Behavioral Design in the Workplace: 5 Ways to Improve Your Office Experience

For the past eight years, I’ve been working with the Behavioral Science Lab in Austin, Texas to help change makers make better decisions. Since the emergence of Covid-19, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we can better tailor spaces and experiences to the newly massive hybrid workforce.

The challenge? Too few people understand how to appropriately weigh economical and psychological factors in their decisions. Today, the result is a great tug-of-war between employees and employers over whether it’s safe to be in shared office spaces together.

But at a high level, any decision is surrounded by multiple factors that drive an individual’s selection: Do I want to work in an office or will I refuse to go in?

The simplest explanation for why someone chooses one option over the other is that for any given choice, each person evaluates whether each option can fulfill their needs and wants, or not. To help you reframe your thinking around whether or not to call your employees back to the office, you should first apply the basic tenets of behavioral design to this choice.

1. Ask Your Team What They Want and Need to Determine What Matters Most

A couple of years ago, a client I work with ran a study to see what drove people to choose one shared work environment over the other to figure out how they might distinguish offerings. We evaluated respondents’ interest based on eight criteria:

  • Parking

  • Location

  • Office interior

  • Services and amenities

  • Networking opportunities

  • Tech available onsite

  • Culture

  • Privacy

While each of these components must be satisfied to a certain degree, we quickly found that privacy was a potential spoiler for certain groups. This is to say, if professionals whose work requires confidentiality can’t find the privacy they’re looking for in a shared office environment, they won’t select it. Privacy at work was important enough to make some folks pause and double-check that every other element they need is present, so we designed a space to satisfy that requirement.

By asking people what they want in a variety of ways, we were able to apply the principles of behavioral design to determine what matters most to them in a given situation.

2. Get a Deep Understanding of What Professionals Need by Asking Why Each Component They Value Matters to Them

Of course, there are many ways to find out what factors play a role and how much they are weighted in the process of making that choice, but however you get there, it’s important not to stop asking questions once you’ve identified which values matter most.

For example, when we talk about privacy, we must also ask, what makes a room “private” to you?

For some professionals, it just means that no one can see what’s on their laptop screen when they’re sitting at my desk in their office. For others, it may mean having a private entrance where clients can confidentially enter the building.

Knowing what kinds of privacy they’re looking for, what privacy means to them,  directly impacts your office design, and it will ultimately make a difference in the employee experience you’re capable of providing.

3. Design for a Multidimensional Workforce

Today’s workforce is full of parents, part-time students, caregivers, hobbyists, and people with complex healthcare needs that don’t easily mesh with a 9-to-5 work schedule.

That’s why this is an exciting moment for any employee and employer; we now know what a hybrid workforce can achieve. This opens the door to tailoring work environments to better serve the way people want to work today.

Rather than asking, “How can we adapt our old office space to meet the team’s needs today?” we can ask, “What needs do we have internally that we need to satisfy and what solution fits that model?”

4. Strategically Test and Apply Behavioral Design-Driven Solutions

As you embark on this journey toward discovering what your workforce’s needs are, it’s important to remember three things:

  1. You can’t satisfy everyone, and that’s not the goal. Some professionals may find themselves called back into office spaces in which they are less productive in service of improving collaboration and office culture. If the overall benefit for the company or group is still met, that professional will have to cope or move along.

  2. You should never underestimate human needs. If you don’t take the time to ask your staff what they value and why, you’ll never know.

  3. Don’t start too big. Changing the framework for how your employees engage with their time in the office and with the space itself will dramatically disrupt your operations if you don’t start small.

As you test out what office or workspace configuration works best for your team, take your time, gather feedback, and make adjustments where necessary. The point of this process is to arrive at a solution that delivers what your company and your people need.

5. Use Data-Based Decisions to Deliver the Experience You and Your Team Need

People want to collaborate; that’s human nature. While Zoom is a wonderful tool, video calls can’t capture the chemistry and energy that we feel in face-to-face interactions. It may have worked pretty well for the past 18 months, but today, we see the holes in this experience.

You can use behavioral design to determine how best to fill those holes, and the solution may not be returning to the office full-time. Instead of assuming that returning to your old office set-up will solve any problems you’re facing today, begin by solving the challenges of the new realities of hybrid workspace.

By using this behavioral design approach, you’ll arrive at the answer and the workspaces you and your workforce need.

Christian Goy is the chief marketing strategist at Firmspace, which offers private office space for professionals and executives. Christian Goy is also the co-founder of Behavioral Science Lab, which uses behavioral economics to provide clients with a clear understanding of how people make choices, while predicting and measuring the consequences of those choices. 


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