What will offices look like in 2020?

Contemporary office space has always been required to keep pace with the needs of organisations and their employees in ways that make it easier to be productive and optimally operational.

The latest technological innovations though have the potential to be truly game-changing and ideas about what offices need to be are being broadly reconsidered and reimagined.

So what might the offices of 2020 look like? Here’s a closer look at some key trends and possible answers to that question:

Built-in collaboration spaces

Offices have increasingly been designed as collaborative spaces over the course of recent years and that trend is only set to continue as organisations come to realise the potential of some of the latest technologies. Collaboration at a particular office has long been viewed as important to operational progress but collaboration between different offices and people based in any number of locations is also becoming an ever-more common practice and office spaces of the future will no doubt reflect that.

Team rooms

Another increasingly common feature of contemporary office spaces are what can broadly be termed ‘team rooms’. Increasingly, teams of professionals are being grouped together on the basis of their collective functions within an organisation. Grouping teams together on the basis of their roles in this way has the potential to improve idea-sharing because interactivity is made easier and there’s a greater degree of clarity about who does what and where they can be found.

Desk pairing

Despite the fact that new technologies mean collaboration and communication can now be enabled in a myriad of ways, there is nothing yet that can replace face-to-face or, more commonly, shoulder-to-shoulder conversations. The offices of the future therefore might well be designed with the idea of desk pairing in mind, whereby working space is afforded for two colleagues to sit and work comfortably side by side.

Relaxation spaces

The notion that employees need space and time to relax and recharge their batteries in order to be optimally productive has steadily been taking hold in all manner of organisations around the world in recent years. Not every employer will buy into the idea that gaming rooms or entertainment elements are worthwhile additions to a workplace but by 2020 it’s likely that many more offices will incorporate some form or other of ‘chill out’ or relaxation space.

Flexible space

One particularly important trend to emerge in the context of workplaces and working lives in recent years has been greater operational flexibility in terms of how, where and with what devices professionals go about their business. By 2020, it seems inevitable that far fewer people will be tied to a specific desk every day and contemporary offices will need to adapt to this changed reality by allowing for much more varied use of working spaces.