Case study Softrend's Office

How to upgrade open-plan offices to Focus-based offices?

Problems with current open-plan offices / stat & data Focus-based office – different tasks require different environment and furniture Case study – Softrend’s new Office

Life in the open-plan office Open-plan offices were revolutionary – they broke down the barriers between co-workers that cubicles had created.

The change gave way to collaboration, communication and involvement. But it has its downsides also. 95% of people say they struggle to focus at work because of the open-plan design.

We lose 2.1 hours a day to office distractions

95% of people say they struggle to focus at work because of the open-plan design.

In a study funded by Harvard Business School, findings showed that open office spaces with limited spatial boundaries, actually decreased the volume of face-to-face interaction significantly, by approximately 70%.

And virtual interaction, via email and instant messenger, increased.

Rather than increasing face-to-face conversations

and promoting collaboration, open spaces appear to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from team members—the exact opposite result the architectural changes were supposed to produce.

The study also suggests that employees don’t feel

they can speak out loud in open offices because being in such close proximity, they would distract their colleagues.

Instead, employees stay tethered to their workstations and resort to chatting online.

And a distraction it is. In a survey commissioned by office-equipment maker Poly and conducted by research firm

Future Workplace, 76% of respondents said a co-worker talking loudly on the phone created a moderate, high, or very high level of distraction for them while at work in their primary workspace, making it the most commonly cited disruption in the survey.

Noise from a co-worker talking nearby was cited by 65% of respondents.

Distractions are not just frustrating but they can be

exhausting and costly to the productivity levels as well. It has been surveyed that people lose 2.1 hours a day to office distractions, we spend on average only 11 minutes on a task before we get distracted and it takes about 25 minutes to fully return to the task.

More and more companies are starting to understand that totally open spaces

are not the best solution and that employees need more private spaces to have the best performance and experience. Open environments should be private, too. Greater degrees of openness are associated with high performance; but noise, privacy, and the ability to focus remain key determinants of workplace effectiveness.

Focus-based office The open layout has its advantages: with employees able to work together, it eliminates a hierarchy and also ensures that individuals are included in important decisions and projects.

Bringing people together helps encourage faster learning, better communication, and more ideas. But as discussed in previous chapter, there is a growing dissatisfaction among employees who are working in that environment. Different tasks require different settings and that is what the focusbased office means.

As workplace environments continually change to accommodate the diversity of today’s employee workstyles, choosing the most appropriate furniture is an increasingly important aspect of the design process.

Furniture can impact workplace change initiatives

by empowering employees, improving employee satisfaction and productivity, enhancing collaboration, and improving overall organizational efficiencies.

The right layout Organizations are moving to the flexible model, which is a workplace with a variety

of seating in a mostly free-address, unassigned environment. One key factor of focus-based office is the right layout. Focus-based office provides different seating areas from private to public or from personal to shared space. For making everyone feel comfortable

and productive in open-plan offices, it is wise to plan zones for taking a break and chatting with colleagues; more secluded sofas with high walls for individual work; creative corners for meetings and brainstorming sessions; small boxes for phone calls and private conversations One key factor of

One key factor of focus-based office is the right layout. focus-based office is the right layout.

This way everyone can choose the right setting for their tasks on the current day. Employee’s tasks also vary from day to day so they can be the most productive at the same place. The point

of focus-based office is to best support person’s daily activities and help reach daily goals.

Creating a more pleasant environment requires us to dampen all kinds of different sounds.

Acoustic furniture When walls vanish and an office opens up, you develop a need for places that can be described as rooms within rooms. Such places can be created using removable screens and furniture that absorbs sound, thereby allowing you to have a more private

conversation or a place to contemplate things in peace. Our acoustic environment plays a major role in our lives. It affects our working efficiency and ultimately also our health.

Sound perception

Public space and open offices often have problems with resonance, meaning that sounds reverberate for too long. Creating a more pleasant environment requires us to dampen all kinds of different sounds, such as fans, people’s footsteps, conversations and phone calls.

People’s perception of sound depends on a variety of factors, including level and frequency, but also the type of the sound:

whether it is constant or fragmented, noise or music.

The ear is highly sensitive and sound waves don’t have to be particularly strong to be heard. People hear sounds from 0 dB to 120 dB (the pain threshold) at the frequency range of 2020000 Hz. Sounds that are at a lower frequency than the limit of human hearing, are called infrasound, while sounds exceeding that limit are called ultrasound.

For voice and speech recognition, the most important frequency range is 300-3000 Hz. People perceive sound differently.

Something barely audible to one person may disturb another. Even one person can perceive the same

sound differently depending on the situation. A 10 dB increase in the level of sound is considered to double the loudness of the sound. A change of 1-2 dB is considered to be the smallest alteration that humans can perceive.

Acoustic absorption Sound waves cannot move freely in a closed room and bounce off the structure of the room. Some of the sound is absorbed by surfaces, while some reflects from them. Monitoring sound absorption and achieving the recommended reverberation duration is one of the principal tasks in the acoustic design of rooms. Acoustic absorption means that

sound does not reflect off a material after reaching it.

That is also the principle of designing furniture with acoustic properties: furniture has to absorb the sound that would otherwise reflect back and contribute to unwelcome noise.

Something barely audible to one person may disturb another.

Materials with good sound absorption are porous and breathable. Synthetic felt and a range of foams are among the materials with such properties.

Case study: Softrend’s Office Softrend, a soft furniture manufacturer, recently moved to a new office in Tallinn, Estonia, designed together with Ace of Space interior architects. The space uses open-plan layout in a clever way thanks to Softrend’s own furniture that creates a focusbased office with small areas that support different types of work.

Softrend’s furniture collection is designed to make focused work possible in the open plan office. Together with different designers they find solutions how the right furniture can increase employees’ satisfaction in the workplace and help them focus on the most important tasks at hand to get more done in an efficient way.

Their new office is the best presentation of their focusbased office concept.

The interior design concept of Softrend’s office is inspired by the location - the large windows at the end wall offer a view of the reedlined Kopli Bay, where many different bird species nests.

The colour scheme is inspired

by the surrounding nature and seaside. Mostly calm and neutral tones are used which makes the space feel light and airy without being too cold. „The enchanting non-urban nature view attracts the attention of the entrant and our goal was to extend this feeling indoors. The openplan surface is functionally divided into different parts,

marked by different materials and tonality – upon entering one walks through the ferncovered forest meadow to the limestone coastal meadow and reaches the sandy beach by the sea, “said the interior architects Ines Käärma and Aivo Arusaar from Ace of Space, worked with a wide range of clients from residential to public projects in Estonia.

The initial brief of the customer stated that they wanted their office to match their company’s mission – an open-plan office that is designed in a way that supports different ways of working and helps employees focus on the most important task at hand.

“We wanted our new office to showcase our furniture the way it’s designed to be used. To create designated places for focused work

in the otherwise openplan office. We have sales, marketing, ecommerce and purchasing all in one office so we have many people with different types of work and different ways of working – some spend most of their day talking on the phone while others need to write, design, do sales analysis, etc. We needed to create different areas for all of them to be able to focus on what they need to do and be productive.” said Softrend’s CEO Joonatan Vinkel.

The importance of zoning When it came to establishing the relationship between open space and enclosed spaces the interior architects’ “Goal was to keep the

Softrend’s furniture collection is designed to make focused work possible in the open plan office.

space as open as possible and to close only the essentials – meeting rooms, booths for small meetings or working alone. “ Main working area consist of bays of tables that are scattered throughout the space and separated by more private working areas and acoustic screens. For working privately, Softrend has August Nook and August Workbay

that have panelled walls that increase privacy and absorb sound. These spaces signal to colleagues that you want to work privately and don’t want to be disrupted.

For phone calls they use Chatbox – a sound-proof phone booth where they can make phone calls without disturbing their colleagues.

For brainstorming sessions, they use a “Creative corner”

that consist of high Rolf table and Hubert rotating poufs and modular Hexa seating system for extra seating. The table is also easily moveable so the area can be as big or as small as needed at the moment.

This is an area that invites everyone in – if a meeting is held there, it means that everyone can pass by and join if they see they can be beneficial to the discussion.

Small meetings are held in built-in rooms that have compact Meeter sofas, for bigger meetings there is a separate room with low Hubert rotating poufs.

Lounge areas are furnished with Meeter or Sans sofas where there is comfortable to take a moment to read the newspapers, have a coffee with a colleague or by the window in a rotating August armchair if you want to take a break in peace and quiet with a stunning sea view.

August Nook is a key product in our new office and in our furniture collection. The table is big enough to fit everything that I need for a day - laptop, phone, notebook, and a cup of tea. Most importantly, it’s comfortable! When sitting here, I can tune out all office distractions and have my privacy, so I can focus on a task that needs my full attention,” says Svea, Softrend’s export sales assistant.

The future of open-plan offices is focus-based.

The interior architects see Softrend’s solution as a good example of how the open-plan offices of the future should be designed. „As Softrend does with their furniture solutions, we looked for ways to create isolation

in an open space without breaking up the layout. We used several solutions where

the office shows how the design of most products is moving in that direction

The areas are also separated from each other according to the activity the movement takes place from the more active to the quieter area. the space remains visually open but allows to create opportunities to separate its more private part as needed.” For example, the creative corner area or main meeting room that can be separated with a curtain; August armchairs that are behind Sigmund screen panels that divide the space between main working area and lounge chairs.

The interior architects predict that the furniture design of

- aimed at smart space separation options, space solution in the room, etc.

“In the case of our solution, the areas are also separated from each other according to the activity - the movement takes place from the more active to the quieter area.

In the case of open offices, this is essential to ensure comfortable work for both individual workplaces as well as to allow for group work and meetings. “

Take a look at softrend.ee to get to know more about how to upgrade your open-plan office to focus-based.

Key takeaways • •

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Analyse what are your employees’ ways of working and what kind of environment would help them focus and do their best.

Find a balance between open and enclosed space. Choose furniture that can act both as a space divider and acoustic panel. It’ll dim down otherwise disturbing office noise and also create personal space.

Plan for private and public space. Open-plan offices have their disadvantages but private cubicles won’t be a solution either. Choose office furniture that helps you create common areas where employees can take a break and enjoy a cup of coffee with colleagues and also separate areas with more private nooks where they can fully focus on the task at hand.