Return-to-Office Strategies Failing? The Coffee Shop Effect Can Help Brew Success

• Coffee shops serve as dynamic work environments where the ambient noise and social presence can boost productivity and creativity for many individuals, in contrast to the quiet, sometimes less stimulating office spaces.
• There are psychological and physiological reasons why coffee shops are effective workspaces, such as varied scenery, social facilitation, white noise, and enhanced creativity, which companies might consider incorporating into their workplace design to entice employees back to the office.
• Rather than offering just aesthetic or “surface” amenities, integrating a fully operational coffee shop into office design could provide a more authentic and appealing environment for productive work.

On a daily basis, coffee shops around the world are filled with people tapping away at their laptops, working on individual tasks, or engaged in meetings or conversations of various sizes. Today, in the post-pandemic era, it is not uncommon to see people taking Zoom calls at their tables. Coffee shops sometimes function as high-octane coworking spaces. 

In the early days of coworking, we used to joke that Starbucks was the largest coworking chain in the world, where people paid for memberships one latte at a time. In Austin, there is even a coffee shop that has a printer and Amazon lockers where patrons collect deliveries and keep their stuff. At this particular location, the amount of work that gets done in a day, per square foot, could easily rival the productivity of many leading companies.

All of this is happening along with the sounds of music, the clanking and whirring of the espresso machines, multiple conversations of varying volumes, tables and chairs moving, and doors opening and closing. Yet, in many cases the laptop warriors are undeterred. Productivity can abound in such environments — not despite but because of the loud hustle and bustle.

SHHSHHSHH

By way of contrast, I recall visiting the beautifully designed and posh offices of a leading architecture and design firm a few years ago. With great pride, my hosts showed me the “cafe area” that was designed to induce casual interaction and “serendipitous collaboration and innovation.” In this particular space, though, there were only two people (not sitting together) and the atmosphere was pin-drop quiet and sterile. 

We were talking, perhaps a bit loudly, when one of the two people in the space asked us if we could keep it down. We were too loud. 

In this particular office, the whole building was equally quiet. Perhaps the creative and technical work of architects and designers requires such intense concentration that absolute quiet is the only way to go. However, there are plenty of other designers who claim that busy and loud and music-filled coffee shops are their favorite places to get their work done.

The Coffee Shop Difference

Of course, not everyone can or wants to do their work in a coffee shop. It is not for everybody, particularly an introvert who might prefer absolute quiet. 

But there can be no denying that something does happen that shifts the quality of experience when lots of people are doing their thing co-present with one another in a place like a coffee shop. This is precisely the source of the “co” in the original version of coworking.

It turns out that there is science behind why coffee shops have the kinds of kinetic effects they do. In light of how universally embraced coffee shops are as places to gather (and increasingly to work), the coffee shop effect is something that companies struggling to bring people back to the office might want to factor into their workplace designs and strategies. 

Not “cafe spaces” with fancy and expensive furniture, but coffee shops!

Embracing the productivity benefits of a coffee shop as a core “work area” for company offices does not replace other types of spaces that make up a great office. Rather, it can be a creative complement to the many other typologies and zones that now make up our increasingly fancy, amenity-rich, and boring offices. 

Many RTO mandates continue to fall on deaf ears as companies engage in office peacocking to counter the broader culture of choice and flexibility that is redefining work. The notion that lavish and over-the-top amenities will be sufficient to attract employees back to the office is starting to seem fanciful. But what types of spaces can draw people back to the office on their own volition?

Four Reasons Why Coffee Shops Rock

One such type of place, I am suggesting, can be a fully functional, vendor-operated coffee shop that operates like a normal coffee shop. There are four core reasons why a coffee shop typology can benefit the future ways-of-working strategy in your company.

• Change of Scenery

Think back to your college days. Moving from the library to the dorm, to the cafeteria, to a university lab or a friend’s dorm room, to the local coffee shop, it is widely agreed that moving locations helps trigger a fresh perspective on what you are working on. When the standard desks, offices, meeting rooms, huddle rooms, blah blah blah aren’t enough, having a truly differentiated place to work would be a valuable addition.

• Social Facilitation

Then there is the impact of positive peer pressure, or social facilitation, wherein the presence of others (more so with more people) who are actively jamming away on their work inspires action. As other people are engaged in productive/creative activities, we too are compelled (for somewhat mysterious reasons) to amp up our activity as well. The result can be very fulfilling and productive work sessions. The first drafts of my four books were all written in coffee shops.  

• White Noise

There is a fine line between when a place seems just a bit too loud and when that place’s volume turns into a soothing white noise. Think of this as a kind of social white noise where all the individual sounds merge into one cacophonous blur of noise. There is ample science to suggest that white noise can in fact boost concentration and productivity.  

• Perspective-shifting Creativity

Again, the science behind why people claim to be more creative in coffee shops is a bit unclear, but at the same time the effect seems to be universal. Perhaps not for introverts, but for many people this is obviously the case. Just walk into your local coffee shop on a weekday afternoon and you can see it on display. 

Activity Based Working on Steroids

As suggested here, adding a proper coffee shop to the flow and feel of an office does not replace other spaces and typologies (though perhaps it should replace some of them). If you look at Clive Wilkinson’s 12 Building Blocks of the future office, as interesting as they are, it is hard to imagine that any organization really needs all those spaces. 

With the proper amount of research conducted on the front end of a workplace transformation project, we should be able to determine what spaces are most valuable to employees. If the coffee shop typology is such a place, then perhaps it is time to run an experiment and try. 

It would be difficult for many organizations to be any less successful than they currently are in luring people back to the office. Innovation requires experimentation, and learning, and this is an experiment that is sorely needed in the post-pandemic workplace conversation.