Workplace design trends- 2010s: Flexibility. 2020s: Balance. The next decade will focus on the search for balance.

There is no question that the modern corporate workplace environment has changed significantly over the past ten years. Out are the private offices and cubicles. In are open environments and collaborative spaces. I’d argue the past ten years of workplace design has been dominated by the chase for a single word: flexibility.

Looking forward, I believe the next ten years will be spent in the chase for a new word: balance.

Flexibility brought to us a few key principles:

• Not everyone works in the same way
• Business change happens, the workplace must handle it effectively
• Collaboration is a key driver of innovation
• Work regularly happens outside the office
• Digital tools are constantly changing the nature of productivity

These principles (more or less) form the basis of most of the modern workplaces built out in the 2010s. They also form the principle behind the epic rise of coworking companies like WeWork. When taken together, these principles give a corporate real estate team a roadmap for being creative with a design.

There has been a lot of talk about whether the flexible open office was a success. But this is no different than the conversation that has come up around every office trend that has ever existed. Different people can rightly disagree on what has worked and hasn’t worked, but everyone acknowledges that there is ample opportunity to do better.

Balance is about an evolution of flexibility:

• Employees need different things to be productive
• Business change happens, the workplace must handle it effectively
• All work styles are equally important (heads down, collaborative, creative)
• Workplace design should support the work/home balance employees need
• Employees will have access to better technology than the company

The biggest difference between Balance and Flexibility will be in understanding that the workplace will never be effective without managers also operating differently. The concept of Workplace must begin to incorporate more business operations principles. Tied to this is the issue that consumer-grade technology has begun to outpace enterprise-installed technology.

Workplace and technology are fundamentally linked. Wifi may be the single most important productivity platform in any workplace environment. If technology does not work as expected, employees are able to grab their smartphone and work around it without a second thought. It isn’t uncommon for cell connection to be better than wifi in some companies. Nothing prevents employees from just running off that connection instead other than locking down access to key systems and files.

Balance will require a new focus on how employees are actually productive. Not just productive in the job they are employed to do by the company, but in how they are productive as individuals. The workplace needs to account for the fact that the lines between work-life and home-life have never been more blurred and will continue to blur further.