The Envy Office: Can Instagrammable Design Bring Back Young Workers?

In the ‘Blueberry Muffin’ meeting room, the walls are of course painted blue. Not just any blue: it’s the soothing color you’ll find in a baby’s room, which the paint refers to as ‘from sea to shining sea’. The room is anchored by a table, red and elongated, decorated with faux succulents in purple pots.

Nearby is the ‘fruity’ conference room, with ‘razzle dazzle’ red walls and vintage chairs upholstered in yellow pineapple print fabric. Down the hall is “maple waffle,” the room where the company holds its more serious meetings with investors. There the walls have a subdued brown shade.

This is the office of the breakfast cereal brand Magic Spoon, which was introduced in 2019 and from last year called on its approximately fifty employees to work physically at least two days a week. In Magic Spoon’s SoHo space, which is designed precisely around the company’s return to the office, meeting rooms are meant to feel like breakfast cereal.

“One of our core company values ​​is, ‘Be a Froot Loop in a world of Cheerios,’” said Greg Sewitz, co-founder of Magic Spoon. “We wanted the office to emphasize that.”

Their space also reflects what designers, executives and employees describe as a trend that is not entirely new but is now becoming the go-to among certain startups, tech companies and other affluent employers competing for young talent. It’s what you might call the Envy Office: what happens when companies try to combine the comfort of a living room and the glamor of a vacation. These spaces – often characterized by colorful walls, upholstered furniture and carefully curated coffee table books – draw employees in with plenty of opportunities to fill their social feeds with photos taken in the workplace.

“It’s taking cues from home, from the hospitality industry, from Pinterest,” says Jordan Goldstein, co-chief executive of Gensler, one of the world’s largest architectural firms, where clients have lately been asking for greenery and soft seating. As an example, he cited Marriott’s new headquarters, which Gensler redesigned with benches, library nooks and a tree growing in the middle of the lobby. Gensler also recently redesigned offices for Barclays, Pinterest and LinkedIn in this style.

To some employees, however, all the fake plants, accent walls and stylish dog beds sometimes seem designed to mask the discomfort of space-saving arrangements like hot desks, where employees no longer have their own assigned work stations.

Before the rise of remote work, the designers behind Magic Spoon’s office, Laetitia Gorra, 41, and Sarah Needleman, 33, were the designers of the social sorority The Wing, a signature millennial pink-infused palace of pillows and color-coded bookshelves, which closed last year. In 2020, Ms. Gorra founded the Roarke design firm, with Ms. Needleman leading operations. The duo helps executives figure out what an office should look like at a time when many employees aren’t convinced they need to go there.

“Our pitch is primarily about employee retention,” Ms. Gorra said. “We came from working on our couches in yoga pants – what can we do to make your employees want to come back to the office?”

It’s a cycle American workers have seen before: As work norms change, office design changes with them. In a survey of some 14,000 employees around the world conducted last year by Gensler, nearly 40 percent said their employers had reconfigured their offices during the pandemic.

“When you look at the history of the office, you’re looking at the history of changing attitudes about what work entails, who employees should be,” says Craig Robertson, media historian and author of “The Filing Cabinet.” “The design of an office is shaped by dominant social values.”

As with every previous iteration of workplace aesthetics, including this latest trend, many managers are also trying to achieve a simpler goal: getting people to spend time in the office.

Cubicle farm to open table

Just over half a century ago, the best new feature of office life was the cubicle.

In the years following World War II, America’s white-collar workforce grew, buoyed by a booming economy and the influx of women into the workplace. Management scholars, such as the efficiency-obsessed Frederick Winslow Taylor, had previously urged companies to view white-collar work more like factory work. Enter the Action Office: modular office furniture, which became cubes that placed people tightly together.

According to office historians like Nikil Saval, cell farms reminded people of their place in the power structure, with higher-ups typically being allocated more space.

“You were surrounded by hundreds of people just like you,” says Sheila Liming, an associate professor at Champlain College and author of the design history book “Office.” “You get the idea that you are replicable.”

It’s hard to look at a cubicle farm and imagine it sparking the kind of out-of-the-box ideas that companies craved in the tech world of the 1990s, after Bill Gates and Paul Allen pioneered had mythologized Microsoft in a garage. Tech startups wanted employees to break out of their sterile cubes and gain a sense of ownership over their work, a sense of infinite potential growth.

That was partly the idea that gave rise to a new phase of office design: the tech utopia. Carolyn Chen, a sociologist who spent years researching life at tech companies in the Bay Area, noticed some physical elements that set their campuses apart. There were free snacks (peanut butter cups, chips, dried mango) and sometimes drinks (beer, frosé). There were sleeping pods and massage chairs.

Ms. Chen saw a company spend part of its design budget on making the office look grungier. It paid money to expose its bricks and pipes, sending the message to employees that they needed to adopt a start-up mentality and work overtime.

And because technology offices of the early 2000s were such social spaces—with happy hours and video games—the takeaway for some workers was that they didn’t have to go home to find free time or community.

“If you think about the way Google revolutionized the office, it was the idea that there was a standing invitation for employees to not only do their work, but also spend their free time there,” said Ms. Liming . “The word campus is really effective.”

But if there’s anything more attractive than a campus, it’s working from bed. So when the pandemic hit and offices became literal homes rather than figurative ones, managers had to rethink what it meant to make the office an attractive destination.

‘Live from head office’

When the Magic Spoon team moved into the new office earlier this year, Sarah Bourlakas, 26, senior social and community manager, took a photo to post to her personal Instagram Story with the caption: “Live from HQ.”

This Instagrammability is not accidental. Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communications at Cornell University, said employers are using social media aesthetics in the same way they use traditional perks like cold brew, or less traditional perks like the Lizzo concert Google hosted for its employees. It’s all about creating corporate images. Companies now want their office design to be visible not just to employees, but to everyone on social media, which Ms Duffy said was about “employee retention by hyping this fun, enjoyable, hyper-social workplace.”

Hollywood and television used to be the main sites showing young people the glamor of office life, Ms Duffy noted. There was “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Mad Men,” “The Internship,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Social Network.”

Now, social media is increasingly where people go to romanticize office life — especially on TikTok, where content creators love “Business Natalie” riff on the professional antics that many young people, who started their careers during the pandemic, have yet to experience. More than half of workers say they derive a sense of identity from their job, consistent survey findings show Gallup polls from 1989 to 2014. It is no surprise that young people want to put on their social media profiles what is so central to their sense of self. And the trendier an office is, the easier it is for employees to convey that their careers are more exciting than the office doldrums chronicled in “Office Space.”

When Ms. Bourlakas photographed Magic Spoon’s new SoHo space, her Instagram followers seemed dazzled.

“So many people said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so sick,’” said Ms. Bourlakas, who recently left Magic Spoon for another job. “‘It’s so Magic Spoon coded.'”

Dreaming about life in a cell

As you tour some of these new Envy Offices, where employees hunch over long desks wearing noise-cancelling headphones, you see a disconnect between what employees get and what they say they want. They have wall stickers and curated book collections. What they really need, some say, is privacy.

A 10-minute walk from Magic Spoon, the communications agency M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment has an office that was also redesigned by Roarke in 2021. Employees sit at long, communal wooden tables in front of exposed bricks and surrounded by a jungle of artificial greenery. A single bunch of fake grapes sits atop a coffee table book by Keith Haring.

Maddy Franklin, 27, a senior art director there, said there were elements of the new office she loved, such as its friendliness to dogs. But because of the hot desk system, she has no place to store personal items.

It can also be difficult to get a spot with a monitor. If Ms. Franklin is working on a major project to secure a coveted seat, “I will aim to get to the office a little early,” she said.

Robin Clark, 58, who works as a marketing director at a health care nonprofit, longs for the days before her office switched to an open floor plan. When her company undertook a complete redesign in 2018, executives tried to make the space inviting by creating lounge areas with sofas in bright colors like orange, teal and lime. But the lack of barriers between desks means Ms. Clark’s workday has an incessant, noisy background: crunching apples, sneezing colleagues. When she started working from home during the pandemic, she realized she wanted some peace and quiet.

As she put it: “With cubicle walls you at least have the impression that you have some privacy.”

Ironically, other workers are now also nostalgic for the era of the cell. Take Jerry Gulla, 56, a senior engineering manager based in Winchester, Mass., who started his career in 1989 when cubicles were the norm. Over the years, working in offices with open floor plans and hot desk systems, he missed the ability to customize his desk himself, and not with the help of a design firm.

Mr. Gulla is a fan of the TV show “The Expanse” and used to have a model ship from the show in his workspace. “Someone might walk by and see you’re a fan,” he recalled. “So you start a conversation and you meet someone new that way.”

For Mr. Gulla, the office ideal is simple: “It’s just a place that’s conducive to getting work done.”