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.
Office occupiers are reworking their real estate strategies to remain competitive and appeal to workers' changing preferences (especially as the search for qualified talent intensifies). Law firms are no exception.
The legal industry has been under pressure to implement cost-cutting initiatives, which includes reducing its second-largest expense: real estate. As of late 2016, the industry had reduced its office footprint by 22.2% from a historic average of 976 SF to 760 SF.
Creating a more sustainable office doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are five simple steps to get started:
IBM has agreed to sign a membership deal for all desks in WeWork’s 88 University Place, in the first reported case of a single corporation taking an entire WeWork space in New York. The deal comes as WeWork tries to extend its appeal beyond startups and freelancers into the lucrative market for corporate clients.
The technology giant is set to move up to 600 employees to 88 University Place, sources told The Real Deal. The agreement means the building will essentially become IBM’s corporate office, but designed and managed by WeWork. The co-working company occupies eight floors covering around 70,000 square feet in the 10-story, 86,927-square-foot building.
“Collaboration” as a buzzword is getting as old as “value engineering”; however, the inherent concept is increasing in importance.
Encourage a collaborative culture by focusing on food and activities that will bring people together, and create a space to house those two amenities. You can spend a lot of money or a little money; the results will be the same – a more engaged and relational workforce.
The benefits of well-designed workspaces impact not only existing employees but the talent companies hope to attract, as well. For job seekers navigating a marketplace crowded with options, including the increasing lure of the “gig economy,” people want to know they’re valued, that their wellbeing is considered and that they can be comfortable and productive at work.
No one can deny that technology is transforming nearly every aspect of the workplace. It’s helping ease communication across distributed teams, improve the physical aspects of workplaces, and increasing productivity.
However, in order to adapt and continue to thrive in these ever-changing conditions, companies must stay one step ahead of the trends for success both in the short-term and the long-term.
It's been billed by big business as a way to inspire a new generation of networking, productive team-players working side by side (albeit in a smaller office), but a new study shows that desk sharing can have a negative impact on an employee's productivity and make them feel less appreciated.
The study published this month in Science Direct surveyed 1,000 Australian employees who work in shared work environments, ranging from open plan office spaces through to, at the extreme end, staff who hot desk -- where staff have no permanent space, arriving each day and setting up at an available desk.
In office design, we often look for ways to bring the outside in—through the placement of plants and trees and the use of natural materials and natural lighting. People are inherently attracted to the out-of-doors. Worker wellbeing goes up when nature provides the backdrop.
So, what if designers also worked on bringing the inside out? What if employers embraced the benefits of getting outside and invested in great outdoor workspaces for their people?
Ahead of Earth Day this Saturday, FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics have released new data on the environmental impact of the existing flexible workforce of ‘telecommuters’ in the US. Assuming they work from home around half of the time (2.5 days out of a 5 day working week), these flexible workers cut the distance travelled in cars by around 7.8 billion miles a year and the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by 3.6 million tons per year, according to the report. The study claims that the environmental impact of telecommuting is seen in a number of ways because commuting contributes greatly to driving, the second largest source of US greenhouse gas emissions, while company offices are a part of the third largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
It is perhaps the most common misconception of evolutionary theory that all animals are somehow evolving towards something perfect. This notion is perhaps best summed up when a sceptic asks: “If we have evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” The lesser of the two problems with this is its solipsistic assumption that humans are the pinnacles of life and that, if evolution were true, all species would eventually evolve into people. The bigger (and related) issue is that the question overlooks the fact that each species is already pretty much perfectly adapted to whatever environmental niche it inhabits at any particular time. It is only when that niche changes that the organism has to adapt to its changing surroundings and conditions, which is why many species continue to thrive almost unchanged over thousands or even millions of years. They have no need to evolve into a human or anything else.
At a time when more traditional businesses are scrambling to adopt the efficiencies of leaner startups, help is on the way. WeWork is currently in the research phase of a new initiative through which it will revamp companies’ offices for them, remaking them in WeWork’s image and arming them with office-management technology and a cultural attaché.
It was not long ago that co-working began taking the office sector by storm and baffling traditional office providers with its rapid rise in popularity, but there is a new disruptor in town: third-party non-core real estate providers.
These providers are offering temporary meeting space, conference rooms and event space to companies that would traditionally have leased or rented that space through their landlord. The goal is to offer employers a temporary solution on a need-by-need basis, giving office occupiers more flexibility to pursue cost-saving initiatives such as shrinking their square footage.
JLL introduced the Future of Work, its unique outlook on the changing world of work and its impact on the next generation of corporate real estate. The model is designed to highlight areas that companies should address to navigate these seismic shifts in the market: human experience, digital drive, continuous innovation, operational excellence and financial management.
It's more important than ever today, when the problems facing our world are so complicated that overcoming them may require multiple solutions, all deployed at once. Design thinking starts by challenging people to be empathetic -- to put themselves in the end-user's shoes. Solutions aren't imposed from on high; they come from the bottom up.
Corporate real estate has assumed a far greater importance for today’s companies. Instead of just cutting costs, companies need a fully-realized workplace strategy to attract and retain employees, says JLL.
The modern workplace is a mobile workplace, now that being "on the job" increasingly equates to being "on the go." For solution providers, there are multitudes of options to consider when it comes to potential mobility solutions for customers. Laptops and 2-in-1 tablets are serving as key business devices in many workplaces, while smartphones with new capabilities -- and even wearable devices -- are playing a bigger role in the enterprise. To give a sense of what's out there, we've rounded up 10 of the latest cool products in mobility that solution providers should know about.
When it comes to working in an office, hell really can be other people. Many staff can have enormous difficulties coming to terms with the sounds that form the backdrop to their working day, especially if they work in open plan areas. The problem of noise at work is particularly acute right now because most UK employees now work in open plan offices and at workstations that are on average about 20 percent smaller than they were ten years or so ago. Yet, on the face of it, the business case for working in open plan offices is pretty clear cut. Not only is it more conducive to communication and less bound by ideas of that great contemporary no-no that we call ‘status’, open plan workstations not only take up around half the space of cellular offices, the costs of fitting out a cellular office are around 25 per cent higher than an equivalent open plan space. It’s no surprise that the open plan is the default model for most workplaces in many countries.
As director of real estate management at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District, Nina Gazzola gets to match startups with the perfect place to thrive. The 1.5-million-sq.-ft. innovation hub comprises private offices and common workspaces for entrepreneurs big and small, giving Gazzola a window into their frenzied lives.
“Their world is fast-paced and they’re focused on growing their business, so they want a space that is going to help them attract talent, that’s going to be inspiring and that’s going to be easy to be up and running instantly,” she says of the psychology behind office design.
Anyone who has worked in an office can relate to the many distractions fellow colleagues can produce. From loud conversations to pungent wafts of lunch foods, coworkers are often real roadblocks to productivity (you might even be experiencing it at your desk right now). Indeed, a study from researchers at the University of Sydney found that office noise was cited as the most frustrating aspect of the work environment by about 50 percent of employees in open offices. What's more, Oxford Economics—an independent global advisory firm—found that 53 percent of office employees complain that workplace noise reduces their satisfaction and productivity.
Alice describes her office as a “panopticon” — a structure built for total surveillance. Your office may be one, too. Whether through “voluntary” corporate wellness programs, smart badges that record voices and GPS locations, or surveillance apps in their mobile phones and personal computers, Americans are offering up more and more personal data at work. Most of them don’t have much idea of where that data goes, or how it will be used — and there aren’t that many limits on what employers can find out about their employees, or what they can do with the data. The more people who opt in now, the harder it will be to opt out in the future.
