Is there a link between comfort in office interior design and increased productivity? Yes, and it’s stronger than you might think. According to Productive Solutions: The Impact of Interior Design on the Bottom Line, a paper released by the American Society of Interior Designers, a positive relationship exists between feeling comfy and being productive at work.

As the paper explains, 42 percent of ASID respondents say focusing on employee comfort pays dividends – a more aesthetically pleasing, comforting and inviting office interior design increases workplace efficiency and worker morale. The flipside to the office interior design argument is also apparent – decreased employee comfort results in losses to the enterprise, in person-hours lost and liability costs.

The ASID paper joins the growing volume of scientific literature demonstrating how designing for comfort is an imperative in office interior design, one you ignore at your peril. Look at the matter closely, and you’ll see that there are three general areas within the general concept of “comfort”: (Read more)

When office interior design encourages people to work together, productivity happens. A recent survey initiated by the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) found this to be the case when office interior design focused on improving accessibility – to both people and resources.

When companies create environments that invite collaboration – by providing space for people to interact – companies benefit more, compared to environments that encourage mostly individual focused work. The workplace is increasingly seen as a place where people meet to interact, instead of a place where people hunker down to do isolated work.

Companies are now finding this out for themselves, leading to new office interior designs that bring workers closer to their colleagues and to the common resources they need to get their jobs done.

More on accessibility and interior design after the jump. Read more…

Office interior design should maximize productivity at every instance, but this is a maxim honored in the breach more often than not. That’s because most people think that office interior design deals primarily with aesthetics, instead of productivity.

Productivity results when four key benefits are delivered by effective office interior design: Improved accessibility, increased employee comfort, limiting noise and distractions, and flexibility & customization. In this white paper, we devote a little more time and effort going into each benefit. By the time you’re done, you should have the knowledge and insight you need to know how you can apply them to your office.

Download our white paper, and read more – download “Designing for Productivity: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

Office interior design often does IT workers a disservice – while many managers extol the modern open floor plan, many IT workers actually prefer to work in more secluded quarters. IT workers are bucking a trend in open office layouts; unlike other creatives, IT workers need quiet environments that encourage concentration and creativity.

“Asking programmers or network administrators to do their jobs in an open space where noise, distractions and interruptions abound can be akin, for some of them at least, to departmental decimation,” writes Computerworld’s Cara Garretson.

This presents a conundrum for the facility manager, who must weigh team interdependence and the intensiveness of the work when creating an office layout for an IT department. To use Bell and Kozlowski’s model of task dependencies, IT engineers represent an excellent example of an intensive workflow.

More on what IT engineers look for in their office interior design, after the jump. Read more…

Ad agencies take their office interior design cues from a vast variety of influences. To see the variations in design among a number of top agency offices, it’s apparent that they take their inspiration from the gamut of human creativity.

Leo Burnett keeps it simple, with raw brick and timber; Moove Media incorporates plenty of “found” elements in their office interior design. Hemels van der Hart’s office interior design is modernity personified.

Still, the rules are not totally flexible, as the example of ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day shows. Agency head Jay Chiat decided to remove all personal spaces within the ad agency, putting virtual offices in their stead. People would check out laptops and phones at the front office, then plug into any available space.

But good spaces were hard to come by, and people became hard to locate. Productivity took a hit. TBWA’s open office became a byword of what not to do with ad agency office interior design.

At its core, ad agency work boils down to teamwork; agencies are made up of teams with a certain degree of interdependence. To use Bell and Kozlowski’s model of task dependencies, advertising creatives represent an intensive combination of reciprocal and sequential workflow: an ad agency’s work and activities flow unidirectionally from one member to another. But not entirely in one direction: feedback from clients and suppliers can send a project moving back down the line for revision, and then back in the right direction again.

The “open office” plan may not work completely for the modern ad agency’s workflow – privacy-enhancing spaces, such as conference rooms, private offices, and high-walled cubicles, ought to be in place alongside conference rooms and open collaborative spaces.

More on creative office interior design after the jump. Read more…

The Internet’s growing importance in the office has caused a major rethink of office space planning practices. A “team” has ceased to depend on members working in the same space; today, teammates can be widely distributed across the country, or across the world.

The Internet has given rise to the telecommuter – though nominally part of a team, such workers are separated by time and space from a regular office, often working individually to contribute to the overall group effort.

“In a virtual team, members are dispersed geographically or organizationally. Their primary interaction is through some combination of electronic communication systems,” explains Wayne F. Cascio in his paper Managing a Virtual Workplace. “They may never meet in the traditional sense. Further, team membership is often fluid, evolving according to changing task requirements.”

More on office space planning for pooled workflow after the jump. (Read more)

A recent study shows that the average office cubicle has shrunk, compared to its size from the 90s. The average office cubicle worker enjoys about 17% less cubicle space than his equivalent from 1994, who had a glorious 90 square feet of space to work in, compared to today’s measly 75 square feet.

The same study, published by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), finds that most cubicles have shrunk from 8×10 to about 5×5. (Check out this graphic of office cubicle sizes from the Chicago Tribune to see exactly how much space has been trimmed out from under us!)

The Score: Cost Cutting 1, Office Cubicle Space 0

Where’d our spacious office cubicles go? Part of the blame for their disappearance goes to our tottering economy – soaring rents, among other rising overhead costs, are behind the push to cram more workers into smaller spaces. After all, real estate costs are known to be amongst the largest cost for businesses, after the payroll.

“In recent years, we’ve seen how companies are trying to shed real estate cost,” says Shari Epstein, director of research at the IFMA. “When you have less space to work, you will try to cram as many people into one space.”

“Knowing the rents with the spaces they have, they’ve got to cram people in,” said Don Wehr of Office Furniture World in Santa Rosa, California. “Mathematically, it makes sense.”

More on shrinking office cubicles after the jump. Read more…

Office furniture is designed to solve problems, not create them. But haphazard planning and execution can make the office space planning process unnecessarily grueling and expensive. The problems that crop up when office layouts interfere with worker efficiency show that there are many more ways to get it wrong than right.

Facility managers need to recognize that there is no such thing as a generic, one-size-fits-all office. What’s right for an accounting firm might not be right for an advertising firm. Even different departments in the same company may have diametrically different requirements – just try moving an advertising art director down the hall to an account executive’s cubicle, and you’ll see what we mean.

In this white paper, we will describe design issues that may crop up when another variable is introduced into the mix, one that varies from office to office – that of workflow.

• Download “Space Planning for Your Office: Designing for Optimum Workflow” (PDF, 75KB)

Office space planning is an evolving art – just ask Marc Kushner, creator of architects’ social networking site Architizer. In an interview with Inc. Magazine, Kushner takes note of how space planning for offices has changed to correspond to changing technology, and our changing perceptions of collaboration and productivity.

Change has been a long time coming: office space planning has historically been programmed around corner offices and cubicles ever since the invention of the latter, and only recent developments (the recession, the Internet) have made office managers consider alternatives like never before.

Reformulating the Working Space

Take office cubicles. The death of cubicles has often been predicted, and sometimes actively sought (without much success). Kushner still thinks those predictions aren’t wide off the mark.

“I think what people are experimenting with is getting that privacy without sequestering people into that defined space,” explains Kushner. “Specifically, you see a clear trend towards casual gathering spaces being a place to not just congregate, but also to actually do work.”

Dutch facility YourMeet offers an example of workplace space planning that takes Kushner’s insight to heart: They’ve ditched office cubicles for an open floorplan that can be commandeered for meetings or brainstorming sessions. As Fast Company Co.Design reports:

Loosely divvied up into zones (for brainstorming, speaking formally, and so on), it’s conceptualized to give workers a free-flowing atmosphere for hatching their cleverest ideas.

Changing Attitudes Influence Office Space Planning

Changing mindsets about working space have enabled office space planning to take another innovative turn – as millennial workers now have less qualms about sharing workspaces, former fringe ideas like “hot desking” are now gaining wide acceptance.

Hot desking refers to the practice of having no assigned desks per worker – instead, desks are available to the first worker who uses or reserves it for use. This space planning concept allows offices to reduce property costs without a corresponding decrease in labor.

British computer services company ICL has seen the light – one-fourth of their 20,000-strong workforce now hot-desk. “We opened a building in Staines which has 320 desks but supports 600 people,” ICL’S Richard Reed told the Daily Telegraph. “We see this building as a model for the future.”

Offices like Dutch consulting firm YNNO have redesigned their office around this concept. YNNO can rock this type of office space planning, as most of their employees are highly mobile with their work.

“Workers should have a place to check in and plug in, but don’t need designated desks, especially since they travel so much as consultants,” explains Suzanne LaBarre. “Think of it as less of an office than a homebase.”

LaBarre figures that YNNO can go a lot further than previous attempts at abolishing the cubicle, largely since the technology and the mindset has now dovetailed with acceptance of this space planning concept.

“We’re more comfortable as mobile employees now than we were then, in large part because we depend on mobile technology,” speculates LaBarre. “The technology will only continue loosening the corsetry of traditional office work…. expect YNNO’s office to become the norm, rather than the exception.”

Whether office space planning experts keep office cubicles or move on to open creative spaces or hot desking, it’s all one to Marc Kushner as long as they keep one thing in mind: the workplace should enable fun.

Good offices consider the joy of work. As an employer, you want to create an experience that is positive and proactive in the workplace. And we’ve seen much experimentation over the years—open offices, closed offices, eco design, and so on. But what it all comes down to is that a workplace is part of the human experience, and a nicer office can help you to have happier, more productive workers.

Style: Formal or Avant-Garde? When shopping for cubicle furniture, you want to make sure you have the right look. Office furniture comes in a wide assortment of colors and styles, so it’s easy to buy cubicle furniture that, upon further examination, is revealed to clash with the existing environment: walls, floors, ceiling work, lighting, etc. So when selecting your cubicle furniture, think of the overall look of your office. Is the dominant style traditional, or modern? This will influence your choice of cubicle furniture, whether it’s stylish and high tech, or traditional and earthy.

Give some thought to the impression your office furniture makes on clients. A firm of accountants needs different styles of cubicle furniture from an ad agency; a call center shouldn’t have the same kind of cubicle furniture as a law firm! The impression you make depends largely on what your clients need from you. A design firm wants its cubicle furniture to look adventurous and creative; an accounting firm needs cubicle furniture that helps it look solid and dependable.

You should also be mindful if the style of cubicle furniture you’re selecting is timeless, or is bound to go out of style in the next few years. Sure, your cubicle furniture looks great now – but in five years, will the new employees be as squeamish in their office furniture as they would be wearing 1970s-era leisure suits?