Environments

Environment impacts the mood and morale of the entire organization. A comfortable, efficient workspace allows for productivity, creativity and employee happiness.  Download our white papers below on building the best environment for your organization.

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.

Churn Reconsidered

Since the beginning of white-collar work, organizations have moved their people and furnishings around within facilities and from one location to another, and still do so regularly: Fully 96 percent of respondents to the latest International Facility ManagementAssociation (IFMA) survey said they’ve relocated personnel within the past year. To better understandand manage these changes, companies track the min the form of “churn,” or the number of office moves during a given year, expressed as a percentage of the total number of offices occupied.

Embracing Boomers – How Workplace Design for Maturing Knowledge Workers Benefits Everyone

Baby boomers—Americans born between 1946 and1964—are redefining what it means to age. They’re staying healthier, remaining more active, and working longer than any generation before them. As a result, we’re beginning the twenty-first century with a workforce whose average age is shifting upward.

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.

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?

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.

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 postsecondary education. Governors, legislators, and coordinating or system boards are considering achievement on performance indicators as one factor in determining future campus allocations.

Patient Rooms – A Changing Scene of Healing

The hospital is still the place where patients and their families, caregivers, and administrators come together for the common purpose of restoring a patient to good health. The issues each of these parties face all come into sharp focus in the patient room. It is there that the delivery of care is undergoing more change than at any other point in history.

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.

Room and Board Redefined – Trends in Residence Halls

A place to sleep, a desk for studying, and a dining hall nearby. Until recently, students at colleges and universities in the U.S. had modest expectations for dormitory life. And dormitories have lagged behind other developments on campus and in American society overall. Considering all the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political changes that have occurred in the past few decades, it’s interesting to note that many colleges and universities still have dormitories with shared restrooms.

Set Them Free – How Alternative Work Styles Can Be A Good Fit

Teleworker. Mobile worker. Bedouin. Nomadic. Location agnostic. Professionals who sometimes—or always—work at a location other than the office have gone by a variety of terms over the years. It’s an alternative style of working, but not an insignificant one: “Roughly one-fifth of [the American] workforce is part of the so-called Kinko’s generation, employees who spend significant hours each month working outside of a traditional office.”

The Changing Campus – Advice and Action to Accommodate Learning

Campuses are changing. As part of a growing movement called the learning college movement, which recognizes the influence of environment on learning, many colleges and universities are shifting their pedagogical approach from a traditional instruction paradigm—which is focused on delivering instruction to students—to a learning paradigm, one in which the goal is to produce learning in students. This shift has radically altered the relationship between teacher and student and has fueled the need for new approaches to learning space design.

The Outlook for Learning – Views on the Future

Opinions vary on how higher education deals with change. Faced with diminishing resources, advancing technology and increasing enrollments, colleges and universities continually attempt to find a balance between innovation and tradition to remain relevant and current in a rapidly evolving world.

The Private-to-Open Spectrum

Since the advent of open plan in the 1960s, there’s been a healthy conversation about open versus private offices. The long-running discussion has been fueled, in part, by semantics. Even seemingly clear terms such as “enclosed” and “open” can have a range of meanings.

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.