How will office furniture adapt to move forward?

Details on the implications to the future furniture needs from each of the four themes collaboration, flexibility, floor plan changes and WFH -- are explored

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, CBRE’s Furniture Advisory team has communicated frequently with many furniture manufacturers to gauge what they were seeing in the market, how they were pivoting and what their own clients were requesting of them. After 12 weeks of discussions, the CBRE team wondered what long-term changes will and should be made to the office furniture of the future?

With that question driving them, they widened their net and spoke with 31 internal and external partners that span the lifecycle of a project. CBRE started with their own real estate professionals and design teams across the globe and then circled back with their furniture manufacturers to develop a research-driven point-of-view.

The objective was to filter out the short-term solutions and requirements and set tehir sights on the long term, a generation of furniture to come next. For the purposes of the research, CBRE defined the “next generation of furniture” as new office furniture product options which meet the criteria needed post-pandemic.

While there were many common themes throughout the interviews, they found four mentioned most frequently: collaboration, flexibility, floor plan changes and work-from-home (WFH). Details on the implications to the future furniture needs from each of the four themes are explored in this report.

OPEN COLLABORATION WILL INCREASE IN VALUE

People have found ways to successfully collaborate virtually, so the office will need to have spaces to support collaboration in ways that working from home cannot. The importance of collaborative spaces to a respondents expressed a need for collaborative furniture that supports changing work styles and more open meeting spaces.