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.
What is active design? How is it implemented in the workplace? What are the benefits? Featured in this interview: Jonathan Webb, VP of Sales and Marketing - Workplace Strategy at KI, Shawn Green, VP of Design and Product Marketing at KI, Rob Kirkbride of Bellow Press, Nila Leiserowitz of Gensler, and Mark Hirons of CannonDesign.
Buildings and space that anticipate your needs. Collaboration with robots. Cafes, parks, and airports as the new office. Sound far-fetched? Workplaces are evolving more rapidly than ever and employers have seen dramatic shifts in where, when, and how employees work. Ten years from now, your workplace may well be unrecognizable from the office you use today. Work is becoming more digital, and yet in need of a more humanized experience.
Via workdesign.com > [paywall]
Following the announcement in September that Apple was to reaffirm its commitment to the UK with a major investment in the creation of a new headquarters building in London, the latest global tech giant to follow suit is Google. The firm has confirmed it is to open a new HQ in the capital which will see 3,000 jobs created by 2020. In an interview with the BBC, chief executive Sundar Pichai claimed that he is confident that the UK Government will not be throwing up barriers to the movement of skilled labour in the wake of the Brexit vote. Based on this he is moving ahead with the Thomas Heatherwick designed £1 billion Kings Cross development that will allow the firm to expand its UK workforce to 7,000 people. Heatherwick has previously worked with Google alongside Bjarke Ingels Group on the design of their Mountain View headquarters in California. He was drafted in to work on the London project after a previous design was rejected because it was ‘boring’.
Looks like the Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick tag team is working out: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that BIG and Heatherwick Studios will continue their collaboration to build another Google headquarters, this time in London’s King’s Cross.
If the Dynamic Duo’s Mountain View extension is any indication, the ten story, 650,000-square-foot project promises to be, at the very least, “interesting.”
It will be the first wholly-owned and Google-designed building outside of the U.S. and will be a part of the tech giant’s growing 67-acre campus, which expects to eventually accommodate 7,000 employees across three offices spanning over one million square feet.
There is a witch hunt on in the workplace. “Open plan” has become a dirty word and the national press are leading the mob in vilifying this so-called scourge. The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and Business Week have all reported that “we can’t get anything done in an open-plan office” as it affects our concentration, our performance and our health. These news items are all damning, but perhaps not as damming as the Wikipedia entry on open plan which states: “A systematic survey of research upon the effects of open plan offices found frequent negative effects in some traditional workplaces: high levels of noise, stress, conflict, high blood pressure and a high staff turnover… Most people prefer closed offices… there is a dearth of studies confirming positive impacts on productivity from open plan office designs”.
Today’s leaders are walking a path filled with greater obstacles and more frequent hurdles than ever before. The previous top-down management style is no longer keeping up with a global business climate requiring agility and innovation.
The Steelcase Global Report: Engagement and the Global Workplace revealed that one-third of employees in 17 of the most important global economies are disengaged. Yet, traditional leadership patterns remain. The Global Report found that 58 percent of executives still work in private offices compared to only 23 percent of employees. While leadership environments such as executive suites remain the norm, Steelcase found that many leaders are taking advantage of technology and mobility to work outside of their traditional office. They know they can’t afford to be isolated from employees who have their fingers on the pulse of the everyday challenges and opportunities in the organization.
Many of us have ways of framing our ideas about the workplace with reference to the things we love. Because I am a Harry Potter fan that means developing notions of Hogwarts and what it says about how the school building influences teaching and learning practices. J K Rowling’s universe offers rich pickings for this sort of thing and in the case of this feature provides us with an example of how we might consider the current state of thinking about the flexible workspace. One of Rowling’s brilliant ideas is the Room of Requirements. For the uninitiated, this is a room that presents itself to someone in need in exactly the shape and form required at the time including all furniture and fittings. Most often it appeared at Hogwarts for students in need to hide stuff, but Harry and his friends also used it for their secret society meetings to practice defence against the dark arts, for example.
Many people today hate cubicles and see them as an outdated part of the office that confines and traps employees. But the history of the cubicle is quite interesting.
Features such as baristas, sky terraces and fine dining will continue a process of transformation at the workplaces of Australia’s leading law firms over the next few years, claims a study by Melbourne based architecture practice Bates Smart. The report claims that the legal workplaces of today are are already unrecognisable compared to what was considered typical yesterday, having more in common with a five star hotel than a traditional office. Bates Smart predicts an even greater shift towards flexibility, collaboration and hospitality from legal firms in the future with the publication of four key findings in its new whitepaper, The Legal Workplace 2020, The report analyses trends in over 135,000 sq. m. of legal practice workplaces and draws conclusions that are indicative of key trends for law firms and the wider market alike.
The dot-com boom led to the birth of the campus space, as workers lived out the bulk of their lives on company property, with their every need catered for. Yet fashion is cyclical, and demand is now spiking for smaller, more flexible spaces with built-in intimacy. The upcoming London HQ for Wolff Olins exemplifies the shift away from desks and meeting rooms towards a more collaborative spirit, reusing and recycling old office equipment wherever possible, while Morgan Lovell’s new office for Taylor Wimpey evokes the upscale domestic arrangements of the developer’s clientele.
The International Interior Design Association (IIDA) and the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association (BIFMA) have released Design Leveraged, Volume II, the second in a three-part series, which makes the case that good design makes a meaningful impact on employee satisfaction and has a positive effect on a company's bottom line. The report highlights new survey findings that provide commercial interior designers with the hard data they need to demonstrate the ROI of an office redesign to C-level executives. More than 1,200 U.S.-based office workers participated in the survey, which showcases the stark differences between employees who are satisfied with their workplaces versus those who are not.
The biggest factor is the move toward public and collaborative spaces in practically all markets. Booths provide a number of advantages in these environments, including their ability to serve as a natural divider of space. By establishing natural barriers, booths provide an easy way to create zones within large spaces. Booths also can make a work or study environment feel more like a social destination, helping to spur creativity, comfort and collaboration that can lead to better productivity. The emphasis many employers place on collaboration is the biggest reason for the growth in booth seating installations in the corporate market. The importance of socialization has led to the introduction of stand-up height booths, which make it easy for communication within a group whether people want to sit, stand, or to briefly join the conversation.
Your company’s office layout might be unfair to women, reports Fast Company. A "Women in the Workplace" study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. suggests that the squared off, segmented space that describes most office layouts favors the hierarchy working style men prefer. Women, by comparison, work best in open spaces, which they view as more congenial.
At its simplest, an agile workplace is one that successfully balances the people, places and processes of its organization. And when the balance is off, an agile workplace can adapt. It provides the room and resources that occupants need, or flexes to meet them when it doesn't.
The key to adaptability, of course, is knowing when the balance is off and having the insight to back your adjustments. Knowing how people use your space—through utilization studies and careful monitoring—is critical to innovation. It's the data that creative ideas spring from.
What makes an office cool? How about a rooftop deck that provides a stunning view of the city skyline? And what if that outdoor deck features floor-to-ceiling glass?
That’s the key amenity that helped bring Grand Rapids, Michigan-based law firm Miller Johnson Attorneys to the Arena Place mixed-use development in the heart of downtown Grand Rapids.
Miller Johnson Attorneys moved into the space in the summer of this year, leasing the building’s top four floors, a total of 60,000 square feet.
Scott Morgan, senior vice president with Colliers West Michigan, said that Miller Johnson has already hosted several receptions and events on the outdoor deck area. The deck, he says, is just one of the many features that attracted the law firm to this space.
The office watercooler days are long gone, and in its place are platforms like Slack, Toggle, and Facebook Messenger. With the rise of our increasingly mobile and connected relationships comes new ways of working. If we take a moment to look around us in any urban city, we’ll see the future of work all over: at our local coffee shop, brimming with entrepreneurs dialing clients, on the sidewalks, where teams are taking their walking status meeting, across open-office spaces, where employees roam freely. With these new standards for office culture, creating opportunities for professional relationships to develop and collaboration to occur is more integral than ever to an organization’s success.
According to a Google For Work Study released in 2016, 73% of employees think their organization would be more successful if they were able to work in a more flexible and collaborative way. As the needs and expectations of employees continue to evolve, companies are building and protecting spaces—virtually and in the office—to help colleagues connect, offer mentorship, and share expertise.
Personal desks haven’t disappeared entirely, but working at one day-in and day-out is on a dramatic decline. Like other major companies, Deloitte has gone all-in with the work-anywhere revolution. For years, the world’s largest accounting firm has been rethinking how offices of the future should look and function, and finding the best ways to keep employees happy and engaged.
Now they are transforming their vast global network of offices into fully realized open-concept hubs. The latest to open is in Toronto, housed in a newly constructed podium building designed by KPMB Architects and architects of record Adamson Associates and ERA Architects.
As office space options have evolved, so have tenants’ expectations. Not only do tenants want a space they can easily access and can grow in, but a space that epitomizes their brand.
This doesn’t just boil down to splashy paint, but everything from the electrical systems to the windows to the amenities needs to match a company’s perceived identity.
Finding and designing such spaces is BuzzFeed corporate real estate and facilities senior director Gabrielle Rubin Deveaux’s bread and butter. She didn’t find BuzzFeed’s current NYC digs, but she was tasked with designing and building it and helping the new media juggernaut move to it, all within 12 months.
That’s a lot to accomplish, but Gabrielle—who will be a panelist at Bisnow's Big NYC Office Event next week—tells us she was able to get significant headway when she asked BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti for three adjectives the space needed to embody.
A desk is like a home away from home for many in the working world.
Family photos, trinkets from a vacation, an extra pair of shoes or spare chopsticks are just some of the things routinely left lying around in what has become personal space.
But that comes at a price for companies, particularly in cities like London or New York, where the cost of real estate is at a premium, and at a time when workers are more mobile than ever.
In its newly opened building in central London, the Swiss banking giant UBS is looking to change the way employees view their relationship with their work spaces.
Many of its employees at 5 Broadgate in the City of London will no longer be tied to the same desk every day with a telephone and desktop computer. Instead, the company has deployed so-called thin desks throughout the building.
Phone handsets were replaced by personal headsets, and employees can log onto their virtual desktops on computers at any desk in the building or at home. There are no laptops to lug around, and their phone numbers follow them from desk to desk or to their mobile devices.
Every year I give my top 10 workplace trend predictions for the upcoming year. You can read my predictions from 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 if you missed them. These trends are based on hundreds of conversations with human resource executives and workers, a series of national and global online surveys and secondary research from more than 160 different primary and secondary research sources, including think tanks, consulting companies, non-profits, the government and trade associations.
Between 2016 and 2017, the job market will continue to improve causing both job seekers and employees to have more leverage, which will cause salaries to increase and employers to invest more job advertising, staffing firms and employee benefits. Depending on who becomes the next president of the United States, hiring may freeze, slow or continue its current trajectory. The demand for a more flexible work environment will continue and you will see an emergence of HR practitioners with new skills, including people analytics, Internet marketing, branding and knowledge on new technologies like virtual reality and wearables.
