Workplace Design Is a Moving Target

Those trying to implement new approaches to maximizing work space are finding formidable obstacles when it comes to actually designing a facility. Ingrained, organizational planning techniques and more mundane political considerations are among the dragons today's work space experts must slay in order to design buildings in harmony with their occupants and functions.

Such was the message left with attendees of a panel discussion on workplace strategies at a recent conference on building performance, in Washington, D.C. The conference was sponsored jointly by Johnson Controls Integrated Facility Management, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the International Assn. of Corporate Real Estate Executives (NACORE) and the International Facility Management Assn. (IFMA). Workplace experts on the panel included Dr. Francis Duffy, chairman of DEGW London Ltd., an international architectural firm, and Vivian Loftness, professor and head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Panelists representing the corporate community were Stephen M. Bell, senior vice president at Fidelity Corporate Real Estate, and Eric Richert, director of the Workplace Effectiveness Group at Sun Microsystems.

Stuck in the Past?
"Many environments in Europe and North America are immensely unsatisfactory in relation to what people who are working in knowledge-based organizations ought to expect," asserted Duffy. "I am dissatisfied with buildings as they exist and with the stereotypes we use. I am dissatisfied with the furniture in them and the assumptions that are built into it. I am dissatisfied with the process by which buildings get designed and constructed by the supply chain, as it were," he added.

Many of today's building designs reflect, if less obviously, various turn-of-the-20th-century design elements, such as the grid, the hierarchical floor plan and the office-and-adjacent-cubicles look. These elements are reinforced in many designers' plans by corporate mandates to reduce costs and maximize space, Duffy added.

But examples of building design that resist such thinking abound, Duffy reminded the panel audience. They can be found at the facilities of "organizations that are reinventing themselves and are deliberately using space and design as part of that program of reinvention," he noted. British Airways' former headquarters was a case study in hierarchical, private-office-based planning. BA's new headquarters is open, transparent and integrating, rather than closed and divisive, Duffy reported. "It is the exact opposite of the past -- it's beautiful and stimulating," he related. More than a place to work, the building signifies to employees that they work for an organization that has successfully transformed itself from a nationalized, bureaucratic behemoth into a streamlined, forward-looking and competitive global business concern.

The Knowledge-Worker Challenge
How to design space for an organization consisting almost entirely of knowledge workers is Eric Richert's challenge at Sun Microsystems, which by many accounts is on the cutting edge of internal real estate asset management. Sun is pursuing a dual design strategy, one that recognizes the importance of local control -- ensuring availability of adequate resources for work teams and departments -- and shared resources.

The latter refers to turning over unassigned space or resources at a central location to those who need them at a point in time, which is not unlike hoteling strategies used by many organizations. Time not spent at the central location is spent with the customers, suppliers or other parties. The difference at Sun, says Richert, is the notion of a network of shared resources, not merely sharing a single work space, such as a conference room.

"At the intersection of these two strategies there is enormous power in that suddenly, issues about managing for change, planning for churn, forecasting hiring requirements, coping with organizational changes that will disrupt a floor plan fall by the wayside," Richert related. "The shared resources strategy decouples real estate issues and business issues at the tactical level," he explained. "It has a side benefit of freeing up resources that can address strategic issues. Of course, a shared resource strategy absolutely demands a local control strategy, because as people share resources they need to adjust them for their personal use."

Sun Microsystems in the United Kingdom was able to increase the number of employees at one facility from 130 -- the maximum number originally planned for the facility -- to 250 with no negative impact on employees' productivity or overall ability to perform their jobs. The building, which Richert calls a "flexible field office," is designed in such a way that sharing resources makes perfect sense. Transferring such successful experiments to Sun's more extensive U.S. portfolio is among Richert's challenges in the near future.

"I am convinced that this is an enormously powerful strategy," Richert concluded. "I don't claim to have it figured out, but it is definitely a direction that is absolutely appropriate for knowledge workers." Such strategies will only work if the focus goes beyond mere space considerations, he added. "Space is an important element of workplace strategies, but it is only powerful in conjunction with the other resource areas of organization and technology."

A Universal Approach
The conference panel's other corporate player, Fidelity's Stephen Bell, pointed out that overturning an organization's real estate asset management style is easier said than done. Bell refers to Fidelity's approach to design and maintenance of work space as a "universal plan." The purpose, he says, "is to provide as much space as quickly as possible and to control the costs if at all possible." That means using walls sparingly, so that people are moved in times of change, not physical structures.

"Times of change" is the operative phrase. Bell estimated the annual churn rate at Fidelity to be between 90 and 100 percent. In the last five years, the investment management firm has added about 300 million sq. ft. (28 million sq. m.) of space to its portfolio. During one 18-month period recently, Fidelity was hiring an average of 500 people per month. "That equates to about 100,000 sq. ft. (9,300 sq. m.) per month that we had to bring on-line," he related. "Change was happening, at least at the macro level, very, very rapidly at Fidelity."

But the universal plan has its drawbacks, Bell acknowledged. "It doesn't work well for everybody," he noted. "One of the fallacies of the universal plan is that it assumes all processes are universal -- they are not." Ideally, Bell stated, "We need places that support both individual as well as ever-changing teams, and those teams are more and more becoming cross-functional teams. We also must move control of the workplace from people like us -- the real estate people -- to the individuals who are using the space."

As if managing the explosive growth in Fidelity's real estate portfolio weren't enough, Bell and others at the firm are organizing the design and development of a 2 million-sq.-ft. (186,000-sq.-m.) campus in Ft. Worth, Texas. The new facility will give internal and external designers an opportunity to apply strategies other than the universal plan, such as activity-based design, which is geared to actual functions rather than pre-set, per-person space limitations.

Missing From the Team
"We are redefining [our] workplace based on current and projected work patterns and processes," said Bell. "We're smart enough not to be doing this by ourselves." The group organizing the facility's design is interdisciplinary, Bell explains, including such internal groups as human resources, finance, the business unit heads, information technology people and real estate. External parties include a variety of service providers, such as architects and engineers, interior designers and workplace strategy consultants.

Who's missing? "We need people to help us figure out what the processes really are that need to be happening in our workplaces going forward, so we can give that information to the people actually designing the buildings," said Bell. "We know that occupants of buildings and their functions and processes are going to change and change often. We cannot design buildings that don't allow as much adaptability as possible."     SS