People

Whether you like it or not, your workspace impacts how engaged and productive your employees are at work.  Making sure you have comfortable spaces for them to focus and collaborate is crucial! The white papers below focus on engaging employees with great spaces.

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.

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.

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

Baby boomers—Americans born between 1946 and 1964—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.

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.

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.

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.

New Directions in Call Center Design – Demanding Challenges for a Complex Workplace

Today’s call centers have evolved to become sophisticated, high-tech showcases of service, support, and sales. Meanwhile, the look and layout of call centers is changing to keep up with the new demands being placed on them.

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.”

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.

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.”

Sound Practices: Noise Control in the Healthcare Environment

“Unnecessary noise is the most cruel abuse of care which can be inflicted on either the sick or the well,” Florence Nightingale wrote in her 1859 book, Notes on Nursing. Understanding the basics of sound transmission and measurement is essential to a realistic assessment of a facility’s sound environment.

The Evolving Nature of Working at Home

More and more people are getting to work without going to work. Instead of commuting to a corporate workspace, they’re staying at home in their own space. Instead of separating their work lives from their home lives, they’re blending them, or trying to. Instead of thinking of work as a place where they go, they’re seeing it as something they do.

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 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.