CREJ - Building Dialogue - March 2016
In a world that seems to be constantly changing, the workplace must evolve as well. There are many challenges we need to address in the modern workplace. It’s getting harder to focus, to concentrative and to think at work. There seems to be no relief from all the distractions. Noisy co-workers, visual distractions and the constant “pinging” of our technology are negatively 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 nuisances 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 (professional services). That factor, no matter how simple, is the key indicator of the mobility level of your organization. Regional influences– whether urban, suburban, virtual, or rural – present different challenges. Traffic, density infrastructure, weather and available workforce are regional variations. Urban environments have access 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 setting 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, workplace 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, entrepreneurial, empowered or controlled. The management structure of a company can be hierarchical, 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 reflection of how your organization runs and flows. Understanding 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 detrimental to your business. To attract and keep the best and brightest, we can’t just focus on employee engagement; we need to strive for employee fulfillment. Offices today need to offer various options where workers 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, privacy and ergonomics. Solutions that allow for adjustability, 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 environments are focused on eating spaces that provide task-oriented solutions. ABW environments encourage 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 encourage people to be flexible and be place independent. Kay Sargent, IIDA, ASID, CID, LEED AP Director of Workplace Strategies, Lendlease End Users MARCH 2016 \ BUILDING DIALOGUE \ 19 End Users The renewed focus on human-centric designs also means a new emphasis on well-being. Getting people up and moving is not only essential for their own personal health and well-being, but also studies show that active workers are happier, healthier, more engaged and more productive. Combining standing-height tables with adjustable seated solutions offers ease of access for individuals and groups. Those solutions often include standing-height meeting tables where teams can work agilely and meet spontaneously or on the go. But standing for long periods is not better than sitting – rather, movement is. Workers who stand for 15 minutes every hour is a great start to improve the health and engagement of office-based workers who typically are sedentary. As change continues at an exponential rate, the office as we know it needs to evolve to stay relevant. We need workplaces that are agile and can adapt. Work environments will have to transform to be more engaging and empower people with choice and options. We need to create environments that support well-being and enable innovation and productivity. And we need to accept that we can not only design space once every 10 years and think it will remain a powerful business tools. We need to embrace that living in a time of change means we must change the way we design space, and the frequency at which we adjust it.