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6 Ways to Redesign Your Offices to Support Employee Learning
Work is about growth and development. Office environments should enable both.
Posted December 11, 2023 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer
Key points
- How our work environments are designed influences our ability to get work done.
- Unfortunately, most office spaces do not support employees' learning, growth, or productivity.
- With the right redesign, offices can become vibrant places of collaboration and focus.
The most successful organizations are the ones that nurture their employees. They build the right conditions for people to learn and grow, so that the organization can innovate and make the biggest possible impact.
Usually, this takes the form of manager check-ins, in-house training events, or sponsoring employees’ continuing education. But as a leader, how much are you thinking about the ways your office environment is creating these conditions for growth?
As an architect, I’ve been a part of this process to create the right environment where people can learn and grow. When Google needed a space to train their 30,000 new employees each year, I designed it for them. Similarly, for dozens of organizations across America, I’ve designed spaces for learning and upskilling.
Across all of these projects, I’ve realized that most office environments lack adequate spaces to enable people to learn and grow. (In the worst cases, they actually make it harder to perform basic tasks.) Most offices use an open floor plan and include some private offices, break rooms, and copy rooms. Some tech offices also include small breakout areas.
These are a good start, but in my experience, leaders just aren’t thinking about the kinds of spaces that really facilitate learning. And since everyone has different learning and working styles, and different tasks across the day—whether it’s focused work or group collaboration—you’ve got to provide a range of options that accommodate this work.
To enable employee learning and development, here are six kinds of learning spaces that you should consider adding to your offices.
Training
Training is a crucial aspect of employee onboarding and ongoing development. It’s essential that you provide dedicated training spaces to ensure your employees develop the technical skills and know-how needed to do their jobs well.
These training spaces can include lecture halls for direct instruction, workshops for hands-on training, and observation rooms.
For example, if your organization sells proprietary tech software, having a dedicated tech lab for teaching that software can create a safe environment for employees to learn and improve their skills, leading to better sales or product innovation.
Discussion
Effective communication and knowledge exchange are vital for organizations. If coworkers are not provided with spaces to engage in real-time conversations and exchange ideas, the learning process can become slow.
To facilitate meaningful discussions, consider creating a conversation pit where employees can gather and share knowledge in a relaxed and informal setting. This type of space encourages open and casual discussions on work-related topics, often leading to valuable insights.
For more structured discussions, a circular room where participants face each other can be highly effective. This design, similar to roundtables found at the United Nations, promotes focused and engaging conversations, sparking even more insights.
Deep work
Some of the best ideas and breakthroughs occur when employees have dedicated spaces for quiet and focused work. These spaces promote a state of flow, where distractions are minimized, allowing employees to get immersed in deep thinking and reflection.
Employers have various options for creating such spaces. Smaller areas include alcoves or caves with acoustic separation or a pace track, which is a labyrinth on the floor that employees can walk on and use to think through a problem.
Larger spaces like design studios and libraries equipped with "blinders" designed to block out distractions can also support deep work and concentration.
Peer-to-Peer
The more employees learn from one another, the more institutional knowledge everyone has, and the less you need to spend on supplemental development.
To facilitate this, provide breakaway areas such as small meeting rooms, booths, lounges, and conversation pods. These spaces allow for smaller groups to gather and collaborate, which leads to peer-to-peer learning.
Even if you can’t add dozens of breakaway spaces, desk layouts can be designed to promote huddling up, creating semi-private spaces for quick discussions at a low cost.
Ideating
Creativity isn’t limited to arts and media companies. If your organization does R&D or has a marketing department, you need spaces designed for brainstorming and generating novel solutions.
This is where the ideation studio comes in: a place where employees can whiteboard, tinker, and think expansively. This can be tailored to their specific work through the technology and tools in the space. For example, tables with large surfaces are ideal for professionals who rely on graphics, drawings, and mockups.
If you can, help your employees by making this a tall space. Because people are up to 25% more creative under a high ceiling.
Presenting
Client-facing teams often need a space to practice pitches, speeches, or presentations. These spaces should be designed for both the presentation itself and the feedback others will give.
The spaces can be simple and low-effort. Start by creating a “crit corner” (for critiques) with tackable walls and a digital display, where team members can watch a pitch and share feedback. The design department at Harvard has this space on every floor.
Offices designed with purpose
Just like schools, airports, or homes, offices should be designed with a specific goal in mind. They exist to help people do specific activities.
If your goal as a leader is to help employees learn and perform better, it’s crucial to think of your office as a tool in that process, with different kinds of spaces at your disposal.
While design can’t solve every problem in an organization, it can create the conditions for success, making it a worthwhile investment.
