A pleasant working environment ensures that employees on the one hand have the opportunity to meet and work together and, on the other hand, can carry out individual work in peace and concentration. These needs may vary throughout the day. The work environment must therefore be arranged in a varied way so that everyone can find a good place. Freedom of choice is very important here; for example, do employees want a flexible desk or would prefer their own workplace.
That requires quite a lot from the organization. After all, it must have sufficient space to create good quality workplaces and to ensure that those workplaces are also available to everyone. There is therefore no place for hierarchical rules in this optimal working environment: everyone should actually be able to use every space. And then it's also nice when that diversity of workplaces is close by. So you don't have to walk halfway through the office to quietly have a call with a customer.
Implementing this ideal working environment also has implications for acoustic design. Where acoustics in the past was primarily about reducing noise to comfortable silence, significant parts of the ideal work environment are now designed as “lively and exciting” places. A distraction takes you more than 23 minutes! After a distraction, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds before you get back to focused on the task you were doing.
