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.
We all fear the job that looks great on paper and is a nightmare in practice. What makes some companies great to work for and others a disaster? The answer: good workplace culture. It’s the difference between Google and Yahoo, Costco, and the Department of Corrections. Studies have shown that office culture is one of the most revealing indicators of workplace satisfaction. How can companies be intentional about building and nurturing a good workplace culture?
New Yorkers have long bemoaned their city being overrun by bland office towers and chain stores: Soon, it seems, every corner will either be a bank, a Walgreens, or a Starbucks. And there is indeed evidence that all cities are starting to look the same, which can hurt local growth and wages. But there could be more than an economic or nostalgic price to impersonal retail and high-rise construction: Boring architecture may take an emotional toll on the people forced to live in and around it.
In the 8 years since Office Snapshots began publishing, we’ve watched the idea of the collaborative office rise to the level of an almost meaningless buzzword. But collaboration – working together to achieve a goal or complete a task – is an essential ingredient in any workplace that will not disappear any time soon. We recently spoke with Melissa Hanley, Principal of Blitz Architecture + Interiors, the San Francisco-based firm responsible for the design of offices for companies like Microsoft, Malwarebytes, Instacart, and Zendesk. She tells us about what collaboration in the contemporary office landscape looks like and how the firm works to help clients create an environment which matches the unique needs of each organization.
Sometime today the Philadelphia 76ers and Kimball Office will launch plans for what is being called the “Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted By Kimball” with the goal being to cultivate an entrepreneurial spirit and foster innovation while connecting and energizing the business communities in the local region. Selected companies will receive office space in the innovation lab furnished by Kimball Office as well as access to industry experts, executives and financiers, and a lot more including business solutions services; plus the opportunity to pitch industry-leading investors and venture capital firms.
When your office lease expires, opting to stay in place and upgrade your existing space can yield significant savings. However, successfully achieving such cost reduction requires careful attention to and management of a wide variety of issues in what can be a complex project process.
The increasing integration of digital technologies in all aspects of our lives is both a benefit and a challenge for employers and employees. How does an organization embrace the reality of today's digital world, put it to work, and stay open to future innovations while balancing the needs of its customers and employees?
Collaboration is an ideal many of us strive to achieve in our relationships, work lives, and extracurriculars. We move about the world with a vague sense that working together is a good thing—something we should do.
JLL's Global Head of Corporate Research, Dr Marie Puybaraud talks about the workplace of the future.
The idea that extraterrestrial organisms have throughout time seeded the surface of the Earth is not the sole preserve of loonies, mystics, conspiracy theorists, the permanently stoned and various wishful thinkers. This idea of panspermia has some pretty high profile and serious adherents. Perhaps one of the most surprising was the renowned but controversial astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle; pillar of the scientific community for much of his life, atheist, Darwinist and the man who coined the term Big Bang, albeit as a way of disparaging it. Yet also a man who believed that the global 1918 flu pandemic, polio and HIV were each the result of micro-organisms that fell from the skies rather than developing here on Earth. The broader scientific community dismisses such thinking because it derives in part from either an incredulity at the processes involved – as was the case with Hoyle – or an ignorance of them.
HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and went public in 2014. It’s one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation — a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work. Imagine a frat house mixed with a kindergarten mixed with Scientology, and you have an idea of what it’s like. It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables. Instead of hunching over sewing machines, they stared into laptops or barked into headsets, selling software.
At Kontor we see thousands of workplaces every month — from radical concepts to chic updates of traditional spaces — and spot new design ideas early. These emerging trends need to be on your radar right now.
Workplace design is important to millennials It’s an undeniable fact, companies need to successfully recruit and retain millennials to drive desired business results. As of 2015, millennials make up the largest generation in the workforce and that number will continue to rise in the immediate years ahead. Millennials are no longer a sub-group of employees on the horizon, they are the people leading teams, redefining corporate goals and contributing business ideas for the future. One constant amidst this shift in our workforce is that employee recruitment, compensation and training remains organizations’ largest expense. Successfully hiring and keeping strong employees is directly correlated to profit. It is estimated the cost of replacing a millennial employee ranges from $15-20K on average.
Many companies are starting to build a meditation practice into their culture—from starting out the day with a group meditation session to encouraging individual practices. Yet few companies have actually designed their workspaces around it. Enter Headspace, the makers of the popular meditation app of the same name. Its new 18,000-square-foot office in Santa Monica, California, is designed with meditation in mind.
Different enterprises require different things from their workplaces. It’s time we met more companies’ needs. People everywhere recognize that technology has changed the workplace forever. Today, every company is a tech company—collaboration, flexibility, mobility, shared space, personal choice, wellness and work-life integration are now valued in nearly every industry. And more and more workplaces are designed to meet these priorities, with flexible spaces, employee amenities, open floor plans, abundant daylight and connections to the surrounding city.
Almost all companies talk a good game about workplace flexibility these days. Yet many restrict alternative work arrangements to a subset of the staff. And employees often don’t feel comfortable taking advantage of the programs—in some cases fearing their job ratings and career options will suffer. According to a 2014 study from the Society for Human Resources, organizations were most likely to report that just 1%-25% of their eligible workforce used each of the flexibility options offered.
If you’re reading this article from a desktop computer in an enclosed cubicle — nary a pingpong table in sight — you’re probably not alone. Despite the media’s appetite for hip organizations with open floor plans, foosball tables, and beer on tap, most offices are pretty boring, according to a new Global Workplace Report by office furniture company Steelcase.
We’re more stressed at work than ever before. Leigh Stringer, author of the forthcoming book, The Healthy Workplace, explains how you can create more time and space for mindfulness meditation in your workplace.
Huffington Post Media Group Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington predicts that nap rooms in offices are going to be “as common as conference rooms” in the next two years. Huffington’s mission: to eliminate the stigma long associated with sleeping at work. Napping on the job used to “mean [that employees were] not as dedicated, not as hard-working,” she told NBC’s “Today” on Monday.
"If all possible old building stock in Los Angeles was converted to creative office space, that still wouldn't meet the demand for creative offices," a commercial real estate broker once explained to me.
At the time, his company was trying to crack the workplace code: how to cater to the technology sector's voracious taste for converted industrial warehouses and lofts? Established tech companies and startups alike had aligned the rough-and-ready aesthetics of the artist studio with the well-worn terms of Silicon Valley – disruption, innovation, and flexibility.
Read the opinion piece on dezeen.com >
From launch to delivery, the degree of expert alignment and synchronization between all aspects of a design project will determine the success or failure of an outcome. Although workplace strategies and design solutions that are geared to increase productivity, encourage innovation and growth, strengthen brand, and nurture wellness depend on the seamless convergence of multiple disciplines, many architecture firms treat consulting and design as separate phases. Not so at IA Interior Architects, where the integration of five practice areas—Workplace Strategy, Design, Design Technology, Environmental Graphic Design, and Wellness/Sustainability—as one team for each engagement has long been at the core of our practice.
