Workplace Trends in 2018: More Interaction Between Employees and Intensive Training

This year, the managers of large companies will put more emphasis on creating work teams. Recent studies show that moments of conversation between colleagues increase profitability by 20%, and 72% of employees who have friends in the office are more satisfied with the job, according to a Forbes analysis.

In trends in the office market, this translates into giving even more importance to areas of interaction between employees, such as meeting rooms – conventional or less conventional, cafes inside office buildings, outdoor spaces for team outings, integrated into these offices. 

It is harder to hire two friends at once, qualified for your jobs. Still, it’s much easier to befriend two skilled office colleagues, allowing them to dine together near the office, relax in the company’s gaming room, or go to the nearby fitness room.

A conclusive example is that of Google Cafés and the relaxation and gaming spaces offered by this mega-company to its employees.

Because of this, IBM decided to give up the remote work of its employees and seeks the most appropriate solutions to integrate the new principles of interaction between employees in the workplace.

The second big trend is the even greater need for staff specialization, transposed as a trend in the office market in more and more meeting spaces. When you take young people from school, exactly it is unlikely to be what you want for vacancies, but a well-developed system of internal courses can quickly improve the situation. For this, you need even more common areas.

How can meeting rooms look like in the future?

Those are already used by large companies abroad. The meeting room in the image belongs to IBM and is in a modular system. It adapts to the number of participants in a meeting – it can have a round table with several employees and two separate spaces for two meetings in parallel.

In Romania, the new modern office buildings bring more common spaces for employee interaction – such as outdoor gardens with cafes or brasseries, amphitheaters, or modular indoor areas with modern facilities.

In this sense, we list the office projects The Bridge, Campus 6, AFI Tech Park, Expo Business Park -Bluerose, Business Garden Bucharest.

Developers are careful to bring cafe or fitness room operators before finishing office buildings or immediately after delivery, for services integrated into Class A office spaces.

Examples of this are the three recent transactions made through ESOP Consulting. A space on the ground floor of the AFI Park 5 office building in Bucharest rented by VIVO Food Bar, a gourmet restaurant specialized in burgers, the rental by World Class Romania of a space of 1,500 sqm in the future AFI Tech Park building, which will be inaugurated this summer and the renting by World Class Romania of an area of 2,500 sqm in the Record Park complex, in Cluj-Napoca.

We will continue our series about workplace trends in 2018, the next point being ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.

If you would like more information about the office spaces for rent in Bucharest, please contact the ESOP team by filling this brief form, or by phone (+4) 0723.26.61.97 or (+4) 021.528.04.40. We’ll promptly answer your inquiry!