Silicon Valley execs are requesting revamped home offices with generators and ergonomic chairs as more companies adopt work-from-home policies

• Tech execs are seeking upgraded home offices as remote work becomes a greater focus of office life in the future.
• One design firm in Silicon Valley is fielding an influx of requests from tech clients.
• Ergonomic chairs, generators for more reliable power, and a sturdy internet connection are some items at the top of the list for execs seeking more efficient home office setups.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Tech offices in Silicon Valley will see a transformation in light of the coronavirus disease when people start returning to work.

Design firms say employers may have to implement one-way hallways to minimize cross-traffic. You might be a part of an office cohort with a few handfuls of your coworkers. The ubiquitous snack rooms, with robust selections, may not be part of a new era of office life where physical distancing is paramount.

Working remotely will be more widely accepted moving forward as companies adopt work-from-home policies in the long-term. You might even only go into the office on days when you have group work, with individual tasks completed at home.

As a result, workers are rethinking their home office setups.

Greg Mottola is a principal at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the architecture firm behind office designs for Square's San Francisco headquarters, Pixar, Adobe, and multiple Blue Bottle Coffee locations. Even before the pandemic, about 20% of the firm's workload was designing for customers' high-end residences, many of which were second homes.

But Mottola told Business Insider that the mid-sized firm is delving even more into home-office design after an influx of requests from tech execs in the region.

"It's not just the place where you go for a few hours at night and then go to sleep," Mottola said of the home office. "Some days you might be there all day rather than going into the office. And I think that's a trend that's probably going to stay."

The tech world was already well accustomed to remote work, with productivity more heavily valued over mere office attendance. But thousands of Bay Area office workers were mandated to work from home in mid-March when the region entered a shelter-in-place order. Many employees — and executives — abandoned their offices for makeshift workstations on the dining room table, the couch, and other areas throughout their pint-sized Bay Area apartments.

Mottola said he was unable to name the clients specifically, but they were "the kinds of execs you would guess" to be making these requests. He also said he hasn't gotten any extravagant requests for home office modifications. Instead, the typical asks are fairly ordinary, yet vital: a solid internet connection, an ergonomic desk chair, and good lighting.

Clients want the office furniture to be more intentional and practical rather than serving purely an aesthetic purpose.

"Can we select the furniture that's not just picking a beautiful, iconic piece of modern design as a chair?" Mottola said. "You're really thinking about it as a work chair — the ergonomic chair — because we might be spending days, weeks, months, needing to work from there."

Factors such as monitor positioning are being considered for some, but for many clients, the primary way of conducting business is via phone.

"Some of the tech clients that we're working with don't really use even a laptop anymore," Mottola said. "It's all on their phone." Or maybe they'll have an iPad with a keyboard attached to it.

For many in the Valley, office workers are accustomed to the open office floor plan, where seas and seas of workstations allow for accommodating a denser workforce. A characteristic of the open office is also a flat hierarchical setup, where sometimes even the CEO doesn't have an assigned work area and is out on the floor among employees.

Many of the tech clients that Mottola is working with are coming from that environment, he said, a transition that the firm is keeping in mind when developing home office designs.

"They just sort of roam and float because they're all over the place," Mottola said. "And that same approach seems to be what they do in their personal life. It's that kind of extreme mobility."

Buyers on the hunt for new homes in the future are also going to want efficient space to accommodate a comfortable, better planned home office.

Employers are "toying with the idea that they'll let their people work more remotely going forward just as a new way of being more flexible," Mottola said. "That kind of impact to office design is going to also have that ripple effect on what people are looking for in their housing." That could even include rental properties.

Clients on the West Coast are also thinking about how to sustainably supply their homes with energy.

Some in more remote areas of Northern California, such as Carmel or Calistoga, have asked for generators to maintain power in case of an emergency like an earthquake or wildfire, Mottola said. A natural disaster or not, people are going to have to stay productive when working out of the home.

"If they're needing to work remotely, they need their services to be really reliable," Mottola said.