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.
I'm not generally a fan of wall-mounted desks because it's often nicer to position as desk so the end user is not looking at the wall. But in some small spaces a wall-mounted desk is the best alternative. We've mentioned the Ledge from Urbancase before, but there are many more designs worth a look.
Love your job, but hate your office? For many of us, our physical workplace can be dark, depressing, bland and even dysfunctional. Windowless cubicle farms and airless open-plan floors can kill motivation and take a toll on worker performance, possibly even their health.
But a refreshing trend is taking root in workplace design: nature.
There’s a growing body of evidence showing that workplaces that incorporate natural elements, such as plants, light, colours and shapes, have noticeable — and measurable — benefits for both companies and their employees.
In a roundup of 2017 workplace trends, Forbes indicates millennials tend to leave after two years at an organization. As millennials – and soon Gen Z – workers become a larger percentage of today’s workforce, organizations now have a greater need to create better employee experiences that incentivize younger workers to stay. Office design is certainly part of this equation: in this month’s news aggregate, we explore the ways in which color, culture and branding are influencing modern workplace design.
Economist Tim Harford writes about a fascinating experiment to identify the most productive and inspiring office setup
The 5S system of management — Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize and Sustain — has long stood for efficiency through tidiness and uniformity. It began in precision manufacturing spaces; clutter was discouraged because it might cause errors and delays, as were distracting personal effects. But 5S has somehow bled from car assembly lines, operating theaters and semiconductor manufacturing plants, where it might make sense, to the office cubicle, where it does not.
Management gurus today sing the praises of the “lean office.” But in this vision, one can see a very simple mistake being made. It fails to realize that what makes a space comfortable and pleasant — and, to turn to the concerns of modern business, inspiring and productive — is not a sleek shell or a tastefully designed interior. Indeed, it may have very little to do with how a building looks at all.
The workplace is changing. Within the last five years or so, we’ve seen the office environment become more fluid and agile. The new workplace is an open environment and that’s largely made possible by technology. Technology is driving mobility. The tech-enabled mobile worker is free to migrate within the office, or even work from home when appropriate. With technology changing where and how we work, it follows that workplace designs must attune to an increasingly mobile workforce. This is somewhat disruptive; it’s different from the office we’re accustomed to with its assigned seating and private offices for those at a certain level within the hierarchy. In today’s workplace structure, that system has collapsed.
More and more businesses are recognizing the power of the workplace experience to drive employee performance and engagement. Global brand Airbnb, for example, has now renamed its head of human resources as “chief employee experience officer.” This is good news for workplace design and management professionals. We are well placed to capitalize on this shift in business opinion, but if we want to make a tangible impact, we need to bring practical solutions to the table. First and foremost, these need to be backed up by research. There have been few studies specifically into what makes a healthy and productive work environment. However, there are a number of research projects that examine how a human being’s surroundings impact their mood and behavior, and in particular how consumer environments shape customers’ perception of and engagement with a brand. As workplace professionals, we can learn a great deal from this consumer research and this is why workplace design and management teams should look towards consumer-facing industries for inspiration.
The enduring struggle to improve the working conditions and performance of people through the design and management of their workplaces has more than a whiff of the Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries about it. The Enlightenment marked a new era in which the old superstitions and dogmas were to be overthrown by pure reason. This intellectual development was seen by its proponents as enough to convince the world of the ways in which we could improve the human condition. It’s a battle that was won in some ways but which continues to this day, as you can tell from the work of the most prominent modern day evangelists of pure reason such as Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens and the enduring ability of people to believe palpable nonsense. You can see the same appeal to reason as firms and facilities managers make the case for a progressive approach to workplace design and management.
In case you still needed persuading that open-plan offices were devised by Satan himself in one of the deepest caverns of hell, the Harvard Business Review delves into new research showing just how frustrating people find them – and just how paltry, on the other side of the scale, are the benefits they bring. Using data from surveys of 42,700 American office workers, researchers Jungsoo Kim and Richard de Dear conclude that it’s not other people’s mess that bothers us the most, nor lack of personal space, nor even noise level per se, so much as a “lack of sound privacy” – hearing other people’s conversations, and perhaps equally crucially, knowing that other people can hear yours.
Anyone who’s experienced the paralysing self-consciousness of trying to conduct a sensitive phone call in the knowledge that four or five colleagues can follow every word won't be surprised by the results: almost 60% of cubicle workers and half of all those in fully open-plan offices cited lack of sound privacy as a frustration, making it the most prevalent annoyance by far. That cubicle-dwellers are even more likely to be bothered than their “partition-less” colleagues suggests it’s even worse when you can’t see who’s talking – or who might be listening in.
Advances in computer power, the explosion in smartphones and faster and near ubiquitous connectivity is connecting more devices and more people to the Internet. All of this is resulting in an explosion of data, which gives businesses unparalleled insight into their customers, powering machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Everyone involved, even remotely, in the world of the workplace can see that the pendulum has swung through the office. It has swept through, taking panel systems with it. In many places we are left with rows of workstations or benches. Employees are frequently elbow-to-elbow and nose-to-nose.
Read the comment sections on any article that discusses this trend and you would think that employees are ready to jump out the window to escape the sinister, dark intentions of their employers. “How can you value me so little?” “They are just trying to save money by cramming me into this awful environment.” “As soon as I find another job, I am out of here!”
As millennials continue to progress in their careers, the workplace conversation is already turning - designers are starting to plan for a new crop of young workers with divergent needs: Generation Z. With the first of this generation less than a year into their careers, the workplace community is mostly guessing. We are still figuring out how changes driven by the Millennial generation take form in physical space. That said, furniture makers, prepare: as Gen Z enters the office, more change is on the horizon. So, who is Generation Z and what types of offices will they need to succeed ... and, perhaps more importantly, how will these changes continue to impact the contract furniture industry? We spoke with several industry veterans to explore this topic.
Desk, computer, telephone – the classic office workstation is gathering a thick layer of dust. Working in the age of the fourth industrial revolution means having numerous devices, various applications and several data sources that can be accessed through different identities anytime, anywhere via the cloud. There is demand for new concepts that can cope with the growing variety of devices, whilst increasing productivity and motivation among employees at the same time. The future belongs to the “one workspace” concept.
In reality only 34 percent of all employee interaction occurs in a planned way, the vast majority occurs ad-hoc and spontaneously (most often around someone’s desk). Sorting things out as and when they arise improves productivity. This fact reinforces the need to focus more on those spaces that allow people to interact with others spontaneously rather than just design spaces for planned interaction.
Workplaces across the globe are suffering through a zombie apocalypse. These zombies don’t have ghoulish features or torn clothing, they look just like you or me. You can recognize these real-life-zombies by their mindless march throughout the day. They fixate on reaching the end of the workday as though it was a feast of brains.
Telltale signs of these zombie workers include their consistent lack of motivation to go above and beyond their basic job role and a disinterest in innovation or new ideas. Most frightening of all, you can see in them the most quintessential zombie characteristic – their ability to infect others. Their lack of morale and active disengagement in workplace culture can spread across the workforce like a pandemic. In a recent global study by Deloitte, “culture and engagement” was rated the number one challenge affecting businesses in the world. The menace is real!
Traditional office environments are a breeding ground for this worker zombie epidemic. At Perkins+Will, we understand that work environments and workplace culture play a vital role in promoting and enhancing workplace engagement, banishing office zombies. The shift from traditional work environments to high-performance workplaces is the cure to this epidemic.
Great design offices stand out. Reflecting a firm’s character and process, these spaces serve as a framework for building new ideas. While they may be housed within simple, rectilinear forms, design studios are organized to support analysis and encourage creative ideation. Few cities represent the diversity of design offices like Los Angeles. As a place where progressive forms and spatial multiplicity coexist, the City of Angels is filled with widely different studio designs and layouts. Though they can be hermetic in nature, these projects provide room for experimentation and promote critical engagement.
Building off our two recent articles that examined multi-unit housing and residential projects, the following collection explores office designs across Los Angeles. Built specifically for architects, designers and engineers, these projects are formed as creative workplaces. From model-making spaces and varied height workstations to collaboration rooms, the projects were created to showcase design. Each were made with forms and programs that reveal company culture while reimagining ways of working. Join us as we take an inside look at some of LA’s most dynamic design offices.
As well as sorting out our online world, Google has played a big part in changing the way we think about workspace – not least as an early adopter of the office slide. Now, with Project Jack, its unassuming modular meeting room concept, the tech giant is starting another stealth revolution in the office.
Even to the “civilian” outside the world of workplace, Google has long been a byword for the next big thing. Its latest development in interiors can be big or small, enclosed or open, and comes in a range of colour, texture and finish options that would make Henry Ford turn in his grave. It’s a deceptively simple modular meeting room concept called Project Jack and is one of the central components of Google’s King’s Cross headquarters at 6 Pancras Square in London – with the potential to make an impact not just on the tech giant’s locations around the world but also to have further-reaching implications for office design in other industries.
Sustainable competitive advantage requires relentless adaptation in the way a company serves its clients and its employees. Too often, companies place employee workflows and experiences on the back burner. It’s difficult to create an innovative workplace if a company’s employees are using tools designed in the 1980s.
Successful companies know the best way to serve their customers is to provide market leading workplace experiences that execute on three fronts – culture, process, and technology. What’s often forgotten is how technology can play a vital role in cultural enablement.
If you think your workplace won’t change much in the next five years, think again. Winners of the “Tomorrow’s Workplace” design competition from Staples Business Advantage and Metropolis magazine forecast that in 2021, the workplace may include inflatable pods set up in urban parks, or young professionals working alongside active retirees in a setting that resembles a small town more than an office building.
In a series demystifying the project process, radioIA host Russell Manthy explores the second design project phase with Principal and Design Director John Hopkins.
Of all the memes and narratives that corrupt public discourse about workplace design, the most pernicious is the one that suggests there is a linear evolution to some grand end point called the Office of the Future. There is a natural human inclination to buy this sort of idea, fed by an assumption that what we find most interesting, aspirational and hence what we read and talk about forms a goal. Read any style magazine and you’ll see the same process at work in every facet of our lives. This is why so many people are quick to consume and then regurgitate the idea that what we see happening in the world’s great tech palaces and creative offices represents the apogees of design to which the rest of us must one day succumb. It rests on misguided assumptions about what really goes on in such offices and what these assumptions mean for firms in other sectors. It is the great apex fallacy of workplace design and it is one we must constantly challenge.
