News
PAPER CHASER
July 5, 2011
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| A paperless office isn't as hard as it sounds: last week at our Office of the Future event in DC, GSA commissioner Bob Peck (right, with moderator Peter Nowland of DAVIS Construction) said ?if the government can do it, so can you." As part of GSA's renovation of its 1800 F St HQ, Bob says he's getting rid of a few file cabinets (a lot of them are empty because everything's digital now anyway). Finding out what drives consumption is just as important as reducing costs when you're going green, he says. Two important variables are office location and space per employee, hence the 1800 F project: Bob says it used to house 2,500 employees, but it'll accommodate over 6,000 people when work finishes. Teleworking is a big part of his strategy to get employees to work smarter, and it's ?not about staying home.? Rather, he says it's designed to help workers be flexible. To those who question whether people out of the office are really working, Bob says, ?How do you know the guy with his office door closed isn't playing solitaire? It's all about managing outcomes.? (So expect some people to be playing minesweeper or even Hearts.) |
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| Work-life balance is so '90s, says Blackboard's Colin McLetchie(in the red, with Gensler's Steve Martin and Sterne Kessler Goldstein Fox's Michael Ray). Young employees want work-life integration, and he says people are spending less time in the office. Creating a sense of connection with employees who aren't at their desks is a challenge best solved by making the office a place where workers want to be (which explains why Blackboard's got a Wii, Nerf footballs, and a foosball table in its space). The keys for designing useful space: casualness and the flexibility to meet where it makes sense, Colin says. ?You can build an office, but people will make it their own,? he says. ?What's important is looking beyond the space to what drives your organization.? |
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| Cisco Systems' Albert Cho (with Bisnow's Arlene Begelman) says five trends are shaping office space's evolution: more international work, sustainability, greater collaborative interaction with customers and partners, technological advancement, and shifting employee preferences. Workers like using the office as a place to collaborate, Albert says, so his company experimented, replacing traditional cubicles with a mixed portfolio of group seating, audio privacy rooms, videoconferencing suites and meeting rooms. 77% of workers in the new space preferred it to the old setup, and he says it came at a cost equal to or lower than ?refreshing? the cubicle space. Also, technology isn't something to be ?layered on? to office planning—it needs to be embedded in the way people use their office space. |
