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INTRODUCTION

Do you work in your own office? Or is your office open plan. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the way we use the office is changing. In this episode, Pippa and Phil talk about office design and how it impacts work, with Kerstin Sailer, professor in the sociology of architecture at University College London.

TRANSCRIPT

Phil
Does the office you work in change the way you work?

Kerstin Sailer
For way too long, we've looked at the office as a kind of one-size-fits-all model.

Pippa
Today we're talking about how offices are changing.

Phil
Hello and welcome to Learning English for Work, our podcast to help you improve your business English. I'm Phil.

Pippa
And I'm Pippa. You can find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

Phil
OK. And to start, I'm going to ask you, Pippa, what kind of office do you like?

Pippa
Hmm. A lot of offices I've worked in have been quite similar, but I would say I like there to be lots of light. Also, I like it to be a nice temperature. Not too cold, not too hot. If it's very hot, then I feel really sleepy at work. And it's also nice if it's easy to speak to colleagues around you. You're sat with the people that you need to speak to, rather than really far away from them.

Phil
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that for me as well. Also, what I think is important is that you work with people who make a similar amount of noise to you. So if you are talking a lot in your work, it's good to be with other people that do that, so you're not disturbing them. Or if you need to be really quiet and focus on things, you don't have lots of noisy people around you distracting you. I think that's good.

Pippa
I think you're getting to the heart of quite a lot of people's issues with offices, because obviously lots of people might be working in one space together. And in the past, people had individual offices more commonly, and then open plan offices became more common, so this is where you have one big space with lots of desks where everyone works together. But are offices maybe changing again? We've talked before on the podcast about hybrid work, so that's splitting your time between the office and home. And does this mean we need to think about office design a bit differently?

Phil
Well, today we are going to be looking at how offices could be changing and the decisions that companies make when they're choosing and designing an office.

Pippa
Yes. And I spoke to Kerstin Sailer who researches how office design impacts the people working there.

Kerstin Sailer
I've always been interested in the relationship between people and buildings. So as architects, typically we are only concerned with the built world, so we think about the walls and the ceilings and the openings and the materials, etc. But a big part of architecture is obviously how it's inhabited and how people use it afterwards, and that's always interested me. And so part of that inquiry has led me to look at workplaces and office buildings, but also other types of workplaces, such as schools or laboratory buildings or hospitals.

Pippa
Yeah. And I wonder, for people who have no kind of background in this, who wouldn't even know where to start, what sort of things need to be considered when you're thinking about a workplace and designing it? What sort of factors do you have to bear in mind?

Kerstin Sailer
The work that I do mostly looks at the layout, so we look at the architectural plan and think about the consequences that it will have. For example, if you walk through an office, the, the door from the street and you're in a big foyer, what are the things that you can immediately see and what are you aware of? Is it just a reception desk and otherwise, you know, kind of devoid of people and human life? Or are you stepping right into, you know, a bustling cafe or can you see aspects of work already happening?

Pippa
Kerstin says that office designers need to think about who is using the office space before they start designing.

Kerstin Sailer
The question I would always raise is what do you want to achieve? So what kind of work are you doing? Is this, you know, highly creative work? Is it repetitive work? Is it more bureaucratic type work? Once you know that and what industry you're in, you can then think about, OK, how do these processes work in space and with space? Is it mainly desk space? Do people, are people on their feet? Do people work with materials? And then you can think about how those should be arranged and put in place. And what's really important is not just the settings, but what is next to those settings. And for example, you wouldn't want to put a collaborative workspace with a round table next to an office area with desks where people are trying to concentrate, for example. So what is next to another setting is really important when you consider, you know, to avoid usage conflicts and to kind of consider how this is going to work ultimately for the people using it.

Phil
OK, so it sounds like some people put a lot of thought into how an office is designed.

Pippa
Yeah, and offices have changed quite a lot over the years, and I think this probably reflects how the way we work has changed, how technology has changed and things like that.

Kerstin Sailer
One of the most important questions, I guess, is how open or enclosed is the office. And if we start right at when the office was born, that was part of the administrative function of manufacturing. So the big railway companies in the United States gave rise to, you know, kind of administrative functions growing. And those were the first offices in the kind of mid 19th century. All of those offices were enclosed offices. So you would have a corridor and then both sides of the corridor, you would move into an enclosed office, and those might be shared between, um, one or two or three people. The corners would always go to the managers or the CEO's. The higher you were in the building, that reflected the hierarchy, so those were very strictly designed and organised spaces around the organisational hierarchy. But then, at the beginning of the 20th century, we saw this move into much more bigger and open plan spaces. But I think what the biggest change we've seen in the recent times, obviously, is the Covid-19 pandemic. And with that, we have seen a shift to more hybrid forms of working so I guess that's interesting in, you know, the most recent changes and how that has impacted the way we see the office and the way office design is responding to those challenges.

Pippa
Yeah. And how is it responding to those challenges? Because I suppose, yeah, the, the office is needing to do slightly different things. Maybe you've got people on video calls, people are coming in for only a couple of days a week and maybe wanting to do more meetings in the office. So how, yeah, are things changing because of that?

Kerstin Sailer
Absolutely. So the pandemic has been a massive, unwanted experiment in some kind of ways. Think of, you know, the office pre-pandemic pretty much was an open plan sea of desks, I think, is a pretty fair description in a lot of industries. And of course, now with lots of video calls, that's become absolutely impossible. So we can see as a response that designers have taken, we can see a higher degree of meeting rooms. So more meeting rooms being designed, more smaller meeting rooms being designed, and you can sometimes see these kind of one person, almost like a phone booth where people can then take their, you know, kind of video call into that. We're also seeing a rise in the so-called third spaces, or in you know, kind of spaces for certain amenities, like more spaces for eating and drinking, more kind of round tables open, you know, kind of soft seating, sofa areas, etc. because the, the amount of collaborative work that is taking place in the office is increasing.

Pippa
I also wanted to kind of ask you about the future, and I guess it's difficult to make predictions. We probably couldn't have predicted Covid happening and that big shift. But what do you think the offices of the future will look like? Do you think we are sort of on a trajectory to, to more of these collaborative spaces, or might we change and go back to, you know, the, the individual offices?

Kerstin Sailer
For way too long, we've looked at the office as a kind of one-size-fits-all model. You know, the office was in person, nine to five, open plan, very little flexibility, very little, you know, kind of diversity of settings or choice of settings. And I think what we're going to see a lot more in the future, or I'm hoping that this is what we're going to see, is a lot more accommodating different perceptions, different workflows, different work processes, different preferences. But the other thing I think we have to keep in mind is specifically lots of young people joining the workforce for the first time, maybe living in quite tight kind of residential quarters. They will want to come to the office to meet others, to build networks, to learn. And so, of course, the office also needs to accommodate, you know, spaces for concentration, for example. So the kind of focus on just saying, oh, the office will be collaborative and we'll, you know, it will all be one big social hub. I don't think that's quite the, the way forward. I would think we would see more diversification, more kind of accommodation of different, you know, work processes and preferences.

Pippa
I think what was interesting talking to Kerstin is learning how we need a bit of a mix of different spaces. So we've moved a lot towards spaces where people can collaborate, lots of open plan offices, but it doesn't work for everyone, and it doesn't work if everyone's sat on video calls all day.

Phil
I guess it just comes back to that thing, isn't it? Always think about what's the purpose of something? What's it going to be used for? How is it going to be used? Those are the really important questions that any designer has to ask, I guess.

Pippa
Yeah. And I guess from your perspective as somebody working in the office, it's about trying to be respectful, trying to, if you have flexibility on where you work within the office, think about, if you're chatting lots like you said, Phil, at the beginning, going somewhere where lots of people are chatting rather than having a really loud conversation where other people are trying to concentrate.

Phil
That's it for this episode of Learning English for Work. Head to our website for more programmes to improve your business English. That's bbclearningenglish.com.

Pippa
We'll be back next week with another episode of work in the future. See you then, bye.

Phil
Bye.

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