What Your Space Says Before Anyone Speaks

Early in my career when I worked in hotels, a leader told me something I’ve never forgotten: “as goes the arrival, so goes the stay.”

His point was that the first moments set the terms for everything after. If a guest pulls up to the porte-cochere and they are immediately greeted by the doorman, the door is opened without being asked, the bags come out and the guest is ushered into a calm lobby to a smiling face anticipating their arrival, that guest has already decided something about the rest of their stay; the tone has been set. Things could go wrong later, but a smooth arrival provides the benefit of the doubt.

Critically, the same thing happens in your workplace every morning, and only the best organizations are designing for positive arrivals.

Resolving Initial Concerns

Like any other animals, humans tend to enter unfamiliar spaces with their ears up and their eyes open, “scanning the savannah” for what might be out of place. Some of this consciously registers with us, but much of it doesn’t, instead accumulating in the background and becoming a feeling about the room.

As those small initial concerns are resolved, people relax. And a relaxed person is someone who can think, decide and connect. That is the entire business case, and it happens below the level of anything you’d put in a design brief. The question is not whether your space is communicating with people, but rather: what is it telling them? What message have you crafted?

The Lenses of Hospitality

Hospitality is initially seen through the lens of cleanliness before anything else. A general manager I once worked for made the point better than I can. On his first day, he asked the staff to guess how many members of the team worked in housekeeping. He allowed three to guess and they were all way off. The Director of Housekeeping then gave him an exact figure, broken down by shift.

“Good answer,” he said, “But it’s still wrong. This hotel has 101 employees, so we have 101 people who work in housekeeping. If I catch any of you walking past a piece of paper on the floor, we’ll be having a conversation in my office. And the same goes for me. If you catch me doing it, there’s a hundred-dollar bill in my desk with your name on it.” That bill stayed in his desk for the duration of his tenure.

Temperature is also critical, as it’s the purest example of something unseen and immediately felt. Nobody walks into a room and compliments the air — they simply decide within seconds whether it’s a comfortable space.

But where a workplace has a real advantage over a hotel in terms of hospitality is the people in the space. In a hotel, your guests are usually strangers who leave in one or two days, maybe a week if you’re lucky. In an office, you see the same people every day and can actually get to know them, allowing for more granular and detailed hospitality that goes beyond straightforward customer service delivery. In the office, true relationships can be established based on people’s personalities, interests and preferences and the opportunity for real engagement expands exponentially.

Informal, Yet Informed

There’s a restaurant in Brooklyn I’ve been going to for years that’s built into an old diner car. The booths are beaten up and everything about the room communicates that it’s an old-school, no-frills kind of classic diner.

The server then sits down next to you in the booth, writes on the butcher paper covering the table and tells you what the kitchen is doing today — which local farm the beef for the burger came from, how they’ve specially foraged and prepared the mushrooms in the omelet, a bit about the monks that made the rare cheese in the grilled cheese and why it’s so special. By then, you’re not just having a meal but an experience.

Nothing about that room is high end or expensive. What makes it exceptional is that the people in it are informed and have decided to let you in on what they know, sharing knowledge and providing context; they’re informal, yet informed. That is the most useful model available to any organization that has looked at a flagship headquarters and concluded it could never afford one. You can’t buy that experience, but you can build it with expertise and attention to detail.

Spaces for Whole People

The office isn’t a neutral environment to begin with — people talk about the Sunday scaries for a reason. Anything that reduces the ambient stress of being in the workplace is valuable, which is why quiet rooms and spaces set aside for meditation, spiritual practice or a moment alone have stopped being perks and started being acknowledgments that people arrive at work as whole human beings.

If you want to know whether an organization designs for its people or for a brochure, look at its mother’s room. Historically, where these rooms existed at all, they were repurposed closets. No windows, no air circulation, plainly never intended for the purpose and often doubling as a wellness room, which meant it served neither function effectively.

I’ve also worked with organizations that took it seriously, and the difference is entirely in the details. Things like giving thought to the materials for furniture and countertops, finding the quietest refrigerator available, providing a white noise machine so the room feels private, good air circulation, a space heater and a couple of soft blankets — none of that is expensive, but each detail makes for a unified, positive experience.

Design for Purpose, Not Trends

The most common mistake I see is designing for trends. Someone visits another office, decides something is essential and installs it without asking whether it suits the people who will live with it.

I once watched a consultancy build a multi-sensory presentation room so sophisticated that using it required specialized software and training. Access was restricted to protect the equipment, so it went almost entirely unused. They have since rebuilt it around a much wider set of needs, which is the correct answer arrived at too expensively. I have seen the same pattern in meeting rooms fitted with costly secure communications technology, in an organization where people only wanted to join a video call and put it on the screen without help.

The assumption underneath all of this is that spending more produces a better space, but what produces a better space is knowing who’s in it and why. Every organization contains populations with different needs, and designing for an average of them serves none of them well. Survey your people and build in enough flexibility for the space to adapt as those groups change.

Why Your Space Matters

People who feel cared for extend that care outward. They look after the workplace, their colleagues and the work itself; people who feel disregarded do the opposite. Once an office reaches the point where nobody wants to report the spill in the hallway, the space has already told you what it is.

Given that working a job is necessary for most of us, why would we not find a way to make that experience as pleasant as possible? We know what kind of work fear produces, and we also know what pride and genuine investment produces — the difference is not subtle.
The question residing behind every floor plan and furniture order ought to be, “What kind of space do you want to create?”

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