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.
Panelists at Wednesday’s CoreNet Global Carolinas mega event in uptown Charlotte largely agreed on one theme: evolving workspace trends have become a big deal in commercial real estate.
“We’re creating a workplace environment that allows workers to be at their most productive,” said Calvin Saboorian, managing director of real estate at Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK), speaking at one panel that examined workplace strategies in commercial real estate. “We’re starting at the bottom and going up.”
Buildings with green labels are nothing new. But, a building that “cares” about your health and well-being and engages you to make healthy choices in your own space — now that’s something new.
The WELL Building Standard is a new building certification gaining traction nationally that not only focuses on the “built” indoor environment, but also emphasizes the health and wellness of people in the building.
If you haven’t heard about WELL, you will. It’s relatively new – debuting in 2013 – but it’s being touted as the first building standard worldwide focusing specifically on the health and wellness of building occupants.
Proponents of the certification say it makes sense to keep your employees happy, healthy, and more productive as it translates directly to the bottom line. Businesses should see an increase in productivity if employees are engaged and happy in their workspace, and building owners should benefit by charging top rates for these healthier workplaces, reports the Urban Developer.
Improving employees’ physical and emotional response to their working environment – from the look and feel of a workplace to non-visual sensory inputs such as smell, noise and temperature – can significantly improve productivity and cognitive performance, a new report suggests. According to Decoding the workplace experience: how the working environment shapes views, behaviours and performance the workplace experience is not just about how well the workplace satisfies functional needs, it is about the overall impression it leaves on the user; and the way an employee experiences an environment is emotional and occurs potentially at a subconscious level. Sensory influences such as the smell, noise and temperature of the working environment are among the main factors that influence employees’ experiences of the workplace and do impact productivity and performance. Expectations of the workplace also change depending on personality, background and numerous other factors; which is why understanding your workforce is the key to creating an effective workplace experience.
A new study out of UV Amsterdam reveals that certain genes control up to 50 percent of an individual’s happiness. But many experts agree that nearly 40 percent of our remaining happiness is a direct result of free will expressed through choices and actions. For example, some people may choose to spend time with family and friends, to volunteer for a worthy cause, or pursue physical activities that contribute to a sense of happiness and satisfaction. The common factor in most of these choices is the connection with people that creates groups or social networks. In part, it seems that we choose to participate in group activities to increase feelings of happiness.
I’m not creative. Neither are most of my colleagues. The Financial Times employs clever people who know how to spot stories, write them elegantly, and give readers the right mix of familiarity and surprise. Experience, knowledge, practice, judgment, skill and intelligence play a part. So does an ability to write. And think. Creativity barely comes into it. This is not to insult the FT. It is to compliment it.
I've managed older and younger high-achieving Millennials in tech and found that there are differences beyond the fact that one group is simply older than the other. Some generalizations and insights from my experience:
1) Attitudes towards "paying your dues" - Older Millennials were in the workforce during the 2008 recession and likely experienced a career pivot or lifestyle adjustment during that time, which taught them how to restructure their career paths and gain perspective on being employed. For most of their lives, they exclusively saw corporate executives as people who had spent their entire careers in one company or industry, starting from the bottom and working their way to the top. The young, billionaire founder/CEO persona did not exist in their minds until several years after they had already been in the workforce. As a result, older Millennials will see hardships, repetitive work, and new gray hairs as part of paying your dues as you work your way to the top.
When I was around 10 years old, my stay-at-home dad went back to work. For the next few years, he switched jobs a lot. For a while he took portraits in a photography studio; another time, he managed a bookstore. He told me more than once that he was looking for a job with plenty of autonomy. He was an independent spirit and liked to see his own ideas implemented–traits that I inherited from him. To this day, I know personal autonomy is an important factor when he’s choosing a new role.
My dad isn’t the only one who believes some measure of independence is essential in the workplace. Studies have shown that autonomy makes workers more satisfied with their jobs and increases productivity.
Leaders around the world know employee engagement is a serious, bottom line issue. Businesses need people who come to work energized, ready to tackle whatever tasks lie in front of them, and willing to generate new ideas and strategies. But the reality is there are not as many engaged employees as organizations need. In fact, according to Steelcase research, the number of disengaged workers outnumbers that of engaged workers. Solving for disengagement involves many variables, but recent research confirms the importance of the physical work environment on employee attitudes, behaviors, and ultimately employee engagement.
On September 8, Kylie Roth, Knoll’s Senior Director of Workplace Research, spoke to the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) Houston Chapter. Delivering a talk on workplace trends based on generational shifts and employee well-being, Roth discussed the evolution of the modern office, using statistical findings to illustrate demographic changes.
The idea of the perfect home came about over thousands of years centered around what would make a person happy if they were there all day. They have personal spaces where they rest, sleep, maybe a work room. They have common spaces where they cook food, eat food, use electronic devices, a playroom.
But now they’re not at home all day. They’re at the office.
Smart organizations understand that their primary goal is to enhance the performance of their people. In a knowledge work economy, people are the engine that keep companies growing, adapting, improving and innovating.
Not surprisingly, thoughtful workplace design can be a powerful tool for supporting employee performance. And a collateral benefit is that what typically supports productivity also enhances employee health and wellness – it’s all interrelated.
Given the nature of today’s work processes, how can the workplace better support human performance? How can the workplace support all of the different activities involved with knowledge work – things like collaboration, creativity, innovation, deep thinking and mentorship?
One way to better understand the nature of human performance is through a definition used by organizational psychologists, who believe it is enabled through a blend of ability, motivation and opportunity.
Developing workplace strategies around trends or benchmarking has always been of great concern to me. Many clients want to know what the latest trends in workplace design are, what others in their industry are doing. Workplace designers have been all too accommodating in providing this data and information, often at the expense of better research into how to quantify performance and uncovering more substantial information that better connects a particular workplace design strategy to an organization’s performance.
One of the first computers required punch cards. I repeat, punch cards. Yes, you would take a piece of paper with tiny holes and use it to interact with the device.
Now we have computers the size of soda cans that sit in your house and control your lights, provide weather updates, solve math equations and tell jokes, all by simply speaking to them… and some of them have better jokes than my actual friends.
“Brain Drain” may sound like the title of a C-grade horror flick, but it’s a real issue many cities with blossoming tech scenes face: smart, driven, talented women and men fleeing for the promise and allure of an ecosystem with top billing.
In Atlanta, that might mean engineers packing their bags for the Valley. In St. Louis, it could be a data scientist headed south for Austin. In Minneapolis, Portland, Chattanooga and Raleigh, developers buy tickets for the Big Apple.
But how big of a problem is it in Chicago tech? We talked with Capital One, which is headquartered in Virginia but is itself building up a sizable digital tech arm in the Second City. They shed some light on their own retention strategies and weighed in on whether or not Chicago faces a drainage of the, er, brainage.
Remember when the ideal was a computer on every desktop? Not anymore. Many of today’s business owners are less interested in cubicles outfitted for stationary desktop systems than they are in fluid workspaces centered on network connectivity and mobile practices.
Diminishing Desktops
For many staff and executive workers, on-the-go business dealings that rely on state-of-the-art mobile devices are the norm, making an inherent flexibility in the design of their workspaces key. That means it’s not enough to plan static layouts for hardwired technology and its associated gear. Office designs have to be adaptable enough to meet technology’s continually changing parameters and the rapid upgrades in the equipment that accompanies them. After all, the rise of today’s mobile business climate is a scenario that’s likely to continue into the near future and beyond.
A study released by international real estate adviser Savills and the British Council for Offices (BCO) shows that almost half (46 per cent) of office workers think the office has a positive effect on their mental health.
“People are the chief currency and greatest asset of any business. With up to 80 percent of a company’s expenses coming from human resources, it’s vital that their workforce is productive, engaged and empowered. Unfortunately, 68 percent of U.S. workers are disengaged, according to the latest edition of Gallup’s annual engagement survey.
“Though there are many factors contributing to this alarming statistic, attitude plays a major role in workplace engagement. And although a well-designed space will have a positive impact on the occupants, we cannot discount or downplay the impact of individual attitudes.”
You know what they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. These days in the workplace, there is one example of something many never thought they would miss, until it was gone—cubicles. Yes, cubicles, those sad monotonous structures symbolic of our workplace oppression. Your own personal cave where you could privately wallow in your case of 'the Mondays'.
The past few years have proclaimed the dawn of the open-plan office revolution, but statistics are beginning to point to the idea that workers actually seem to be missing the dismal cubicle culture due to the collective feeling that they lack privacy within their office space. A fascinating survey conducted by Gensler with over 1,200 UK office workers in 11 different industries shows that effectiveness ratings in the workplace decrease the more people you share an office with and the less privacy you have at work.
Workplace design is not just about the physical space, says Charlie Grantham. It must include and integrate talent leadership practices and build upon a technology infrastructure if it’s going to support the whole person in his or her livelihood. Here’s how you can do it.
Generation Z and millennial employees love technology in the workplace, but the digital natives still crave human interaction at work.
Though they were born and raised with cell phones, internet connectivity, and social media, both millennial and generation Z employees crave in-person communication in the workplace.
A recent survey conducted by Future Workplace and Randstad revealed that while the digital natives of the workplace have drastically different values than previous generations, 39% prefer in person communication over digital alternatives, such as email, social networking, and video conferencing.
