Today, office cubicles make up about $2.27 billion of office furniture sales in 2010, or about 27.4% of that year’s $8.3 billion total in office furniture sales, as per historical data compiled by the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer’s Association. Office planners are spoiled for choice: they can choose to buy brand-new cubicles from established brand names in the field, or they might take a chance on cloned cubicles manufactured in China. Alternatively, they might explore buying remanufactured systems furniture, or even go for used cubicles if that’s all their budget can afford.

Do you know what office cubicles are right for you? In the following paper, we’ll explore the different types of office cubicles, and what each type of office cubicle can deliver, in terms of features, advantages, and other perks. Download our white paper: Something Old, Something New, Something Green: How to Choose Between Brand New, Cloned, Newly Remanufactured, Refurbished/Used, or New Alternatives (PDF, 559KB).

And yet not all facility managers are eager to bring in a professional interior designer. Maybe outdated thinking has something to do with their reluctance – after all, most people still believe that office interior design is primarily about aesthetics, not productivity.

But DIY design can lead to disaster, especially if you’re not trained to make the decisions that a professional interior designer makes as part of their job. A professional interior designer shouldn’t be optional, they should be required.

Here are a number of very good reasons why no productivity-boosting initiative at work should go without hiring an interior designer to assist, or even head, the process.

First, a professional can explain the costs and benefits of office interior design to top management. “Top management will still require a cost/benefit analysis to justify any investment in office design,” explains MIT’s Limor Gutnick. So if you’re looking to implement productivity-boosting changes to your workplace, a professional interior designer can be your best salesperson to the top brass.

“The designers’ role would be twofold,” says Gutnick. “To base the office interior design on sound principles and established research and to present quantitative returns on the investment.”

Secondly, professionals use training and resources that clients generally do not have access to. Remaking office interior design involves a number of decisions that laypeople are generally not equipped to handle. Hiring a professional forestalls such problems.

A good interior designer combines an intimate knowledge of your business objectives and an awareness of the designs and products that can help you meet them. To solve your problems, he or she will call upon an encyclopedic knowledge of materials, finishes, and products, as well as a long list of vendors, contractors, and other service providers. It’s his job to coordinate the team and make the final call on the products to be used in the job.

In short, as the American Society of Interior Designers puts it, only a professional interior designer has “the training and expertise to plan, schedule, execute and manage your project from start to finish.”

Third, professional interior designers can help both managers and rank-and-file participate in the design process. “Interior designers […] are in a unique position to propose a strategic, design-based approach towards increasing productivity,” concurs Cubicles.com’s CEO Aron Groner.

By soliciting feedback from affected employees, planning workshops, and creating focus groups to study proposed office interior design plans, interior designers can facilitate a participatory design process that empowers rank-and-file employees to participate in design decision making, while making managers more aware of the interaction between space and human behavior.

“In some cases, interior designers or facility managers may serve only as a resource or consultant,” an ASID paper comments, “empowering employees to decide for themselves what type of environment will make them more productive.”

Finally, hiring a professional actually saves money. An interior designer can help manage costs by selecting the right suppliers at the best possible value. They can leverage their relationships with suppliers and contractors to get better discounts that you could never have scored on your own.

In some instances, a product supplier with knowledge of office interior design can present even greater opportunity for savings. Look for a vendor who can provide design services to reduce your expenses even more. One example of such a vendor is Cubicles.com, which offers free space planning and office interior design services to their clients.

Find out more about hiring an effective office interior designer (with an eye to greater productivity) in our white paper:  “Designing for Productivity: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

Let’s start with Leo Burnett, a global force in advertising. Their Sydney headquarters reflects the collaborative nature of agency work – by filling large spaces with natural light, Australian interior designers Hassell intended to create “thought provoking spaces [that] encourage the ‘generation of big ideas.’”

Hassell’s office interior design for Leo Burnett is filled with collaborative spaces; “kitchen tables” that become hubs for brainstorming, presentation rehearsals, or just chit-chat among trusted colleagues.

Speaking as a former advertising copywriter, it’s in these common, collaborative spaces where 90% of advertising agency work gets done – and I’m willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that a correlation exists between an advertising agency’s annual awards hauls and the presence of such collaborative spaces in the office interior design!

Moral of the story: Office interior design can help business performance – particularly in companies like ad agencies or software companies that put a premium on creativity and collaboration. A 2010 study by Gensler found “a strong correlation between good workplace design and business performance” – employees of more successful firms spend plenty of time collaborating and socializing compared to their less successful counterparts.

Such open office designs provide two key benefits. One – teams with more open workspaces are able to make decisions faster, as the ability to make crucial decisions are devolved to the ranks. Two – open-access workspaces support team building efforts, accelerating group cohesion and improving team effectiveness.

Gensler concludes, “providing opportunities and spaces for people to interact is important to creating the trust necessary for a collaborative working environment.”

Our second success study comes from Facebook, the social media powerhouse. Not surprisingly for a company that made their bones providing “ownership” of online spaces to distinct personalities, Facebook has allowed their employees the same free rein.

“Just as people make the space on the website their own, we’ve opted to do the same with our physical space,” writes Everett Katigbak. “We’ve left a lot of the walls white and the spaces unfinished to encourage employees to add the finishing touches.”

Facebook’s office interior design takes this to an extreme, with modular boxes of varying sizes and shapes that can be rearranged into new working spaces.

Moral of the story: In their paper Personalization in non-territorial Offices, Dutch researchers Sandra Brunia and Anca Hartjes-Gosselink find an innate human need to take control over their environment which drives the need to personalize one’s space. In fact, “when objects are prohibited to personalize your work environment, people seek several additional ways to make the environment familiar and comfortable for them and to mark their identity in the organization” (source)

On the other hand, companies like Facebook that implement office interior design options that favor flexibility – like offices with reconfigurable spaces for both individuals and teams – report upswings in productivity. As researchers like Brunia and Hartjes-Gosselink have found out, allowing customization in their environment can provide employees with a feeling of being valued, giving them more leeway to be more productive.

This need not be taken to an extreme – an ordinary company would not be able to personalize to the the level of Facebook, or create collaborative spaces like Burnett’s – but take these examples as something to strive toward, not something to actually accomplish.

For more on the link between productivity and office interior design, download our white paper:  “Designing for Productivity: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

Such a shift means that office interior design plays a greater role in encouraging collaboration between colleagues. And where collaboration goes, productivity often follows. Design firm Gensler reports that companies report productivity increases when they create environments that invite collaboration, by providing space for people to interact, for instance.

The research points to a new ideal: a workplace that balances collaboration and privacy. This involves an office interior design paradigm that permits both the ability to do distraction-free solo work for workers and teams, and the ability to support impromptu interactions. A study conducted by BOSTI Associates, a workplace planning and design consultancy, found that when an office interior design addressed these abilities, “individual performance jumped 4 percent to 5 percent, team performance 23 percent. Job satisfaction rose 23 percent.”

What happens in a workplace that encourages collaboration? First, teams tend to make decisions faster, as the ability to make crucial decisions are devolved to the rank-and-file. Second, open-access workspaces support team building efforts, accelerating group cohesion and improving team effectiveness.

Workplaces that succeed in inviting collaboration seem to balance three factors, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Proximity: Colleagues working on common projects should be located as close to each other as possible, minimizing distance traveled and potential for interruption inherent in each meeting. The office interior design should naturally direct traffic to shared spaces, and allow them to stay there.

Privacy: If workers want to focus on their jobs without distraction, the spaces should allow them to do so. If they want to collaborate without being overheard, the space should let them do that, too. “This gives workers the freedom to speak freely, creating an atmosphere of expression and trust,” opines consultant Lisa Gardner. “Sometimes an open floor space plan can actually inhibit collaboration, as employees may feel vulnerable about being overheard and overexposed.”

Permission: Policies that encourage collaboration should be encouraged by the leadership. They can send positive signals by providing comfortable furniture and modeling desired behaviors.

An office interior design that invites collaboration provides for all 3 P’s, no less. “Having only one or two usually isn’t enough, and over- or under-emphasizing any of the three can backfire,” the Harvard Business Review authors warn. “Build flexibility into your design so that you can test permutations, and measure the designʼs effects.”

The success of the 3 P’s revolves around the use of informal spaces in the office – a coffee corner, or impromptu meeting rooms. These spaces encourage informal meetings, which in turn build trust and encourage the free flow of ideas between colleagues, completing the collaboration circuit.

“Informal spaces may exude a “personality” that helps members connect and relate,” writes Dorothy Deasy, noting that her research finds an association between informal spaces and a perception of “better” meetings. “Meetings that were more high energy, involved freer exchange of ideas, more enjoyable, felt more relaxed and continued for longer than anticipated because of the productivity of the content tended to take place in informal spaces.”

For more on the link between productivity and office interior design, download our white paper:  “Designing for Productivity: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

The Cabinet War Rooms are located under a government office building off Parliament Square in London. As war loomed, the building’s basement storage space was converted into Britain’s central war command, a bomb-proof and secure location from which the Allied effort could be fought and won.

Churchill’s office desk in the War Rooms can be found in Churchill’s Room, a suite made available for the Prime Minister and his family. Radio microphones remain standing on the desk, a reminder of the days when he would make wartime speeches from this location. Near the office desk is a closet-like space where the hotline to the White House was placed. (Read more…)

Ministers and officers working with Churchill marveled at his endurance – the Prime Minister was accustomed to working through the night, retiring at 3 or 4 in the morning, oblivious to the fatigue of his companions.

Today, Churchill’s office desk at the War Office, the original communications equipment and maps, even Churchill’s chamberpot and nightshirt, are preserved as they’re thought to have been during the war years. This was not always the case; after V-E Day, the War Office was abandoned and stripped of furniture until it was converted into a museum in 1984.

Old photographs were used as a reference to the renovation; office desks and other furniture were sourced from second-hand furniture shops. The original feel of the underground lair, however, has been retained.

Away from the War Office, Churchill made his home at Chartwell, his much-beloved country manor. In his personal life, Churchill disdained office desks, preferring to work from bed. But his study was also used often, where Churchill worked at an 18^th-century mahogany desk topped with red leather, with three brass-handled drawers on each side. Today, the leather bears coffee mug and brandy glass stains, none of which were present in a limited edition of 250 reproductions sold as a fundraiser for the National Trust. (The office desks went for about $6,000 each, and were quickly snapped up.)

Whether at Chartwell or underground at the War Office, Churchill never tidied his desk. According to consultant Ivan Walsh, Churchill would never have approved of a “clean desk” policy; the mess just worked for him.

Despite the seeming chaos of Churchill’s desk, he knew where everything was. Besides, his long hours meant that there was no “end of the day” for the Prime Minister to use as a cleanup time. Churchill would never have derived any benefit from pristine office desks; much the opposite, in fact.

Both Chartwell (www.nationaltrust.org.uk/chartwell/) and the War Offices (www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms), as well as the office desks within, are open to the public for viewing.

This article is part of a Cubicles.com series on the History of Office Desks, Past and Present. Read the first part here: Office Desks of the Rich and Famous: the Resolute Desk.

As it’s part of the first impression you make on your clients and visitors, your reception office furniture – if selected properly – can create a lasting positive impact of your enterprise, and can improve your business prospects too.

Flaunt Your Attitude. Choosing your reception office furniture – and the other elements that go with it – require that you make a decision about the character and attitude of your enterprise. Do you want to be seen as creative? Conservative? Energetic? Such attitudes spell the difference between Twitter’s reception office (think: birds in flight) and the Dental INN’s therapeutic reception lounge. Read more…

Choosing a Reception Desk. What items, at minimum, would your new reception area need? The reception desk is item number one, the most important bit of office reception furniture you’ll need to get. You’ll need to choose a reception desk to match your company’s personality and image. For instance, tech start-ups may want to have this reception desk, constructed from the wing of a Douglas DC-8 plane – but law firms may give that desk a pass.

Don’t forget that the reception desk you choose should be as functional as it is attractive – reception office furniture that looks good but is barely usable in reality defeats the purpose of having a reception area in the first place!

Choosing Reception Seating. Every reception office furniture setup should aim for a comfortable seating experience. Having your guests wait in discomfort is only marginally better than having them stand around a seat-less reception office.

Install enough seating that offers multiple seating choices; you can decide the minimum number of seats you need by counting the number of visitors you receive on a daily basis.

Be sure that all seats can be seen and reached by the receptionist on duty. (“Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones will see you now… Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith?”) If money or space is a bit short, you might settle for one of these bench seating units – they also offer the added advantage of being quite modern in appearance.

Choosing Everything Else. The reception desk and seats cover the basics – everything else is there to add dimension and warmth to the reception area. Reception office furniture like a coffee table and a magazine stand add to the comfort level of the reception area, lessening the ordeal of waiting for business to commence.

• Magazine Stand: Do think about the selection of newspapers and magazines that your guests can read in the reception area. If you can stock the magazine stand with magazines full of articles that cover your business in a positive light, that will increase the high regard that your visitors have for your business.
• Refreshments: A coffee machine, water dispenser, or bowl of sweets adds a touch of convenience for waiting guests, and makes the wait less of an ordeal.
• Access to communications: more visitors have their own WiFi-capable devices on hand, so it might be a good thing to provide WiFi access to visitors. In the same vein, you might want to have a phone in the reception area handy.

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)

Ergonomics. Among the respondents to the ASID survey, 20.6 percent reported improvement in employee productivity a year after ergonomic furniture was installed. Apart from the added comfort provided by better-adjusted office cubicles and seats, improved ergonomics provides employees with the satisfaction of control over their environment.

We’ve discussed the subject on this blog before; common wisdom on ergonomics has evolved, moving away from correct posture toward increasing the range of movement. Also, hiring an ergonomics professional may be preferable to doing the whole thing yourself.

Lighting. Bad task lighting does more than just waste energy; it gets in the way of productivity, too. Bad lighting creates glare that causes eye strain, accelerating the sensation of fatigue and discomfort. And many offices are simply over lit, a result of poor office interior design planning.

Wilson Dau breaks it down – many offices are set up to have 50 footcandles’ illuminance, but “in today’s computer-intensive workplace, 50FC is too much light. Plus, most, office furniture is sold with individual task lighting, which ends up flooding 60 or 70FC over the worksurface.”

Part of the solution to bad lighting lies in the use of more natural light in combination with lower overall illumination levels. In a tip of the hat to ergonomics (i.e. giving employees control over their own environments), many comfortable office environments have taken the trouble to install adjustable, individual task lighting.

Air Quality. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates, businesses lose up to 60 million work days annually because of negative air quality concerns. Poor indoor air quality may result from ambient pollution, or from outgassing coming from paint, laminates, and carpeting.

Ergonomics, lighting, and air quality have everything to do with productivity. Many facility managers forget this, because comfort is its own worst enemy, not bringing any attention to itself; nobody attributes their increased sales figures to, say, the new delivery of Aeron chairs.

And yet see how much attention the distraction of discomfort calls to itself!  Which is exactly why discomfort is bad for productivity. Bad office interior design takes up plenty of mental real estate, brain power that can be more productively used tackling work-related problems. But how can one be focused on corporate solutions, when the brain is distracted by that dull and growing ache in your wrist, or the uncomfortable settings of your badly-adjusted office chair?

Is there more to accessibility and office interior design? Sure! Download our white paper, and read more – download “Office Interior Design: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

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…

Cisco Systems’ Collaborative Connected Workplace Environment, for example, tore down cubicle walls and created a campus-like office interior design that had space set apart for informal meetings and enclosed quarters for private work. Unmooring employees from assigned desks, Cisco introduced wireless LAN and IP telephony systems to allow their people to stay connected wherever they might be on campus.

Cisco set the bar for a high degree of accessibility to people and resources: while private spaces still exist for staff who need to concentrate on their work, the office interior design is largely composed of spaces for meeting and collaboration, welcoming both large and small groups. Workers even have access to overseas teams and resources, through the use of teleconferencing, interactive white boards, and instant messaging.

Cisco found two key benefits in their more open, access-friendly design.

Faster decision making: the ability to make crucial decisions are devolved to the ranks. Instead of a top-down decision workflow, strategy and action flows from and between the people who are closest to the situation, instead of executives who may be far removed from the problem.

Better group cohesion. “Providing opportunities and spaces for people to interact is important to creating the trust necessary for a collaborative working environment,” writes Doug Zucker in “What does Change Look Like?”, and he couldn’t be more on the money. Shared perspectives and experiences create a bond of trust and camaraderie between colleagues, something that just isn’t possible when the interior office design discourages close collaboration.

Cisco isn’t alone in gravitating towards office environments that tear down physical barriers. The open office design now getting more common in the workplace is most suited to an open-access, collaborative environment, although other office innovations are also encouraging collaboration on their own.

Zucker comments how law offices are changing to incorporate collaboration and socialization into their structure: “New types of spaces are being created to enhance either planned or chance interactions, incorporating an attorney lounge into the constantly shrinking library, providing interactive café spaces with amenities like cappuccino machines and spot lounges for chance encounters.”

Perhaps it’s because decision makers are wising up – changing business conditions and the need for greater corporate competitiveness leads them to resort to effective office interior design, with the need for collaboration becoming a big part of the mix. Their employees are following suit – according to the ASID survey, 90% of respondents believe improvements in office design can increase employee productivity. Wherever you look in the organization – from the corner office to the warehouse – accessibility wins!

Is there more to accessibility and office interior design? Sure! Download our white paper, and read more – download “Office Interior Design: Key Factors in Building the Ideal Office Environment” (PDF, 210KB).

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).

“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…

Collaboration and Privacy. Intensive workflow demands a high degree of collaboration, as each worker depends on another for the completion of one’s overall task. But this collaboration needs to be balanced against the need to concentrate in a private area. Research by Cornell professors Frank Becker and William Sims suggest that fully-optimized knowledge workers make use of both spaces: closed offices that allow them to concentrate, and open offices that allow them to build trust and interact with fellow team members.

“Our research […] indicates that the more open the ‘open’ plan office environment, the more conducive it is to overall work effectiveness, when communication and interaction are critical elements of the work process,” explain Becker and Sims.

On the other hand, IT workers require an environment where they can concentrate on certain tasks. “The need to concentrate at work… requires a quiet setting with relatively few distractions,” explains Thomas Davenport of Harvard Business School. “Some studies have found that programmers spend only 20 to 30 percent of their time doing solo programming, but others have found workers devoting up to 64 percent in ‘quiet work.’ Whatever the fraction of time, it’s important for the production of final knowledge work outputs.”

Close distance matters. Despite the advance of remote communication technologies, distance still matters, as Gary and Judith Olson demonstrated in their paper (download PDF). Workers separated by distances greater than 30 meters saw their interactions drop precipitously. Under the magic 30-meter boundary, though, awareness of co-workers increases collaboration, allowing informal interactions to take place.

All these factors affect the kind of office that IT workers require to get their jobs done. “At a minimum, there need to be meeting spaces and conference rooms,” explains Davenport. “Maximum facilitation would be to create a variety of collaborative spaces, technologies, and facilitation approaches for an array of collaborative purposes. Technologies for collaboration—from videoconferences to webcasting to shared networks—are increasingly making a big difference in collaboration.” All this, of course, must be balanced out with the need for privacy – a space that facilitates information sharing with a minimum of outside distraction.

Is there more to workflow and space planning? You bet there is. Download our white paper, and read more about space planning and workflow in your office interior design – download “Space Planning for Your Office: Designing for Optimum Workflow” (PDF, 75KB).