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.
If sitting is the new smoking, is a standing desk the equivalent of giving up smoking? Maybe. Or maybe not. At the moment, we don't have strong evidence to say standing for longer produces health benefits, never mind the standing desk craze.
For years, people have been developing the model for the home. They have personal spaces where they rest, sleep, maybe a work room. They have common spaces where they cook food, eat food, use electronic devices, a playroom. This idea of the home came about over thousands of years centered around what would make a person happy if they were there all day. But now, they are not there all day, they’re here in the office.
Employee engagement is on the mind of today’s organizations. This is part three in a three-part series on engagement in the workplace. Read part one and part two on the VOA blog.
In an industry where a private office flush with glass plaques and deal mementos is the ultimate sign of success, commercial real estate firm CBRE gambled on a new strategy that hinged on concepts workers tend to hate. Employees seem to love it—but more importantly, clients are begging for it.
Gallup Poll results documented in this article support the notion that the telecommuting trend is on the rise. Signifiantly, 37% of participants say they have worked remotely at one point, which is four times the amount of respondents that indicated this just 20 years ago. Likely contributors to this jump? Advanced technology, a generation entering the workforce that prefers mobility and flexibility, and organizations seeking to expand remote and/or flexible work options as a way to attract and retain talent.
If you go to work every day in a soul-sucking cube, we have some good news.
Fitness centers are pitching meditation and mindfulness sessions for stressed-out members.
When it comes to each individual’s working space and workstation area, a question that is always worth asking (and often is) is whether it is best to back off and let people customise their immediate surroundings to fit with their own tastes and needs or whether a company-wide tidy desk policy and uniformity of approach be imposed to protect a specific look and standard. One factor that is relevant is that there seems to be a pendulum swing between aesthetics and wellbeing going on at the moment, with many companies going back and forth in pursuit of the best approach. A study, conducted a few years ago by psychological scientist Professor Kathleen Vohs, along with a number of other researchers from the University of Minnesota, considered the behaviour of people working on both messy and clean desks and found that the individuals working in messier spaces came up with more creative and interesting results in their work overall.
Derren Brown is clearly on to something. And if you’ve read his books you’ll know that what he’s on to is finding ways to tap in to our fascination with how our thoughts and actions can be manipulated using some well-defined and researched techniques and principles. Add in some showmanship and what you have is something that is indistinguishable from magic. You can believe in the magical and mystical if you like, but Derren Brown is a creature of the Enlightenment and has no truck with any of that. He’s got psychology and science on his side. The magic is in our own heads. It’s not just Derren Brown who has used the findings of psychologists to find ways to control people. Many of our current beliefs and the very workings of our society are based on this sort of manipulation. You can also see its workings in the way we think we think we can use workplace design to influence the feelings and behaviour of others.
Dear long-suffering office worker: Are you still marooned in your cubicle, laboring under fluorescent lights, preparing for another formal meeting in which your participation is limited to getting up for a refill of bad coffee?
I can’t remember a more rewarding time in my career when interior designers could truly be influencers. I’ve been trying to figure out why now. During my career, there have been highs and lows in the influence asserted by interior designers. What is different today? Doesn’t it feel like opportunity is increasing and more doors are opening?
As much as our productivity depends on learning how to focus our minds and mastering time-saving hacks, sometimes it’s the small—and often times unnoticed—things that boost our efficiency. I’m talking about things like room temperature, desk supplies, and that cup of Starbucks coffee you get every morning before work.
The key to increasing employee engagement, health, happiness and well-being lies in employers who establish a workplace culture of wellness, according to a study released Feb. 17 by Humana and the Economist Intelligence Unit.
With a huge amount of office space under construction in Ireland, a report finding that 11 per cent of employees are highly dissatisfied with their offices, and highly disengaged from their jobs as a result, makes interesting reading.
Haworth white papers: work is changing and workers are changing – so workplace design needs to change too to keep up. To kick off a series of articles in collaboration with Haworth, the office furniture giant's research head Michael O'Neill explains what the company is doing to help clients provide the ideal office (+ interview).
Joel Pavelski, 27, isn’t the first person who has lied to his boss to scam some time off work. But inventing a friend’s funeral, when in fact he was building a treehouse — then blogging and tweeting about it to be sure everyone at the office noticed? That feels new. Such was a recent management challenge at Mic, a five-year-old website in New York that is vying to become a leading news source created by and for millennials. Recent headlines include “Don’t Ban Muslims, Ban Hoverboards” and “When Men Draw Vaginas.”
Offices need to be built around people, rather than trying to control and corral employees, argues Jonathan Openshaw. We first started writing about the rise of ‘Bleisure’ (the convergence of business and leisure) back in 2009 at The Future Laboratory, and since then we’ve seen the boundaries between work and play dissolve drastically. ‘We’re seeing workplaces that are more intelligent, connected and human-orientated – a move from facilities management to hospitality’ explains Jeremy Myerson, co-founder, Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art. His comment hints at the convergence taking place in workplaces that are now as much about leisure, wellness and hospitality as they are about observation, quantification and efficiency.
Open spaces, water cooler talk, and allowing employees to update Facebook are often more effective in creating a collaborative workplace than all the team-building exercises your consultants can dream up. Here's a look at what works in the real world.
Flexible working is on the way to becoming the norm in financial services with the average employee spending 39 percent of their time working remotely, according to new research from tech consultancy Intercity Technology. The company surveyed a mere 100 employees from different organisations within the financial services market to gain insight into their workplace habits so you may want to treat this carefully. The respondents also thought this proportion of time spent remote working would increase in the next two years to 41 percent, with an ever increasing adoption of technology-led solutions in the workplace. Additionally, the surveys suggests that 70 percent of employees believe using a device of their own choosing positively impacts the way they work with their colleagues, with the biggest specific benefits identified as flexibility (51 percent), more productivity (42 percent) and improved collaboration (33 percent).
While the fluorescent-lit rows of cubicles — implemented to save costs in an era when workers had no choice but to work at the office — have been summarily rejected by the new generation of tele-able employees, young hires are looking for a workplace experience that engages in more ways than the quirky or off-beat.
Perfecting the art of office design remains a work in progress. Though architects and planners have been incorporating innovative design principles for decades to try and adjust to the evolving preferences of workers, keeping employees happy in the workplace can be an elusive goal, says a New York Times Magazine article by Nikil Saval.
