Why "De-tethered" Workers Need New Office Design
The changing face of knowledge workers' work requires a major design overhaul at the office to cut down on wasted space and to reflect the needs of today's employees, says Mark Golan, vice president of worldwide real estate and workplace resources at Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, California.
Golan detailed recent workplace changes and their implications:
- Knowledge workers spend 70 percent of time in some form of collaborative effort and about 30 percent in individual contributor work today; it is just the reverse of 20 years ago. Meanwhile, most offices are designed to isolate people.
- Dumb terminals and dedicated phone lines of the past, which "tethered" workers to their desks, have been replaced with a bright, wireless future. While the typical knowledge worker continues to have an office, utilization rates are down to 45 percent - a waste of space and dollars.
- Despite the "de-tethering" of the knowledge worker to perform work almost anywhere, there continues to be a big need to come together with fellow workers to collaborate on projects and, yes, to socialize because most humans are social creatures and love the interaction.
"At a place like Cisco Systems now," reports Golan, "our time is spent in collaboration and the nature of our IT tools is such that we no longer have to
be in any one place to be productive. We have been looking at the workplace environment and realize that this thing is an anachronism."
Golan said it is no secret that the cost of fixed assets for most corporations dwarfs any other operational expense except salaries. To compare the situation, he said that if the head of a manufacturing group went to his board for $2 billion to build a manufacturing facility that would run 100 percent of the time but only at 45 percent peak utilization, he would be kicked out of the room. "That would be totally unacceptable, yet every single day right now we are doing it in corporate America," he said.
Golan's answer for reducing excess space while creating a work environment that better fits the needs of the modern worker is to make it more like home: "The end result will be an environment that looks and feels very different," he said. "We are trying to move away from space assignment, not in a "hoteling" sense of the word. I don"t like hoteling because hoteling to me feels like the same old environment - only shared. What we are talking about is an environment that is much more akin to your home than it is to the office that people are used to today.
"You come into an environment and you move around in that environment as needed, depending on what activity you are doing," he went on. "In effect, the whole place is your office.Just as when you come home, you don't go into a cubicle - you don't sit down in a cubicle in your house."
The other aspect about this new environment, according to Golan, is that it must have "buzz": "We want an environment that is buzzing because that means that people are talking - communicating. You walk in and - wow - something is going on here. People are constantly talking and interacting in informal ways. There is also formal collaboration going in open areas and meeting rooms. Yet it is a very vibrant, lively environment. It is also designed in a more human way that is a lot more inviting than a standard cube form."
Cisco is practicing what it preaches: "Cisco is putting these ideas to work in a limited scale deployment. In the not
too distant future, it will be made the company's standard deployment," he concluded.
Obesity's New Workplace Focus
Corporate exercise facilities are a great employee perk, and now they could be just the ticket to help lower insurance costs by getting the exercise challenged to get their hearts pumping.
"Across the country, companies are paving the way to encourage an increasingly overweight society to get fit," said Dan Jeakins, AIA, Principal, HKS, Inc., Dallas, Texas. "The new methods go way beyond offering discount gym memberships and teaching the virtues of vegetables."
Jeakins said that at Sabre headquarters, Southlake, Texas, fitness is a way of life. A pedestrian-friendly campus encourages employees to access buildings by landscaped walkways. With bike racks in the garages and bike paths lining the facility, employees can pedal to work. Locker rooms and showers are also a part of the fitness package. In addition, Sabre dedicated a four-acre strip of land that will connect the campus and the city's bike train system to the city of Southlake.
The architect said that hospitals, of course, are also getting on board. A 1,500-square-foot fitness area was transformed into Bayfit, a 6,500-square-foot state-of-the-art wellness center for staff at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Florida. Today, Bayfit offers wellness counseling and education, fitness evaluations, personalized exercise prescriptions, aerobics and other guided exercise programs and weight management, diabetes, and workman's compensation programs.
At the J. C. Penney corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas, the company puts a great deal of emphasis on health issues. Said Jeakins: "The J. C. Penney headquarters acts as an indoor walking facility with a 1-1/2-mile walking/jogging trail. It features a full-service health club - with fitness center, yoga and aerobics classes, massages, trainers, etc. - a childcare center and an on-site medical facility."
How Green Design Can Save Money, Boost Employee Morale
"What is sustainable design or green design?" asked Don Rudy, senior project manager, Jones Lang LaSalle, San Francisco, California, at a panel on Green Design at NAIOP's Annual Conference and Marketplace. "It is a collaborative, interdisciplinary process. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, sustainable design can go much farther. Green design is simply good design, resulting in high-performance buildings. It cannot be layered on, post-project; it is integral to the design of the
project. Green design [consists of] design and construction practices that can reduce or eliminate the negative impact of buildings on the environment. It is about reducing
the environmental footprint of what we do."
It boils down to five primary categories, he said, including:
- Site - sustainable site planning.
- Water - safeguarding water and water efficiency.
- Energy - energy efficiency and renewable energy.
- Materials - conservation of materials and resources.
- Indoor air quality.
Rudy said that the main driver behind green design is the U.S. Green Building Council in Washington, DC, whose purpose is to promote a leading-edge system for resources in the design, construction, operation and certification of green buildings. This group is the developer of the Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).
For more information
U.S. Green Building Council: www.usgbc.org
For an excellent book on the subject: Cradle to Cradle:
Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough.
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Logistics: Corporate America's Competitive Weapon
Warehouses are strategic and tactical today, part of corporate America's efforts to hone logistics as an important competitive weapon, according to Jon DeCesare, principal, WCL Consulting, Long Beach, California. DeCesare chaired a roundtable discussion on logistics at NAIOP's Annual Conference and Marketplace in San Diego.
DeCesare detailed the logistics chain in a graphic (shown here), stating that "This graphic is intended to show the supply chain from factories in Asia to the consumers throughout the malls of San Diego, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago. It takes sometimes 35 days to move products from overseas factories to the ultimate retail stores. This graphic represents all of the stakeholders that it takes to move the product. Sometimes our focus is narrow and we do not realize that upstream and downstream, it takes many players to move the product to the ultimate goal."
Some of the logistics trends DeCesare and the roundtable identified:
- The warehouse is not just a real estate decision anymore; it is a logistics decision that can have ramifications throughout the entire chain. Warehousing on inexpensive land in an out-of-the-way location can wreak havoc on the chain.
- Financial pressure on the supply chain: Chief financial officers are concerned about the amount of money they have in warehouses and inventory and focus on a term called cash-to-cash. This means from the time they buy the product until they sell it, they are out the money. The corporate strategy today is to reduce
the cash-to-cash cycle. DeCesare offered an example of how critical it is to move goods faster: "Target Stores says that for every day it takes out of the movement of goods, it can save $100 million," he said.
- Shortening of product life cycles: Until recently, products were good for a 12- to 16-month lifecycle. Today, products have a four- to six-month lifecycle.
- More movement to where products are selling. Corporate America can tell at the speed of computer what products are selling and where they are selling. Today's warehouse is a 24/7 operation that needs to be completely flexible.
- Increasing clashes of residential and warehouse uses. Residential communities have moved closer to industrial parks and there are now clashes as the warehouses try to work longer hours. Corporate America wants to know exactly where the residential communities are before they sign on the dotted line.
- The warehouse is becoming a "customization center," where products are often finished.
- Downsized corporate America needs help from the real estate industry. DeCesare said that the real estate professional who can help the corporation analyze the impact of the real estate deal on its entire logistics chain could be an important asset to his client.
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By Ron Derven, co-editor of Development magazine
