Activity-based workspace at the Danish Building and Property Agency

The activity-based workspace makes facilities available for a variety of work needs, and at the same time it is space efficient. Specifically, the Danish Building and Property Agency with its activity-based design has halved its area consumption from approx. 23 m2/employee to approx. 12 m2/employee.

In the office, there is three types of workplaces:

Focus workstation for ordinary individual work
Active station for knowledge sharing and project work as well as short breaks between meetings.
Quiet workstation for work without disturbances.

In addition, the home workplace, which from now on is considered a new zone in the activity-based environment, which employees can choose from as needed and by agreement with their boss. In addition, there are a number of support facilities such as sofas, telephone boxes, flex rooms and meeting rooms, which create a good framework for conversations, informal and formal meetings.

The support facilities have been accommodated because the desk ratio is seven desks per. 10 employees. Detailed analyzes have been made of the use of the former office, just as an architect firm has assisted with advice and guidance. Based on observations and questionnaires, the Danish Building and Property Agency could conclude that approx. 50 pct. of the desks was empty during the day in the former offices, which were a traditional open-space office where everyone had permanent seats.

As everyone in the Danish Building and Property Agency - both directors and employees - now has an activity-based workspace, you are free to sit wherever you want and among the colleagues from your own or other units for the best support of the specific work task.

An office that houses the work tasks

When the Danish Building and Property Agency moved from the office in Valby to Kalvebod Brygge in January 2019, it was also moving to a new interior. The Danish Building and Property Agency's decision to develop an office based on principles other than the traditional open-scale office is based, among other things, on development trends that reflect the flexibility that is in modern working life. With laptops and cell phones, employees can work anywhere and anytime. In addition, there has been an increase in interdisciplinary collaboration, where the employees' closest organizational colleagues are not necessarily the primary colleague during the working day. When the employees' everyday lives are flexible, so must the office be.

In addition, the traditional open-scale office did not function optimally. There was a lack of facilities for e.g. concentration, just as the office space was not used optimally, as many desks were empty during the day due to absence in the form of meeting activity, holidays, etc.

Danish Building and Property Agency'sdirector, Rasmus Brandt Lassen explains:

The fact that we had to move was a great opportunity to rethink the design of our workplace to suit modern working life. We want knowledge sharing between the employees, and we simply found that the traditionally open-space office could not accommodate our needs well enough. Either there was too much noise, which for example made concentration impossible, or we had the opposite problem, where we put too much effort into not disturbing the colleague sitting next to you, so it hampered the sharing of knowledge. With the activity-based work environment, we have far better opportunities for both knowledge sharing and concentration.

The Danish Building and Property Agency'soffice in Skanderborg is also designed to be activity-based, thus the agency is working fully activity-based.