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.
Do you recognize the person sitting next to you at the office? In many workplaces, you’d be forgiven if not. As employees have expressed a desire to move throughout office spaces during the day and choose how and where they work, experts in office design say they have seen a shift in traditional workplace office designs in the last several years.
Read the article on marketwatch.com >
Airbnb has shaken up the way we travel thanks to its quirky and off-beat escapes. In fact, its model has been so successful that big hotel chains are ripping pages from its book.
We spend around 40 hours a week in the workplace (some of us a lot more), so creating an environment that’s good for employee health and wellness is essential.
A well-designed office can actually reduce levels of absenteeism and lower staff turnover because staff are happier and healthier at work. Today I’m looking at five things you can do to create a healthier environment in your workplace, to improve wellness for you and your colleagues.
Why are the two companies spending billions to build offices that look lifted straight from the 1960s?
Work pods, open planning and sit-stand desks may just sound like the latest Google-born workplace fad, but Vince McCormack, president of the 100-year-old workplace solutions company Perdue, said that they are trends that are leading to greater productivity and wellness in the office.
Essential reading on the topic of change management can be found in one very accessible volume, thanks to the Harvard Business Review. Gary Miciunas, a principal who leads workplace innovation and change management services for NELSON, recently read the entire collection with one specific question in mind: How can we apply these management ideas about organizational change to workplace transformation? For our purposes here, workplace transformation is defined as the integrated process of changing both physical space and human behavior in the creation of new work environments.
Read the article on workdesign.com > [paywall]
The rise in popularity of coworking spaces has been largely attributed to growing demand from creative and tech start-ups for shared workplaces that are cost-effective alternatives to traditional office leases. But there’s new evidence from the US that coworking spaces could also be eminently suitable even for larger occupiers, and especially in costly metro areas such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. According to a new report from CBRE Group a number of misconceptions that have perhaps kept larger occupiers away from extensive use of coworking facilities do remain, including that this type of space is priced at a premium compared with traditional leases; that it is only utilized by entrepreneurs and small businesses; and that the users are exclusively post-college millennials. Yet CBRE’s report found that these assumptions are not accurate.
For years, people have been developing the model for the home. They have personal spaces where they rest, sleep, maybe a work room. They have common spaces where they cook food, eat food, use electronic devices, a playroom. This idea of the home came about over thousands of years centered around what would make a person happy if they were there all day. But now, they are not there all day, they’re here in the office.
Employee engagement is on the mind of today’s organizations. This is part three in a three-part series on engagement in the workplace. Read part one and part two on the VOA blog.
In an industry where a private office flush with glass plaques and deal mementos is the ultimate sign of success, commercial real estate firm CBRE gambled on a new strategy that hinged on concepts workers tend to hate. Employees seem to love it—but more importantly, clients are begging for it.
We've covered this on cfn.new with videos and stories, but here is the latest story. At the new SRAM office in Chicago, there are simply no excuses for not biking to work. And that’s by design.
If you go to work every day in a soul-sucking cube, we have some good news.
The next generation of employees believe that if employers they want to attract and retain the best talent, they need to change their approach to new ‘live’ technologies which enable people to communicate in real time. According to new global research (albeit from a video comms company) despite 85 percent of employees using video as part of their everyday lives, only 28 percent say their employers are proactively encouraging them to use video at work to communicate. 72 percent feel that live video has the power to transform the way they communicate at work and 69 percent believe that increased use of video conversations would help employee retention at all levels within the organisation. The research, conducted among 4,000 employees across the UK, Germany, France and the US, also found that only one in seven (14 percent) employers is good at providing communications tools at work which mirror those employees use at home.
Derren Brown is clearly on to something. And if you’ve read his books you’ll know that what he’s on to is finding ways to tap in to our fascination with how our thoughts and actions can be manipulated using some well-defined and researched techniques and principles. Add in some showmanship and what you have is something that is indistinguishable from magic. You can believe in the magical and mystical if you like, but Derren Brown is a creature of the Enlightenment and has no truck with any of that. He’s got psychology and science on his side. The magic is in our own heads. It’s not just Derren Brown who has used the findings of psychologists to find ways to control people. Many of our current beliefs and the very workings of our society are based on this sort of manipulation. You can also see its workings in the way we think we think we can use workplace design to influence the feelings and behaviour of others.
Dear long-suffering office worker: Are you still marooned in your cubicle, laboring under fluorescent lights, preparing for another formal meeting in which your participation is limited to getting up for a refill of bad coffee?
I can’t remember a more rewarding time in my career when interior designers could truly be influencers. I’ve been trying to figure out why now. During my career, there have been highs and lows in the influence asserted by interior designers. What is different today? Doesn’t it feel like opportunity is increasing and more doors are opening?
Interior Design magazine's Georgina McWhirter takes a look at some pretty interesting office projects.
The key to increasing employee engagement, health, happiness and well-being lies in employers who establish a workplace culture of wellness, according to a study released Feb. 17 by Humana and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
With a huge amount of office space under construction in Ireland, a report finding that 11 per cent of employees are highly dissatisfied with their offices, and highly disengaged from their jobs as a result, makes interesting reading.
There’s been a lot of assumptions and predictions made about Millennials, and the upcoming generation of workers dubbed Gen Z. They’re alternately spoilt with a sense of entitlement or have a zeal for change and strong social conscience. So while there is a danger of stereotyping this diverse group, employers still need to work out the best way to attract and retain the most talented. Today’s graduates have enjoyed much higher quality university accommodation and facilities than previous generations, and the flexibility of the modern day campus is clearly influencing their work choices. Unlike the generation before them, recent graduates place double the importance on flexible work and work-life balance than they do on their earnings to chart their success. A Bright Network study of over 2,000 of the country’s top graduates also found that high priority was placed on a clear path for advancement over and above high earnings.
Haworth white papers: work is changing and workers are changing – so workplace design needs to change too to keep up. To kick off a series of articles in collaboration with Haworth, the office furniture giant's research head Michael O'Neill explains what the company is doing to help clients provide the ideal office (+ interview).
