Any workplace optimization strategy needs to start with your business drivers. And for many today, the key driver for success is talent. How to attract the best, yes, but more importantly, how to keep them happy when they’re on board.

While it’s easy to chalk the talent war up to a competition for Millennials, it’s important to understand that the reason attracting younger employees is so important is because there are so many more of them than anyone else. Millennials in the workforce outnumber Gen-Xers two-to-one, and Baby Boomers are retiring by the thousands every day.

Via officerenew.com >

“You can’t always get what you want,” sang the Rolling Stones. It’s true in life and no less true in the workplace environment, particularly when it comes to amenities. But a smart and strategic approach to amenity selection and design can result in something much better: you get what you need.

The idea that amenities can help in recruiting and retaining top talent has resulted in a veritable corporate keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competition, with companies trying to one-up one another with over-the-top perks. “I’ll match your fitness center with a climbing wall and raise you a kegerator.”

But no matter how lavish the amenities, they’ll prove ineffective in making any kind of positive impact if they don’t align to a company’s culture and the characteristics that make an organization unique.

Instead of wasting time and money copying what others are doing, the solution is to build a sustainable environment that truly works for the company and its employees. This can be readily achieved by approaching amenity selection and design through a framework of three critical factors: location, wellbeing and culture.

Via gensleron.com >

Companies are built on products and services, but sustained by culture. Culture establishes the context and values for how people communicate, engage and work together and with their customers. This has always been true, but the significance of culture is increasingly being recognized as a critical differentiator that gives organizations a sustainable, strategic advantage. 

Via studiotk.com >

Noisy, open-floor plans have become a staple of office life. But after years of employee complaints, companies are trying to quiet the backlash.

Many studies show how open-plan office spaces can have negative effects on employees and productivity. As a result, companies are adding soundproof rooms, creating quiet zones and rearranging floor plans to appeal to employees eager to escape disruptions at their desk.

Companies are “not providing sufficient variety in spaces,” says David Lehrer, a researcher at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Lehrer studies the impact of office designs on employees, and lack of “speech privacy” is currently a significant problem, he says. Employees in open-plan offices are less likely to be satisfied with their offices than employees in a traditional office layout, Mr. Lehrer adds.

Via wsj.com >

When a tech company recently came to Stefano Schiavon at the University of California, Berkeley to test an air-conditioning system for its office, his mind went to flip-flops. The new system would blast cool air from the floor rather than the ceiling, and this being the Bay Area, and this being a tech company, Schiavon figured he couldn’t use the same old models researchers have been using since the 70s to study thermal comfort. (Yes, that is the name for the academic study of maintaining a building at just the right temperature.)

He needed to test people in flip-flops.

Feet, it turns out, are exquisitely sensitive to temperature. When you get cold, the blood vessels in your extremities are the first to constrict, which is your body’s way of preventing more heat loss. “You feel uncomfortable because your feet get numb or getting close to numb,” says Edward Arens, an architect at the University of Berkeley, who also studies thermal comfort. If building managers could heat or cool the feet alone, they could cut energy and costs. So at Berkeley, researchers are focusing on thermal comfort from the feet up.

Via theatlantic.com >