With devices becoming increasingly portable and fast, we can now access our work almost everywhere, seemingly only dependant on wifi connection. Technology’s greatest impacts in the way in which we work are often cited as the ability for greater precision, consistency and for easy communication – with one click we can connect with people across the globe at any time of day, making it far easier to do business with companies worldwide – but what about the impact on office culture?

The ease of sending emails is overriding the office worker’s impulse to pick up the phone or walk over to someone’s desk – many of our clients complain of “email culture”, with clogged inboxes and endless “reply-all”. This begs the question of whether new technology has influenced our business culture or business culture is influencing how we use new technology.

It seems to me that, because we have access to information instantaneously anytime, we also seek this from people as well as technology. There have probably been times when we can all admit to wondering why someone hasn’t responded to our email immediately!

Whilst it’s useful to stay connected, being able to access five different communication methods – from messaging to face time on our smart phones – also means we have to think harder about our work/life balance. To resist checking emails away from the office, when it’s so quick and easy to do so, is more difficult than it may seem. Has it become the norm for our working hours and own time to become blurred?

This blurring of boundaries can also work the other way, with many of the most popular workplaces bringing elements of home-life into their culture and design. In a recent list published on Glassdoor, based on both a survey of workers’ opinions on the pros and cons of holding a job at their company, as well as ratings on how satisfied they are there, the top three companies (Google, Bain & Co. and Nestle Purina) were all supported by employee comments citing things like “beautiful campus” and “excellent culture”, with employees at Nestle Purina even able to bring pets into the workplace. Employees clearly place high value on being able to bring elements of their home and social life into the workplace, and employers are increasingly finding ways to offer this.

So what does this mean for our clients and our workplace designs? How can we maximise the benefits to the merging of work and home life and what does this mean for the future of offices? For example, an approach of 50:50 workspace and social space could enable us to interact and work in a less formal manner, and as long as deadlines are met and the work is done, why should we not embrace a flexible workday?

Although it has both benefits and limitations, technology can only be what we make of it, and so it is imperative that we understand the best ways to make it work for us and for our clients

Amy Bourne (amy.bourne@archtam.com) is a designer at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in London. 

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The conference explored Next Generation Activity Based Workplaces (ABW). I shared an extended case study of SBS’ Agile pilot space in its Artarmon headquarters.

With a background as Australia’s multicultural broadcaster, SBS has a special charter to provide multilingual, multicultural and Indigenous radio, television and digital media services that inform, educate and entertain all Australians, reflecting Australia’s diverse society.

ArchTam has been helping SBS to rethink its workspace to seize the opportunities of media convergence – staff need to be able to work flexibly across content areas and drive multiple platform delivery.

Our SBS client, Manager of Corporate Services Martin Wright, has been leading SBS’ vision of a more innovative and efficient working environment through a period of high-profile budget scrutiny from the Federal Government.

In November, an Australian Federal Government report on possible expenditure cuts at Australia’s two public broadcasters flagged the concept of “variabilising” fixed property costs, suggesting moves by employers to more flexible work practices – and a portfolio of space options that encourage more collaborative consumption of space – might become even more of a priority.

Flexible work practices should be taken up more broadly in the public sector in Australia, where we lag well behind the UK civil service and the US General Services Administration. It was good to see representatives from the Department of Finance and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet paying close attention at the ABW Conference.

SBS’ Agile pilot is an island of raw, experimental energy in its Artarmon building. It looks, feels and sounds like a creative community. All work points are shared, and a wide range of options beyond the desk give staff plenty of choice of where to focus or collaborate.

New laptops, headsets and the wireless presentation screens were all part of the IT upgrade to enable mobility. It’s just celebrated its first year in action, and ArchTam’s Strategy Plus team has completed a post occupancy review of the pilot to understand how it is performing and to build an evidence base that shapes how its workspace develops from here.

The review process included interviews, workshops and onsite observations. It also revisited the previously completed online survey and space utilisation study. The review calibrated the performance of different work settings; while the establishment of sit-stand desks was popular, the ‘grassy knoll’, in contrast, was seen as a design folly that failed to meet comfort basics for viewing content over extended periods. The feedback was clear on what worked, and the evidence we gathered on the ‘workarounds’ confirmed where the change process required more attention.

Images: Design by Hassell, Photos by Nicole England

As we were putting the presentation together, Martin commented that the pilot review process has given him a solid foundation for future development. In much the same way the initial strategic brief for the space framed the design and implementation process, the pilot findings are now setting up the next evolution of the Agile program.

One key change is the need to give work groups the security of a location, but not the ownership of a desk.

SBS wanted to promote collaboration and crosspollination between different work groups in the pilot, so no team neighbourhoods or home zones were put into place throughout it. However, the feedback from participants was that it was more important to be within ear-shot of your primary colleagues than to work alongside people in other teams.

For SBS, the point of the pilot was to take some risks. It needed to trial new settings and new behaviours and, most importantly, set up a feedback and learning loop for the next stage of the public broadcaster’s accommodation story. If you’re not scoring an epic fail in some part of the space or the process, then you’re probably not pushing hard enough beyond the frontier of the organisation’s comfort zone. Pilots let you test these risks before the size of the capex starts to rule them out. And the nature of a building project – long lead times and extended delivery – means that any major new accommodation project needs to position the organisation for where it needs to be, not where it is now.

Sue Wittenoom (sue.wittenoom@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Australia. Follow her on twitter @swittenoom

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The Global Cities Indicators Facility (GCIF) at the University of Toronto has for a long time worked with many cities around the world to collect and share data on city-level information that would be valuable for city management. Their global conference held this past May in Toronto brought together several hundred representatives of city governments, architects, planners and academics to explore what is being discovered. As a senior fellow of the Global Cities Institute I was invited to speak at the conference.

Created in 2008, the GCIF provides a set of city indicators prioritized by cities, with a globally standardized methodology that allows for comparability of city performance and knowledge sharing. Beginning with nine pilot cities, the GCIF has now developed into a global network of over 255 cities across 81 countries. Building on these core indicators, this work has evolved into a new ISO Standard (ISO 37120) and the concurrent creation of the World Council on City Data.

The big news about the data that the university is collecting is that it is now able to do so under the imprimatur of an ISO standard. It means that the data are being gathered under clear standards for comparability. The ISO standard provides an enormous boost to the value of such data and will increase the level of interest (and investment) in such data by those seeking to support cities with ‘smart’ urban infrastructure. We can expect to see a huge uplift in intelligent analyses of these kinds of data that will provide a kind of ‘meta’ overview of urban performance. See for example the establishment of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in New York, a public-private research center that “observes, analyzes, and models cities to optimize outcomes, prototype new solutions, formalize new tools and processes, and develop new expertise/experts in ‘Urban Informatics’.

I am interested in how this development of a ‘smart city’ movement and the enrichment and availability of data to understand urban performance relates to our own perspectives on work, workplaces, and the city. It suggests that our analyses of workplace data should now be related to wider perspectives on where and how work is happening on an urban scale in new kinds of working environments – some of them public or semi-public, some of them embedded in all sorts of different kinds of environments (residential, social, retail, educational etc.). Many of these new workplaces are mixed-use environments, with work taking places alongside many other kinds of functions and uses. So what are some of the avenues to explore further?

• We know that most office workplaces are grossly under-occupied (average active occupancy is around 43%).
• We know that staff in many organizations are already working in a variety of non-office based places and spaces in cities.
• We don’t have the tools to measure and analyze how this wider network of workplaces is being occupied and used and how it should be designed and provided for in the future.

The smart city movement and the availability of rich datasets from global cities means there is a huge opportunity to explore urban-scale working patterns. I am looking forward to researching and defining new kinds of performance goals for these emerging kinds of networked urban buildings and places.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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I was invited to speak at the International Facilities Management Association workplace strategy summit held near Reading, UK in June. This was hosted by Professor Alexi Marmot from University College London and was a followup to a previous summit held at Cornell University in 2012. The attendees were an interesting mix of workplace strategists from around the world (including several previous DEGWers), academics (such as Frank Becker and Wim Pullen), a few architects, as well as a smattering of corporate and government end users. The format was a mix of presentations and panel discussions as well as roundtable exercises. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. The scale was relatively small (around 100 people), which meant that the in-between conversations were often as valuable as the formal discussions.

The big theme seemed to be ‘where is workplace strategy going’? There were several propositions:

• Workplace is becoming consumerized: workplace as a service (WaaS) will replace workplace as designed space. We need to define the requirements for user experience rather than simply enumerate conventional programs of space.
• Workplace is an aspect of Human Resources and as such needs to be considered alongside other organizational rewards, costs, and benefits and in relation to organizational goals for employee behaviors.
• Workplace strategy must consider and ideally measure how the workplace is contributing to health and well-being. Examples would be minimizing the risks of sedentary work styles, and accommodating the different needs of multi-generations.
• Workplace is no longer merely the office but the wider world of co-working and third places. Our methods of briefing and programming need to be re-imagined to take this much more diverse and distributed network of spaces and places into account.
• Workplace strategy is in a sense becoming part of urban strategy: technology has enabled work to happen in less conventional workplace environments, blurring living, working and learning spaces in urban places. We need new approaches for briefing these multi-use and multi-scale environments.
• New responsibilities and managerial concerns arise as workplaces cross the boundaries of private and public spaces and become more like curated experiences or settings for different kinds of events and performances.
• New forms of ownership and procurement of space are emerging in the ‘sharing economy’ that will challenge the old supply chain of developers, landlords, and designers.

Andrew Laing (andrew.laing@archtam.com) leads ArchTam’s global Strategy Plus practice.

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As work leaves the confines of the office, organisations are looking to the workplace to be an anchor of collaboration that connects people and ideas. In a workplace landscape replete with huddle spaces, whiteboards and meeting rooms, collaboration is king. Whilst this is particularly relevant to the knowledge worker in the head office, what about the rest of the organisation? The back office is often relegated to outer suburban locations, considered ‘second class citizens’, and the work environment reflects this.

In recent research led by Strategy Plus, we looked to understand where the workplace is heading for this sector. We took a deep dive into the offices of a major financial services provider to give insight into how call centre, operational and IT project teams function. What we found was a culture aimed at bringing a highly motivated, recharged and inspired outlook to process-based workflow. Recognising that these values, attitudes and behaviours are fundamentally different to the brainstorming, meeting-centric, flexi-workers over in the head office, how might a future workplace experience look for these groups? We can look to a number of global trends to give some clue as to the direction we are moving toward.

Self-appropriation

In a workplace where decoration is an integral part of office expression, the maker movement provides an example of how technology is transforming the traditional DIY movement to cross the physical and virtual realms.  Environments, objects and services are being ‘hacked’ or improved to create new or highly customised uses and functions from a bottom-up approach.

Empowered employees

Traditional motivational tools such as leaderboards, performance statistic displays and team boards are getting social. Social networking platforms such as Mozilla Open Badges show how people are using online tools to freely curate one’s own professional identity in order to be publicly recognised for achievements and skills. In turn, organisations are using gamification concepts as a performance management tool to motivate and recognise employee achievements. Think LinkedIn meets FourSquare.

Mozilla Open Badges (Image: www.blog.mozilla.org)

Connected organisation

In the same way that museums are connecting with visitors through creating immersive and interactive experiences centered around visitor engagement, the office environment can be a mechanism for developing two-way communications between the organisation and the employee. Jake Barton from Local Projects calls this act of listening and participating ‘collaborative storytelling,’ and I think that organisations can adopt this concept to rethink how they converse and share with their workforce. In this way, traditional signage and messaging can be re-imagined to be a conduit through which staff can actively share and layer their own personal stories and ideas to the broader organisation.

(Image: www.jasonbruges.com)

One example is The Bloomberg Connects project at Tate Modern, which invites visitors to learn and contribute their own interpretations of the art to the gallery space.

Health

In a homogenous job centered around sedentary behaviour and shift work, opportunities to recharge both mentally and physically is a priority in keeping staff productivity high and turnover low. The value of natural environments has been shown to aid patient recovery times in hospitals, or to rejuvenate passengers on long-haul flights. Amsterdam-Schiphol’s Airport is one example which combines physical movement – indoor and outdoor gardens, stationery bikes double up as mobile phone chargers – with mental stimulation – an interactive virtual butterfly enclosure, public library, access to natural light and air.

Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport Park (Image: www.inhabitat.com)

While these examples provide brief glimpses into the future, they paint a much greater picture in which the workplace is a platform for people to curate their own authentic and customised experiences. In this way, I envision a workplace which responds to the unique needs of different employees, allowing people to create personal fulfillment and meaning through work, regardless of organisational level or department.

Charlotte Fliegner (charlotte.fliegner@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney who worked at a call centre during her years at Architecture school. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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Looking back to when we (then DEGW, now Strategy Plus at ArchTam) carried out the first Time Utilisation Survey (TUS) for IBM in the early 1990s, we didn’t realise that it would become the start of a database of over ten million observations of around 125,000 workspaces across nearly 500 buildings worldwide!

We initially did these studies in the UK, but it quickly became apparent that clients wanted to understand their space use across geographies, not just within one office. This started to reveal interesting comparisons between sectors and work cultures, and a great benefit of the database as it is now is that we can show clients how their workspace use compares with many other groups: other companies in their business sector, country or region, organisations who have already implemented new ways of working, or organisations who have also implemented desk sharing.

Looking closely at these differences can be fascinating, but the more data we collect, the more the database reinforces a bigger picture that we have long reported but that still surprises people: our workplaces are grossly underutilised, on average at just over 40%. This wouldn’t be accepted in other spheres – NHS beds are occupied 88% of the time and West End musical theatre seats at 73%  in 2013 – so why is it acceptable that our offices are used at such a lower level? I discussed this in more detail recently, with Nicola Gillen, in our See Further magazine.

The database now contains nearly all the TUS studies we have done dating back to 2005, and a sample of those dating back to 1995. It’s been a labour of love for me and my colleagues who have worked on it, and I believe the scope of the database is unrivaled in our industry. However, we won’t be standing still admiring our work for long – there’s work to do, as we want to continue adding early studies to the database and look for trends over time in workspace utilisation, giving us an even richer resource to draw from when planning the offices of the future. I also want to find ways to augment the data about space with data about people, as until we can understand what people are doing and their experience of the space, we are still not getting the full picture. It will be interesting to see what that picture looks like in another ten years!

Carolyn Whitehead (carolyn.whitehead@archtam.com) is a senior consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in London. 

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Urbanism, the future of work, and the implications of both for real estate were top of mind when the Strategy Plus team hosted a Think+Drink event in ArchTam’s San Francisco office earlier this month. The “thinking” portion of the event, attended by more than 50 guests, centered on a lively panel discussion.

The conversation was-wide ranging and touched on some unexpected topics such as the surprising uses Houstonians find for their city’s parking lots. Panelists Neeraj Bhatia (architecture professor at California College of the Arts), Alexa Arena (senior vice president at Forest City), and Andrew Laing (global practice leader, StrategyPlus, ArchTam) also debated more practical topics, ranging from the influence of the tech industry on work patterns (especially relevant for those of us in the Bay Area), to the reality of workers using the broader city as a workplace.

Some of us on the team were intrigued by one topic in particular: the role of suburbs and what their status means for future cities. The debate centers on whether suburbs (particularly those in the United States) are declining and only arose relatively recently as an anomalous urban development pattern, or, as some argue, represent a natural advancement in city planning and show no sign of going anywhere. Considering the stakes for urban infrastructure and real estate over the next 20 years it’s surprising that a scan of the literature finds this debate unresolved. A trend one way or the other would dramatically impact the look and feel of future cities, not to mention the ways future citizens of these cities will live and work.

For this post let’s consider a possible future that bends toward one side of the spectrum. Imagine a 2034 in which migration to urban centers has continued steadily for 20 years. New semi-urban communities with their own walkable centers have sprung up around existing city centers. Overall density has increased significantly as people prefer to live relatively close to their friends and colleagues. The people of these cities buy fewer cars to avoid inadequate infrastructure, preferring instead to use public transit and buy transportation on an as-needed basis. They live in smaller dwellings, and instead of a daily commute routine to the same office, they purchase a variety of work services depending on given day’s workstyle need. Technology has not replaced the need to interact with associates in person, but instead has augmented and supplemented those interactions.

A trend in this direction would mean a rethinking of strategy for real estate developers. Instead of leasing large office blocks to single-use tenants, city blocks would be broken up into smaller leases and building types tailored to a broader range of functions. Imagine mixed-use development on a new scale and with a new level of connection to the city. Forest City’s 5M project speaks to this future. They’re already partnering with thousands of organizations and individuals and throwing thousands of annual events as they embed themselves into the community at the beginning of a multi-phase development. The development sprawls across a San Francisco city block. It makes use of existing buildings, includes plans for new construction, and focuses on activating adjacent streets and alleys.

Growing urban populations and new trends in real estate development provide powerful arguments on one side of the suburb debate, as in Forest City’s 5M development.

Whichever direction the future trends, today’s suburbs may be the bellwether for U.S. cities. But in truth, the trend may be well underway in high-growth cities around the world such as Tokyo, São Paolo, and Mumbai. Will the global trend towards urbanization continue? If so, which city will be the U.S. poster child? Do mega-cities in other parts of the world show us a window into the future for U.S. cities? The debate continues and we look forward to exploring the possibilities with you. Let us know what you think!

Devin Harvath is a design strategist with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in San Francisco.

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The Symposium brought together the full lifecycle of academia – design students, PhDs, lecturers and professors – and an incredibly diverse range of practitioners – architects, engineers, BIM modellers, and conservation planners – even facility managers. The conference themes covered Utzon’s humanist philosophy and dedication to a collaborative design process, the transcendent poetry of epic architecture, transcultural influences in Utzon’s work, the dilemmas of living with and adapting world heritage with the focus question across all fields being “what would Utzon do now?”

The papers ranged from technical (water proofing ceramic façade glazing units/orientation and daylighting in Utzon’s houses) through to incredibly personal and sometimes viciously political (testimony from Utzon’s colleagues, friends and family, recounts of the process to select the design, defending the completion of the building by Hall Todd and Littlemore.)

The organisers where keen to extend Utzon’s thinking, and rather than just viewing Utzon’s contribution from an historic perspective, engage with contemporary and future discourse across architecture and urbanism. ArchTam submitted two papers addressing the city-making theme. James Rosenwax looked at the development challenges of Western Sydney, and Andrew Laing and I offered a perspective on how the changing workplace is reshaping our cities. We set out five propositions for the emerging workscape that recasts the office as an urban proposition, rather than a private arrangement:

• Use less space
• Share the space you have
• Look for permeable precincts
• Celebrate in-between spaces
• Plan for events and experiences.

See the illustrated paper here.

In 2014 people really can work anywhere, anytime. They have more options to choose from. The organisations that they work for are rethinking how much space they need. They’re questioning the purpose it serves, how it should be organised and what skills are needed to help it thrive.

Many players in real estate in Australia are in denial about the fundamental shifts that face the sector. Supply-side industry commentators continue to promote the view that flexible work practices are just the latest design trend, and pose no real threat to the take-up of commercial office space.  I’d be happy to debate them anywhere, anytime!

Sue Wittenoom (sue.wittenoom@archtam.com) is a director with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney.

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But more than the synergy between the technology businesses and the growth sectors of the economy, what was interesting to me also was the fact that the technology products being developed are applications to improve how we live and work in dense urban environments. And the technology workplace, as such, has become a harbinger of wider trends and innovations in how we design, use, and procure space. Whether in the form of new types of coworking spaces, or in the “meet-up culture,” or in terms of how technology is enabling space to be procured in new ways, the tech industry points to big changes in how we think about the future workplace.

Ironically, the tech industry in New York points to how important the networked physical fabric of environments for working and living in the city are, even in an increasingly virtualized world. Two big shifts are highlighted, which have general implications: the shift towards more collaborative and urban “workscapes” that are more heterogeneous, mixed-use and multi-scaled; and the shift to the collaborative consumption of workspace and workspace-as-service, provided in ways that are more responsive to short-term changing user demands.

Read “Work and Workplaces in the Digital City,” a paper I wrote for Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) and presented at a conference hosted by CURE November 1, 2013 called “Building the Digital City.” Let me know your thoughts.

Andrew Laing is global practice leader, Strategy Plus, ArchTam, and a senior fellow at the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) at Columbia University. 

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