Companies are also being drawn to modular furniture amid increased demand from employees to raise health and wellbeing standards. These quality-of-life issues have become top priorities for office workers, even above their salary, according to JLL’s 2022 Workforce Preferences Barometer.

“With office fit-out now evolving to support both high performance work and employee wellbeing, we have seen the emergence of homely ‘resimercial’ furniture and design layouts,” says Betty Surgis, Tétris Head of Furniture Solutions EMEA.

“This puts people first by mixing domestic interiors with traditional workplace aspects, making the office a comfortable ‘home from home’ and producing collaborative and agile spaces that people want to spend time in.”

It’s a concept that can be seen in abundance in the UK office of global tech firm, Campaign Monitor, where flexibility and comfort is key. Multi-use areas feature tables in interesting shapes which can be reconfigured through linking elements and moved on castors.

Once again, modular seating comes into its own, offering employees choice by dividing spaces into zones for different types of work, or intimate private areas for informal chats or focused reading. What’s more, these spaces can easily accommodate later changes in office culture and are endlessly configurable as teams shrink, expand or move.

Modular or multi-purpose furniture doesn’t just make good financial sense.

In the UK, an estimated 1.2 million office desks and 1.8 million office chairs end up in landfill each year, while U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures puts overall annual furniture waste at almost 10 million tonnes.

“A more sustainable approach to office design is long overdue and flexible furniture solutions not designated for just one task, can avoid these issues, easily fulfilling multiple purposes over their lifetime - or even during a single working day,” says Surgis.

The highly adaptable office space of Fintech company Wise took this one step further, not only upcycling and re-upholstering existing furniture, but implementing forward thinking materials, like ROOM booths which are made of 1,088 recycled plastic bottles.

“As a win-win situation for the environment, the employee and budget conscious enterprises with ambitious decarbonization targets, modular furniture is something that more organizations will be looking at closely as long-term hybrid work strategies are put in place,” Surgis concludes.