As work changes, the workplace has to change to keep up with it. As professional expectations expand to include mobile and remote productivity, offices are having to serve not only as permanent workspace installations, but as “hotel” or temporary touchdown spaces for staff on their way to or from somewhere else. Creating flexible, functional spaces that enhance productivity while retaining a grounded sense of collaborative purpose is a goal for all organizations. There are some core principles to remember when designing and implementing workspaces and interiors to meet the needs of mobile workers; bear them in mind from the start of your project and you will end up with happy end-users and a balanced budget.
The Surprising Truth About Choice
Discovering the unexpected is typically a joy in research—as well as one of the reasons to conduct research in the first place. But the discovery of unexpected insights can also be puzzling, as it forces researchers to confront surprising circumstances and theorize explanations for findings they never anticipated.
That was certainly the case with Gensler’s 2016 U.S. Workplace Survey. When we first launched the survey, we expected choice—a person’s ability to choose where they work—to be on the rise. Our 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey had found that one in three respondents had choice at their places of employment. This made sense, considering the proliferation of mobile technology that has made working at Starbucks or from home or from a conference room as straightforward and doable as working at the same desk every single day. Technology gives us the power to check emails from home in the middle of the night and to collaborate in real time with colleagues all around world. And because choice empowers a person to work in whatever style they find most conducive to success, we expected our 2016 survey to show that more organizations are offering choice to their employees.
The very idea of a universal workplace is seriously flawed
The debate around designing a workplace that works for millennials and now Gen Z is a public one. Every week a new article highlights what is required to create a workplace that millennials want. However for large companies with a diverse workforce, more than the desires of just one generation must be considered to make the workforce effective. Is it possible to create a universal workforce that can work across generations to serve the needs of all employees, and should that be the goal for workplace design? Right now, we know that tech firms are drawing more top talent than they did before. It can be seen in the a comparison of Harvard MBAs in 2007 and again in 2014 that went into banking (13 percent down to 5 percent) vs tech (up from 7 percent to 17 percent). Following their lead, broader design has shifted to adopt a tech feel in their own offices, with open layouts trending upwards. Office amenities from ping pong tables to slides are also rising as companies try to bring a fresh approach to the workplace.
Zoom video conferencing service raises $100 million from Sequoia on billion dollar valuation
Zoom, the cloud video conferencing service, announced a $100 million Series D round, entirely funded by Sequoia. The company now boasts a $1 billion valuation, putting it in the vaunted unicorn club.
It also announced a significant update to the product that includes the ability for customers and third parties to build applications on top of the Zoom platform.
The company, which was cash-flow positive last quarter, had previously raised $45.5 million. It actually wasn’t even looking for funding, according CEO Eric S. Yuan, when Sequoia came knocking. Sequoia had been looking for a company in the video conferencing space when it heard about Zoom from its portfolio clients.
5 Must Have Office Amenities
Sure you want a good location and fun colleagues, but office amenities or the lack thereof can make or break your day. We’ve chosen the must have amenities that people are requesting in 2017. But don’t take our word for it, we’ve just added over 20 amenities you can filter by, making finding the right spot for you and your team a breeze.
A Workplace That Works: The Importance of a Well-Designed Workspace
It might sound strange to say that we spend more time with our colleagues than we do our families, but this really is true for most people. If you work a standard eight-hour day, you’re spending a huge amount of your time ‘at the office,’ so you have a right to expect a pleasant work environment.
This is true whether you’re the boss of the company, a mid-level player, or on the janitorial team. We all just want to feel happy at work. Office architecture and design have a big impact on productivity and satisfaction levels. Good workplace design speeds up daily routines minimises downtime, and fosters positive energy.
So, if you’re looking for a way to take your business to the next level in 2017, invest in contemporary workplace designs and office fitouts.
Why Open Offices are Bad for Us
Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office.
His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.
In April 2015, about three years after moving into the open office, Nagele moved the company into a 10,000-square foot office where everyone now has their own space — complete with closing doors.
How Open Office Plans Affect Workplace Productivity
Open office spaces have initiated the halcyon days of productivity. Or they’re a harbinger of workplace productivity doom. It all depends on whom you ask.
Open offices were meant to be the antidote to the woes of cubicle dwelling — a friendlier, more efficient and generally more human workplace. And while these office setups do come with some benefits, they’re also not without their shortcomings. As a result, open office plans have received a fair amount of backlash in recent years.
So do open office plans help productivity, or do they inhibit it? Turns out the answer is both.
Survey finds link between office design, innovation
In the early 20th century, much like today, city planners were preoccupied with how they were going to accommodate an influx of people in urban centres, said Annie Bergeron, design director, Gensler. However, unlike today, the planners were thinking about how they would deal with all the horses that would surely accompany the new arrivals to power the popular mode of transportation of the time: the buggy. That is, until the T-model Ford arrived.
“We hear a lot about the driverless car and the impact that’s going to have,” said Bergeron. “Whenever I hear that, I think back on those guys that were trying to plan for manure removal and big barns … this is the technology we know today, and that’s our current perception, so it might not be.”
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE WORKPLACE OF THE FUTURE
The first in a series of articles about the workplace of the future by Jodi Williams, an associate vice president at CallisonRTKL.
One of the most popular questions we hear is: what is the workplace of the future? We are not futurists, but we are strategists, designers, and workers ourselves. While we cannot definitively say what the workplace of the future will entail, we can, with a reasonable amount of certainty, make predictions for the next five years and offer overall trends and direction for what we expect to see over the upcoming 10 to 25 years (even futurists get it wrong sometimes).
In order to discuss the workplace of the future, it is important to understand that the workplace is bigger than a set of desks and collaborative spaces or the strategies surrounding their use.
The New Age of the Tech-Enabled Workplace
Together, Millennials and today’s technology are reshaping and humanizing tomorrow’s world of work.
With 10,000-12,000 Baby Boomers retiring daily, workforce demographics are rapidly changing. By 2025, Millennials will represent 75 percent of the workforce. While it’s counter-intuitive, there’s a craving for human-friendly spaces amidst the digitization of work and unprecedented advances in workplace technology—and the demands are coming largely from Millennials. The following are five tech-driven trends illustrating how organizations are upping their workplace game to win the war for talent.
The Way A Space Feels Is Just As Important As The Way It Looks
Once upon a time the average work environment was very impersonal and lacked connotation. Now, all over the world the idea of what a professional work environment should be has evolved. Coupled with the way that people work within these environments. Organizations realized that designing a space that is conducive to its employee’s well-being, creativity as well as their potential, is of high importance. When the traditional workspace became obsolete, so did the idea of what a quality workspace looked and felt like. The feel of an environment has become an equally important component when designing a space.
Seven workplace resolutions for 2017
2016 saw more companies look to their physical office as a strategic way to engage and attract talent, cultivate personality and stay competitive. No matter where you are in your workplace journey—just renovated, just thinking about it, or just not sure—here are seven things to consider as you improve your workplace and your employees’ experience in 2017.
Google Got it Wrong. How Open Plan Offices Ruin Our Productivity
We have seen a rise in the number of office refurbishments over the last couple of years, most of them – not surprisingly – are open plan offices. Praised for creating an inclusive environment, open plan offices are now even incorporated in more conservatives institutes. In an effort to bond the team and invent new ways to collaborate and exchange ideas in more productive fashion, the companies of all sizes are moving toward the open plan offices. Google did it after all, why shouldn’t everyone else?
After the first celebratory drinks’ stains are dry cleaned off the new carpets and the novelty of the new office wears off, everyone who embraces the idea of open office too hastily, will soon discover that the office staff is getting distracted too much too often. While employees might feel like they are part a of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.
Inside The R&D Lab Where Uber Is Building "The City Of The Future"
Self-driving cars are no longer a far-flung prophecy; they're descending upon our roads, dominating conversations about the future of mobility, and becoming a fascinating urban and UX design problem. Uber has been behind some of the biggest autonomous driving pushes—and blunders—in the past year and conducts much of its research, development, and mad-scientist experiments from its Advanced Technologies Group Center in Pittsburgh.
The gleaming new office and machine shop designed by Assembly, a new architecture firm based in San Francisco, was conceived as a celebration of technology. Eric Meyhofer, who heads autonomous vehicle ventures at Uber, told the firm: "I want you to be able to worship the car. I want you to know the tangible thing you are creating, that you are building the city of the future," says Denise Cherry, one of Assembly's principals. "We took that idea to mean celebrating the city, which is integral to Uber's culture: You’re building the city of the future, which is this highly evolved robotic thing in what’s formerly the City of Steel."
Four-hundred employees now work at the 98,600-square-foot office located on the banks of the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh's Lawrenceville neighborhood. The structure was formerly a Restaurant Depot. Assembly mostly worked on the interiors' look and feel while Strada, the architect of record, redesigned the shell and worked with Uber's engineers on the layout of the heavy-duty machine shop areas.
Strategy in 2017: Climates in the Workplace
The design philosophy at IA integrates qualitative and quantitative research to develop a workplace strategy that informs our design decisions. During our process, we use a systematic approach when analyzing the integrated management of people, place, processes, and culture. Because, as we like to state, data + design = positive business outcomes.
Defining what we see for 2017, autonomy and resilience will be two of the driving forces of change to the social, political, economic, and technological climates and their inherent impact on the workplace ecosystem.
3 OFFICE SPACES THAT IMPROVE CONCENTRATION AND SUPPORT SOLO WORK
They’re sometimes called in-between spaces: those flexible places in the office that employees or guests can claim as their own when they’re between meetings or simply need a change of scenery. These areas may be enclosed or more exposed. They can resemble a living room, a library, a coffee bar, a gazebo, a reading nook, a porch—the design options are almost endless. But what these diverse spaces have in common is they give workers options. They’re onsite alternatives that let people retreat from the group when they need to relax and rejuvenate, or focus on heads-down work.
Workplace design can combat ill effects of winter on workers’ mental wellbeing
The January blues are well documented but aside from the usual clichés which abound around this time of year, there is some evidence of the impact of winter on people’s mental health and wellbeing, According to a new survey from Peldon Rose over two-fifths (44 percent) of employees say winter has a negative effect on their mental wellbeing, half (51 percent) believe it adversely affects their mood and 30 percent state winter affects their productivity. Over a third of respondents (35 percent) even identify themselves as suffering or having suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – a type of depression that becomes more severe in the winter and three-quarters (76 percent) have experienced or are currently experiencing stress in the workplace. But the report concludes, effective workplace design can help combat some of these ill effects.
NBBJ Designs Lush Nature 'Spheres' for Amazon's $4 Billion Urban Campus in Seattle
SEATTLE - Of all of Amazon.com 's transformations of Seattle's urban core, perhaps no single project has drawn as much curiosity as the glass domes now slowly emerging.
The fruit of a bold design, the so-called Spheres will serve as a haven of carefully tended nature geared to letting Amazonians break free from their cubicles and think disruptive thoughts. It's an internet-era, Pacific Rim answer to the architecturally astounding gardens set up by European monarchs during the Enlightenment era.
The structures are also the architectural crown jewel of Amazon's $4 billion investment in building an urban campus, an eye-catching landmark that symbolizes the rise of what 20 years ago was a fledging online bookstore into a global e-commerce and cloud-computing leviathan.
The Office Where HBO Is Incubating Its Next Big Idea
When HBO was founded in 1974, home entertainment involved network television and renting movies. Cable was an exciting novelty. How things would change in the coming decades. In the on-demand world of today, we can tune into the ol' boob tube, subscribe to any number of streaming services, access premium channels à la carte, and watch shows and movies on our phones, tablets, and computers. To keep pace, entertainment companies have had to innovate, and the pressure is more intense than ever to keep audiences engaged and happy.
In 2012, HBO announced the formation of HBO Code Labs, a software-engineering arm based in Seattle—a strategic move to tap into the Pacific Northwest's tech scene—to help the company stay fresh. Since then, Code Labs has created new experiences for the brand, including its HBO Go and HBO Now streaming services, both major boons for the network.
To help spark the next big idea, the company worked with Rapt Studio—a multidisciplinary design firm with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—to design a workspace that would fuel collaboration and creative thinking.




















