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 use of view glass and the size of floorplates are changing, but just as much drywall is being used in open-office floor plans as in traditional ones, USAA Real Estate Co.’s executive managing director Dirk Mosis tells GlobeSt.com.
From the cubicle to open offices to coworking, offices are changing—and the outdoor office is one of the next frontiers.
Workforces, both in the US and globally, are in flux and today’s new realities unveil opportunities for creative solutions. Outdoor offices are one piece of the puzzle, and from Silver Spring, Md., to Amsterdam they are already impacting local markets and giving people a place to get away from the office and enjoy a beautiful day outside — all while working.
In the knowledge economy, where communication technology allows the workforce to be completely mobile, are corporate offices going extinct?
Some statistics would suggest the answer is yes. Many Canadians want to bid their offices goodbye. A 2014 Conference Board of Canada study found that more than 70 per cent of full-time workers aged 18 to 29 would be more satisfied in their jobs if they could work remotely using cloud software.
There is no question that technology provides full mobility for many workers, yet personal interaction remains a fundamental source of innovation in knowledge-based businesses, facilitates creativity and smoother workflow, and builds employees’ sense of identity vis-à-vis the firm.
How many people in your office have some form of disability? You might be surprised. An estimated one out of every three employees has a special need requiring accommodation, and most simply make do as best they can with the workplace they have. The good news is that more companies are going well beyond American Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements, and proactively creating offices that enable people of all abilities to be as productive as possible. In this article, JLL‘s Kim Vanderland and Bernice Boucher explain how you can design for employees of all abilities in your workplace.
It is a different mindset that the corporate real estate, facility managers, and companies need to have about the willingness to keep their space fresh. I'll give you an example, can you imagine if an IT guy came in and said 'here is your phone, good luck, see you in ten years.' You'd laugh! There are going to be ten different versions of this phone that's going to come out in the next several years. Well, in a sense that is what is happening with how we work as well. The traditional real estate model of, 'here is your space, good luck, see you in ten years.' That doesn't work anymore and I don't think most companies have fully embraced that yet.
A recent study conducted by Dodge Data & Analytics with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) has found that architects and building owners are beginning to place higher priority of the impacts of design decisions on human health. Nearly 75% of architects and 67% of owners responded that health considerations now play a role in how their buildings are designed, indicating that healthy environments have become an important tool in marketing to tenants and consumers.
For the average job-seeker or any parent wondering what kind of livelihood awaits the next generation, the current headlines are the stuff of anxiety attacks. In June, the Associated Press announced that it would begin using an automated writing service to cover more than 10,000 minor league baseball games each year. Driverless trucks may soon be taking over from humans, elbowing out an entire profession. New technology purports to bring great change to a surprising number of fields, including law, medicine and financial services. What will be the human toll and net effect on the economy? Has the U.S. reached an epoch of irreversible job loss?
A good story engages people, is relatable, and connects people to the content or the message. Storytelling is a key leadership tool in some of the most successful companies. For example, 3M has banned bullet points and replaced them with a process for writing strategic narratives, according to Dan Schawbel in Forbes Magazine. P&G has hired Hollywood movie directors to teach senior executives how to lead with storytelling. While the verbal art of storytelling is no doubt a key to making presentations in the design world, a story can also be visually conveyed with graphics and the use of space through the design process.
Stale air. Outdated lighting that’s a little too light. Stuffy, tired workspaces that used to be inspiring. Every office needs a makeover now and then, and that can mean a perfect chance not only to refresh the office experience and renew employee engagement — but also to re-green. Yes, re-green: after all, sustainability features have come a long way, too. Overwhelming evidence tells us that green office space is not only a win for the planet and your bottom line (think: energy savings), but also offers important employee health and wellness benefits.
Today’s classrooms and offices are catering to a different world, a world driven by the Internet, smart phones, and other innovations unimaginable during the Industrial Revolution. There is also new research available that points to more effective approaches in teaching and learning.
Educators have realized that learning is more effective when students are engaged with one another (active learning) rather than when students sit and watch a lecture (passive learning). Retention rates are significantly higher when students are working together in collaborative, hands-on experiences. At the heart of active, project-based learning is the effort to develop students’ non-cognitive skills. These social/emotional skills — including communication, collaboration, creativity, perseverance and critical thinking — are uniquely fostered by this kind of active learning.
Throughout history, new technologies have constantly changed the way we’ve worked. They’ve been responsible for full-scale revolutions. And continued investments have come as corporate demand for worker productivity drives tech spending.
We should expect augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to eventually attract increased spending in the enterprise as they combine with new mobile network advancements to make an emerging trend called “productive mobility” a reality.
Productive mobility is about being as productive out of the office as inside, and as productive in a virtual instance as a physical one.
Tech companies see the workplace as a physical experience that serves as an extension of brand and culture. A company dictates the brand, but the individuals dictate the culture, and when the two merge, it creates a style that is authentically them. By moving towards designed spaces that are much more purposeful and memorable, tech companies are placing focus on the high caliber of their work and their employees.
Many organizations are making fundamental shifts in their workplaces and, often, these environments haven’t changed in 10 years, 20 years, or more. For those companies, change is not incremental—it is transformational. A new workplace can constitute a significant investment in real estate, and bring to bear results of many layers of decisions. This is where pilots come in. The results these test environments produce can illuminate ways for organizations to stay agile and dynamic in our rapidly changing world.
For many businesses, a new workplace must support the organization as they evolve and thrive in the global economy, as well as attract and retain the talent that is a primary force behind any company’s success. When starting the process of a new workplace project, corporations face the question: How much change is appropriate? With the guidance of their corporate real estate teams companies must weigh the risks associated with all degrees of change.
The open office trend is growing in popularity worldwide. However, huge numbers of workplaces still have private offices.
If you’ve got a private office, chances are you spend the majority of your head-down work time in isolation, without the social or collaborative benefits offered by an open office. This makes it even more important to design your office specifically to address common workplace health and wellness concerns (both physical and emotional).
In late May, eight employees of Mayo Clinic's medical-records department packed up their belongings, powered down their computers and moved into a brand new office space in the heart of Rochester, Minnesota. There, they made themselves at home — hanging up Walt Disney World calendars, arranging their framed dog photos and settling back into the daily rhythms of office life.
Then, researchers started messing with them. They cranked the thermostat up — and then down. They changed the colour temperature of the overhead lights and the tint of the large, glass windows. They played irritating office sounds through speakers embedded in the ceilings: a ringing phone, the clack of computer keys, a male voice saying, “medical records”, as if answering the phone.
Organizations in every industry are realizing that their people are their most important assets, and their workplace must be optimized for them. We have more than 20,000 policyholders across the Eastern Seaboard, and as MEMIC’s chief ergonomist I see the impact of poor workspace design on the bodies of employees and the bottom lines of companies as productivity decreases and healthcare and insurance costs — including workers’ compensation costs — rise.
Workers in open-plan offices are more distracted, unfriendly and uncollaborative than those in traditional workplaces, according to the latest industry survey.
Employees who have to share their office with more than two people experience high levels of colleague distrust and form fewer co-worker friendships than those working in single-occupancy offices, according to the new report from Auckland University of Technology.
Take a moment to think about the first desktop computer you used in a professional setting. Chances are, it was a lifeless taupe or black box and clunky keyboard attached to a bulky computer screen that weighed more than a healthy teenager, all connected with a pile of cords that looked like a plate of spaghetti.
“Now,” said computer designers to the office furniture industry, “build something to hold this stuff. And while you are at it, manage all those cords and the the power needed to run it all.”
That’s the point when furniture became nothing more than a prop for technology tools. I recently looked through a book on workplace designs from the mid-1980s. I immediately wanted to assign blame for the sea of cubicles and sterile office chairs found in that era of the office. Should we blame the office furniture makers for creating lifeless panel systems? Perhaps it is better to blame the interior design industry for bastardizing the products the industry created and applying them in the wrong way?
For companies, a strengthening economy has many pros and, surprisingly, a few potential cons. Booming business means increased capital and the ability to bring on new team members. At the same time, office leasing rates are climbing. Offices rental rates in downtown Fort Lauderdale have reached $36 per square foot and rates in Miami’s Brickell area are climbing as high as $45 per square foot.
Because we are now so immersed in technology, we can sometimes forget just how young the Internet is. It was only in 1995 that the final barriers to its full commercial development were removed. In 1994, the number of people using it worldwide was estimated at around 20 million, there were under 15,000 company websites and the UK had one ‘cybercafe’. Even so, there was something in the air. A sense that everything was about to change – and change pretty spectacularly. The management writer Charles Handy was outlining a new world of work in which people developed portfolio careers, organisations were formed from ‘shamrocks’ of freelancers, core staff and part time employees, a world in which half the people would work twice as hard. There was excited talk about new forms of office design and ways of working such as telecommuting and hot desking. The world that emerged has broadly followed the trajectory of these forecasts, even if the details have proved very different.
