Exclusive Insights with Peter McCamley: What Drives Workplace Evolution

‍Key Takeaways:

1. Traditional Workplace Hierarchies Have Broken Down
   Early office design was heavily influenced by job titles, but modern workplaces focus more on function and team collaboration than hierarchy.
   2. Tech-Driven Transformation of the Workspace - enabling more agile and flexible work environments.
   3. Progressive Leadership Is Redefining the Workplace
   Today’s leaders focus on fostering purposeful, connected, and people-first workspaces.
   4. Evolving Workplace Diversity
   Workplace environments are being intentionally shaped to become more dynamic and richly diverse, fostering deeper connections and more meaningful collaboration.

We sat down with Peter McCamley, founder of StudioP3 in Australia.  

A self-professed ‘veteran designer’, Peter’s workplace design experience dates back to 1992 where he project-directed Westpac Place, Australia’s largest integrated workplace of 75,000sqm, whilst at renowned workplace design studio, Geyer.  

Peter has not just witnessed the workplace transformation but has been part of it over the past 40 years, so his insights are fascinating.  

1. Breaking down of hierarchies in the workplace; At the beginning of Peter’s career, space allocation was more based on job title rather than the actual role someone was performing. Peter reflects on one of his first projects for Bankers Trust, completed in 1992, which incorporated 1800x2400 workstations with a complete wrap-around style and high screens. Another milestone project that followed was Campus MLC by BVN Architecture in the late 1990s. This project advanced the thinking beyond traditional open-plan offices, as the screens came down and the focus shifted to creating settings based on the functions being performed, rather than one's job title.

2. Shifts in technology: as technology aids us in our job functions; the nature of the desktop has significantly shrunk. Put simply, we no longer need the big deep screens, fixed PCs and ample space for paperwork that limit our agility. We cover this in more detail in the next section.  

Changing leadership attitudes towards culture: arguably the most influential in this evolution, according to Peter, is the maturing of the way leadership thinks about their culture and the importance of fostering an organisation that’s purposeful and connected. This became most pronounced in the early 2000’s where the work environment became more dynamic to encourage meaningful interactions, coinciding with cultural shift towards a team-oriented way of working over individual tasks.  

Team-work makes the Dream work

“The evolution of how we think of space really took a turn with the cultural shift towards teamwork in the early 2000s. Around this time, workplace settings deliberately became a lot richer and more diverse for the purpose of bringing people together for greater interactions,”

— Peter McCamley, Studio P3

3. The adoption of Activity-Based Working (ABW): Right up until 2017, there was an emphasis on space based on occupancy and square metres per person, typically 10-12 m2. Then as ABW took hold, the focus moved away from space per person to the breadth and depth of resources available for employees to perform various tasks. According to Peter, ABW seemed to work well things got a shake up when Covid came along and caused us to reevaluate the purpose of the office once again.  

4. Post-pandemic Return to Office (RTO) strategies: Coming out the other side, many organisations are still grappling with how comfortable they are with RTO policies that work best for them, while others are mature enough to go forth and take decisive action.  

In effect, hybrid working has seen ABW evolve to become team and activity focussed and less about the individual.  

“The way I see it, ABW is predominantly based around a work point. They may not own it, but they still have a desk. Whereas with hybrid, the premise is that you come in to work for what you need to do and that may not involve a desk,” says Peter.

Countries at the forefront of workplace innovation

Progressive European countries like Sweden and the Netherlands tend to be automatically considered the most progressive for workplace design. However, all the way on the other side of the world, Australia is making its mark with an arguably more innovative approach to workplace design.  

This theory was put to the test when two Australian architects from Hassell toured companies across the globe just before the pandemic hit. Visiting cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, London, and Amsterdam, they reported in a 2019 article in the Australian Design Review that none of these global hubs surpassed Australia in terms of workplace innovation. This was despite visiting some of the world’s most prominent startups and established companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Airbnb, and WeWork.

According to the 2019 ADR article, Silicon Valley companies sought to compensate for their rows of grey workstations and lack of amenities by tacking on free food, table tennis and beanbags. Australian companies, on the other hand, recognise that attracting and retain top talent requires more than these add-ons but rather a different proposition altogether.  

While the US and UK have historically shaped workplace design trends, recent years have seen these nations increasingly draw inspiration from the more open and flexible work cultures of Australia and the Netherlands. As highlighted in a 2019 article from Workplace Insight, this evolution can be attributed to the shift towards single-tenant buildings that support agile, employee-centric workplaces prioritising collaboration and well-being.

For example, Macquarie Bank's Sydney headquarters in 2009 and Deloitte’s The Edge in Amsterdam in 2015, still stand as pinnacles for how corporations can foster social interaction and build strong communities within the workplace.  

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