Human beings are complicated creatures. You know that, but does your workplace design survey know it?

How do people really work? When you’re designing an office environment, understanding this can seem like a holy grail of insights—powerful and elusive. (Learn five reasons so many workplace design surveys don’t help you reach that understanding.)

Architects, interior designers, how often do you survey your client’s workforce to get the data you need—and then you end up relying on prior experience or resorting to educated guesses to create the best office environment for them?

In the first two articles, we discussed that the dominance of digital screens in our work and private lives is already “here and now” as opposed to being for the “future workplace”. We also explained that most screen-enhanced workspaces can be considered unique because the function of those spaces is truly in the eyes of the beholder, or in this case, the worker.

In this article, we want to share the strategy we take when designing workplace design surveys. Specifically, why we ask the questions that we do and the insights we’re able to capture by taking an indirect questioning approach.

Together with our research partner Work Design Magazine, we conducted a survey to learn more about what screens tell us about how people really work. Between May 14^th–31^st 2019, 368 of you participated in our research. Here is part one of the results!