The new 'collaborative club'

In an article dedicated to employees' return to the offices, published in the most recent issue of ECO's Pessoas magazine, Duarte Aires gave his testimony regarding the new collaborative hybrid workspaces:

The future of the office is today

"The office will become a club, a place where employees are proud to belong and where they develop the most brilliant ideas", believes Duarte Aires, CEO of Vector Mais. And he gives as an example of this "new philosophy", the project that the company, which develops projects for the design and construction of interior spaces, created for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk at Quinta da Fonte. "We created a hot-desking office, divided into three main zones: an informal one, which promotes casual encounters and creativity; a collaborative one, where a team can meet to develop a project, and a focus one when someone intends to work and not be interrupted. All this is complemented by several lounge areas, phone booths, plants and a cafeteria filled with natural light", he describes.

Projects were not lacking during the pandemic, so much so that the company reinforced the engineering team. "With the pandemic, many companies took advantage of WFH to start remodelling projects at their facilities, without disruption to their services, as people were working at home. They also began to pay even more attention to the office as a physical manifestation of its values ​​and identity", says Duarte Aires.

"The office is no longer just a place to perform tasks and exercise presentism, to become a forum for sharing ideas and creativity", he says. They won't shrink either. They will be different. "Without dedicated places for each worker and more areas of collaboration", an option that "in many projects, represents more than 40% of the total occupied area of the office", he says.

"This new configuration will allow companies to hire more people without having the immediate need to increase the office space because teams will be in a natural rotation model, joining at truly essential moments."

Text: Ana Marcela / Pessoas / ECO