Complete with kitchen gardens, roof gardens, refreshment points, cafés, relaxation and play areas, colourful and warm, in a word: liveable. Offices are looking ahead to an inclusive, sustainable future, but above all, one capable of tempting staff back into the office, where they will hopefully actually feel better than they do at home. What matters now is not just hiring the right candidate but “creating workplaces that young people want to go and work in”. And the workspace can make the difference.

Difficulties in finding qualified staff in all sectors (starting with hospitality, but also in many others) are certainly playing a role in this new wave of workplace organisation and design.

What trends are being seen? First of all, it is out with plastic partitions in neutral colours and in with ecological, environmentally friendly materials that create individual, protected work pods. Then, when colleagues want to be together they can meet in a communal space, which might be a rooftop. Examples of this include the undulating cardboard walls that the Indian studio VDGA designed at Pune. Meanwhile the Cookfox studio has brought beehives, flowers and plants to its roofs and terraces to create a pastoral-bucolic atmosphere: in New York’s Chelsea district, on 512 West 22nd Street.

Relaxation areas are essential now, and they need to be quite separate from spaces where people work or hold meetings, also in stylistic terms: their purpose is to provide “detachment”, so there are no technological devices, they are soundproofed and they have appropriate lighting. In addition to this they will typically have comfortable seating, green plants and a bookcase or a hi-fi system for listening to music.

Some offices are going even further and preparing fully equipped gyms where employees can not only train, but also meet and socialise with colleagues from other departments.

Air quality is another important aspect, with the introduction of purifiers, plants and paintings that absorb polluting substances, as seen in the new Helsinki offices of realtor Bo LKV.

Among the other popular features of the new office is the provision of healthy, inclusive food that respects the demand for ethical diets and food intolerance solutions. This could be through new-generation vending machines, or small kitchens equipped with state-of-the-art machines, such as miniature espresso coffee makers, designed for the home or small retail spaces, which raise the bar on the kinds of coffee offered so everyone can choose (and even extract) their own coffee, be it a traditional Italian blend or a rare Ethiopian single-origin coffee.

Generally speaking, then, as we head ever more towards a hybrid way of working – partly in the office and partly from home – and look forward to a shorter working week that will enable people to improve their work-life balance, trends that look set to remain include the creation of smaller offices and investments in quality for the benefit of workers’ health, wellbeing, and creativity.