Work in the Future

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Work in the future / Does office design impact our work?

Episode 251110/ 10 Nov 2025

4.8(21,158 ratings)·25,547 students

Transcript

Note: This is a transcript of a spoken conversation and is not a word-for-word script.

PhilDoes the office you work in change the way you work?

Kerstin

SailerFor way too long, we've looked at the office as a kind of one-size-fits-all model.

PippaToday we're talking about how offices are changing.

PhilHello and welcome to Learning English for Work, our podcast to help you improve your business English. I'm Phil.

PippaAnd I'm Pippa. You can find a transcript for this episode to read along on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

PhilOK. And to start, I'm going to ask you, Pippa, what kind of office do you like?

PippaHmm. A lot of offices I've worked in have been quite similar, but I would say I like there to be lots of light. Also, I like it to be a nice temperature. Not too cold, not too hot. If it's very hot, then I feel really sleepy at work. And it's also nice if it's easy to speak to colleagues around you. You're sat with the people that you need to speak to, rather than really far away from them.

PhilYeah, I think I'd agree with that for me as well. Also, what I think is important is that you work with people who make a similar amount of noise to you. So if you are talking a lot in your work, it's good to be with other people that do that, so you're not disturbing them. Or if you need to be really quiet and focus on things, you don't have lots of noisy people around you distracting you. I think that's good.

PippaI think you're getting to the heart of quite a lot of people's issues with offices, because obviously lots of people might be working in one space together. And in the past, people had individual offices more commonly, and then open plan offices became more common, so this is where you have one big space with lots of desks where everyone works together. But are offices maybe changing again? We've talked before on the podcast about hybrid work, so that's splitting your time between the office and home. And does this mean we need to think about office design a bit differently?

PhilWell, today we are going to be looking at how offices could be changing and the decisions that companies make when they're choosing and designing an office.