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.
Since the world’s first skyscraper went up in Chicago in 1885, people have converged to work together for a common goal. Companies and how people work together have changed dramatically since then and, in recent years, these changes have come fast and furious.
Human beings are social creatures. We have an instinctive need to belong to a group and feel included, accepted, and respected. While a part of this need is fulfilled by our social circles outside of the workplace, it’s important to recognize that majority of us spend most of our time at work —whether that be in an office, at home, a coffee shop, or in a coworking space. Work is not just a thing you do, it’s also a place where the things you do are carried out. It doesn’t matter how you work or what you do for a living; everyone needs a space.
Millennials hear a lot about how their personality traits from other people. At least that’s how it often feels to this millennial (whose job involves getting pitched many drafts of articles on that subject every week) but also to plenty of others in my generation.
The whole idea of generational cohorts, after all, is tenuous from a sociological point of view and worthless from a practical one. If you’re trying to understand what a given employee wants or why she’s acting a certain way, you can’t expect characteristics that supposedly apply to everybody born within a 15 to 22–year timespan to be all that precise.
Office workers spend most of their week sat at a desk - but many people probably don't realize how dirty they can get. Even though it might not look it, your work station could be 400 times filthier than a toilet seat. Despite this gruesome fact many of us will still sit and happily eat at lunch at our desk - which only adds to the germ count.
After years of speculation, 2017 appears to be the year when the Internet of Things becomes an ever-present part of our lives. The rise of smart speakers like the Amazon Echo or Google Home and wearables like the Fitbit means that smart objects are making our lives easier.
If you work as, say, a professional athlete, the link between good health and good work is pretty clear. For the rest of us, however, it might not be so obvious.
After all, who among us hasn’t hauled ourselves to the office when we’d have been better off in bed. If you think about those days (staring blankly at your computer screen while wiping your nose), they probably weren’t among your most productive on the job.
Indeed, a recent CBRE report on Wellness in the Workplace finds that every year up to $227 billion is lost to employee absenteeism (when you’re out sick) or presenteeism (when you’re in the office, but not feeling well enough to work at your typical clip).
What do busy workers need most from their workplaces today? First and foremost, they need it to be human centered; a workplace crafted to mentally excite and engage, physically comfort and emotionally support the people that work there. Although many have predicted the death of the office since mobile technologies allow workers the ability to be productive on the go, people have discovered they need more. Needs for collaboration, team building and individual focus are just a few reasons employees are heavily relying on their office to provide them with access to the people and tools they need to get work done.
Junior members of the workforce are most likely to be disengaged, demotivated and lacklustre about work according to a survey on happiness in the UK workplace from HR consultancy Personal Group. Based on a survey of 800 people benchmarked against a larger database of 41,000 from the University of Warwick, the survey claims that 48 percent of employees are not often happy at work and that almost one in five are rarely or never happy at work.
Productivity and teamwork are both significantly improved when employees can choose where they work, a global survey of on global flexible working trends claims. The survey commissioned by Polycom, Inc. a global leader in enabling organizations new levels of teamwork, efficiency and productivity by unleashing the power of human collaboration. The survey of over 24,000 people found that 62 percent of the global working population now take advantage of flexible working practices. Nearly all respondents (98 percent) state that flexible working has a positive impact on productivity. Although many remain concerned that their absence from the office may have a negative effect on their careers, they are drawn to flexible working to increase their productivity, achieve a better work life balance and avoid the problem of commuting.
James Ludwig is vice president, global design and product engineering for Steelcase. 360 recently sat down with James for a two-part discussion on the impact technology is making in the workplace, the kinds of tensions it’s creating for people, how workplace design can help and what we may see in the future of work. Part 1 is all about you — how Smart + Connected Spaces can improve people’s experiences at work.
In 1997, McKinsey & Company tackled the increasingly competitive employee recruitment and retention landscape in a pioneering study that coined the phrase “war for talent.” Two decades later, the phrase is part of the global management lexicon, and the “war” is even more prevalent: Generational shifts and advances in globalization and technology have made attracting top talent and reducing turnover high priorities for most employers.
The tech sector is taking off in Asia Pacific. Both start-ups and tech giants are building their presence in the region – whether Facebook and Google in Singapore or Slack and Zen Desk in Melbourne.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley-like projects have popped up across Asia in cities such as Shenzhen, Bengaluru and Ho Chi Minh.
The trend of American employees working remotely continues to grow, according to Gallup's State of the American Workplace report.
In 2012, Gallup data showed that 39% of employees worked remotely in some capacity, meaning they spent at least some of their time working in a location different from that of their coworkers. In 2016, that number grew by four percentage points to 43%.
For years, designers, architects and facility managers have been measuring and improving interior workspace. But, as technology untethers us from set work locations and workplace cultures relax, attention is turning to activate and measure dormant outdoor space with the same fervor. The field of Landscape Architecture no longer is limited to sustainable plantings and beautifully manicured greenspaces. One almost could say the worlds of interior design and landscape architecture are beginning to blur as together, they tackle the new challenge of leveraging outdoor space for optimal engagement and health of workers.
Sodexo and Quora Consulting partnered to understand what knowledge workers need from their workplace in order to maximize productivity. The report, “Creating a Workplace That Maximises Productivity”, claims that only a third of respondents found the workplace to be configured in such a way that it optimizes productivity. According to the report, “This suggests that unfortunately workplace designers are placing cosmetic design and style over substance.”
There’s a good reason why we find it hard to establish the causal links between our working lives and our personal happiness. It’s because it’s all very complicated. So complicated in fact that you can sidetrack any discussion on the subject by asking elementary questions such as: ‘what do you mean by happy?’ or ‘should it be the role of work to make us happy?’ A lot of commercial interests in the workplace sector would like us to think that there is a correlation between what they do and how happy people are at work, but the research shows that things are never that straightforward. It all depends not just on a stimulus but how we choose to respond to it. One thing that seems evident is that the design of the workplace would be characterized as a ‘hygiene factor’ according to the work of Frederick Herzberg dating from the 1950s, which explained why the things that motivate us are not the mere opposites of those which make us unhappy.
Five years ago, Marc Andreeson predicted that software would eat the world. As a testament to that prediction, self-service is rapidly taking over.
While we’re a long way off hologram-only meetings or humanoid robot supervisors patrolling office space, automation and AI are already transforming aspects of business. It’s hardly hot news that the office space era of nine-to-five, fixed desks, and water cooler moments’ is drawing unceremoniously to a close, replaced by a mixture of flexible, remote and distributed working.
Well networked and armed with multiple devices, today’s professional is always connected but admittedly stressed, as the hazy line between personal and professional life continues to fade and the pressures of each impinge on the other. But research confirms that a work environment focused on wellness, with real opportunities for engagement and wellbeing, can make a difference to mitigate stress, improve health, focus attention, and increase productivity.
It’s no secret that allowing employees to work remotely can have a positive impact on employee engagement and work-life balance. But a new report from the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that, for some employees, the ease of anytime/anywhere work can actually backfire.
