Working towards wellbeing in office design

As building designers and specifiers, we are learning all the time about how to make workplaces really work – from how we can shape places that boost productivity, to how to encourage ideas sharing and the chance meetings that drive innovation. Equally, we want to help our clients attract and retain diverse talent and enable them to deliver their best work.

This is at the heart of what we do at the Government Property Agency (GPA), given our role to create great places to work for civil servants, leading one of the biggest workplace transformation programmes currently underway in the UK.

One of the big questions that has come to the fore in recent years is how we design health and wellbeing into the office. Recent data from Cushman & Wakefield suggests that it is an area that needs greater attention.

The company’s experience per square foot survey found the number of employees globally reporting a very good or excellent sense of wellbeing at work has slipped by a staggering 34 percentage points between 2019 and 2023. That is a worrying statistic, but it is also an opportunity for the design and construction community to show its value.

How can we embed employees’ personal wellbeing into clients’ projects from the off and boost workplace performance as a result?

Health and wellbeing through inclusive design

The process can start early. At the GPA, for example, wellbeing feeds into our decisions around site locations and how easily people can get to the office by active travel. However, in most cases the real work begins with the building layout.

Demands on the functionality of internal space are likely to keep growing as we cater for different health and wellbeing needs, including neurodiversity and long-term conditions.

Keeping these evolving requirements front and centre, our emphasis, whether for private or public projects, is therefore two-fold: first to accommodate the typical and atypical needs of people who work there and second, to remove barriers to comfort and concentration as best as possible, including intrusive sound, lighting, movement, patterns, smells and temperature to name a few.

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Our aim with the GPA workplace design guide is to provide options, to enable people to choose where to work within the office in order to get the job done – whether they are working on their own, or with a group or need a few minutes away from the sensory overload of a busy floor. It provides guidance on location and design of these settings, supporting the inclusion of neuro-diverse spaces.

I am thinking about recovery and nursing rooms, for example, or focus zones for colleagues who need them.

Designing for talent

The way that interior office spaces are planned is changing significantly as we recognise the workplace’s value as a meeting place where colleagues can connect face to face in an increasingly digital world – a place where teams build relationships and strengthen their sense of belonging to an organisation.

Allowing more people to access the workplace and providing this choice and flexibility in how and where they work is crucial. Many organisations are working hard to employ colleagues from a range of backgrounds, communities and skill-sets and those efforts will only pay off if people are supported to be the best they can be.

We also have a specific brief at the GPA to help open up civil service careers to more people across the country.

Building on strong foundations to balance priorities

However, teams need to strike a balance. Dedicating too much space to personal areas can be counter-productive to the efforts of encouraging people to get to know each other and exchange ideas. This is where data comes in.

We are lucky at the GPA to have a wealth of Leesman survey findings on civil service demographics and working preferences. This insight is core to shaping our schedules of accommodation so that we are not over-engineering buildings and are making the best, most efficient use of space possible.

Not all design teams have this detailed information at their fingertips (nor will they always know who the end occupiers will be), but there are aggregated studies that can provide a guide.

We should always start with the basics – creating buildings around the needs of the people who are using them

With the right fundamentals in place, teams can then start to think about more detailed fit-out considerations – for us this has included the installation of changeable lighting and accessible temperature controls to empower employees to adapt individual spaces to their needs.

Once again, much of this has been informed by client feedback and data from completed projects, informing updates to the GPA’s design approach.

There is so much to explore, but as experts we should always start with the basics – creating buildings around the needs of the people who are using them. Get the space right first, then everything else will follow.

Sam Carey-Smith is head of workplace design, innovation and assurance at the Government Property Agency