Today’s hybrid workplace is more than a place to work—it’s a place to have experiences. People who can choose to work elsewhere come to the office to collaborate, revive connections with coworkers and experience workplace culture.
Behind those experiences lies the smart design that powers them. To learn more about collaboration, privacy and acoustics in today’s hybrid workplace, i+s sat down with a team from furniture maker Ghent to learn more about solutions for designers and specifiers, as well as a major change with the company’s go-to-market strategy.
i+s: There’s been a lot of discussion around the hybrid model in the workplace. How do you define the term and what’s so significant about it in terms of designing for the workplace today?
John D’Agostino, President: How do you entice people to come back when they don’t have to? They’ve got to want to. You’ve got to make them want to come back. An appealing workplace, culture and environment makes all the difference.
Scott Bowers, Vice President of Product: Right now the challenge we are trying to address is the idea of how do we make sure everyone’s voice is getting heard? How do we give that equal meeting and work experience and put the right tools in their hands? A lot of people did temporary things when they first worked from home, but now the next level is that this is kind of the new permanent norm until something else changes. How do you put products in a more personal way?
D'Agostino: Half of it is how do you help people who are working in the home, and the other half is for the people who are coming in, how do you design your workplace?
Bowers: To bring it all together, there is a challenge in designing the space for everyone, but also designing the products that will work for everyone regardless of where they are working. For the variety of people who are going to come in, we have to make sure our products are going to work virtually anywhere. You might be meeting in the cafeteria, a large empty corner or out on the patio. We need to think through how it can be mobile, configurable and hackable so if two people want to get together, it is as easy to take the cap off a marker, and boom, they’re working in seconds.
i+s: Collaboration was a buzzword even prior to the pandemic. What’s changed in terms of getting people to work together now vs. in the past?
Susan Claus, Director of Marketing: When people are in the office, how do you become really efficient at this idea of collaborating? Collaborating is like a collision of ideas, and that’s not easily replicable in a virtual setting. There’s something about getting to interact with people, whiteboarding an idea and gaining trust of the people you are working with. But on the flip side, we can do a lot more virtually than we ever thought we could. One thing we have been talking about, especially with our products, is the idea of needing meeting experience equality when people aren’t always in the office. How do we engage the remote worker on the same level and make it an engaging experience for everyone?
D'Agostino: Just as it can help with inclusion if everybody has their own box on the Zoom screen, as opposed to only the people who are remote, so that it feels less exclusionary for the remote team, it’s also important for remote workers to participate as collaboration unfolds on a whiteboard, in real-time. One of the products we now offer is a high-res camera that goes over the top of a whiteboard and allows people to follow along as the presenter is writing. Those scribbled figures have more meaning and prompt others along the way for their engaged input – much more so than only sending out a picture of that board afterwards; the picture could be meaningless if you didn’t see it being created. We recognize that importance and we’re glad to be offering this digital solution now as an accessory to our whiteboards.
i+s: What are the challenges to collaborating today and what are some solutions available to designers?
Bowers: The real challenge right now is everyone is not together all the time, missing out on some of those chance collaboration times. So I think the question we as a manufacturer are trying to answer is how to do we design products that not only make people want to come into the office, but allow them to collaborate efficiently.
Claus: People want things that are on wheels so they can have that collaboration time when and where they need it. It doesn’t necessarily need to be in a conference room. The really cool thing we are working on that will be on display at NeoCon is for spaces outside the office. We have some outdoor collaboration furniture and we are excited to be the first to bring an outdoor whiteboard to market. It is a complete solution that creates an outdoor meeting space without having to invest in several other products to create an environment.
Bowers: It’s the functionality of a whiteboard, but how do we deliver it in an architectural way so you create an environment? So much of what we’re trying to do is to figure out how we’re going to inspire people to do great work. Time in the office is so precious, so let’s maximize that time and make it efficient.
i+s: Privacy and acoustics are also big considerations when designing for the workplace. How can specifiers help address these concerns for clients?
Bowers: Finding solutions to support neurodiversity is a passion of ours right now. We have to partner with the architect and really rethink how space is used so we’re building in that sensory choice. Everybody’s working differently, and the same person doesn’t even want the same space in the same day. But if we can build in nooks and crannies, if we can build in gathering spots like breakrooms and cafeterias and start giving that choice, then I think work starts being a place I want to go to. I’m choosing space that drives me to work.
D'Agostino: Something we’re building into products recently is the ability for the user to adapt them throughout the day. We have items that are soundproof when they’re turned one way and when rotated they’re a simple divider, closer to being an open space; some others that are light and mobile so they can be moved either in or out. Unless you have an unreasonably enormous office space, you can’t have a dedicated spot for every personal preference. Spaces have to be customizable or hackable by people who are working with them. And all of our dividers have writing surfaces incorporated into them so you can collaborate at any time.
Bowers: People underestimate the value of the pre-session and post-session of collaboration. A lot of people organize their thoughts, take things away and work on them. It’s collaboration, but there’s also individual collaboration. So much of this is about getting people to feel comfortable. If people feel comfortable because they’re outdoors or because they can control the lighting in their workspace, they start going “I feel better, I want to do more, I can do more.”
i+s: Tell us about some of Ghent’s products and solutions and how they can help create more effective office environments.
Claus: One thing we do that is quite different from other companies is really try and get a lot of feedback from various sources, whether that’s our internal team, other partner manufacturers, as well as designers and dealers. We host focus groups, so we’ll bring in those specifiers and dealers who are looking for solutions and get feedback directly on them on what their needs are or what modifications we should be making and then put that through a really talented product team. That’s where a lot of our innovative products have come from—hearing what people need, what their challenges are in the workplace and how we can help solve them with color, writeable surfaces, space dividers or acoustic solutions.
Bowers: We have a line of floor partitions that’s modular and there are literally 2.5 million configurations. It’s using the ability to do manufacturing here in the U.S. and let the person decide: do you want dry eraseability, do you want acoustics, do you want clear acrylics so you can do natural lighting? It’s a very simple system, but you’re building in choice so they can customize and adjust the product even after they buy it.
We also have a brand-new collection coming out that works four different ways: it’s a mobile on wheels, a partition between desks, a wallboard and a huddle board, which is a board that goes on the wall in portrait aspect for a short, quick standup meeting. It’s got a great writing surface, it’s built with fabric for the acoustics and has that softer, more residential feel to things. We just came out with a product that allows you to take glass and have subtle backgrounds on it, like pictures of monstera plants for biophilia. The idea is that a blank slate on the wall is a very generic work tool, but by giving things a more artistic feel, it gives it a dual functionality and makes people feel a little bit more at home. We’re going to spend an awful lot of time in these environments—why not make them beautiful as well?
i+s: Ghent has some big news around its branding and position in the market. Can you tell us more about that and how it fits into the company’s overall strategy?
Claus: As we have talked about in this conversation, the way people work and where people work has changed. With that comes changes to how our partners want to interact and work with us. Our goal is to offer all of our solutions across all of our brands and scale all of the capabilities we have developed over the last 45 years producing functional artwork with our glassboards, whiteboards, and display solutions, to name a few. We’re merging our three brands (Ghent, Waddell and VividBoard) into one under our flagship Ghent brand. We have always prided ourselves on being easy to work with, and this change will make that promise have even more meaning. We want people to seek us out and we want to help them solve their problems.
Bowers: Our founders started with a mantra: “Service to the customer, service to the employee, service to the community.” We talk about that constantly. We’re going to make it as easy as possible to buy a product, install a product and come back next time. People have choice. We recognize that and we want to make sure we give them every reason to pick Ghent.
