On November 14th, 2017, Susan S. Szenasy, our director of design innovation, sat down with a panel of design experts at the Haworth showroom in Washington, DC, to learn more about the business case for wellbeing and how improving office design with a focus on workplace wellness can limit employee turnover and improve performance. The panel included Chris Calhoun, vice president of real estate and workplace services at T. Rowe Price, Randy Fiser, CEO of ASID, and Anjell Karibian, senior workplace design strategist at Haworth. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for clarity by Bailey McCann.
Susan S. Szensasy (SSS): Our subject matter is really important, the business case for well-being in the workplace. Digital work, generational changes, cultural changes; we’re all confronted with these issues right now. So let’s talk to Randy. You started out to create a really strong study of behaviors, of interactions, of how people work, and how people use the space, and how people interact with one another. Can you give us a kind of first peek into what your findings were?
Randy Fiser (RF): What we were hoping with the goals that we set, was for the ASID office to be a living laboratory to help support productivity, engagement, and retention through the lens of health and sustainability. What we wanted was to be able to study it and have the results show that this matters. That’s exactly what we’ve been able to demonstrate.
SSS: Could you give us the specifics of how this was studied?
RF: Sure. There are actually four or five basic studies that are going on within the office. In one that we did in partnership with Cornell University, we used socio-metric badges. Pre-occupancy, people wore the badges that had GPS, Bluetooth, infrared, and they also measured voice.
The next study was with Michigan State University, which was measuring innovation and innovation through space. We had a benchmark dataset that allowed us to collect data and then, through the lens of space, compare us to other organizations. That study came out to prove that there have been increased levels of innovation through the use of the designed space. We also did a wellness study, which looked at the health of the staff. This was done by the International WELL Building Institute and we used their research questions to have conversations with staff to see if they were actually seeing health and wellness improvements at work.