Hybrid Working: What the Office Is For Now

Ask a business how many people are in on a given day and you tend to get a shrug, then a number, then a caveat. Tuesday and Wednesday are busy, Friday is quiet, and nobody says it out loud in case it hardens into policy. Hybrid working office design starts right there, with an honest count of the busiest day rather than the headcount on the payroll.

The furniture question comes along behind it. When everyone was in five days a week with one desk each, the answer was easy and slightly boring. Now the office has to earn the commute, and that changes what belongs in it.

The office has a different job now

Nobody travels forty minutes to answer email. People come in for the things that are worse at home: seeing colleagues, and sorting out in ten minutes what would otherwise take four days of messages.

The catch is that the same person still has a call at half two, and possibly one they would rather the whole room did not hear. An office that is brilliant for collaboration and hopeless for concentration quietly trains people to stay away on the days they have real work on, which is most days.

The brief, then, is two moods on one floor, and a way of moving between them without having to ask anyone.

Two modes, one floor

1. Somewhere to work together. Runs of desks people can drop into without booking, tables you can pull chairs around, and enough room to stand behind someone and point at their screen.

2. Somewhere to go quiet. A booth, a screened corner, anywhere with a door or a convincing impression of one.

3. Somewhere to put your things. People who are in twice a week arrive with a bag and no desk of their own, and a bag on the floor is a trip hazard with a laptop in it. Lockable office storage is the usual answer.

Bench desking handles the first job because it stops pretending every seat is owned. A single row of the Impulse bench desk workstation runs from 240cm to 540cm wide, seats two or three, and takes an extension kit when the busy day gets busier. The desks are 80cm deep, which is the number that decides whether two people can face each other without a slow-motion laptop collision.

What a booth actually is

A privacy booth is furniture doing an impression of a room, and that is worth saying plainly before anyone spends real money on one. The fully enclosed Brixworth booth is 249cm deep and 133.5cm high: tall enough to swallow your half of a conversation, not tall enough to be a phone box. Seat height is 43cm and it is rated for eight hours of use, so it is built to be worked in rather than perched on.

They are heavy, too. Between 68kg and 102kg depending on width, which is not something you nudge across the floor on a whim. Place it once and place it properly. Away from the kettle, out of the walkway, ideally where the person inside is not staring straight at reception.

If a desk sits empty three days a week, the question is not whether to remove it. It is what that square metre could be doing on the other two.

Furniture that flexes

The pieces that earn their keep in a hybrid office are the ones that do more than one thing.

Acoustic desk screens clamp on and come off again, so a bank of desks can be four private spots on Tuesday and one long working table on Thursday. Tables on castors get pushed together for a workshop and pushed back afterwards, and an unassigned desk with a power module in the middle suits whoever turns up. None of this is exciting, and all of it stops the office feeling like a room laid out for a company that no longer exists.

Start with the busiest day

Averages will let you down here. Fourteen desks for an average of fourteen people sounds sensible until Wednesday arrives with twenty-two, and four of them end up on the breakout sofa with laptops on their knees, which is nobody's idea of a workspace.

Count the peak, then take a little off if a booth or two can absorb the overflow. Space planning comes with every project we quote, one desk or a whole floor, so if you would rather not do the maths on a Sunday evening, send us the room and we will do it with you.

The office competes with the spare room on people, not on comfort, and it only keeps winning if there is somewhere to think as well as somewhere to talk.