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).

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…

So under those super-creative veneers, good ad agencies also focus on an office interior design that permits this workflow to flourish. For Gervais Tompkin, a VP for design firm Gensler, formal studies like Gensler’s “activity portrait” help clarify the optimum design for ad agency offices. The following factors are considered:

Space Layout: Jay Chiat may have been way ahead of his time, but the open office simply prevented employees from getting work done. An optimal layout permits agency creatives to collaborate and brainstorm, but makes a clear delineation between creative departments and account servicing; the former’s work often gets disrupted by the latter.

Space Usage: How are agency employees using existing space? Do agency creatives use the conference rooms too often for brainstorming, crowding out account executives or media people from meeting in them?

Workarounds: How does the office layout help workers get their job done? Ad agencies require both collaborative and thinking spaces, and any agency worth their salt ought to be able to provide such spaces without workers resorting to uncomfortable workarounds. In Chiat/Day’s case, many workers simply left the office to meet… and sometimes never returned for the rest of the day!

So don’t be too dazzled by those incredible ad agency office interior design galleries; there’s a serious bit of business under all that fun, and if the office design isn’t geared around helping the office workflow run smoothly, then all that dazzle will be all for naught.

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).

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)

Dynamics of Pooled Workflow

To use Bell and Kozlowski’s model of task dependencies, telecommuting represents a great example of a pooled workflow: as opposed to other workflow models where work cascades sequentially from one step to another, pooled workflow involves individuals working alone, adding to one overall group effort. In pooled workflow, group interaction can be optional or wholly unnecessary.

Pooled workflow is marked by a number of common characteristics:

Independence of tasks. Workers in a pooled workflow system manage to accomplish tasks independently of other workers, without timing or technical dependencies on other components in the workflow.

This frees up managers to organize teams as they like, focusing purely on the desired outcome, office space planning be damned – “teams can be organized whether or not members are in proximity to one another,” says Cascio, and “firms can use outside consultants without incurring expenses for travel, lodging, and downtime.”

Participants work independently. With largely independent goals, participants in a pooled workflow can be grouped in different combinations for different activities. “Dynamic team membership allows people to move from one project to another,” explains Cascio. “Employees can be assigned to multiple, concurrent teams.”

Centralized authority. Pooled workflow participants are never wholly independent; they generally depend on a central authority that oversees output, making sure problems are dealt with and work proceeds smoothly.

This is where technology steps in, allowing a single manager to oversee a disparate team: “Team communications and work reports are available online to facilitate swift responses to the demands of a global market,” says Cascio.

Pooled Workflow and Office Space Planning

So who works under a pooled workflow model – and what implications does this kind of workflow have for office space planning? Telecommuters aren’t the only workers who use a pooled workflow model; teachers, for instance, also depend on a individual efforts leading towards an overall push.

Both teachers and telecommuters can work isolated from one another – the teacher in his or her classroom, apart from fellow teachers; the telecommuter, at home or on the road, apart from colleagues on the virtual team.

Offices can now afford to create “hoteling” systems in their offices for their teleworkers, even impersonal ones – telecommuters don’t miss having personalized space in their main office, if they already have a space to call their own at home. Any time spent in the office will be focused on the few group tasks needed in pooled workflows, like client visits or group meetings.

In a pooled workflow, the office has become almost superfluous, and the design of the office follows from its changing function.

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).

One of those new ideas that’s getting another look is the concept of “hot desking”. We’ve talked about hot desking before: the practice of having no assigned desks per worker, allocating them instead to the first worker who uses or reserves it for use.

Office space planning professionals use hot desking to reduce property costs without decrease the labor force in turn. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Telford College’s faculty and staff have joined the bandwagon, implementing hot desking in their Granton campus to allow the same number of people to work in a smaller space.

Technology has allowed hot desking to gain the critical mass it failed to reach in prior decades. When Jay Chiat of Chiat/Day ad agency tried it out in the Nineties, it was a famous failed experiment in space planning. Today, high speed Internet, cheap laptops, and Wi-Fi has allowed most firms to succeed where Chiat failed.

More on hot desking after the jump. Read more….

As general manager of Australian firm Link Recruitment Gemma Avon explains, “with laptops and BlackBerries and mobile phones you can do the work wherever you are,” noting that sales reps don’t even go back to the office to file sales figures anymore, when uploading can be done remotely. “It’s all about outcomes, who cares where the job is done? I can’t image any modern manager who isn’t more interested in outcomes than anything else,” comments Avon.

Will hot desking work out for your office as well as it seems to have for  Avon? It depends – there are two types of businesses that seem to adapt well to space planning for the hot desk:

Businesses with shift workers benefit from the creative space planning that hot desking offers. On average, office desks are occupied from 40 to 50 percent of each working day; that’s a lot of office real estate wasted, which can be put to good use when used alternately by different shifts.

Businesses with a high proportion of part-time employees benefit from the smaller overall footprint required by their staff, who can then be allocated desk use in a far more efficient manner than would be possible with a largely full-time crew.

Of course, businesses operationally need to adjust to a hot desking system once it’s implemented: cabling, telecommunications, furniture, and filing systems should facilitate hot desking, not hinder it. Office furniture and wiring must be adjusted to permit switching between users, applications, and equipment.

Even with such standards in place, it’s the people involved who may need to make the biggest adjustment. Employees may feel attached to their own spaces; managing expectations may help ease the adjustment period. “In a customer service centre where people are coming and going, if people know that is how it is going to be they don’t get attached to a little piece of real estate,” reminds Gemma Avon – “there is no status attached with what little piece of the world they have.”

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…

The New York Times reports that “in the last three years, companies have given up 137.8 million square feet nationwide, according to the real estate research firm Reis, and would most likely put more on the market if they could.” The need to redefine the space they can afford has forced even the most tradition-bound companies to innovate:

Many companies are redesigning the workplaces that remain, opening them up to make them flexible for multiple uses. Even tradition-bound firms in accounting and banking are embracing open-plan offices and other changes. They have shut sections of floors to save money on utilities, squeezed remaining employees closer together, torn down walls and downsized cubicles or gotten rid of them entirely.

When Your Office Cubicle Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade

Some of these changes are all for the better: with the office cubicle paradigm falling victim to cost-cutting, more workplaces are looking towards more collaborative office designs that also accommodate more workers per square foot. Open office systems, for example, allow colleagues to collaborate more, increasing productivity.

The Vancouver Sun reports that some former office cubicle workers welcome the open office trend with open arms – they see themselves coming out on top in the tradeoff. “My last cubicle was tucked back in a corner, and you were lucky if you could find a window,” remembers Terry Stegman of PSA Financial, whose workplace replaced cubicles with an open workspace with better lighting and furniture.

Today, Stegman reports, “We’re surrounded by windows on three sides – we have huge conference rooms with drop-down computer screens and more access to them than we had before. And our kitchen looks like a Starbucks.”

“It makes sense,” remarks Angie Earlywine, senior workplace strategist for architectural firm HOK, noting that employers are “allocating space less to the individual and more to the team…. Managers are realizing if they give employees more space to get together and solve problems, solutions come faster.”

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)