Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
How can design impact the largest number of people in a positive way? It’s a question Tim Brown, CEO of global design firm IDEO asks regularly. Businesses are not just machines and companies — from design to traditional industries — have to start thinking differently, Brown said.
Did you earn your college degree back in the 20th century? Then perhaps you remember a freshman History of Ideas lecture at 8am—the one you sat through with 300 other sleepy students. Your professor stood at a podium and chalked words on a blackboard while students scribbled notes and dozed. Remember the card catalog at the library? Call slips? Typewriters? Maybe you had a pager to keep in touch with friends. Or, perhaps you had to rely on pay phones or the wall-mounted phone in your dorm room.
The latest idea to grip the sometimes limited imagination of the world’s workplace chatterers is that of the six hour working day. This has its roots in a Swedish experiment designed to limit the hours people work in an attempt to improve their work-life balance and possibly even increase their productivity. These are always commendable goals and you can see the logic. We know people find it increasingly hard to switch off, we know that this is bad for them and we know that long hours don’t necessarily equate to greater productivity. The problem is that the very idea of a six hour day is rooted in the same command and control thinking routinely derided by the very people pushing for a new era of fixed hours. Indeed, you could achieve a six hour day simply by telling people to work 9 to 5 and remember to take their full lunch hour and a couple of proper breaks. The whole idea is deeply conservative, dressed up in radical clothing.
New technology continues to change our office workspaces. If this trend continues, here's where we may be headed. I recently received an infographic from WeAreTop10.com showing how work desks have evolved over the past 40 years. The graphic (reproduced in full here) also predicted how desks might evolve over in the near future. It occurred to me that the infographic doesn't really go far enough in either direction (past and future). By adding more background and projecting current trends into the future, we can see what our workplace will look like in the next century.
Over the past few years there have been many discussions around the death and disappearance of the office. Most believed that with co-working locations, the spread of Wi-Fi and mobility, and the rise of co-working locations that there would be no need for an office anymore. We would all work from anywhere and everywhere and this was of course a fair and reasonable prediction. But, it’s not entirely true. Our traditional idea of an office is in fact disappearing, that is the row of cubicles lined in a building that looks and smells like a hospital but the office itself is far from dead!
If you’ve ever reminded yourself to “just breathe,” then you’re already on the path of mindfulness. And if your colleagues remind you to “just breathe,” you may be working for an organization that supports mindfulness. In Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the Inside Out, author David Gelles explores the history of the mindfulness movement, examining its origins to more current applications in Western culture and business.
I'm sitting in a private work pod right now. The day is a bit dreary here in Minnesota but I have a task lamp pointed toward my keyboard. It's helping my disposition a bit. I have my feet propped up on a small blue ottoman and I'm listening to the new album by Grimes. There's a thin plastic shield surrounding me that looks exactly like something out of Star Trek. The pod is called the Steelcase Brody, and it's a wonder of workplace engineering.
One of my favorite parts of my job is helping clients determine how they should go about creating a workplace strategy for their organization: More or less, developing the “strategy” for the strategy.
Trust. Clarity. Vision. Focus on these to make your virtual team more effective. Do what it takes to getteam members to trust you and each other. Be clear about what each needs to do – specifically. Then make sure the parts fit together in line with the overall vision, Allsteel.’s National Architectural and Design Manager A.J. Paron-Wildes took me through this thinking on the plane to this year’s HATCH. When I saw her last year, she was hoping for a promotion. She got it in March, used First-Time Leader to help accelerate her onboarding into her new role and now has a virtual team of 20 designers spread across the country that others are begging to join. None of this is surprising as A.J. oozes inspiration and enablement from every pore.
At Steelcase, we study how the workplace impacts human interactions and human behavior. In recent years, we’ve found that the physical environment can be used as a strategic asset to engage workers. Specifically, when workers are given the freedom to choose where and how they work throughout the day, they are more likely to be engaged.
Read the article here or on Steelcase.com >
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder. But when we see beauty—whether in a glorious sunset, a majestic mountain, an inspired building, or a fellow human being—we know it. Visual beauty is tangible.
Driven by the challenges of doing business in the global, technology-driven economy, and by an increasing demand for flexibility, the distributed workforce is growing. Whether you call it mobile or remote work, agile or flexwork, WORKshift, or telework/telecommuting, the reality is that many workers are no longer tied to the traditional office. The benefits of flexible working arrangements range from improved employee engagement and productivity, to reduced commuting and less pressure on infrastructure. Of course, new challenges also come alongside these benefits.
You could walk into the room and feel the energy. Already, a large group of real estate professionals had been in LA for a day or two taking classes to improve their professional skills and to hear the latest when it comes to representing the strategic value of commercial real estate.
Tracy Wymer, Vice President Workplace, Knoll, joined Andrew O'Donnell, Ernst & Young LLP, Chris Kane, formerly of the BBC, and Derek Bock, eBay, on a panel debate at WorkTech ’15 in London. The panel, which Wymer moderated, discussed ways in which companies can stimulate innovation by bringing the right people together. The panel also addressed how workplaces that take design and programming cues from the world of hospitality can enhance the overall work experience.
Google coddles its employees with free food, massages and other lavish perks, yet some of its best engineers still grouse about their jobs and bosses as they struggle to get assignments done. The Internet company tackled the puzzling problem with a study that concluded how teams work together is more important than who is on a team.
Today, knowledge workers are faced with a business climate centered on constant communication and a rapid pace of change. They are being asked to do more with less. Our research shows that we need to provide the setting and support for the broadening diversity of activities packed into the workday. More and more, we see the individual workstation is not the sole location for work; it is one of many settings where work happens.
It’s been 75 years since the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened on Oct. 1, 1940—ushering in a new era of highway construction across the United States.
What is good design? Do you think good design happens automatically? For my entire career, I have been interested in design culture and am motivated by the power of individual expression and perspective. Encouraging ideas and creativity within our offices is not only invigorating, but is essential for sustaining a practice focused on design excellence. How do we advance and nurture design culture?
The attitudes of businesses, public sector employers and people to the next wave of technological change remains a tangled and sometimes conflicting mishmash of fear, uncertainty and indifference according to three new reports. According to a new study published by Vodafone and YouGov, while businesses are aware of their need to keep pace with technological developments, around half doubt they will be able to keep up over the next five years.
Poor communication and working practices among remote teams is widespread, a new report by the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) claims. Organisations are failing to capitalise on the potential for remote working to improve performance and efficiency with 88 percent of remote workers struggling with inconsistent working practices and miscommunication, while 83 percent feel overwhelmed by emails. Although 84 percent of remote workers report improvements to their work-life balance, a lack of team identity can cause isolation and loneliness.
