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/ BUILDING DIALOGUE / MARCH 2016
I
n a world that seems to be constantly chang-
ing, the workplace must evolve as well. There
are many challenges we need to address in
the modern workplace. It’s getting harder to fo-
cus, to concentrative and to think at work. There
seems to be no relief from all the distractions.
Noisy co-workers, visual distractions and the con-
stant “pinging” of our technology are negative-
ly impacting our ability to concentrate and focus.
The World Health Organization has projected that
“techno-stress,” the stress of constantly being on
and overwhelmed by technology, will be the biggest
health issue of coming century. Not to mention, we
are facing a war for talent, and entering the age of
the nomadic worker. Staff members not only expect,
but also demand, a workplace that is more in tune
with their needs and their lifestyles. To address these
growing concerns, the workplace has to evolve.
To achieve the right solution, corporations must
look inward and truly understand who they are as
an organization and who their staff members are as
a workforce. What should drive the solution is your
specific organizational DNA. Understanding the nui-
sances of six key strands of an organization will help
create the right solutions:
• Industry
• Regional influences
• Demographics
• Corporate culture
• Managerial structure
• Individual work styles
Industries
fall into the general categories of legal;
corporate services; technology, advertising, media and
information (TAMI); health care; government; higher
education; financial; and energy. Industry nuisances
include whether customers are coming to you (legal,
health care), or whether your employees are going to
them (sales, consultative) – or if it’s a hybrid (profes-
sional services). That factor, no matter how simple, is
the key indicator of the mobility level of your orga-
nization.
Regional influences
– whether urban, suburban, virtu-
al, or rural – present different challenges. Traffic, den-
sity infrastructure, weather and available workforce
are regional variations. Urban environments have ac-
cess to amenities, so there probably is no need to have
on-site health care, gyms or food courts. Suburban
settings might have limited public transportation,
and organizations may want to create a campus set-
ting with amenities, so employees don’t have to leave
campus to get lunch, go to the gym or run errands.
Workforce
demographics
affect design not only due
to generational differences, but also gender, ethnicity,
full-time/part-time schedules and personality types,
all of which affects work styles, and, therefore, work-
place as well. Understanding who you are designing
for, their attributes and traits should all be factors in
the design of your space.
Corporate culture
is a main driver in the design of a
space. It is the core or heart of an organization, and
spaces that captures the culture are more effective in
reinforcing it, be that formal, informal, casual, entre-
preneurial, empowered or controlled.
The
management structure
of a company can be hi-
erarchical, flat, web-based, like a hub with decisions
spreading out from a central point, or completely
decentralized. If your space solution does not align
with your organizational structure, then there will be
a fundamental conflict. The space should be a reflec-
tion of how your organization runs and flows. Un-
derstanding that is key to knowing that right mix of
open vs. private space, and how it should be laid out.
Work styles
run the gamut from individually focused
to meeting-intensive, collaborative, social, focused or
learning. These styles often overlap in one workplace,
so companies may need to create a variety of spaces
to enable a variety of work styles. But understanding
what staff does, and then defining the right mix and
balance, ultimately will determine how effective the
space is.
Successful workplaces have a renewed focus on
people – after all, human resource cost is a business’s
greatest expense, and also its greatest asset. People
costs are 10 times the cost of space, so doing anything
that negatively impacts your staff can be detrimen-
tal to your business. To attract and keep the best and
brightest, we can’t just focus on employee engage-
ment; we need to strive for employee fulfillment. Of-
fices today need to offer various options where work-
ers can choose the right type of space to support the
task at hand, their personality, and their individual
work style. Solutions need to offer a variety of settings
and configurations for a multitude of space types.
And those solutions need to be adjustable to adapt
the needs of the day.
To achieve the right environment, we must meet
the physiological needs of the occupant – lighting,
temperature, movement, air, noise – before we can
begin to address secondary concerns of safety, priva-
cy and ergonomics. Solutions that allow for adjusta-
bility, control of lighting at the task level, as well as
airflow maximize human comfort. Solutions that
provide adjustable screening aid in noise reduction,
limit distractions and enable privacy as needed. Once
those basic needs are met, then people seek a sense
of belonging and social connections. That base allows
people to focus on the task at hand, to innovate and
be productive.
Over the past decade, we have seen the evolution
of activity-based workplaces (ABW). These work en-
vironments are focused on eating spaces that provide
task-oriented solutions. ABW environments encour-
age movement and empower people to select the
right space for the task at hand. They are designed
to provide options and give workers choices. This
requires that we stop designing spaces that support
a single workspace per employee, where people are
place dependent, and instead design spaces that en-
courage people to be flexible and be place indepen-
dent.
Kay Sargent,
IIDA, ASID,
CID, LEED AP
Director of
Workplace
Strategies,
Lendlease
End Users
