Seriously, what other industry makes its most important decisions while sitting on fake hay bales at Pac-Man tables in pirate-ship themed treehouses?
This Hilarious Story Lampooning Ludicrous Tech Company Decor Is Simply Perfect
What Makes a Workplace Healthy?
Evidence keeps piling up that healthy workplaces produce big benefits for employers. Studies show offices and other work areas designed to enhance worker health and wellness not only reduce employee absences and reported illnesses, but also improve productivity and help to attract and retain employees.
WHERE TWO WORLDS COLLIDE…
Mark Barrell, Design Director at The Boss Design Group, talks to us about the crossover between the workplace and hospitality sectors. The Boss Design Group is a designer and manufacturer of office seating. Established in the UK in 1983, the company now operates multiple production facilities around the world and has supplied more than half of the UK’s FTSE 100 companies.
Beyond Beta: Virtual Reality Supports Empathetic Design
As workplace strategists, we study the people and culture of an organization from the insider’s point of view with ethnographic field visits. Observation periods, focus groups, interviews, activity logs, and surveys are a few methods we use to help understand ways a workplace supports or inhibits the worker and, often times, the company culture. We analyze the collected data—some of which is user-generated through hands-on exercises—and feed key insights into what is known as user-generated, or participatory, design. But this is nothing new. We have engaged in such activities for years to guide our clients to a newly designed workplace that better fits their people, culture, brand, and processes.
How Technology Has Changed Workplace
Recently, while discussing some tweaks to the layout of his own office, I was asked by an investment industry leader, “What’s changed in office designs?” As a leader of workplace design for Financial Service Firms at Gensler, it’s something I think about every day. It’s also a multi-layered issue that can be difficult to distill into boilerplate ready responses. Ironically, this straightforward, off-the-cuff question brought a sudden rush of focus to the complex and always evolving factors currently inciting changes in workplace design practices.
WHY RESTROOMS MATTER IN THE WORKPLACE
People are sensors, constantly dialed into their surrounding environment for clues about everything from the primal mandates of safety, to the psycho-social basics of “how I’m perceived” and “what people think of me”. This general — yet fundamental — insight into the self-perceptiveness of humans is one of the factors that has guided the transformation of the physical workplace.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
Distracted in the office? Blame evolution
Primitive survival instincts mean we can’t easily switch off from our environment but clever workspace design can sharpen focus.
Therapeutic Office Design: It Matters
Finding and setting up a new office as I return to private practice has meant thinking about the impact of space and design and décor. Oh, there’s a part of me that thinks it shouldn’t matter. After all, while working in large community agencies, my clients and I coped with crowded waiting rooms, institutional grade furniture, pea green walls and nothing that indicated my personality on the desk of whatever office I was assigned that day.
How to Design a Killer Game Room in the Office
Entrepreneurs set on grabbing top talent and injecting their company with startup culture often start by creating spaces to have fun with their teams. They want to create a workplace that projects a sense of passion and puts their personality on display. They want to differentiate themselves from the startup down the street and larger companies drawing from the same talent pool, and increasingly, they’re looking to space to make that differentiation.
TrendSpotting: Co-working in the Corporate Environment – Part II
Co-working is a positive trend in real estate that is taking over our offices and the headlines in industry news. Co-working models are becoming specialized by industry and are beginning to morph and blend in different ways, leading to even more iterations and opportunities for change. Organizations within the same industry, or who share similar business lines or services are exploring corporate co-working models, and discovering opportunities for mutual growth and success.
Engagement in the workplace | Part one
Engagement is a complex issue in which culture, opportunity for meaningful work, advancement, mission and leadership all play a role. But design, too, can influence engagement.
CAFÉ ENVIRONMENTS IN THE WORKPLACE INSPIRE COLLABORATION AND INNOVATION
If your workplace has a café, it’s probably a popular meeting space. Throughout the day, you may commonly hear people head to the café for meetings, lunch or a quick visit with a friend. The workplace café environment encourages collaboration and innovation among teammates in several ways.
Refreshing your Workspace
People spend the majority of their waking hours on work; staring at the same walls, sitting on the same chair, surrounded by piles of paper. It’s no wonder then that, eventually, productivity levels go down. Which is why a properly organized and decorated office is important, as it can help boost creativity and infuse excitement about their work and their workplace. Giving workplaces a fresh look every now and then is a good solution to dropped efficiency levels and low morale in the office.
The Future of the Life Science Campus is Now: Nautilus
What if you could accelerate the time to discovery? Make employees happier at work, more productive, and innovative faster? Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. (Alexandria), the owner and operator of a four-building 240,0000 sf campus, recognized the opportunity to transform its dated, and mostly vacant, development into a state-of-the-art campus that would drive this type of success for its tenants.
“Tech” company workplace design trends
The rise of the disruptive upstart — the Ubers of the world — has ushered in a sort of second wave dotcom era. So said Adrian Berry, senior associate, Toronto interiors studio manager, B+H Architects, while co-presenting an IIDEX seminar titled Office of the Future: Trends in Tech Workplaces.
"Our Approach: Activity Based Working"
Interview with Domenic Meier, Haworth Schweiz AG. The modern office has changed significantly and will change even more in the future. There is less and less of a need for classic office furniture. Companies need to store significantly less furniture than just ten years ago. Today the majority of data is electronically archived, making the search for information so much more efficient, the employees are more mobile and the exchange of information is easier.
Perkins+Will: One Day at SRAM video
SRAM Headquarters was captured in action over the course of one day with employees providing their perspective on their new Perkins+Will designed workplace. This is “One Day at SRAM” – their space, their story.
Open plan offices linked to low engagement and workplace satisfaction levels
As we’ve pointed out before, while open plan working can bring cultural benefits such as improved communication and collaboration; the continuing popularity of the open plan office is largely down to cost. The reason the UK has more than twice as many open plan workers as the global average is primarily due to high real estate costs. Now a new report from Steelcase suggests that space and cost-saving strategies such as open plan offices and hot-desking could be impacting workplace satisfaction and engagement. UK employees are falling below the global average for almost all workplace satisfaction metrics, reporting a lack of control over their work environment (59 percent), difficulties concentrating (43 percent) and an inability to work without being interrupted (50 percent). These three factors were found to be central to fostering an engaged and satisfied workforce. Only 29 percent of UK workers are engaged, compared to 34 percent globally.
ESTÉE LAUDER'S LONDON OFFICES WILL MAKE YOU WANT TO WORK THERE IMMEDIATELY
Do you ever take a look at your life and wonder what the bloody hell you're doing with it? Well you certainly will when you take a look inside the Estée Lauder offices, which are so ridiculously swish you'll want to quit your job immediately and start spamming their HR department with applications for anything going.
Fresh Dirtt: Overland Partners
This business school set out to create a new, state-of-the-art learning facility where students could harness the latest technology for discussing leading-edge business theory and tackling real-world challenges. DIRTT provided the flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing infrastructure requirements, while simultaneously providing a high level of design and finish. DIRTT’s micro-perforated acoustic tiles help manage sound in meeting and conference rooms, as well as in the large commons area. Multiple-monitor media walls with speaker bars support large meetings and events, while imbedded millwork provides seamless and innocuous storage, including full-height AV racks and printers.