Since the rise of work-from-home arrangements, traditional office spaces have naturally had to compete with all the freedom and flexibility of hybrid or fully remote job roles. After all, who wants to work in a sterile office when you can enjoy working from your couch with the sun filtering in through the window? The answer to this modern dilemma – lifestyle offices.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, lifestyle offices are basically office spaces that have been redesigned to help employees better meet their lifestyle goals — whether that means having on-site gym facilities, cosier decor, or other great amenities like office coffee machines and a range of different types of work spaces (i.e. lounges, brainstorming spaces, standing desk set-ups, etc.).
For most modern professionals, having a welcoming and pleasant social area to work is miles ahead of traditional offices and even working from home, which is just one of many reasons why lifestyle offices are on the rise. Here are a few of the other forces behind this shift towards lifestyle office spaces.
What makes it a lifestyle office?
Before we dive in, let’s first preface by saying that “lifestyle office” isn’t a hard and fast term. Pot plants, bean bags, and sunny days doesn’t necessarily make it a lifestyle office — other elements like sterile walls, whirring air conditioning, and poor amenities can offset all that.
So in essence, the less your office feels like an office — and more like a social space to enjoy — the closer it is to being a lifestyle office.
What are the benefits of a lifestyle office?
If your business hasn’t had to compete with a work-from-home set up, you might not think a lifestyle office is necessary. But consider this: beyond the obvious improvements to morale and your working environment, maintaining a lifestyle office space can also aid in ensuring your company stays agile and competitive, being better positioned to attract industry talent and strengthen your staff retention rates.
Here’s a more detailed overview of all the benefits that accompany maintaining a lifestyle office for your enterprise.
Employee Retention and Satisfaction
Simply put, people want to like where they work. If the place they’re spending 9-5 in isn’t pleasant, they’ll likely look elsewhere. In this regard, a lifestyle office positions your company as an attractive place to work, thus presenting your enterprise as a more established fixture of your industry or sector.
Attracting Talent
The job market is competitive, and companies need to show they value their employees by providing them with value, be it in the form of career advancement opportunities, a comfortable office environment, or ideally, well, both. These perks can be a big part of what sets companies apart for job candidates, and naturally, the best places to work attract the best workers.
Increased Creativity and Innovation
A stifling, unpleasant environment not only breeds negativity, but it also discourages innovation and creativity – people are more apt to think of creative ways to get out of an ugly office than ways to help it. Contrastingly, a positive and productive office environment allows for new and unusual ideas to crop up, and potentially create ideas that disrupt your company’s niche and set you apart as a singular player in your wider industry.
Focus on Well-Being and Mental Health
People want to feel like they’re working towards something valuable, and see that value they provide reflected by the way their company treats them. Providing a pleasant and positive place to work does that and keeps employees mentally healthy and confident in themselves and their work.
What are the cons to having a lifestyle office?
When compared to working at home or a more spartan office, the biggest con is simply the price of implementation. But does a more comfortable office affect productivity or provide distraction? It’s worth considering the following drawbacks before committing to an office update.
Cost & Time for Implementation
Auditing, redesigning, buying, building and maintaining are all new costs for creating a lifestyle office. It’s a pricey endeavour and even considering the best aspects to implement takes time. Because of this, many businesses implement features slowly, bit by bit, and this means attaining a lifestyle office can be a long-term commitment too.
Potential for Distractions
Having a clean and simple workspace gives you very little to look at aside from your computer screen. You can’t take a break and shoot some pool, or enjoy the pot plants. You knuckle down, do your work and go home. A mismanaged lifestyle office can easily be a place where work is the least appealing option in the place, and keeping track of that issue is a distraction in itself.
Not a One-Size-Fits-All Solution
When it comes to pleasing your employees, it’s apples and oranges. Some want a pool table, others want ping pong. Finding out what people want is one issue, then finding the most beneficial things to implement is another. And if you give your employees free reign to use rooms for whatever they want, new and unexpected issues will crop up there too– one may want to use the break room to practise the violin while another wants to sleep.
Health and Safety Concerns
A simple office with desks, chairs and carpets are easy to wipe down and vacuum. When you add amenities like gyms, kitchens, games rooms, and the like to the mix there’s the potential for cross-contamination. Food can cause allergies, games rooms can have tripping hazards or unexpected injuries, and gyms can become unsanitary. All this and more news to be considered and accounted for when designing a lifestyle office, or else these issues may negate the positive effects of the amenities.
How to design a lifestyle office for your business
So how do you design the ideal lifestyle office for your business? Of course, the answer to this question can differ from organisation to organisation. Generally speaking, however, lifestyle offices tend to include the following amenities.
Practical Amenities
If you cycle to work or go to the gym before or after your shift, then you’re likely to value an office space that provides shower facilities or even storage facilities for your bags and workout gear. Other practical amenities in lifestyle offices include kitchen facilities that support employees bringing healthy meals from home or even preparing food during their lunch break. Similarly, for professionals who are caffeine crazy, having a good quality office coffee machine in their company break room can provide their java fix without having to spend extra dollars every day on barista-grade brews.
Ergonomic Office Furniture
For office workers, comfortable furniture really is worth its weight in gold, and ergonomic office furnishings can help ensure they don’t leave the office feeling crumpled at the end of every day. Office spaces that provide ergonomic desk chairs and other lifestyle-focused furniture like standing desks are effectively communicating to their staff and prospective job candidates that they value your comfort in the workplace.
Quiet Rooms & Collaborative Spaces
Speaking of comfort, whilst open plan offices can be highly conducive to collaboration, they can also be a constant source of headaches and distractions. To offset this, lifestyle offices provide a good mix of quiet spaces and collaborative spaces, ensuring that your office maintains the right environment for all types of work habits.
Soft Lighting
Nobody likes fluorescent lighting, so you’d likely have expected soft lighting to be on the list of features you’ll find in any lifestyle office space. Alongside providing warm lighting to fight eye strain, lifestyle offices may also be characterised by the abundance of natural light. As natural light is considered to be one of the most valuable design qualities of home offices, lifestyle offices that invest in this particular feature are better positioned to provide a seamless working experience for hybrid workers who alternate between their home office and their company’s office space.
Indoor Plants
Much like natural light and warm lighting, indoor plants can help bolster the ambience or atmosphere of your office space. The inclusion of garden greenery can also improve air quality and support mental health in the workplace. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest that office plants actually aid in improving worker productivity, as desk plants provide soft mental stimulation between tasks on top of also improving your office’s interior air quality, which can help combat brain fog.
Conclusion
After reading about lifestyle offices, you’re likely thinking they sound like a great place to work – like a place you can really settle into and get some work done while enjoying the atmosphere and chatting pleasantly with colleagues – and that’s the goal. Ultimately, the ambition of any lifestyle office space is simply to provide a place where you and your colleagues want to work. Whether all the bells and whistles of the bigger brands are affordable to your company will be up to the financing department, but even the smallest company can take some time to improve their employees quality of life, and enjoy the benefits of doing it too.
