Office design

Cisco Saves 90 Million Using TelePresence
http://www.bnet.com/2422-13950_23-219559.html?promo=713&tag=nl.e713
Abstract: Company tests video conferencing tool for internal use.

Business travel is getting more costly everyday so many companies are turning to video conferencing to curb corporate travel. Cisco Systems has built a solution known as TelePresence. In this video, correspondent Sumi Das meets Laura Ipsen, co-chair of Cisco’s Eco-Board. They talk about various green initiatives Cisco is developing such as a new Wi-Fi enabled city bus, energy efficient workspaces and their video conferencing solution. According to Ipsen, TelePresence has had a strong financial impact internally saving the company 90 million dollars in 18 months by reducing 20,000 meetings.

Podcast explores other ways in which office design is reducing green footprint.

Why Office Design Matters
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4991.html
Extracts: From either previous research, logic, or common sense, there are a few things we know about the relationship between physical work environments and knowledge worker performance. They include:

Knowledge workers prefer closed offices, but seem to communicate better in open ones.
Of course there is great variation among open and closed office types, but the most extensive research in the area (from Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims) suggests that while most knowledge workers prefer closed offices because they are better able to concentrate, they communicate informally and build trust and social capital more easily in more open office environments (even high-walled cubicles, they say, restrict interpersonal communications). They note: "Our research, done with employees in job functions ranging from software development to marketing and business development, indicates that the more open the 'open' plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process."2 Becker and Sims are undeniably experts on this topic, but I feel that, like many corporate executives, they downplay the need for concentration and quiet when knowledge work is done in office environments.

Knowledge workers congregate in particular geographical areas.
This factor has been made well-known by Carnegie-Mellon professor Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class. He documents the fact that knowledge workers (not synonymous with the "creative class," but closely overlapping it) are drawn to, and are made more productive by living in, cities and regions with concentrations of other people like themselves. Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin are prominent examples of this phenomenon, at least for knowledge workers oriented to information technology. The connotation is that if you're a knowledge worker or a business that needs to hire them, you need to find out where the center of action in your industry is, and locate yourself there. If you're a city manager or mayor and you want these successful, taxpaying individuals to live in your city, you need to make your city attractive to them and to the businesses that hire them.

Particular designs can encourage certain types of behavior, although they will never guarantee it.
Knowledge workers move around in the course of their work. They need mobility and spend a lot of time out of their offices. Several firms that have observed their knowledge workers have found that they spend up to half of their time out of their offices—either in meetings, talking informally in other peoples' offices, or traveling. As a result, organizations need to provide them with the ability to work and be productive outside of their offices. The most obvious instantiation of mobile work environments is the laptop computer, but there are others—for example, access to physical work artifacts such as books and files, the ability to use telephones, computers, and messaging technologies while traveling.

Knowledge workers collaborate.
They meet, they chat, they congregate. Office environments need to facilitate the collaboration and exchange of tacit (hard to express in explicit written terms) knowledge. What does this mean? At a minimum, there need to be meeting spaces and conference rooms. Maximum facilitation would be to create a variety of collaborative spaces, technologies, and facilitation approaches for an array of collaborative purposes. Technologies for collaboration—from videoconferences to webcasting to shared networks—are increasingly making a big difference in collaboration, but users are frustrated by technical difficulties in many cases.4 Very few, if any, organizations have attempted to foster collaboration to a high degree, in part because they haven't made the effort to understand what kinds of collaboration are needed.

Knowledge workers concentrate.
The opposite side of the collaboration coin is the need to concentrate at work. This requires a quiet setting with relatively few distractions. Such an environment is particularly important for knowledge creation activities—thinking, writing, programming, designing, and so forth. This takes up a widely varying proportion of knowledge workers' time—some studies have found, for example, that programmers spend only 20 to 30 percent of their time doing solo programming, but others have found workers devoting up to 64 percent in "quiet work."5 Whatever the fraction of time, it's important for the production of final knowledge work outputs. Many organizations that have moved to more open offices trumpet the benefits of increased collaboration, but they discount the penalties incurred on the concentration side.

Knowledge workers work in the office.
Despite many years of discussion about telecommuting and telework, a very small percentage—some studies suggest 5 percent—of workers do "serious" (full-time or near-full-time) telecommuting, and a good proportion of those are administrative workers rather than knowledge workers. Knowledge workers, like all other types of workers, like flexibility, and they like to work at home occasionally. However, they don't want their homes to be their only offices. They know that to be constantly out of the office is to be "out of the loop"—unable to share gossip, exchange tacit knowledge, or build social capital.6 This means that organizations should not bother with office arrangements that assume full-time telecommuting, even though occasional telecommuting doesn't save companies any money. It also means that firms that are committed to telecommuting may be less attractive in the knowledge worker labor market.

Knowledge workers communicate with people who are close by.
Tom Allen, the dean of researchers on the work behaviors of scientists and engineers, found more than two decades ago that technical workers (a proxy for knowledge workers) whose desks are more than thirty meters apart have a frequency of communications that is roughly zero.7 Some might argue that e-mail and instant messaging have changed the relationship between physical proximity and communication. However, I'd argue that you rarely e-mail or IM intensely with someone you don't know. Assuming it's still true, Allen's important and oft-cited finding means that companies should design work environments so that knowledge workers who need to communicate are physically close to each other. Of course, this requires some strategizing about who needs to be talking with whom. Organizations such as 3M and Herman Miller have tried to do just that in the design of some of their facilities.

Firms that are committed to telecommuting may be less attractive in the knowledge worker labor market.

Knowledge workers don't care about facilities gewgaws.
At least there is no evidence that anyone ever took a job, stayed at a job, or worked more productively because of foosball, pool, or ping-pong tables, cappuccino bars, office concierges, hearths, conversation pits, quiet rooms, lactation rooms, creativity rooms, relaxation rooms, nap rooms, etc., etc. In these lean and mean times, many workers are even reluctant to be seen using these facilities for fear that they won't be considered hardworking enough. In any case, there's no clear relationship between knowledge worker performance and various appealing features of the work environment, though they may help slightly with recruiting or morale. To my knowledge only a couple of office furniture firms (Herman Miller and Steelcase, to be precise) do much to have an impact on such workplace innovations—and their focus is on broad workplace changes, not on architectural gewgaws—so we may never know for certain whether they are worth the money and the architect's time.8

Despite the faddish nature of workspace design and the absence of detailed knowledge on its implications, many organizations truly believe in the effects of the particular approaches they have adopted. It is often assumed, for example, that open offices lead to increased collaboration and open communication. This was the goal at SEI Investments, where all dividers were torn down in favor of a big open room that, according to one SEI knowledge worker we interviewed, "creates a fun environment in which people can communicate freely." Of course, an HR manager at SEI admitted that only about half of the potential hires for the company thought they could stand working in such an open environment, which seems a high price to pay for architecture (although, to be fair, SEI believes that the environment is a good screening mechanism for the collaborative workers they want to hire).

Certainly there are many occasions in which chatting over cubicle walls has facilitated the flow of information through knowledge work processes. Yet we heard just as many anecdotes about workers who stayed at home to do heads-down work because they couldn't concentrate in the office. One knowledge worker involved with highly sensitive political risk analysis, for example, feared that his job performance would be severely compromised as soon as the firm moved to a completely open floor plan. And at Monsanto (which later merged with Pharmacia & Upjohn to form Pharmacia), where a business unit had attempted to do away completely with private offices to reduce hierarchy and increase communication, senior officers of the unit eventually erected their own private offices. Employees are skeptical of open office arrangements and often suspect (as do I) that the primary benefit of these designs is the lower space costs of packing more people into cubicle-structured space.

Similarly, mobility within the workspace and outside of it is a frequently cited objective. This obviously makes sense in industries such as professional services, where workers must travel to clients frequently. Yet we don't know what price organizations pay in social capital when employees are highly mobile and can't be easily located for a face-to-face conversation. "Hoteling," for example, or the assignment of workers to whatever workspace is available when they come into the office, is clearly an efficient means of allocating space to mobile workers, but several firms that have experimented with it report that it engenders about the same level of community we find in an actual hotel. How many friends have you made in hotels? When the person next door is different every day, informal social relationships don't develop easily.

Arrgh! It's just another day at the office...
http://www.theage.com.au/national/arrgh-its-just-another-day-at-the-office-20080830-465f.html?page=-1
Extracts: The cubicle was actually designed to be a force for good when in 1968, in the small community of Zeeland, Michigan, office furniture company Herman Miller released the world's first "Action Office". Unlike workplaces with offices along the walls, or rows of desks lined up like a typing pool, it boasted moveable partitions, mobile desks and pin-up boards. The boss of computer firm Intel famously took up a cubicle in a corner, moving among his fellow workers in his open-necked shirt and gold chains.

A recent article in The New Atlantis, titled The Moral Life of Cubicles, detailed its utopian origins: "Cubicles seemed to lack the fixity, and the constraints of bureaucracy of the old office. Moreover, cubicles eliminated the hierarchical distinctions between managers and workers; every cubicle had an open door, everyone was equally a worker. Empowering and humane, cubicles seemed to create a workplace with a soul."

That soul was conceived by inventor Robert Propst, who believed his flexible, adaptable office would improve productivity, motivation and interaction between workers. His early sketches of the Action Office show desks and chairs arranged in organic patterns like flower petals.
But his dream ultimately became every office worker's nightmare. Companies opted to shrink down each cubicle to cut costs and maximise floor space, arranging them in tight groupings under the watchful glare of management. Propst, who died in 2000, described what had become of his creation as a "monolithic insanity".

"The dark side of this is that not all organisations are intelligent," he said in an interview in 1998. "Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes. They make little bitty cubicles and stuff people in them."

Workstations grew wider and deeper to host large computer screens, then smaller again as technology improved and city rents skyrocketed.

Now they are smaller than ever, particularly with the rise of flatscreen technology. Under an old L-shaped desk arrangement, a workstation might have occupied six square metres a person, Power says. That has shrunk to about 4.5 square metres under new "snowflake" designs, where desks are set at 120-degree angles to each other. Desk space drops as low as three square metres a person for the straight workstations popular in design and architecture firms - half the minimum space recommended by Worksafe Victoria.

Power says companies are gradually incorporating several types of workstations to suit the space and level of collaboration needed by each worker. Much effort has gone into calculating the optimum height of computer screens. Set them at 1.2 metres from the ground and they're low enough so no one feels alone, but not so low you have to look anyone in the eye.

Jodi Oakman, from La Trobe University's Centre for Ergonomics and Human Factors, envisages a new role for the office that could finally kill off the much-maligned cubicle.
As we work more from home and on the road, the office might assume a more social setting - the place we come for important meetings or simply to mix with colleagues, she says.

These four walls: The real British Office
http://www.gensler.com/uploads/documents/TheseFourWalls_07_17_2008.pdf
Various statistics about British office productivity.

U.S. Workplace Survey (2007)
http://www.gensler.com/uploads/documents/USWorkplaceSurvey_07_17_2008.pdfThe
Extracts: The survey included more than 2,000 participants at all staff levels, representing eight industries with equal distribution across the continental United States. Collection of useful benchmarks on various aspects of office utilisation.

Three New Designs for Optimizing Collaboration
http://www.bnet.com/2403-13056_23-190685.html
Case studies of the new office designs at Jones Lang LaSalle, Microsoft, Group Health.

Image Gallery: Best and Worst Workplace Design BNET
http://www.bnet.com/2346-13056_23-190491-1.html
10 examples of good and bad office design.