With 2025 just around the corner, Aman Parmar, Head of Marketing at the UK’s largest flexible workspace provider, BizSpace, has shared his predictions and insights into how the culture of workspaces could shift in the next twelve months.
A flexible workspace generally refers to a type of office environment that provides businesses and individuals with adaptable work areas that can be tailored to meet their needs. So it does not generally cover industrial workspace or storage facilities. For BizSpace it covers the likes of managed offices, services offices, co working, and studio spaces such as office studios and workshop studios.
Here at Bizspace, we are seeing certain SMEs offering solutions such as desk sharing, work from home certain days a week and others to work from the office, coupled with financial incentives for employees to work from home to help with an increase to their home costs like energy bills.
This approach can help with savings in rental costs for businesses, but often the bigger savings come when medium to larger sized SMEs make organisational or logistical changes, such as the adoption of satellite offices and the hub and spoke office model. These two trends increased in popularity out of the Covid pandemic where satellite offices and businesses embracing the hub and spoke model became more prominent.
Satellite offices are branches of a company that are physically separate from the businesses’ main office. While decentralised and physically apart, they are known for their interconnectivity. Satellite office capacities can range anywhere from holding one to hundreds of employees. They can also be geographically dispersed throughout one country or globally, depending on the business requirements.
‘Hub and spoke’ offices are flexible workspaces where a business allows employees to work from either their city hub or a dedicated, strategic ‘spoke’ location of one or several regional workspaces. As you can imagine, these have a variety of cost saving implications, for both the business and staff, not to mention lesser liabilities for the business that come in the form of long leases for larger head offices.
We are also noting the following trends impacting the designs of office spaces:
Hybrid work and flexibility: Many offices are incorporating adaptable layouts and technology to support hybrid work. Features like hot-desking, movable partitions, and multi-functional spaces allow seamless transitions between in-person and virtual collaboration.
Wellness and biophilia (connection with the natural world): There is a strong focus on integrating natural elements such as plants, natural light, and organic materials to promote mental health and productivity. Wellness-focused amenities, including meditation rooms, fitness centres, and ergonomic furniture, are also increasingly common.
Sustainability: Eco-friendly practices in office design include energy-efficient lighting, low-emission materials, and features like green roofs or living walls. These elements reduce environmental impact while supporting a company’s sustainability goals.
Enhanced technology: Modern offices integrate advanced tools such as virtual reality rooms, IoT-enabled devices, and collaborative tech hubs to cater to a digitally connected workforce.
Employee centric spaces: Offices now often feature amenities like barista-style reception areas, social hubs, and quiet zones. These designs foster community, creativity, and individual focus, aiming to make the workplace more engaging and supportive.
Inclusivity: Designs now prioritise accessibility and diversity, offering gender-neutral facilities, prayer rooms, and features that support employees with different needs.
While these are not necessarily brand new trends, they are what we see continuing into 2025 and beyond, which is an approach that businesses may choose to use.
