wor k p l ac e de s ig n
nice
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bumping
Which office design best promotes collaboration,
creativity and the p-word, productivity?
esigning workplaces to facilitate
increases in productivity requires
that a couple of basic questions be
answered: what is productivity,
and how is it measured? For a word
commonly used in all sorts of contexts,
productivity’s definition is simple and
vague: the quality of being productive. This
has been extended to add a quantitative
meaning: the measure of efficiency of
production. These two definitions don’t
always agree. When designing spaces to
increase productivity, should the focus be
on the worker or the company, the quality
or the quantity?
An easy way to increase a company
office’s productivity is to get the same
output from fewer people in less space.
Installing open-plan offices with a hotdesking policy is one route to instant
R
by peTer JoHns
savings. But recent reports and surveys
find that doing this can lower an individual’s
productivity markedly because it makes the
same work harder, more stressful and less
satisfying to do.
Office compression is often the primary
driver for change – why use five floors when
three will do the job? It’s a way to cut lease
costs, which is justified by an assumption
that too much space is being devoted to
empty desks. This reasoning offers
immediate lease savings, but can in the long
run make a workplace more expensive by
being less productive.
In 2008 the US National Institute of
Building Sciences estimated that 10 per cent
of a building’s running costs are tied up in
rent. Energy and maintenance eat up
another three per cent, and the remaining
87 per cent are costs related to occupant
salaries or productivity. If a new workplace
increases work stress and staff turnover,
lease savings are quickly lost to lowered
individual productivity, redundancies,
rehiring and sickness. But this is tricky to
measure if the data isn’t being collated, or
it isn’t being shared. If overall productivity
calculations only factor in bulk wages costs,
or the number of full-time equivalent
workers, a company could be under a
mistaken illusion that labour productivity
has increased.
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WOR K P L AC E DE S IG N
into you
ACTIVITY-BASED WORKING
Activity-Based Working (ABW) was
developed by Dutch firm Veldhoen
+ Company in the mid 1990s. It can
incorporate hot-desking, but is more than
that. A partner at the firm, Louis Lhoest
believes hot-desking is “more about a
property solution than a way of working”.
ABW is concerned with processes before
property. It offers spaces with different
qualities tailored to the culture and tasks
of a company. Employees can choose
which spaces suit what they are doing
at a particular time, and it’s this choice
that is a key difference between ABW and
hot-desking.
After a period of company psychoanalysis,
decisions are made that purport to reflect
the nature of the company or team. There
has to be management buy-in – the
bosses need to be the first to let go of the
paperwork and their private offices. Lhoest
thinks this ensures that workers don’t
feel the changes are just for cost-cutting
or ‘a trick’.
A more collaborative and innovative
working environment is a commonly
stated reason for major change. One way to
catalyse innovation is through moments of
‘serendipity’ - basically getting people to
bump into other people. This gets people
within and around a business talking,
possibly about better ways to do their
work. Designers can force these encounters
by creating spaces, such as generous
stair landings and in-office cafes, which
encourage the random connections that
once only took place in the smokers’ zone,
tea rooms and at the watercooler.
Workplace architect James Calder of Calder
Consultants finds ABW too generic and
simplistic a solution as it addresses only
some of the questions. Both processes and
property are important. His firm combines
an architectural practice, a management
consultancy, an anthropologist and change
managers. They approach office design by
focusing on where the real value-add is –
getting teams collaborating in parallel and
in real time. For Calder, there has been too
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wor k p l ac e de s ig n
Leafy communal spaces at
Melbourne’s NAB building
much emphasis on making the individual
comfortable, with not enough consideration
of how different business units within an
organisation can be made to interact. This
is when the creative sparks really fly, and
it’s too important to be left to chance.
Investment in engineering space should
be seen in relation to investment in client
contact databases and mobile technologies.
The office is falling behind.
Calder worked with Woods Bagot on the
new NAB building at Melbourne’s Docklands,
a hub for collaborative and project work
that the local community is encouraged to
be involved in – a clear departure from more
security-conscious designs of a decade ago.
Like many corporate buildings these days,
this building has large floor plates bisected
by an atrium. This is becoming the standard,
replacing office towers that are less suited to
collaborative working and matrix-structured
organisations.
There are many ways that a work
environment can influence productivity
and innovation for individuals and teams.
They extend well beyond the parameters
of ABW. Following are some key points
that should enable HR executives to better
interrogate a design. Most underline
the importance of allowing a choice of
environments so that an office can support
many styles of working. For most to work,
variety is the key. We seem to need it as
much as we need sunlight. Determining
what informs this variety is a task that needs
to be handled with care and skill to achieve
the best results.
Indoor climate
New buildings being designed for ABW use
have highly localised air conditioning, so
that it can be turned down or off in areas
not being used. Existing buildings being
retrofitted for ABW or hot-desking need
to have their air conditioning reevaluated
for the new employee densities – a stuffy
office is not a healthy or productive place.
A 2004 Finnish/Singaporean study found
that if indoor temperatures are three to six
degrees higher than a person’s preferred
neutral temperature, their productivity
will drop at least 30 per cent. Even a twodegree difference can result in a 10 per
cent loss. When this potential productivity
loss is multiplied across all employees,
the importance of a building’s mechanical
design dwarfs any cost savings obtained
through space saving. Bearing in mind that
people have different neutral temperatures
and that sensitivity to temperature varies
with different tasks and with humidity
and the seasons, modern mechanical
engineers have their work cut out. It’s
unfortunate that when construction
estimates overrun and need to be cut, as
often happens, air conditioning is often one
of the first components to suffer, thanks
to its invisibility. The study finds that,
“a comparison between the productivity
loss and HVAC lifecycle costs indicates
that the productivity loss of a two-degree
temperature difference from the neutral
conditions could easily be two and a half to
five times higher than the cost of the system
over [a 10 year] lifecycle.”
Lighting
More than half (54 per cent) of Australia’s
workforce don’t spend time outside during
winter work days, placing themselves in the
‘at risk’ category for Vitamin D deficiency.
In 2011 Nestlé was alarmed to discover that
42 per cent of 104 employees tested at their
Sydney HQ had low levels of Vitamin D by
the end of winter. One in three had low
levels through summer, too. A lack of UVB
Inside view
Jo* works in a large new building in
Melbourne. She likes the building and
its light and views. Though she works
there for the full week, Jo has to arrive
early to secure a hot desk within the
team area she manages. Otherwise
she would have to sit in another
group, where she is not meant to talk
to the strangers around her. If she
misses the train, she runs the risk
of not finding a desk and having to
return home to work. She thinks that
productivity has probably increased
as they have less area, so building
costs are lower. Jo admits that she is
a little bitter that management fought
hard for their own offices at the same
time they were extolling the virtues of
hot-desking.
Hot beds
The term hot-desking has its origins
in US Navy submarines. They
economised on the number of bunk
beds by having different people use
the same bunk at different times.
As the bed was still warm from the
previous person, the terms “hotbunking”, “hot-bedding” and “hotracking” became commonly used.
Hot-desking originally applied to
shift workers using the same desk at
different times of the day.
*Real person, fake name.
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wor k p l ac e de s ig n
exposure, which you can’t absorb through
glass, can lead to a variety of ailments that
can dampen productivity and increase
presenteeism, as well as leading to muscle
and bone problems in later life. The problem
is not helped if people eat lunch at their
desk because of work commitments or office
culture. Design can assist by providing
work-enabled balconies, external stairways,
and placing cafes around the outside of a
building rather than just within it. NAB’s
new building in Melbourne has a rooftop
garden on the 14th floor to provide staff
with light and fresh air.
Humans have a natural 24-hour circadian
rhythm that has been disturbed by electric
lights at night. If this rhythm is disturbed,
it is thought to cause lower recall and
creativity, and increase the likelihood of
obesity, diabetes and depression. A joint
study released this year by neurology and
architecture departments at universities in
Taipei and Chicago found that workers near
windows slept an average of 47 minutes
longer every night and performed better
during the day than people toiling in well-lit
but windowless rooms. The study found the
results demonstrated “a strong association
between workplace daylight exposure
and office workers’ sleep quality, activity
patterns, and quality of life”.
Audiovisual
Speaking at Worktech12 Melbourne last
year, Jason Heredia (VP of marketing at
Steelcase), thought the Globally Integrated
Enterprise would be the next big thing,
where advanced audiovisual technologies
NAB’s cutting-edge design
might completely remove the social barriers
between distributed teams. This would allow
larger companies to form closer bonds across
disparate branches. Walls could become
two-way windows to other offices, not just
for meetings, but all the time in between.
Meeting rooms
Jason Heredia believes that to make
meeting rooms better spaces for generative
collaboration, the door needs to be open
or the walls need to be removed. The
meeting then becomes transparent to the
organisation and useful knowledge is not
shut out. Passersby can perch at perimeter
benching for a while, listening and even
contributing. From detailed observations,
he also advocates seating that is lower to
the ground, for better connections, and
designing in the ability to push back from
the table while being able to have your
devices within reach on pull-out trays.
Sound masking
One person’s interaction can be another’s
distraction. ‘Pink noise’ is currently used
in offices to mask the sounds of others, or
the starkness of silence. It sounds like a
low-volume stream of white noise mixed with
distant crashing waves. Technically speaking,
most musical melodies have the same pitch
variations as pink noise. Like music, pink noise
falls in between chaos and predictability, so it
doesn’t annoy or bore us.
In an open-plan space, many seek refuge
using ear-bud headphones and an mp3 device.
A 2006 Spherion study found that most
perceive this as beneficial to productivity and
job satisfaction. Headphones also act as ‘do
not disturb’ signs, useful in an environment of
perpetual interruptions. The downside comes
when people feel they need to use these devices
all day to block office noise. They will also miss
out on shared learning possibilities and risk
hearing damage, which is hardly the aim of a
healthy and collaborative office.
Many creative offices and co-working hubs
are using stereo music for noise masking,
stimulation and camaraderie. Playlisting
can either be done by a very considerate
music aficionado, or through the use of
collaborative playlisting software. While
there can be problems and it won’t suit too
many businesses, stereos can offer a palatable
alternative to having half the office plugged
into iPods. HRm
Connecting people
I
Optus Centre, Sydney
n suburban North Ryde,
upwards of 7000 Optus
employees work in seven
low-slung buildings
knitted together on a
generous seven-hectare
property. The outside areas
are not dissimilar to a
subtropical five-star hotel,
and are all WiFi enabled. By
choosing to build on land
well away from the CBD,
Optus has been able to take
a slightly different tack in
its collaboration building.
It offers open-plan offices
with dedicated desks for
all, with formal meeting
spaces and informal ‘town
squares’ taking up 40 per
cent of the floor area around
the cores of the buildings.
Optus also looks well beyond
the office for opportunities
to connect people. As the
location is rather isolated,
there are cafes, bars, a
shop, a gym and a childcare
centre scattered throughout
the campus, frequented by
Optus employees who have
the chance to rub shoulders.
Employee experience
manager Andrew Parker says
that they occasionally revamp
under-utilised facilities after
taking comments on board.
He says that a high proportion
of meetings occur in the cafes
as people prefer the culture
and bustle associated with
them. Optus also holds
cultural celebrations, live
music performances, and
seminars to support a sense of
community beyond the office.
Commuting is an issue at a
remote campus, so they’ve
initiated shuttle services to
Epping and the CBD as well
as a car pooling program and
a share car service.
And how are their plans
working six years down the
track? Parker says they
are now looking at revising
workstation designs to pull
desk-dividers down half
a metre or so, almost to
the desktop. In 2007, the
only resistance to the openplan design came from the
legal department, who didn’t
think it would be suitable for
them. Six years later they’ve
been offered space that
is more ‘closed plan’, and
they’ve turned it down.
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