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.
In 1993, Jay Chiat had an epiphany while skiing in Telluride, Colo. The adman who created Apple’s memorable “1984” TV commercial thought it was time to “think different” about his own office: Chiat believed the workplace had become as static as an elementary school, with people only leaving their desks for lunch and for trips to the bathroom. He wanted his office to be more like a university campus.
The design of work environments has undergone major changes in the past decade as Baby Boomers have begun to retire and Gen X'ers and Gen Y'ers (Millennials) have begun to dominate the workforce. Boomers desire for hierarchy and private offices has given way to open offices and more collaborative workstyles.
Will this trend continue for the foreseeable future? Most likely yes, BUT . . .
The next generation of workers is just beginning to enter the workforce and they will have a significant impact on design of work environments. Generation Z (generally those born after 1995) will create another shift in how we think about work. In approximately five years, they will comprise approximately 60 to 80 million people and 20 percent of the U.S. workforce.
Developed thousands of years ago in China, feng shui is actually one of the earliest instances of evidence-based design. I started learning about it when I was looking for ways to support health and wellness in my work. It’s about living in harmony with the natural environment, and today those principles are adopted to more urban environments.
Traditionally, a professional workspace community is designed to function as an extension of your employer’s brand, seamlessly integrating key attributes and defining characteristics of the company. From the location of your office to where you sit each day to what type of equipment is required, your effectiveness was directly tied to the physical components of your company’s office space. Before the digital revolution entirely changed the way we live and work, providing customized solutions for today’s mobile workforce, this centralized workspace also provided a productive hub for employees to collaborate and meet with partners and clients.
Going to the gym is about to get a lot more expensive. That's because the share of companies offering wellness programs dropped 13 percent this year. These programs -- which often include subsidized gym memberships, free fitness trackers, and bonuses for losing weight -- keep employees healthy, thereby cutting medical and insurance expenses. At least that's the theory.
In practice, many companies aren't seeing a return on their wellness investments. So they're ditching the programs. That's a mistake. Employers can save themselves millions through wellness programs. They just need to find ways to boost workers' low participation rates.
Millennials are not happy about the nation's direction, and they don't think the country's economic fortunes will improve any time soon.
That’s the conclusion of a survey released last week (PDF) by the Economic Innovation Group and EY (Ernst & Young). About 63 percent of the respondents said they believe the country is on the wrong track, compared to 25 percent who said it’s going in the right direction. That majority held among older millennials, younger ones and the people in between. The same is true of opinions about whether the national economy will improve in the next year, with 65 percent saying they think it will be the same or worse, and only 25 percent saying it will be better.
Once heralded as an ingenious design strategy for saving money and fostering collaboration, the open-plan office has fallen from grace. It's increasingly viewed by employees as a stressful, noisy nuisance, but with real estate prices soaring, it's not an easy trend for many companies to reverse. That's why some of the best solutions have been small-scale interventions that reconfigure existing open-plan spaces to fit employees' needs in the moment.
But ask Skylar Tibbits to design a reconfigurable space for your open office and you're going to get a whole different animal. That's what happened after Drew Wenzel, a civil and environmental engineer who is part of the campus development team at Google, met Tibbits and started collaborating with him earlier this year.
Day-to-day influences like your office space can affect how employees interact, what they do and if they have common interests and behaviors—all of which add up to company culture, Cushman & Wakefield tenant rep Kevin Meissner tells GlobeSt.com. We recently spoke exclusively with Meissner, who has written a thought piece on the subject, on how office space and culture work together to create a successful company.
“A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.” (George Bernard Shaw)
As the recognition grows that the workplace – when well designed, created, maintained and adapted – is able to make a positive contribution to a range of clichés (productivity – this year’s star draw – innovation, creativity, wellbeing, wellness, motivation, inspiration, engagement, development, attraction and retention amongst others), in rough proportion so too grows the number of people talking, presenting, writing and commenting on the subject.
Partial to lobbing a fizzer on a Sunday to generate some discussion, I tweeted that I find it amazing how many of these often-heard folk have never actually created any workspace. The most excellent @antonyslumbers (an expert in a fair few things) replied that many a theatre critic had never written a play. Their encyclopaedic knowledge of who wrote and starred in what, and their ability to quote from the most obscure of creations is no doubt astounding. Yet they will unlikely have experienced the writer’s creative anguish, anxiety, self-doubt and self-recrimination in the smallest of hours that night offers…..unless of course they’re a failed writer.
Your employees spend a minimum of 8 hours at work in the office space every day. That’s a big chunk of time – about a third of their lives, to be fair. In those eight hours they must be exceptionally motivated in order to prove the best possible results.
One thing you can do to maintain motivation and productivity is spruce up the office space. People’s work environment can impact their productivity, so you should do everything you can to create a space that your employees will want to return to everyday.
Almost three out of four of U.S. architects say the health impacts of buildings are influencing their design decisions, according to a survey by Dodge Data & Analytics in partnership with Delos and the Canada Green Building Council, and with assistance from the American Institute of Architects.
Two-thirds of building owners surveyed also said that health considerations affect how they design and construct buildings. Sixty-nine percent of owners who measure employee satisfaction and engagement reported improvement in both attributes due to their healthier building investments. These findings are included in the report, “The Drive Toward Healthier Buildings 2016.”
Employers are being urged to create a more inclusive and flexible working environment for their employees by adopting a trust based approach which focuses on the meeting of objectives rather than hours. This is the advice of Harvard University’s Global Leadership award winner Charlotte Sweeney on the launch of National Work/Life Week. In 2015, 23 percent of employees were reported to be doing some of their work remotely, up from 19 percent in 2003 according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. But more than just adopting agile working, the diversity expert says businesses should begin to focus on individual well-being and supporting employees to enrich all aspects of their lives, their families and their communities. Corporates should implement a trust-based approach, which focuses on employees meeting their objectives, rather than focusing on where they are actually doing the work or even how many hours it takes to complete.
Flexible working has developed a reputation as something of a silver bullet. It is the perceived solution to almost any of the major workplace problems you care to mention, including the gender pay gap, work life balance, churn, property costs, staff engagement, personal autonomy, stress, physical wellbeing, productivity and – of course – as a way of meeting the needs of those alien beings we now call Millennials. There is some truth in all of this, as we have known for some time. There is no question that there are major problems with the way many people work and that flexible working, hand in hand with new tech, is a way of solving them to one degree or another. And yet, as one of the most interesting yet overlooked recent pieces of research into the effects of flexible working has made clear, the reason behind this may be more complex and fragile than we might suppose and has an antecedence in research that is now approaching its centenary.
You may have heard the open-office floor plan is dead. You may have heard we need more open spaces to collaborate at work. What if we told you, everybody is right? Let us explain.
Despite a growing need for teamwork, ideation and creativity to propel companies forward, we still need our privacy. Depending on your personality, what you’re doing and how your day is going, your need for privacy changes. Privacy is contextual. It’s all about what you need to do your best work in the moment.
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are innovative business giants known around the globe. They all have at least one thing in common. They each find a way to control the immense demands on their time, making sure they give their brains the ability to think of the next big thing or solve their most pressing problem. It’s very valuable and requires the intentional search for privacy.
The portrait often drawn of Millennials is that of a generation which is keen to stand out from that of its elders, and which is difficult to pin down. They’re said to have difficulty accepting a hierarchical structure and no longer view their salary as the only motivating factor but instead are looking for a sense of accomplishment in their work. Yet as we reported recently, the behaviour and expectations of this younger generation has in fact stayed fairly constant. For them, the ideal company has attributes which are actually fairly similar to those cited by their more experienced colleagues. The result of the latest Edenred-Ipsos barometer into the under 30s suggests that for employers, the issue is not so much about dealing with this generation independently of the others, but rather globally rethinking leadership challenges in an environment which is increasingly digitalized, horizontal and multi-task oriented, taking into account individual countries’ cultural differences.
A recent study conducted by Dodge Data & Analytics with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has found that architects and building owners are beginning to place higher priority of the impacts of design decisions on human health. Nearly 75% of architects and 67% of owners responded that health considerations now play a role in how their buildings are designed, indicating that healthy environments have become an important tool in marketing to tenants and consumers.
For the average job-seeker or any parent wondering what kind of livelihood awaits the next generation, the current headlines are the stuff of anxiety attacks. In June, the Associated Press announced that it would begin using an automated writing service to cover more than 10,000 minor league baseball games each year. Driverless trucks may soon be taking over from humans, elbowing out an entire profession. New technology purports to bring great change to a surprising number of fields, including law, medicine and financial services. What will be the human toll and net effect on the economy? Has the U.S. reached an epoch of irreversible job loss?
My trade is to ask questions about the workplace then make sense of the answers. That has been a particular challenge with the question, ‘what are offices today?’ What seems clear is that the various actors in the workplace ecosystem look at offices through very different eyes. Urban planning and development professionals still view offices as a distinct category of real estate and most real estate professionals view offices in terms of the delivery of floor space. Some things have changed,however. For some time, the hybrid economy of serviced offices has turned the product into a service. But, in many cases this has simply made the leasing of space simpler and more flexible. As Neil Usher says in his workessence blog, “while co-working is declared to be disrupting the institutional stuffed shirt that is the commercial rented sector, the sprouting centres come to increasingly resemble the corporate world at which their earlier incarnations cocked a snook”.
“Is sitting the new smoking?” asks a headline in Forbes. Martha Grogan, cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic and others think that too much sitting is as bad for your health. Standing desks may or may not be the cure, but these desks have other important benefits.
I spoke with Jennifer Carpenter, of Jennifer Carpenter Architect, who designs workspaces for corporations and institutions. Her goal is to make people happier. “Happier employees have a better day at work, which improves employee retention,” said Carpenter.
