A FEW days ago the nation celebrated Labor Day in honor of the Filipino work force, who, in many different ways, painstakingly built this country to be what it is right now—an economic tiger in the region.
I have always believed that the only way to grow any kind of business is to grow the people in it. However, it all starts with the acknowledgment that the work force is truly any company’s most valuable asset. So as I reflected on how I could do my share in valorizing the labor force in this week’s column, I was suddenly reminded of a quote from famous designer Frank Chimero, who said, “People ignore design that ignores people.” His point is that any kind of design, in whatever form or for whatever purpose, should always consider the needs of the people for which the design was made. This is particularly true in property development, specifically in designing office-space layouts.
While preferences have changed over time, one thing has remained the same: modern office-space layouts have always been anchored on the specific demands of a company’s workers. Meaning, office layouts must consider the nature of the employees’ respective jobs.
Although many design elements have come and gone through the years—resurfacing in a different era and repurposed for newer demands—most of them echo the modern businessman’s ethos: productivity, cost-efficiency and growth, all of which are dependent on the effective performance of the work force.
Gensler Workplace Survey: Identifying tenant preferences
Around three years ago Gensler—an American design and architectural firm—came out with a survey dubbed the Gensler Workplace Survey, which aimed to feel the pulse of the American work force in terms of the office spaces they would like to work in.
In the 2013 survey Gensler commissioned a nationwide survey of 2,035 professionals to take the pulse of the American work place and try to understand what knowledge workers believe a high-performance workplace should look like. The survey examined the design factors that make up an effective workplace and how design can better support knowledge worker engagement, satisfaction and performance. The survey also took into account the influence of the workplace on organizational culture.
Survey key findings
The Gensler Workplace Survey had three key findings. First off, the survey indicates that workers have been struggling to work effectively.
Oftentimes, in designing workspaces, it comes down to a choice between focus and collaboration. Private rooms and cubicles encourage the former while open-office layouts, the latter. Based on the Gensler survey, however, tenants believe that when focus is compromised in pursuit of collaboration, neither works well.
Indeed, strategies to improve collaboration, which resulted in the popularity of the open-office layout used by big companies like Facebook and Google, proved ineffective if the ability to focus was not also considered. Another key finding of the survey is that effective workplaces are those that balance focus and collaboration. The majority of the respondents to the survey believe that workplaces designed to enable collaborative work without sacrificing the employees’ ability to work privately end up being more successful. There is a notion that individual focus and team collaboration are opposites. However, they really function best as complements.
A third key finding, and this is, I believe, the most important one, is that choice drives performance and innovation. Employers who provide a spectrum of choices for when and where to work are seen as more innovative and have higher-performing employees.
Companies who enable choice and provide the right alignment of tools, policies and spaces are able to create a workplace climate in which highly engaged employees can make meaningful decisions on their own to maximize their individual job performance. It is clear that modern workspaces need to acknowledge and cater to workers’ diverse work demands and styles. The freedom to choose when to privately do one’s tasks and when to work with team members makes for a more productive work force.
After all is said and done, the best office design is one that acknowledges the importance of the worker in the workplace setting and provides them with choices, which the workers themselves have to make. Although that may be easier said than done, this freedom of choice may just spell the difference between business success and failure.