Common Ground

The workplace of the future is not just about some employees working from home while their counterparts toil in an office. It’s about rethinking the concept of an office entirely.

Consider what’s happening on the 48th and 49th floors of the iconic Columbia Tower in downtown Seattle. The completely redesigned, 41,000-square-foot corporate headquarters of Seattle-based data company MCG Health is so inviting that employees across the United States are willing to fly in for meetings.

“When they want to get together now, instead of renting hotel space in Chicago, they’re just going to use our office in Seattle,” MCG Chief Financial Officer John Pollard says. “We’re telling all the managers to bring their people together in the office when they have a purpose, and that ought to be at least once a month.”

Back in the dotcom days, ping-pong tables and game rooms defined the cool, modern tech office. Now, meditation rooms, state-of-the-art video conferencing setups, quiet spaces and seating nooks are hot commodities as employees increasingly clamor for a hybrid work environment.

A Gallup survey of more than 8,000 employees found that about 56%, or more than 70 million workers, say their jobs can be done remotely. Only two in 10 work full time from an office, and only 6% want to work entirely on-site moving forward.

The pandemic notwithstanding, MCG had some unique needs. About half of the company’s 450 employees in the U.S. are in Seattle. The rest are scattered across the country. It was relocating its office from another site in downtown Seattle and company leaders wanted an untraditional, collaborative workspace. They also wanted natural daylight and to take advantage of spectacular views from the city’s largest skyscraper.

MCG’s design features plenty of small conference rooms and collaboration spaces, as well as a twisting staircase connecting the two floors, with a moss garden on the lower floor near the base of the staircase. Other features include a hallway lined with glass-enclosed private workrooms; transparent walls to enhance both views and natural lighting; and state-of-the-art audio and video capabilities to support remote and in-office communications.

The space has spacious workstations but no private offices, with unassigned seating that can be scheduled via a phone app. It boasts an open corporate suite sans door that is visible from an employee work lounge located near a large kitchen area featuring a long island counter with copious seating.

The redesign began in February 2020 during the most tumultuous time for office space in modern history. It evolved once it became clear the pandemic would have a lasting effect. It represents among the first fully redesigned offices with the post-pandemic worker in mind.

“When Covid hit, we had to assess not only how can we provide more choices for people, but also how do we design for a fluctuating population in the office,” says Sidney Scarboro, an associate principal at architecture and design firm Perkins & Will, the company MCG enlisted to design the space. “I think that’s the nugget that everybody is still trying to put their arms around right now: What does a hybrid workplace look like when you don’t know really week to week what your headcount is going to look like?”

MCG’s office now features significantly more meeting space and about “eight or nine different work environments, including a big lounge that had a lot of seating in it of various types,” says Scarboro, who notes that virtual and augmented reality allows tenants, architects, and developers to visualize a space throughout the design process. “There’s a lot of technology that is helping us achieve this new workstyle in the best way we can.”

Though the country and world survived on Zoom calls during the pandemic lockdown, that “takes the magic away,” says Doug Demers, senior managing principal at B+H Advance Strategy, a consulting and architecture firm that has worked with Seattle companies Amazon, Nordstrom, and Expedia on their office designs.

“You can do Zoom meetings and Teams meeting and get stuff done, but it’s not fulfilling,” says Demers, adding that hybrid-remote work is most probably here to stay. “I can have a Zoom meeting and a real meeting, and if we’re in a cool space, it can be magical because if you want people to come back into the office, you’ve got to create that magic.”

The 2+U urban village in downtown Seattle blends spaces in common areas and offices

Photo by SKANSKA USA

Swedish developer Skanska is working on several new approaches in a variety of buildings in and around Seattle, including 400 Fairview in the South Lake Union neighborhood, the recently completed 2+U in the heart of downtown, and The Eight in Bellevue, which should be completed early next year. For that development, Skanska is utilizing new window-tinting technology that eliminates the need for blinds.

At 400 Fairview, Skanska created a market hall on the ground floor that connects the offices of South Lake Union with the dense residential neighborhoods to the east. The market hall has become a “third space” for the community, says Stewart Germain, director of innovation and senior development manager for Skanska USA Commercial Development.

At 2+U, Skanska raised the tower seven stories in the air to create a multilayered exterior plaza with retail and meeting spaces. In The Eight, it created a living-room like gathering space and an indoor-outdoor blending of the lobby and retail. The concept of blending spaces is characteristic of almost all recent Skanska projects. Those spaces tend to run throughout the building in common areas as well as the tenant space itself.

“We do pull inspiration and trends from our other offices around the world, in Malmö (the third-largest city in Sweden), Warsaw (Poland), and Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.,” Germain says. “We’re able to react globally to what’s happening with good ideas that are bubbling up in different places, and then importing those good ideas into Seattle, and exporting good ideas out of Seattle as well.”

One imported idea can be found at an office development tentatively called The Nine, a smaller, 150,000-square-foot boutique office building to be located next door to The Eight in Bellevue. It is slated for completion in 2026. Skanska plans to build it with mass timber (wood), which is relatively popular in Europe and is becoming increasingly more common in the United States as developers and companies seek to mitigate their building-related emissions. According to industry trade group WoodWorks, about 1,300 mass-timber buildings are under construction or have been completed in the U.S. Washington state has 94 such projects under construction.

“(Mass timber) is something we have not done before, nor has this region really seen a high-rise, mass-timber office building,” says Charlie Foushee, executive vice president and regional manager at Skanska USA Commercial Development in Seattle. “That (project) really is a total byproduct of what we’re seeing today, that desire to have more tactile finishes in a space and it’s highly sustainable in a health and wellness aspect.”

As a director at Seattle-based contractor and high-rise-office builder Lease Crutcher Lewis, James Furlan works directly with large tech companies with operations in the Seattle area, including Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft. Those and other companies are demanding outdoor-space projects and fitness facilities. Sustainability is top of mind, as is air-monitoring technology inside buildings.

He says that large tech companies in general were better prepared for the pandemic because they already had remote and hybrid work mechanisms in place due to their numerous offices around the world. Still, companies across Seattle are taking widely different approaches. Starbucks recently began requiring corporate workers to return to the office three days a week. Microsoft has also announced a return to in-office work, though companies including Amazon and Meta have no such mandates — at least not yet.

“At some point, companies can’t continue to wait,” Furlan says. “They are going to have to start either making informed or less-informed decisions about how to get people back to the office. And it’s going to be fascinating to see what they actually are putting out there.”

Scarboro adds that many of the planning principles her team developed for the MCG project have influenced work on other projects since. “The variety of choices that we’re offering for people to work in has expanded, and it will be for a long time moving forward.”

Pollard says the workplace of the future, in the end, is best designed like anything else determined in business. The desire to have employees in an office, at least some of the time, is simply beneficial.

“Most people do their heads-down work at home, and if you’re coming to the office, it’s because you’re going to be with people,” he says. “As a manager, you should probably have some reason for your team to get together at least once a month. It would be shocking if you didn’t.”