spotify prioritizes providing personal solutions for all its employees, no matter where they choose to work.

“We want to make sure it feels like we’re providing those solutions at a bespoke level — very curated, engaging employees directly,” said Folsom. “It always rotates back to the people. It’s a very challenging thing to make a global solution for, but the way we craft it is by making sure we understand exactly what the business needs at the local level, and cater some of our service levels to that directly.”

Building off this, Marroney discussed how engaging staff should be an ongoing concern throughout the design, iteration and planning stages.

“We’ve been very intentional in our process of engaging at the employee resource group level, different lines of businesses and functions, and really stress testing, this is what you had before the pandemic, this is what we’re thinking about for the future of our operation, and our design standards have all been updated,” said Marroney. “It’s really about building in that ecosystem so that people can give continuous feedback.”

Marroney notes that Standard Chartered Bank has introduced more focus space, quiet zones meant to serve employees who might be potentially neurodiverse.

“So there’s a whole different process that we’ve undertaken, and a lot of that has been driven by direct engagement,” said Marroney. “It’s really taking the time to get to know the users, and making sure that we also incorporate our own team’s feedback into that as users of the space.”

Folsom noted the irony of the discussion about rebooting office culture including how workers don’t always come into the office, and that aligning those needs with the needs of those who are there is the balance required to get this right.   

“It’s about perspective,” said Folsom, “that the actual end users are now interacting with space and services in a different way. They are coming in with less frequency and a different perspective about why they’re in, which changes their behavior and their opinions about the services and spaces they’re interacting with.”