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.
Class-A offices eager to attract and retain tenants are putting in amenities that imbue an impressive, sometimes eclectic, mix of features and perks. Due to a growing and increasingly demanding millennial workforce, property owners and managers are choosing amenities that cater to this generation’s desire for connectivity, community, capabilities and convenience.
The world of work is changing pretty rapidly, but one thing has been pretty consistent over the past few years: Workers are feeling optimistic about their prospects. The U.S. economy keeps adding jobs at a healthy clip and unemployment remains at pre-Recession lows, making this a jobseekers’ market.
Nobody is getting any work done anyway. Letting employees finish the week early is an easy way to show you care about work life balance.
Apple’s new home in Cupertino — the centerpiece being a $5 billion, four-story, 2.8 million-square-foot ring that can be seen from space and that locals call the spaceship — is still getting some final touches, and employees have just started to trickle in. The full squadron, about 12,000 people, will arrive in several months.
Measuring success by lower expenses and higher productivity, IBM should have been yielding high-performance results. The company’s real estate annual savings total over $1 million and its internal research states that this contributes to their remote workers increased productivity.
At outdoor gear company Patagonia, employees have been known to cut out of work to go surfing. Another very well-known tech giant scatters its campus with athletics fields to keep people moving. And at health care provider Kaiser Permanente, workers can use a bike-share program to move about the company’s campus or clear their heads with a trail ride.
Dogs are already known to be stress relievers for people who have them in their homes, but to have them in a place where people are the most stressed makes a significant difference in the success of a business as well.
Amenities have typically ranged from providing daily conveniences (dry cleaning, food courts, etc.) to recreation or health (gyms, saunas, clinics, etc.). To appeal to a younger generation, building owners are in a race of amenity one-upmanship, with popular amenities like table tennis and complimentary food becoming less of a differentiator than health complexes, basketball courts and hair salons.
There is a particularly notable trend in today’s business culture toward the “shrinking” of office spaces. For the last several years, this pattern hasn’t only made an impact in the physical workplace, but also how people work and are being managed, the technologies that enable their everyday tasks, and how each company employs the workplace for its own ends.
Haworth hosts a Q&A with an expert panel on designing offices that support today’s workers without driving them to distraction.
Whether you’re a brand new startup or seasoned company, workplace strategies are important to retention, employee satisfaction, and even success! In their quest to support a happier, more productive, and healthier workforce, companies across the globe are increasingly adopting various flex work programs and workplace strategies.
Ergonomics was a hot topic for OSHA in the 1990s, with the agency issuing a standard for ergonomics in 2000, which quickly was repealed in 2001. So why should employers continue to concern themselves with ergonomics?
At least, as you know it. Sensor-studded office desks and chairs will monitor your every move—and alert your boss when you no longer need a permanent workspace.
Workplaces are shifting from endless rows of cubes to a free-address work environment that allows you to work anywhere and everywhere. You are no longer tethered to an office or a cubicle. Why the shift? Most companies benefit from spontaneous collaboration—when you share information with colleagues on the fly and integrate as a team. The high-walled cubicle—your home-away-from-home—hinders this integration.
The rise of the liquid workforce is transforming the way people work together, with demand soaring for freelance services and a growing pool of talent ready to supply it. Over the past five years, the number of contingent, “on-demand” workers has spiked, now comprising roughly 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. And yet, full-time talent recruitment and retention remain a vital part of the equation, considering clear benefits such as institutional knowledge and long-term employee engagement.
FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics have published their 2017 State of Telecommuting in the US Employee Workforce report, which claims to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive data analysis available on the state of working from home in the United States. According to the study, the number of people telecommuting in the US increased by 115 percent between 2005 and 2015.
If you take the door off the conference room, will the meeting be just as productive? That’s a question Microsoft, in collaboration with San Francisco–based Studio O+A, is hoping to answer. The two have partnered for the design of Microsoft’s Envisioning Center, an evolving space for testing prototypes at the tech company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters. Unlike most testing facilities, however, the Envisioning Center isn’t a lab, but rather a fully designed environment where both in an active setting. In this case, that setting is the office of the very near future.
Organizations will need to re-think their workplace strategies and how they utilize their real estate. Some companies are starting to look at flexible workspace operators to help them better manage their portfolios. This is the case between IBM and WeWork.
