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.
A Ping-Pong table and W hotel-style furnishings don't guarantee that an office is a meaningful space for employees. Office design crimes can take many forms — from too-bright lighting to squeezing employees into a too-small space. But mistakes can go deeper than furniture and carpet, even as firms devote money to upgrade their surroundings. CannonDesign principal and design leader Robert Benson shared a few design crimes he's encountered when working with companies to build their offices.
In a further nod to the growing relevance of flexible working, the ability to work anytime, anywhere is now key to job satisfaction with well over a third (38 percent) of employees in a global survey rating this as the number one factor, with the UK (43 percent) scoring this the highest. According to the “Mobility, Performance and Engagement” report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and Aruba, employees in Western countries report themselves to be happier in their jobs, more loyal to their employers and more productive in their work compared to their counterparts in Eastern markets. When it comes to securing loyalty, the ability to hot desk was seen as paramount by many employees, notably in Singapore (37 percent), UAE (31 percent) and the US (34 percent), while the ability to collaborate with other employees was the number one choice for employees in Germany (43 percent), France (37 percent) and Japan (35 percent).
When consulting on workplace design strategies, especially for the next generation-workforce, our clients usually have read the latest articles and have compared their existing workplace to Google. They wonder how to achieve cutting-edge trends in their own facilities. But sometimes this can't be further from a beneficial workplace strategy.
Officing Today realized there was an opportunity to fill a gap in the industry: there wasn’t any place were you could go and find a definition or explanation of terms that are often used in relation to flexible workspaces. Link and you will find a a glossary of terms. It’s still a work in progress so please feel free to make any suggestions and additions you’d like to see.
The Technology, Advertising, Media and Information companies, collectively known as TAMI tenants, are increasingly taking over the office leasing market as these small incubating companies grow into Amazonian-like monsters. According to Cushman & Wakefield, over 100 TAMIs are now seeking some 4 million square feet of space. While the majority are focusing on offices of 10,000 feet to 100,000 feet, seven of those hundred are searching for over 100,000 feet, and a few are also new to New York City.
If you think the way people work is probably not quite as glossily portrayed in the media, then you’d probably be right. A lot more European workers than is commonly supposed still believe that fax machines are essential business tools, according to a new report from unified communications business Fuze. In a study of the working habits of 5,000 EU employees, it found that the fax machine is considered ‘essential’ by 30 percent of workers in the UK, 39 percent in Germany and 42 percent in France. The report also found that many also think that desktop computers are still more important in their day-to-day working lives that laptops, tablets or smartphones. Anybody horrified by the report’s findings will be heartened by its claim that the machines will die off in time as a new generation of people who don’t know what the hell a fax machine is supplant those who still cling to their battered, old, paper-based devices.
People have been talking about the death of the office for at least a quarter of a century. Leaving aside the often misleading conflation of flexible working with homeworking that is often involved, the underlying premise of such talk has been the same for all of that time. The main argument is, and always was, that there is an alternative to the tedium, aggravation and expense of travelling to an office solely to work inside its hermetically sealed and fluorescent-lit, blue-carpeted interior alongside people who can drive you spare, before you schlep home again. The problem with the argument is that, in spite of its evident drawbacks, office life maintains an attraction for both employers and employees and there will always be an upper limit on how long people want to spend home alone. Things are changing but the death of the office is a myth.
If you’re still confused about the proliferation of green building standards worldwide, then brace yourself. A new standard that seeks to measure the wellbeing inducing characteristics of a building has been launched as a counterpart to the WELL Building Standard developed by the Green Building Certification Institute and the International WELL Building Institute. The new standard is called Fitwel, was designed by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the General Services Administration and is overseen by the Centre for Active Design. The standard uses a scorecard that ranks buildings on over 60 criteria such as indoor air quality, fitness facilities and lobby and stairwell design. According to its proponents these criteria apply well-established scientific principles to address seven characteristics of a healthy working environment. The standard is very much a product of the US public sector at this stage and was piloted in 89 federal buildings during 2015. Its full launch is scheduled for next year.
Unhealthy workplaces are not only depressing to behold, they constitute a significant financial strain. Research indicates that healthy employees are three times more productive than unhealthy employees. It’s estimated that employers can lose up to $4,600 of productivity gains per work year as a result of health-related absenteeism, and this number does not account for workers who are present but unable to perform at a high level due to poor working conditions.
A significant proportion of businesses are still not giving their employees the support they need to effectively work remotely and flexibly, despite the fact that 72 percent of UK office worker believe the traditional fixed workplace is no longer relevant. For the vast majority the traditional nine-to-five is already a thing of the past, with nearly two thirds (62 percent) of people already working remotely at least one day per week. On average UK workers spend 2.5 days, half of their week, working remotely. The findings revealed in ‘The End of Nine-to-Five’ report commissioned by TeamViewer highlights that, despite the increased demands and expectations of employees, nearly 2 in 5 (37 percent) UK office workers said that their company’s IT department do not encourage remote working and do not make it easy. This figure went up as the size of the organisation increased, rising to 44 percent for companies with over 500 employees.
The Fitwel rating, from the CDC, measures things like access to public transportation and how easy it is for employees to take the stairs—and then suggests how to make your office healthier.
Relentless open plan and reduced office space came under scrutiny at the British Council for Offices conference in Amsterdam, writes Paul Finch.
Read the article on architectsjournal.co.uk > [paywall]
At the Tradeline Space Conference in Boston this May, I got the chance to share some work my firm, EYP, is doing with Harvard University’s School of Public Health, piloting a new measuring system for well-being: the Health and Human Performance Index (HaPI). In this latest premium offering, we’ll explore what it is and why it matters.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Technology is proving to be something of a double edged sword for the big hotel chains. On the one hand it’s helping them to engage with guests through easily scalable and cost-effective initiatives and drive loyalty in new ways. Apps and interfaces allow integration with other relevant products and service providers, and encourage customer engagement through multiple touchpoints. On the other hand, rapidly evolving technology is fueling fierce competition from online travel agencies.
The average office worker spends 5 hours and 41 minutes sitting at their desk each day – and that doesn’t include time spent sitting in front of the television or computer at home in the evening. Sit-to-stand working is becoming increasingly popular as we become increasingly aware of the health risks of a sedentary lifestyle. But how do you introduce sit-to-stand working in your office? Today I’m looking at five steps to help your workplace adopt sit-to-stand working, and reap the health and productivity benefits it offers.
When we talk about the future of office space as a service, it turns out that the future may not be about the space at all. Take, for example, RocketSpace, a tech campus for startups in San Francisco and — having just last week announced plans for another campus — London. Since opening in 2011, it has sent more than 15 unicorns out into the world, including Uber and Spotify. Today, it continues to attract tech entrepreneurs and high growth startups to its campus, but there’s a twist: it’s attracting big corporations, too. In fact, only 50 percent of RocketSpace’s business revolves around providing space and services for startups. The other 50 is all corporate innovation consulting, helping companies like AT&T, RBS, and JetBlue to ward off disruption.
Although flexible working remains an idea that is still often presented as some sort of novelty, challenge to the natural order of things, ‘trend’ or (spare us) a ‘craze’, at some point a lot of people will have to accept that it’s just the way an awful lot of people work nowadays. Earlier this year, The Work Foundation published a report suggesting that half of UK employers will offer flexible working by next year. Now, job site Monster.co.uk has published its own survey suggesting pretty much the same thing. It found that around a third of British employers already offer their staff some sort of flexible working arrangements and 26 per cent already offer them to all employees as a matter of course although it tends to apply somewhat disproportionately to senior employees. However, the research also claims that more than a fifth (21 per cent) of employees don’t know what their company’s policy is which is obviously a major constraint on its uptake.
It is rare for business software to arouse emotion besides annoyance. But some positively gush about how Slack has simplified office communication. Instead of individual e-mails arriving in a central inbox and requiring attention, Slack structures textual conversations within threads (called “channels”) where groups within firms can update each other in real time. It is casual and reflects how people actually communicate, eschewing e-mail’s outdated formalities, says Chris Becherer of Pandora, an online-music firm that uses Slack.
Throughout 2015, Metropolis’s publisher and editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy, led the Metropolis Think Tank series of conversations on the seismic cultural shifts reshaping our society and the importance of injecting a new humanism into design and architecture in order to better deal with emerging challenges. As part of these ongoing discussions, Szenasy engages key industry leaders and gives a voice to different knowledge groups that participate in these processes—from architecture firms and clients to researchers and consultants.
There is little new about working in hotels, says Alex Gifford, Brand & Communications Manager from Allermuir. For a long time they have had meeting rooms and conference facilities, while lobbies have always been used for meeting clients or colleagues.
