Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
Technology has been redefining where and how we work for more than a decade. With that shift has come new expectations and challenges when accommodating multiple generations of business travelers. Airports and hotels are changing rapidly to keep pace with the realities of a modern, mobile workforce.
Work friendships can contribute to a lack of creative diversity in the office, according to new research from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.‘Relational capital and individual exploration: Unravelling the influence of goal alignment and knowledge acquisition’, a paper that examines the double-edged sword of friendships between colleagues, has revealed that friendly workplaces discourage employees from challenging ‘group think’. The researchers examined 150 respondents within large R&D departments of three Fortune Global 500 firms, gauging whether their accounts of personal friendships affected individual creativity, in information obtained from their colleagues. Tom Mom, along with co-authors Pepijn van Neerijnen, Patrick Reinmoeller and Ernst Verwaal, demonstrate that by aligning themselves, employees become less likely to innovate away from the established and accepted ‘norm’.
We know, and have for a long time, that the workplace is in a state of near constant flux and so we often fall into the trap of assuming that there is some sort of evolution towards an idealised version of it. That is why we see so many people routinely willing to suspend their critical facilities to make extravagant and even absurd predictions about the office of the future or even the death of the office. This is perniciously. faulty thinking. However we can frame a number of workplace related ideas in terms of evolutionary theory, so long as we accept one of the centralprecepts about evolution. Namely that there is no end game, just types progressing and sometimes dying out along the distinct branches of a complex ecosystem. As a nerdy sort of guy of a certain age, I’ve tended to frame my thoughts on all of this with reference to an idea from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the great Douglas Adams.
Open workspaces have grown in the last five years as a solution to the problem of workplace costs spiralling higher than smaller tenants can afford. They include artists’ studios, makerspaces, incubators, accelerators and co-working spaces. London was recently reconfirmed as the most expensive city in the world to live and work; the combined cost of living and working space has overtaken New York and Tokyo, and is 70 per cent higher than start-up capital San Francisco. In this very challenging environment, open workspaces enable businesses and professionals to reduce upfront or ongoing costs by sharing space, facilities or specialist equipment.
The increasing integration of digital technologies in all aspects of our lives is both a benefit and a challenge for employers and employees. How does an organization embrace the reality of today's digital world, put it to work, and stay open to future innovations while balancing the needs of its customers and employees?
Collaboration is an ideal many of us strive to achieve in our relationships, work lives, and extracurriculars. We move about the world with a vague sense that working together is a good thing—something we should do.
“Think of the workspace as a tool. And any tool — whether a computer or a wrench — will require training,” said Jed Link, spokesman for the Houston-based International Facility Management Association. So “if you approach an open office the same way you approach a closed office, it’s not going to work.”
HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and went public in 2014. It’s one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation — a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work. Imagine a frat house mixed with a kindergarten mixed with Scientology, and you have an idea of what it’s like. It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables. Instead of hunching over sewing machines, they stared into laptops or barked into headsets, selling software.
What we’ve traditionally called the “office” is changing. As technology increases its foothold in our lives and changes the way we work, more companies are using less space and fewer permanent desks. In the next 10 to 15 years, we may see new artificial intelligence that will automate repetitive tasks and allow offices to be a gathering space for critical thinkers and problem solvers, rather than a place for work. But many questions remain: What are the technologies to look out for and adapt to? What does a high-tech office look like now? We asked ESD's workplace practice leader, Nathan Snydacker, and technology services practice leader Nick Lawrence to gaze into a crystal ball.
We’re more stressed at work than ever before. Leigh Stringer, author of the forthcoming book, The Healthy Workplace, explains how you can create more time and space for mindfulness meditation in your workplace.
From launch to delivery, the degree of expert alignment and synchronization between all aspects of a design project will determine the success or failure of an outcome. Although workplace strategies and design solutions that are geared to increase productivity, encourage innovation and growth, strengthen brand, and nurture wellness depend on the seamless convergence of multiple disciplines, many architecture firms treat consulting and design as separate phases. Not so at IA Interior Architects, where the integration of five practice areas—Workplace Strategy, Design, Design Technology, Environmental Graphic Design, and Wellness/Sustainability—as one team for each engagement has long been at the core of our practice.
When, where, and how people work has changed dramatically over the last ten years – telecommuting has grown 103 percent over in the US and an estimated that 50 percent of people will work remotely by 2020. While many companies have begun to integrate remote work, there is a growing trend for firms to fully embrace remote work as an integral part of their business. Virtual companies that operate with fully or heavily distributed workforces now come from many industries, including accounting, health, law, marketing, non-profit, news/media, sports, travel and others. However the best sectors to find a remote post are in Computer/IT, HR/Recruiting and Education; according to the third annual list of virtual companies compiled by FlexJobs. The diversity of companies represented in this year’s list, demonstrate that the remote work model can be applied regardless of company size and/or industry.
The current obsession with ‘engagement’ is evident every time you read the business media these days. This is understandable in many ways, not least because it seems true that firms and employees are often working in an atmosphere of mistrust. But one thing that is often noticeable when a profession such as HR gets itself into a debate of this nature is the gap that can exist between practitioners and everybody else proffering a view. So while academics can talk about definitions and suppliers seek to apply their solutions to the issue, it is often down to those who work at the sharp end to dish up the truth, however unpalatable or cynical that can seem to be. One of the best and funniest quotes on the matter was something that once appeared in a small piece in Human Resources magazine, in which Vance Kearney the HR Director EMEA for Oracle said ‘the only thing worse than employing an idiot is employing an engaged and motivated idiot’.
There are many reasons why organizations like open plan offices. When it comes to making the business case for them however, firms prefer to talk about some more than others. So while they prefer to focus on the argument in terms of how openness can foster better lines of communication, collaboration, teamwork and team spirit, they talk rather less about the fact that the open plan is a lot cheaper than its alternatives and how they like it because it allows them to keep an eye on what people are doing. In theory, a great deal more of this surveillance now happens electronically so the need for physical presence should be less pressing, but the residual desire to see with one’s own eyes what people are doing remains. This is the instinct that constrains the uptake of flexible working and also means that there is a hierarchical divide in who gets to decide where they work.
The conversation around generations and the clichéd stereotypes with which they’ve been appropriated is a tired conversation, and not relevant to informing workplace dynamics. But the characteristic relationship and comfort level of each generation with the technology that drives the workplace remains a significant indicator of generational preferences and ways of working. Technology is a key factor in the social, economic, political, global, and life events that characterize the experiences of each generation.
It has been said that the No. 1 job of a CEO (and the entire C-Suite, really) is to cultivate culture. The notion being that if a strong culture exists, everything else—employee morale, customer satisfaction, and more—will fall into place. But what happens when you bring together two vastly different cultures in a merger? In real life, they say opposites attract, but does that apply to business?
Already buzzing with energy as he is, the real estate wellness pioneer Paul Scialla takes it to another level when discussing how to lure office workers to the water cooler. “If people see water, they drink water,” he says. The former Goldman Sachs partner is outlining his plan as to how office space can be configured to improve the visibility of what he insists on referring to as “hydration stations”.
There’s a mobile revolution taking place around the world, but based on a new Global Workplace report from Steelcase, it hasn’t quite permeated our workplace. That’s right — the environments in which we spend the majority of our workweek are still decidedly landlocked, and it may just be this lack of mobile technology (and by extension, mobility) that is taking a toll on overall workplace satisfaction in companies across the United States.
What would a fully automated future without jobs look like? The Guardian recently released an animated short set in a time when machines dominate the workforce. The story follows the last human worker going on with their average day. Most other humans seen are lining the streets in poverty, as empty high-rise apartment buildings line the skies. The short is beautifully depicted, but has frightening implications.
As we create new workplaces to support organizational goals, those workplaces must do their part to attract and retain top talent and enable team performance. Much has been written about what the newest members of the workforce want and how to design for them. This is only part of the picture. As the workforce evolves – not only by adding the next generations, but also by becoming global and increasingly diverse, exible, full-time, or contingent – our expectations of the workplace continue to evolve as well. Expectations are and will continue to be a moving target. We now have de nitive insights into six signi cant factors that consistently correlate to knowledge worker performance that we can apply. Our challenge, then, is to design a dynamic, adaptive workplace that embraces diversity in all its forms, and enables the more timeless elements that support performance: relationship building and social cohesion, trust, effective communication, and expertise sharing.
