Open offices save on costs but skimp on privacy—and employee comfort as a result. Bringing privacy to open plan offices highlights that while open office design is meant to increase engagement, engagement “only flourishes when you have the choice to avoid it.” After riding the wave of open offices (and their ensuing crash), companies are realizing that balance is best.  It’s about creating space that fosters a spectrum of experiences.

A well-designed space offers room to escape via an activity-based layout. And not only can employees work how and where they want, but they feel empowered by management to actually go there.

In Why you can’t concentrate at work from the Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger talks visual noise—another issue with open office design. Once you find a quiet place to sit, activity visible in your periphery can still thwart concentration. Studies indicate this is a less-voiced complaint than privacy or excess sound, but just because your people don’t articulate the problem, doesn’t mean it should go unsolved.

If you have an activity-based office, help cut the visual clutter—and enhance your people’s productivity—by minimizing sight lines with plants, half walls, fabric panels and curved layouts.

Collaboration in the office is a must, and now more companies are understanding the value in connecting outside the workplace, too. The “premium” coworking trend has swept large organizations for a number of reasons. It caters to established professionals like business travelers, high-growth organizations that want to keep offices smaller for P&L reasons and innovative organizations that want to expose employees to outside entrepreneurs.

While startups have certainly pioneered the coworking trend to share space (and costs) with other entrepreneurs, the added interest from corporations has caused the shared office to become hotter than ever, with 1.2 million coworking. Coworking is just one piece of a larger trend toward creating space where people feel happy, healthy and connected—even if it’s from home or another office.

9.2 million: The estimated number of workers in the gig economy by 2020 (as projected by Intuit). That’s up from 3.8 million in 2016. The rise has been fueled largely by startup contractors that work for on-demand delivery and service apps, but the trend is transcending industries. As Generation Z steps into the workforce and more employees launch “portfolio careers,” companies should ask themselves how the workplace can give flexible workers what they want.