From CFO in August 2003.
People tend to stay with a company if it provides a quality work environment that’s shaped to their needs.
A workplace needs to be a functional environment. But that doesn’t mean it has to be dull. Companies are starting to realise the value of investing in a space that keeps employees happy, loyal and effective.
Jane Williams, practice director at architects Bligh Voller Nield, says one of the biggest things she is seeing with corporate clients is not necessarily moves from offices to open plan or vice versa, but more trying to make a community of people.
She says this is symptomatic of the changes, such as workforce mobility, unleashed by technology. “It’s really about focusing back on people and culture. That’s really the side we get involved in – the aim is to build quality environments.”
Leone Lorrimer, director of Woods Bagot, says the biggest trend she sees is the making of communities and the companies wanting to make employees feel valued. “Because people are working longer hours, there is more demand on performance. Equally, there is more emphasis in teamworking and collaboration, and also this idea of knowledge-sharing.”
Williams sees the shared environment as the way of the future. “Technology and furniture solutions have helped teams come together in the past five or 10 years,” she says.
Although trends such as open-plan layouts and cubicles have successfully swept the office floor, they are static and difficult to move quickly. According to Williams, more companies are using mobile furniture. “You might form a project team for a month or two and you need to find spaces in which those people can come together very quickly, and that’s where having mobile tables and a range of flexible furniture solutions assist in being able to form a team overnight,” she says. Using any room, they can pull tables together for a collaborative environment and pull away to work alone again. “It’s giving people more control over their work environment, but the key issue is still being able to plug into the IT system and power. They are the areas that have been a little bit slow to catch up.”
But is Australia up there with the rest of the world in office and building services technology? Not according to Lorrimer. “Australia has been pretty much behind the rest of the world in some of the building design,” she asserts.
One example is the use of ducted air-
conditioning and heating systems in Australia, which chill or heat the air and pump
it into a working environment. This leads to the problems of one half of a building being hot and the other half cold. Lorrimer says cutting-edge design chills or heats the air near the user and gives local ventilation control, including a mix of fresh air.
Ceilings are an eyesore, too. “To me, one of the biggest issues in buildings in the ceiling,” she says. “You have these nasty acoustic tiles with rows of lights and things.”
Sometimes the architect is able to get into buildings before acoustic tiles are installed and expose space up to the concrete slab of the floor above, revealing the ducting. Lorrimer says it allows more creativity with the environment. “I think we will see people challenging that flat, horizontal landscape.”
Research suggests one of the most important things for employees is access to natural light. “Natural light and access to outlook are very, very high on the agenda for people’s productivity and loyalty,” she says.
“People will stay in the employment of a company if they have a quality work environment, and a very high component of that is light,” she says. “I still think there is nothing like daylight.”
However, with a trend towards larger floorplates of 2000 or even 3000 square metres in Sydney and Melbourne, not everyone can have access to light.
Lorrimer says that different light effects and colors of light can be used to signal different areas of a workplace. “In areas where workers are trying to concentrate, a good, clean, even, bright white is best, or some pooling of light over the task in certain instances.
“We also try to design a fitout so that you get an illumination along walkways, with pools of warm light around activity centres,” she says, using as an example BHP Billiton’s new headquarters in Melbourne, where Woods Bagot created streets and avenues with lights angled slightly for variety, and always a window at the end of a walkway.
At lawyers Phillips Fox, six clusters of workstations kept at the ends of the “streets and avenues” achieved an effect of a warm glow at the end of each walkway. This is where the support people are located.
Mobile working is starting to have an impact on the mobility of teams in the workspace. But not everybody needs to be mobile. “If you pay to give someone a laptop because they need to be mobile, then that almost defines them as a person who could benefit from wireless,” says Lorrimer.
Bligh Voller Nield designed premises for Accenture. “They have highly mobile people who work in a hoteling system,” Williams says, which means nobody owns a desk and everyone has to book one each day they come into the office. “You have people shifting around every day, if they come in every day, or who are working on large project teams off-site.”
The design is about ensuring they don’t feel dislocated when they return to the office. “Working out at building sites and in site sheds it is quite easy to feel dislocated from your own home office,” says Williams. “That is one reason why there has been such an
emphasis on making the workspace a community and more humanised.”