A quarter of large companies have ended remote work. Here’s how five days in an office can still be flexible.
Amazon recently came down with a drastic office mandate: Employees must come into the office five days a week starting January.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy emphasized the importance of in-person collaboration and how it can strengthen company culture and help Amazon maintain its fast-paced, inventive environment. The move follows similar full-time return-to-office mandates by companies like Tesla, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and others. In fact, 25% of large companies with more than 25,000 people have shifted to full-time in the office, and in many cases those mandates have backfired.
Can flexibility and employee happiness exist when working in an office five days a week? The answer, experts say, is absolutely.
“The ‘place of work’ is only one form of flexibility,” says Ludmila Praslova, a professor of industrial-organizational psychology at Vanguard University in Southern California.
Most people assume that flexibility only means working remotely at times, she says. But where you work doesn’t define flexibility entirely. It means not only where you work, but when you work and how you work.
Flexibility means making work fit the individual, not the other way around. It means choices. And inside the office, the physical design of a space matters.
Designing Offices for Flexibility
Take for instance, Gensler, a design and architecture firm with 6,000 employees who work five days a week in offices around the globe.
“We feel like we can get our work done better in the office than we could at home,” says Greg Gallimore, a Gensler principal. “Flexibility, for us, tends to be around choice.”
Gensler designed its San Francisco headquarters specifically with that in mind. None of the 300 people who work out of the office has an assigned desk in the San Francisco office, yet people choose from a variety of places to work, depending on their mood.
A person might choose a brighter space when they need energy or hole up in a darker space for focused work. They can choose from standing desks, sofas, desks and nine other seating postures. People can adjust the lighting, acoustics, and temperature based on them and the people they’re working with, and they can open windows.
“It’s offering the right experience at the right place for the right state of mind,” says Gallimore.
More Choices in the Office Lead to Stronger Teams
Gensler’s 2024 Global Workplace Survey found a correlation between stronger teams and access to diverse space types inside an office. And so not surprisingly, the company added multi-functional spaces that can transform for different purposes for teams.
Furniture with wheels allows people to reconfigure the desks and tables for short-term or long-term needs, and custom pin-up boards can be hung from wooden pegs to create easily moveable walls when needed. There are also 38 traditional conference rooms with high-quality audio-visual equipment and smaller two- to three-person rooms and one-person phone booths.
Gensler also considered those in-between spaces, such the corridors that take people from a meeting room to their desk or the cafeteria, for instance. The spaces were carefully designed to provoke joy or calm through art, lighting and color.
“We want to create delightful experiences that help shift your mind away from the stress of your job that inspire, provide moments of delight,” says Gallimore. “These touch down areas in between meetings or your desk are sometimes just as important as the destination.”
Phone Rooms, Outdoor Spaces Matter
High-performing teams tend to have three times greater access to spaces for focused concentration and confidential conversations and recharging. Those could be nap rooms, innovation hubs, meditation spaces, phone rooms, tech-free rooms, outdoor workspaces, work cafes or break rooms.
Add to that, people who used those spaces were more likely to spend time learning something new, unplugging from technology, getting outside, socializing or reflecting inside the office. And, not surprisingly, those people said those activities positively impacted their personal health, well-being, job satisfaction, work-life balance and their career advancement.
Where a company locates its office also matters to flexibility.
Gensler found that companies with “high-quality” buildings were those that were close to amenities and services, whether that was a pharmacy, dry cleaning, childcare, restaurants and the like. Those services simply made work-life balance easier, and people tended to be satisfied with the location and work performance again was higher.
Giving People Autonomy at Work
Flexibility, however, goes beyond a physical workspace.
It can mean offering flexible work schedules and hours. So perhaps a person needs to come into the office at 10 a.m. because he must drop off kids at school first or because he’s caring for an aging parent, says Ira Wolfe, a longtime HR consultant, author, and speaker on the future of work.
It can involve giving people more autonomy in their work and “job crafting,” says Praslova. That involves letting employees take more control over their jobs and even altering their responsibilities and the nature of certain tasks—with the goal of finding more meaning and purpose in their work.
Other forms of flexibility include time-off options, part-time working and job-sharing.
Gallimore says Gensler’s leaders understand that people’s energy is not necessarily consistent. A person may have periods of high creativity bursts and then lower level energy or focus. Another person may like to do writing and creative tasks earlier in the day and analytic tasks in the afternoons.
People at the company are encouraged to shape their day to accommodate those differences rather than try to force themselves to fit with everyone else. There’s a big focus on understanding each other, focusing on personal goals versus solely company goals, and improving communication to reduce tension and friction in the workplace, says Gallimore.
The Payoff for Flexible Workplaces
Offering flexibility pays off. Research shows it boosts employee retention and recruitment, decreased absenteeism, increased loyalty, job satisfaction, and productivity. Autonomy at work has been shown to reduce mental pressure and encourage more energy that stimulates innovation. And flexible work schedules prevent burnout while boosting revenue growth for organizations.
Flexibility, it turns out, says Praslova, may simply boil down to making work fit the people and not the other way around, and then creating the right environment for choice.
