If you want employees back in the office, give them food, says executive

What do employees and employers really want in a workplace of the future? This was a theme that came up last week in my conversations with CEOs, designers, and thought leaders at Fortune’s Brainstorm Design conference in Macau.

If you ask Ray Yuen, managing director at design and architecture firm Gensler, the answer is food. A recent Gensler survey asked employees to rank the office spaces that are most important to them. The top three? The office cafeteria, cafeteria or lounge.

Also read: JPMorgan’s new $3 billion headquarters has pub and coffee shops to attract 24/7 employees

“It’s really about food and wellness,” Yuen said on stage. “They didn’t even mention anything about work. Everyone just chose the things we truly want as human beings.”

These human desires are worth listening to as companies try to bring people back to the office, Yuen said.

He described a project he recently worked on for a large company’s new headquarters in Tokyo, where 50% of employees were working remotely, and his mission was to find a way to bring them back.

One of the biggest successes was a bar to listen to vinyl records in a lo-fi atmosphere, without technology or conversations, he said.

Flexibility is also key. In the past, Yuen said he used to design about 80% of a company’s headquarters with built-in furniture and modules like cubicles, and leave about 20% as “flexible space.”

Now, the balance is more 50/50, so companies can easily transform their spaces when needs arise, like an office happy hour, he says.

“We’re not just designing workplaces anymore. We’re actually designing experiences. Because (employees might) think, ‘Well, if I can work anywhere, why would I go to work? I can do this at home,'” Yuen said.

“You really have to make the office more than work, and that’s the fun part of it.”