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.
The wellbeing of your employees isn’t a program or HR checklist. It’s a business strategy aimed at increasing employee productivity, enhancing engagement and improving overall health and happiness in the workplace. And like any good business strategy, it’s ongoing, targeted and essential to what defines your organization and its success.
In Spain, where daily naps are the norm, a new “nap bar” called Siesta & Go is getting some attention. The bar, which opened in late June, rents out bunks by the minute (perfect for those 15 to 20 minute power naps!). The top bed in a bunk is 12 U.S. cents per minute, in case you ever wondered how much your sleep was really worth.
There is growing sentiment among younger workers that flexible working is less a right – as outlined by the Government in 2014 – and more a ‘selective benefit’ for a choice group of employees. New research by Michael Page claims that two thirds (67 percent) of millennials believe employees with families are more encouraged to work flexibly than their single colleagues, and 6 in 10 (61 percent) feel the same flexible working privilege appears to apply more to senior co-workers, with junior team members more often discouraged from flexible working initiatives.
Many corporate cultures have been shifting toward collaborative workspaces, where there is less physical division in the space between workers. Although this fosters a high level of productivity and creativity for some, it can be a detractor for others.
A number of recent surveys of the ways in which we work have highlighted the implications of flexible working and the integration of workplace technology into our lives. While we should take most surveys from businesses with a pinch of salt, when they all point in the same general direction, we can assume that their results are broadly correct.
Quite apart from the time and rent saved, there’s growing evidence that remote teams can be more productive than in-person ones. Consider: “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home.” Consider companies like Automattic, Gitlab, InVision, and Zapier, all of which thrive as fully remote companies.
With so much data available, why is it still difficult to understand how an organization’s biggest assets, people and spaces, perform?
There has been, historically, a divide between building performance and human performance. I would argue that there’s no reason why they have to be divided. What we need to do is combine the information and produce best practices that serve both. We need to ask questions like, “Why do men and women differ when it comes to, say, thermal comfort?
We’ve all been in a meeting where people failed to participate. One person runs the agenda. One person writes on the board. Everyone else occasionally checks in but also checks email, text messages and does other work. Conversely, we’ve seen what can happen when someone is passionate about a project. Energy and inertia can often be sparked by a creative idea. That’s when something big can happen.
Open-plan offices have become more common since the 1990s but have come under scrutiny in recent years. A recent Haworth's white paper said that open-plan offices are "sabotaging" employees' ability to focus at work, with office workers losing 28 per cent of their productive time due to interruptions and distractions.
Health-focused rating systems exist because occupant health is gaining more attention from business leaders. They are responding to employee demands for healthier workplaces.
Smashing things may not seem at first blush to be a winning idea to wrap a business around. Since March, however, nearly 1,500 people have shown up to break housewares, electronics and furniture at the Wrecking Club, two reinforced rooms in the basement of a building in the garment district of Manhattan.
Nearly one in three (28 percent) of employers are struggling to keep their employees engaged, claims new research from totaljobs, with staff spending too much time internet browsing, being constantly late and chatting with colleagues.
Despite significant scientific evidence that our brains need periods of respite and rejuvenation, more than 40 percent of American workers who received paid time off did not use all of their vacation days in a study by Oxford Economics.
While technology, the rise of the contingent workforce and demand for innovation had forced workplaces to rapidly-adapt, face-to-face contact remained central to the economy.
So what might the workplace of the future look like? We asked six office-space experts from around the world to hazard a guess as to where, and how, we will we all be working in ten years from now.
