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Don’t miss our upcoming Government Affairs Forum with Massachusetts State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg.
12/09/2025
9:45am - 11:00am
Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
Join us in person to learn about Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL), a prestigious leadership program shaping top talent across Greater Boston. Hear from alumni, explore the application process, and stay for networking and refreshments.
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On November 17, the Chamber’s Women’s Network featured Elizabeth Lowrey, Principal and Director of Interior Architecture at Elkus Manfredi Architects, in a virtual conversation, moderated by management expert and writer Douglas Hardy, to learn more about planning and designing workspaces in the time of COVID-19, as well as the impact of work-from-home and hybrid working. Elizabeth is shaping the future of the workplace, ensuring that strategy drives design for innovation and fosters culture and community during and after the pandemic.
With Elizabeth’s expertise in workplace strategy and design, her vision of future workspaces involves a reimagining to meet the needs of today and tomorrow. Elizabeth knows that the hybrid work environment is now permanent and must encompass in-person group collaboration, collaboration among in-office and remote participants, and heads-down individual work. She urges all companies to ask themselves, “What’s my hybrid?” to consider the success, ingenuity, and innovation that a hybrid workspace can yield with the proper attention to design and strategy.
How can design create an equitable experience for all teammates, whether in the office or working remotely? An example: in meeting rooms, voice-tracking technology designed to follow whoever is speaking can create a more realistic experience for remote workers. But in pre-pandemic meeting rooms, glass and other materials bounce sound and interfere with the technology. These spaces can be reworked to accommodate new meeting technologies that are designed to make collaboration more natural for all participants, remote or in the office.
By creating collaboration areas comprised of “neighborhoods” to replace the former rows of workstations in the workplace, collaboration and a sense of community can flourish within each team as they work with their own collection of touchdown spaces for group work and private “Zoom Rooms” for individual meetings with remote participants.
We need to be able to pivot and flip spaces quickly for different purposes. A space should be able to transform with moveable furniture, monitors, and digital whiteboards, adapting to the changing needs of the team in real time.
Because the workplace is no longer a mandate, it must become a “magnet” that attracts employees to the office and away from working from home. Elizabeth knows that companies will need to address this issue. The workplace is the culture-keeper of a company, and a strong culture is the glue that will hold the workforce together in these times of remote working. The magnet workplace will ensure collaboration and innovation – both critical for companies to maintain their competitive edge.
Relationship capital is at stake – an innovative team builds trust and cements bonds in communal spaces, sometimes capturing each other’s best ideas during impromptu interactions in the office. While most of the workforce is now accustomed to virtual Zoom meetings, that doesn’t mean that we are finished with physical offices. On the contrary, our employees and teams want to gather in person to collaborate, mentor, and innovate, and leaders must understand that their employees and the company’s overall culture, productivity, and speed of innovation depend on the office becoming a magnet.
While organizations previously thought about sustainability and ethical impact, the events of 2020 have given us a new lens and a new urgency, and businesses are rallying around ESG (Environment, Social, and Governance) factors. Elizabeth feels that business leaders have a responsibility to enable and participate in that conversation, to support it, to really think about what it means, and to act on what they learn. Of course, she knows that architecture can’t solve these problems in every way, but she feels strongly that designers need to be very aware of what impacts they’re having.
As we watch the roll-out of vaccines in the coming months, employers will be reinventing their workplaces, and answering the critical question of “What’s my hybrid?” to maximize the innovation of their workforce. Elizabeth urges everyone, especially executive leaders, to embrace the opportunity for reinvention. Seizing the big question of how coworkers, whether in the office or virtual, can be inspired in the coming years will be the key to developing an agile workforce and successful workspace.
Watch the entire virtual event featuring Elizabeth’s excellent insights here, and be sure to join us virtually at the Chamber’s upcoming Women’s Networks events.
The Chamber’s Women’s Network event series is a place where everyone belongs. The Women’s Network includes a diverse group of 3,000 women and male allies from all sectors, industries, and professions, all committed to ensuring that Greater Boston becomes the best place for professional women to thrive. All identities welcomed and encouraged to attend.
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