Good morning!
What do both employees and employers really want in a workplace of the future? It’s a topic that came up last week in my conversations with CEOs, designers, and thought leaders at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau.
If you ask Ray Yuen, office managing director at the design and architecture firm Gensler, the answer is food. A recent Gensler survey asked employees to rank the office spaces that were most important to them. The top three? The office food hall, cafe, or lounge.
“It’s really about food and wellness,” Yuen said onstage. “They didn’t even mention anything about work. Everybody just picked the stuff that we really want as human beings.”
It’s worth listening to these human desires as companies try to bring people back into the office, Yuen said. He described a project he worked on recently for a large company’s new Tokyo headquarters, where 50% of the company’s employees were working remotely and he was tasked with finding a way to bring them back. One of the biggest successes was a lo-fi vinyl listening bar, where no tech or talking was allowed, he said.
