ENHANCE OFFICE DESIGN ENHANCE OFFICE DESIGN
Office Design Hinder Employee Productivity, is it
true???
~The answer is yes, according to many corporations. Here's what they're doing about it.~
THE COST-CUTTING, productivity-boosting fervor that has transformed factory floors over the past two decades and is now sweeping through corporate office space bears less resemblance to a tidal wave than to a tornado stuck in one spot. Instead of rolling through, it spins and spins, a perpetual motion machine that rearranges the office landscape so fast and so often the idea of a stable physical environment disappears into a chaos of flying computers, workstation components and people.
This is all to the good, at least from the lofty perspective of top management and increasingly activist boards of directors. Indeed, everyone with a financial stake in the matter -- including employees who don't want to lose their jobs -- wants corporations to be more competitive, and it is the job of the facility executive to make sure that office space keeps up. But given the realities of corporate budgets and the limitations of existing space, maintaining a state-of-the-art office design is easier said than done.
An increasing number of organizations are taking steps to encourage spontaneous communication among members of different teams. When NDL/The Polk Company redesigned its office space to promote team collaboration, it created both "neighborhoods" -- open-plan team spaces set behind walls of floor-to-ceiling systems furniture -- and "watering holes" designed to "provide an opportunity for people from different teams to run into one another," says Marilyn Heit, director of facilities and purchasing management. "They really work well to transfer information among teams." There are several watering holes on each floor, strategically placed along natural walkways. Each watering hole provides work-related services -- including a mail stop, high-volume copying and collating, printing, faxing, and voice and data connections -- as well as a coffee bar, comfortable chairs, and a kitchenette with a microwave.
As part of its move to open plan offices, the company also designed project rooms -- which can be taken over by teams essentially as needed for meetings -- along with more traditional conference rooms that have to be signed out by the hour or the day.
It is worth noting that all of NDL's common areas -- whether they are called watering holes, project rooms or plain old conference rooms -- provide voice and data connections. Companies are increasingly dependent on information technologies to boost employee productivity. The problem, says Hillier's Lalli, "is that the physical space is having a very hard time keeping up."
"Very often people find their infrastructures outdated in two or three years," reports Fred Shen, [president] of Shen, Milsom and Wilke. He sees a multitude of issues. There are growing demands for faster transmissions speeds and wider bandwidths. And communication closets -- previously just tangles of cabling -- are beginning to house networks hubs and servers that demand climate control.
Shen says that when facilities are built or upgraded, companies should attempt to forecast their information technology needs for the next five to 10 years and make sure the new or upgraded space can meet those needs; the pace of technological change makes it impossible to see beyond the next decade. One example: More workers are asking for a FAX or printer on their desks -- and being told that it isn't possible or that it's too expensive. A way to avoid that problem is to increase the number of cables run to each workstation from two to three or four. "When a facility is being built or upgraded, the cost is minimal," says Shen.
It is important to have adequate vertical chase and horizontal plenum space, points out Vivian Loftness, professor and head of the Department of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. She notes that leading-edge buildings are beginning to incorporate multiple vertical cores , sometimes located on the periphery of the building, for power, data and HVAC, and to rely on raised flooring for cabling and air distribution.
When FMC Corp relocated its executive offices, it recognized that the
demand for voice and data links was growing, says Kristin Pospisil, senior project
designer with LSH/Hague-Richards
Associates. In the new space, each workstation has at least six outlets, two of them
spares; in some departments, a seventh provides a link to the company's LAN (Local Area
Network).
That sort of long-term thinking is far from the rule, observes Leonard Kruk of Office Vision Consulting: "Instead of planning today to build the proper environment, senior management says, 'We don't need it now, so let's save the money.'" What companies need to do, he believes, is to take their strategic goals, look at the technologies and organizational behaviors needed to achieve those goals, and then follow through with an analysis of the impact on facilities.
The short-term thinking about facilities that characterizes many corporate boardrooms highlights the fact that there is no consensus among CEOs about what productivity means as it relates to buildings. Some top executives want facilities that make a positive contribution to corporate strategies and are willing to invest in measures to achieve that goal; other senior managers look at buildings and see nothing but red ink.
Cut costs or support productivity: Corporations sometimes manage to pursue both goals at the same time. Often, however, the two objectives are at odds.
"We're investing less and less in buildings and we're investing even less in infrastructure because you can't see it," contends Loftness of Carnegie Mellon. "In our search for least cost officing, we're stuffing people into smaller and smaller workstations -- and we're doing that regardless of whether the infrastructure can support that level of density."
Other attempts to reduce occupancy costs could also backfire in terms of productivity. Gerald Davis, CEO of the International Centre for Facilities, describes a corporation that built a new facility with a retail area and food court on the ground floor and decided it didn't need to have coffee break rooms on individual floors. The result was not only a proliferation of coffee pots at workstations; it was a parade of employees to the food court.
"Total added travel time was 26 or 27 minutes a day," Davis says. "The present value of that time equaled the capital cost of the new building they moved into. At least as far as the capital cost was concerned, you could throw the building away and start over."
That's not the only time a measure designed to reduce facility costs imposed a far greater cost in lost productivity. Davis recalls a company where turnover among newly hired engineers in product development -- a critical function for the company -- was rising to an unacceptable level. When the human resources staff started asking people why they were leaving after only days or weeks on the job, they learned that the engineers considered their workspace -- which had been built in the 1960s and never updated -- intolerable. The solution was a multimillion dollar renovation that produced a quiet, pleasant workplace.
That happened in the early 1980s, in a business climate that seems a world away from the fierce employers market that is the rule in most industries in the 1990s. But it illustrates a point that is as true today as it ever was: Companies that view office space solely as a cost to be controlled run the risk of seeing facility-related economizing turn out to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.
"Companies have to distinguish between performance and cost reduction," warns Frank Becker, professor and director of the international facility management program at Cornell University, a principal in @Work Consulting Group, and author of Workplace by Design: Mapping the High Performance Workspace (Jossey Bass). "Companies certainly need to get their costs under control. But the real issue isn't cost reduction per se. To improve performance, companies have to utilize all their resources to their fullest potential “ .
Main Internet Accountability Morale Enhancing Employee Benefit
Productivity Recognition Communication Volunteer Works Enhance Office design Smart Notes