Change

Adapting to new processes, new workspaces or even new employees can be difficult for an organization.  Creating a great space that allows for change and flexibility is important for every office. Download our white papers below that discuss being flexible in the workplace.

Adaptable Spaces and Their Impact on Learning

Research reveals the divide between what is known about the learning experience and the spaces built to support them. This has prompted exploration of new types of spaces. The goal is to understand the role of adaptable spaces in supporting the learning experience. Just as important is an examination of the impact technologies, pedagogies, and, yes, furniture has on these spaces.

Appropriate Flexibility: New Twist on an Old Conundrum

In 1968, Bob Propst and his team of researchers and designers at the Herman Miller Research Corporation published a remarkable book—The Office: A Facility Based on Change. This book served as the software designed to run the first systems furniture, Action Office, introduced by Herman Miller in the same year, and invented by Propst and his team. There were no computers in offices. No fax machines. No e-mail. No cell phones. No search engines. No printers.

Beyond Four Walls and a Door

If you ask people who work in offices whether they need privacy to do their jobs, most of them will say yes. Ask them whether they currently have enough privacy, and many of them will say no. In a study of people working in both fixed-wall offices and open plan environments, about 50 percent said their space “provides all the privacy I need to get my work done.” But when people feel they must have privacy to do their work and don’t get it, they report significantly lower productivity and job satisfaction than those who say they have the privacy they require.

Bright Idea Personal Control for Office Lighting

Providing light for the workplace has always been at the top of the list for those who build and manage offices. However, they have tended to focus on the effects lighting has on a building’s performance, often at the expense of the people who work there. The cause of this focus has been the rising costs of real estate and energy.

Engaging Students – Using Space as a Tool to Connect with Millennials

Though there is more demographic diversity than ever before in the makeup of college students, Millennials represent the majority at over 60 percent. They will be part of the higher education landscape for the next decade. Their unique characteristics are causing them to collide with how learning is implemented in the classroom.

Everybody Deserves a Good Chair

But what is a good chair? For almost 100 years now, researchers have been trying to answer that question. This research summary examines their work and tries to establish whether they have reached any significant conclusions.

Forward Thinking – Why the Ideas from the Man Who Invented Cubicles Still Make Sense

If rules are made to be broken, it would explain what happened to those that Bob Propst, inventor of Action Office®, the first open-plan panel system, proposed in The Office: A Facility Based on Change. Published in 1968, the book is Propst’s thoughts on what the office should and could be.

Home Sweet Office – Comfort in the Workplace

Comfort is as elusive as the blind men’s elephant. Is it long and skinny like a snake or round and thick like a tree? Is it a neutral state—the “absence of awareness?” Or is it a positive sense of ease and contentment? Is it a noun (comforter), or is it a verb (to comfort)? Is it an outcome or a process?

If the Chair Fits

The old adage, “People come in all shapes and sizes,” is a tired cliché to a lot of people. To those who design and manufacture office chairs, it’s a daily reminder of the difficult task they face: making chairs that fit a tremendously varied population. Walk through the offices of just about any company and you’ll see people of vastly different sizes and proportions.

Imagine That: How Visioning Spurs Performance

Because vision and visioning are related, it’s helpful to understand what each is. Vision has been described as “a compelling image or picture of the purpose having been achieved” and as “a clear mental picture of a desired outcome.”

It’s a Matter of Balance – Acoustics in the Open Plan

Most office workers—in developed and developing countries alike—worked in bullpens until the advent of systems furniture in 1968. The transition to open plan brought more visual privacy and a better acoustical environment. It wasn’t long, however, before these workers became accustomed to these improvements and wanted more.

It’s All About Me – The Benefits of Personal Control at Work

As the ways we work change and the work itself changes, people look for ways to cope. For most that means “tuning” where they work to the way they work and who they are. Having some control over the workspace can improve comfort and the ability to get work done and reduce stress. This, in turn, can lead to greater productivity and better health. Having some control also allows people to “own” a workspace, which gives others a sense of who they are.

It’s Here Somewhere – The Effects of Storage Methods on Job Performance

Every day, office workers are inundated with a tidal wave of information. A recent report by a business research firm declared information overload “the problem of the year” for 2008. The research firm, which specializes in studying the way knowledge workers use technology, estimates that the problem is costing U.S. companies $650 billion a year in lost productivity. The report quotes an Intel engineer who says his company figures that time lost to information overload costs each knowledge worker up to eight hours a week.

Making a Case for Case Carts

Hospitals are under intense pressure to cut costs everywhere, especially in the surgical suite. An efficiently run OR can be an attractive profit center, but it is also one of the most expensive departments to manage. While quality patient care is always the first priority, cost containment pressures are forcing surgery departments to operate as efficient business units as well.

Making Room for Collaboration

In a constantly and rapidly changing business environment, organizations increasingly look to collaborative work processes to stimulate practices that will generate market value and gain competitive advantage. But while everyone seems to agree that collaboration is a good thing, business leaders and consultants often have differing ideas on what collaboration is and how—or even if—it can be managed and supported.

Measures of Success – The Facility’s Role in Effectiveness

Measure it, or you can’t manage it. The maxim has been a tenet of business life since well before the “balanced scorecard” came along. Until recently, however, the concept of measurement as applied to real estate and facilities focused on the cost of operating and maintaining space, as opposed to measuring the impact of space on human and business performance.

On the Move – How Mobile Employees Are Changing the Workplace

The New Yorker published a cartoon about the changing workplace nearly 20 years ago that was not only funny but also visionary. An incoming employee, briefcase in hand, is being given a heads up about his new office environment by a worker wearing a pair of pants covered with pockets. “You don’t get an office,” the new employee is told. “You get cargo pants.”

Paradigm Shift – How Higher Education is Improving Learning

There are increasing calls for change and improvement in the American educational system. The accountability movement, begun in an attempt to revitalize K-12 institutions, is now gaining momentum in post secondary education. Governors, legislators, and coordinating or system boards are considering achievement on performance indicators as one factor in determining future campus allocations.

Patterns of Care and Facility Design

Some healthcare organizations are adopting the techniques of lean manufacturing to identify the best patterns of care. As a result of aligning people with efficient processes and logical layouts, they are controlling costs even as they are improving patient outcomes. For them, and the lean consultants advising them, the value of flexible facilities and modular furnishings is becoming increasingly apparent.

The Siren Song of Multitasking

Personal technology has become so ubiquitous that it seems unnecessary to quote statistics about the growth of cell phone use (every minute another 1,000 users are added to the 2.4 billion existing users), the global growth rate of Internet use (200 percent between 2000 and 2006), or how many e-mail messages and instant messages compete for our attention every day (an estimated 62 billion and 14 billion, respectively). In fact, technology use of this kind is increasing so rapidly that statistics like these are outdated as soon as they are documented.

When Work and Life Balance, Everyone Wins

What do employees want? It’s an important question for companies around the world as they gear up for the labor shortage that experts and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics say is almost upon us. Within a few years, U.S. companies will be down six million workers, and between 2015 and 2025 there will be between 10 million and 16 million fewer workers than there are jobs.

Why and How We Meet

In many business circles, the word meeting has bad connotations, including “unnecessary” and “unproductive.” One researcher has asked more than 200 groups around the world what activities are their top three time-wasters. “In every case but three,” he writes, “more than three-quarters of each group indicated that half their time spent in meetings is wasted.” Still, little would get done without getting together in the same space, real or virtual.