What is the future of the workplace? Co-working is increasing in popularity and office design is changing. What is a passing trend and what is a signal of permanent change?

What is the Office of the Future?

I spent a few months in 2018 working at JLL’s downtown Minneapolis office, complete with its standing desks, huddle rooms, a collaboration room (my kids liked it for the video games!) and more robust kitchen area typical of modern office buildouts.

Perkins & Will’s downtown Minneapolis offices in the IDS take the concept a bit further, with a more modern and austere feel, exposed ceilings and open seating rather than permanent desks. Perkins & Will seems to use their own offices as laboratories for their office design practice, as seen with their “new” Dallas office.

You can see CBRE’s downtown Minneapolis corporate office featured here, yet another example of those in the real estate industry practicing what they preach.

And then there is co-working. Wework is the most popular example now, and their downtown Minneapolis offices attract the usual millennial, independent consultant worker you might expect, drawn to the cool common areas and beer taps. But it’s more than a hipster thing, and a relevant option for large companies as well. As one example, Syngenta announced that it’s moving 200 employees to the new Wework space in Uptown. Yes, a seed company. It’s a matter of attracting and retaining talent.

Of course, there is the interesting case to be made that Wework is too big to fail. Discuss….

So what is the future of co-working? This report by Newmark Knight Frank shows co-working’s potential future market share. While co-working has doubled its market share recently, it still represents only 1.4% of the U.S. office market inventory. The question is, will market share grow to as much as 20% or more in the next few years, or is it a passing fad? JLL predicts co-working will be 30% of all office space by 2030.

What could happen!?

(A few more co-working resources:

Work Design Magazine

Coworking Resources

Entrepreneur.com

Area Development

Coworking Mag)