WOOD WISE
Co-working trend changing
SA’s office landscape
The international trend towards co-working – sharing office
space, equipment and services – is set to change the office space
landscape in South Africa, as it is currently doing in Europe and
other developed markets.
By Claire D’Adorante, Paragon Interface director
54 APRIL / MAY 2019 //
P
aragon Interface, an interior architectural company
that has designed some of the largest and most iconic
corporate headquarters of recent times in South
Africa, including the new Discovery head office and Sasol
Place that are both located in Sandton, is seeing a growing
move towards adopting this international trend locally.
What the co-working trend implies for large corporates,
in particular, is that, instead of maintaining and staffing a
fully-fledged office building, they can now simply ramp up
or down as new projects roll in or existing ones are
completed. The key driver here is to cut real-estate costs,
especially given the constrained global economic outlook
and increasingly tight margins.
The major benefit of this trend for employees is that it
supports what is termed ‘agile’ working, which is the logical
next step of the open-plan office revolution. While
traditional open-plan offices still tie workers to individual
desks and offer little in the way of shared services or
collaborative working, ‘agile’ workspaces allow employees
to work where and how they want to, with the full support
and functionality required to do so.
There has been a key shift towards appreciating that
office-space design must incorporate a social context, with
the explosion of technology in recent years enabling this
cultural shift. Employees, especially the younger
generation, do not particularly enjoy being confined to a
single desk set-up in a multi-partitioned open-plan
environment.
Savvy corporates, on the other hand, understand that not
only is this bad for productivity and creativity, but that this
is also a prime area where they can be more efficient with
their real estate commitments, while driving staff
engagement and wellbeing – resulting in measurable gains.
Therefore, agile workplaces represent the next stage of
the open-plan revolution. What is needed is more
collaboration and interaction among co-workers and this
has resulted in concepts such as ‘hot desking’, which means
that individual employees no longer have desks assigned to
them personally, but simply utilise the office space as, and
when, they require it.
Sasol Place is an example of workplace design responding to the
impact of technology.
As for the future evolution of the co-working trend, it may
result in a paradigm shift regarding the structure of major
corporates. Economies around the world are in constant
flux, which means business contracts and expands all the
time, while overheads tend to remain fixed. Consequently,
there is a realisation that the rigid work space model is no
longer needed and that business has other options in how
it utilises a traditional workspace.
However, there are a few key interior architecture
principles that underpin effective co-working space design;
it is important to design collaborative spaces that stimulate
creativity and enable social interactions. At the same time
there is a real need for private meeting spaces and quiet
focus zones to balance all the activity.
Paragon Interface’s design emphasises teamwork and
collaboration over hierarchy and insular work practices. Key
factors here are flexibility – to maximise space usage – and
identify potential growth areas in the building; efficiency,
which means creating multiple-use spaces; adaptability, to
be able to respond to changing requirements and
technologies; and sustainability, which relates to ‘green’
and healthy work environments that support the wellbeing
of all staff.
www.timberiq.co.za