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 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 whitepaper, 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.
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.
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…
Hi, I’m Mike, and I’m a binge computer worker – my bottom is practically glued to my office chair. This blog entry, in fact, is the end result of a long binge on my PC, having come out of several hours’ work producing a couple of blog entries, several emails, and now ? a few Twitter and Facebook updates.
Binge computing is no joke, really. Defined as intensive computing for long stretches without a break, binge computing is commonplace among college students and office workers alike.
In a survey of college students at two college campuses, a link was discovered between binge computing and musculo-skeletal disorder (MSD) symptoms; longer hours of bingeing led to greater MSD severity and concurrent hampering of lifestyle.
Binge computing for more than six hours seems to be connected to a greater than 100% increase in the risk of severe MSD, compared to computing hours of less than 4 hours per day.
Such health problems are a growing risk for coeds who can’t get off of their office chair – as the Herman Miller Well-Being Blog reports, “increasing numbers of university students [have] computer-related musculoskeletal disorders of the neck, shoulder, arm, and hand. Surveys at two American colleges found that 40-50 percent of undergraduates suffer from upper extremity pain due to computer use.” (Read more)
Executives in the top echelons of business love to spend on office desks – the type of office desks that telegraph accomplishment, prestige, and money to burn.
They’ve reached the pinnacle of accomplishment, or so the thinking goes – therefore these top-flight executives need office desks that show off their newfound rank and privileges to whomever might drop by their office.
Office Desks That Make a Strong Impression. Take the C-119 Flap Desk by MotoArt pictured above – one of a series of office desks crafted from wing flaps salvaged from the Fairchild C-119 “Flying Boxcar” airplane that saw action in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. Now what does that kind of office desk tell you about the guy who sits behind it for a living?
MotoArt goes to extreme lengths to give the Flap Desk an intimidating impression, spending thousands of man-hours of labor cutting, polishing, and burnishing these impressive office desks, and topping them off with a 3/8″ glass top that conforms to the flap’s shape–
Customized to match the contours of the flap, it exposes the rivet detail and handsome intricacies of its construction. The legs are made of 4” x 8” architectural aluminum I beams. The legs are lightened by cutting radial holes at the top and bottom and are then powder coated for a rugged black wrinkle finish.
The Flap Desk is a limited edition office desk – after all, how many C-119s are around to provide their wing flaps, anyway? – which makes these office desks a rare but attractive proposition for executives on the rise.
More office desks on steroids after the jump. (Read more)
When permitted by H.R., Christmas decorations are a wonderful way to share the spirit of the season with the people whose company you share for the bulk of your day. Office cubicle denizens, given enough latitude, may go as far as this Toronto company does every year, with decorations that include an actual wood-burning stove. I assume the local fire department had to sign off on this, er, “unique” office cubicle Christmas decoration.
In Texas, companies like Mouser Electronics are encouraged to go all-out with their office cubicle holiday flair. Mouser, in particular, is tough to beat this year – their cubicles are brought together by one toy railroad track with a working train.
The train “actually makes sound and blows smoke,” says Sheryl Gaines, credit manager at Mouser. The railroad track runs across desks, connecting cubicles and curving around computer keyboards. The snow is made from cotton; small ponds are formed from blue Saran Wrap, and the little houses and figurines are part of someone’s personal holiday collection. Tunnels for the train — well, sheets of black paper made to look like tunnel entrances — were added at the last minute, Gaines says.
Image courtesy of the Star Telegram.
Before undertaking any major Christmas decorating, check with your H.R. department if any such office cubicle bedazzling is acceptable. Christmas originated as a religious holiday – so garish holiday décor may unwittingly cause offense to others who do not share that faith. Danyelle Little of the Cubicle Chick recommends toning down.
“You will always have the one employee who goes a little too far with their decorations. You will also have the one employee who is offended by such a show of “religiousness,” says Danyelle. “When in doubt, I say don’t decorate at all.”
If office regulations are too stringent for any serious office cubicle redecorating, you might try just changing your desktop. Luckily, Microsoft came out with a Holiday Lights Windows 7 theme for just that instance.
If the rules permit, and everybody gets to deck out their own office cubicle spaces for the holidays, whoopee for you, and have fun. But remember, unless the office imposes a Christmas theme from above, the results will probably be a mixed bag.
You won’t always get the results you want – after all, it’s rare you get everybody to sign off on a single office cubicle Christmas theme. Leave it to big bosses, and VIPs so important they can do whatever the hell they please to their office cubicle, to dream big. Take late night host Conan O’Brien, who launched his improbably-decorated set last week:
From all of us at Cubicles.com, Happy Holidays, everyone, and a Happy New Year!
