Workplaces are being re-evaluated as Gen Z reshapes expectations around flexibility, wellbeing, and purpose. For organisations, office design is no longer a background decision but a cultural signal. Drawing on decades of execution experience across India, Sammeer Pakvasa, Managing Director & CEO, Eleganz Interiors Limited outlines how poorly planned offices quietly drive disengagement, while people-first environments strengthen collaboration and retention. In conversation with Asma Rafat, Senior Correspondent, Realty+, he discusses why cost-led design thinking fails young talent, how hybrid work has altered the role of offices, and why acoustics, lighting, zoning, and technology now matter as much as aesthetics in contemporary Indian workplaces today.
Gen Z is entering the workforce with very different expectations from offices. From what you see on the ground, what are they rejecting about traditional workplace design?
Sammeer Pakvasa: What I see Gen Z rejecting most is the idea that an office is only a place to sit, comply, and be visibly present. Traditional workplace design was built around fixed seating, hierarchy, and uniform environments. In today’s context, that translates into spaces that feel rigid, impersonal, and disconnected from how people actually work.
Across our delivery footprint, having executed projects in over 35 cities and delivered more than 30 million square feet since the business began in 1988, the patterns are clear. Younger employees push back on layouts that offer collaboration without focus, open floors with weak acoustic planning, meeting rooms that fail in hybrid settings, and workplaces that look good visually but ignore wellbeing fundamentals.
The deeper shift is cultural. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey shows that younger workers are prioritising wellbeing, purpose, and growth over traditional markers like title or even pay alone. When a workplace functions poorly, Gen Z doesn’t see it as a design flaw, they read it as a signal about how the organisation values their time, energy, and autonomy.
Many companies still treat office design as a real estate or cost decision. Why is that a flawed approach when it comes to attracting and retaining young talent?
Sammeer Pakvasa: Because it assumes cost efficiency equals performance efficiency, which it doesn’t. When office design is approached primarily as a real estate or capex exercise, the result is usually density-driven planning, not environments designed around how people think, collaborate, or stay engaged.
This matters because retention is now closely tied to experience. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 makes it clear that low engagement continues to be a global challenge, with disengagement directly linked to attrition, reduced productivity, and cultural erosion.
On the ground, we see how small design decisions compound into daily friction. Under-designed meeting ecosystems, inadequate breakout spaces, poor lighting strategies, and weak acoustic detailing don’t fail dramatically. They fail quietly, every day. Over time, those irritations disproportionately affect younger employees who are more conscious of how environments impact focus and mental wellbeing.
Having delivered thousands of projects over nearly four decades, we’ve seen that workplaces designed around people consistently outperform those designed around cost alone. Treating design purely as a financial decision ignores the real cost: disengagement, churn, and weakened culture.
Flexibility is often cited as a Gen Z priority, but flexibility can mean many things. How should offices be physically designed to support autonomy without losing structure or productivity?
Sammeer Pakvasa: Flexibility has to be designed, not declared. Remove structure entirely and the office becomes chaotic. Over-structure it and the space becomes rigid and underused. The balance lies in offering choice with clarity.
Physically, that means a deliberate mix of settings: quiet focus zones, project rooms, collaboration areas, informal corners, and technology-enabled meeting spaces. Spatial zoning is what makes flexibility functional rather than disruptive.
This isn’t theoretical. Gallup’s ongoing hybrid work research shows that a majority of remote-capable employees prefer hybrid work arrangements. That means when people come to the office, they expect to move through multiple work modes in a single day.
At Eleganz, our integrated Design & Build Fit-out model allows us to engineer flexibility properly through modular layouts, future-ready MEP planning, and spaces that can evolve without constant disruption.
There is growing evidence that poorly designed workplaces directly contribute to attrition. In your experience, what design choices most often push young employees to disengage or leave?
Sammeer Pakvasa: The most common attrition triggers aren’t dramatic. They are daily irritations that accumulate.
One of the biggest is noise fatigue. Open offices without a clear acoustic strategy create constant distraction, increasing cognitive load and stress. This has been well documented by Harvard Business Review, which has highlighted how poorly planned open-office environments reduce productivity and increase mental fatigue when sound and privacy aren’t adequately managed.
The second is lack of privacy and spatial hierarchy. When everything is designed to be “collaborative,” nothing actually works well. People need places to focus, take calls, and decompress.
The third is inadequate hybrid infrastructure. Meeting rooms that don’t support virtual participants properly, poor camera placement, weak connectivity, insufficient power access, these are functional failures in a hybrid world.
Finally, environmental neglect matters. Harsh lighting, thermal discomfort, and poor indoor environmental quality directly affect wellbeing. Frameworks like the WELL Building Standard exist because these factors are proven to influence human performance.
When these basics are missing, Gen Z doesn’t just complain. They disengage or leave.
Beyond aesthetics, how do elements like acoustics, lighting, spatial zoning, and technology integration affect how Gen Z employees collaborate, focus, and feel valued at work?
Sammeer Pakvasa: These elements define the lived experience of work.
Acoustics determine whether collaboration feels energising or exhausting. Lighting influences mood, alertness, and fatigue. Zoning quietly communicates where different types of work belong. Technology integration determines whether meetings enable progress or waste time.
This is also where perceptions of respect are formed. When the workplace repeatedly creates friction, employees interpret it as a lack of care.
From decades of execution experience, the difference between a good design and a great workplace usually lies in detailing: acoustic treatments, lighting calculations, MEP coordination, and on-site quality control. These aren’t aesthetic decisions, they’re performance decisions.
Hybrid work has changed the reason people come to the office at all. What should the office offer today that employees cannot get from working at home?
Sammeer Pakvasa: The office must offer what home cannot: connection, mentorship, cultural alignment, and high-quality collaboration.
If the office only offers desks and meetings, people will question the commute. Gallup’s research shows that hybrid is now the preferred structure for many remote-capable employees, meaning presence has become a choice, not a mandate.
The office today should enable:
- Stronger team alignment
- Informal learning and mentorship
- Faster decision-making through real collaboration
- Creative energy that is difficult to replicate virtually
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey reinforces that growth, learning, and wellbeing strongly influence engagement. A well-designed office can support all three, but only if it’s planned as an experience, not just a facility.
Indian offices often borrow global design trends. Where do you think companies need to localise workplace design to better reflect Indian work culture and Gen Z sensibilities?
Sammeer Pakvasa: Global benchmarks are useful references, but localisation is what makes a workplace usable.
Indian offices operate under different realities: higher density, varied collaboration styles, longer working hours, and a strong sense of community. At the same time, Gen Z expects autonomy and personal space. The challenge is balancing both.
Localisation also means responding to climate and building behaviour. Materials, acoustics, glare control, thermal comfort, and maintenance patterns vary widely across Indian cities. Blindly copying global trends often imports global problems.
Eleganz’s presence across multiple Indian cities and Singapore has reinforced one lesson: the best workplaces aren’t those that look global. They’re the ones that feel human, efficient, culturally aware, and designed for how people actually work.
