Your next office could look more like a coffee shop

Future. Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson hopes to turn offices into coffee shops in a bid to create an environment more attractive to gathering employees who would rather work from home. With ADP Research finding that two-thirds of workers would quit their jobs if coming back to the office was mandatory, turning them into quasi-Starbucks may bring more people back… without them ever feeling like they are.

Starbucks check-in
After seeing remote work demand increase from 15% to 50% among his workforce, Lawson is reimagining how employees want to gather.

• He notes that even though people don’t want to be in an office most days, they do want “connection” and “belonging.”
• So, he plans to experiment with creating a network of Twilio coffee shops around the U.S., where workers could “come in and work when they are looking for community, a change of scenery, or a double latte.”
• Twilio is already testing this idea by converting two floors of its San Francisco office to feel more like a coffee shop.

The move makes sense. People love working from coffee shops — a phenomenon backed by science. A 2019 study published in Scientific Reports says that coffee shops provide the right amount of “stochastic resonance” (white noise) to help our sense of concentration, creativity, and decision making. Some even call it “the coffee shop effect.”