Lately I can’t seem to escape discussions about wellness in the workplace. In the past few weeks I’ve received several wellness related articles  from colleagues, witnessed real life issues onsite with clients and helped kick off a firm wide wellness initiative in my own firm. There are definitely enough issues surrounding this topic to turn this into a series of posts, but for now I will focus on sitting and walking in the workplace.
A colleague recently sent me these great infographics: Sitting is Killing You, highlighting some interesting statistics on the detriments of sitting for prolonged periods of time, fueling the argument to get up and walk around throughout the day. Personally, I hate the idea of sitting at a desk all day. I jump at any chance to walk across the office to talk with a colleauge. Not only does it add a few extra steps to my day, but often I can be more productive by engaging with a coworker face-to-face as opposed to long email chains which I’ll eventually have to go back and delete when cleaning out my inbox.

Adding to this discussion, HOK recently launced on Facebook what we are hoping to be The World’s Largest Workplace Survey. This is a great open forum to provide input on how well or not-so-well your workplace is performing. Join the dicussion by taking the survey here. The chart below shows some recent realtime survey results, indicating that an overwhelming amount of people complain about some physical discomfort in the workplace.

And in [...]

Are you curious about what other offices throughout the world look like?  Do you sometimes wish you could sneak into another company’s workplace and see how they operate on a daily basis?   If so, I’ve got good news for you: Enter wovox, a new website devoted to just that…discovering workplaces!

I stumbled upon wovox recently, and have really enjoyed snooping around.  Anyone can post photos to the site—companies and individuals alike—which gives it a neat range of workplaces from all over the world, from tiny home offices to huge global corporations, and hundreds in between!  To give you an idea of the breadth of spaces, there are posts from McDonald’s Australian headquarters, the Smithsonian in DC, Cubion (a Danish consulting firm), Adobe’s office in San Francisco, Groupon’s Amsterdam office, and even one from the Quayside Fish Market in Doha, Qatar.
Here in the design industry, we get a fair amount of exposure to the latest design and workplace trends, but there are still infinite spaces that we’d never have been able to see before wovox came onto the scene.

So if you are looking for some fresh design inspiration (or want see if the carpet really is greener on the other side of the world), then check it out.  Happy workplace snooping!

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I recently had the opportunity to write a guest blog for Virtual Office. The blog focuses on personalization of the workplace, and how new workplace trends could potentially limit our sense of individuality. With more and more mobile work styles emerging, and less and less people “living” at their desks in a traditional 9-to-5, forty hour work week, I question whether the or not people will also start ditching all of their personal knick-knacks in favor of  more streamlined, flexible work environments. 
Check out the full blog post here: A Home Away From Home Away From Home. The blog even makes a brief Office Space reference. Enjoy.

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We’ve been working with a client here in New York where the idea about how to ‘brand’ the lobby space has been a particularly tricky design challenge. Through our discussions, I got stuck on the idea of lettering that is classic, elegant, timeless. Recently, I wandered up 5th Avenue to check out how other companies represent themselves. Here’s what I found:

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Last year the HOK Chicago Interiors Group completed an office relocation project for Millward Brown, a leading global research agency. One of the main goals of the project was to make sure the branding of the space worked with the overall brand values of the company but also maintained a local identity to the Chicago market and their specific location. Millward Brown is a very youthful, creative and highly collaborative organization, and the physical space, amenities and branding all needed to reflect that culture.
The final workplace soultion is a very open plan with a variety of collaboration spaces,  reduced amount of materials,  youthful, energizing graphics and several areas for employees to kick back and relax, including a fully loaded Wii Rock Band area. It’s a great mix of a laid back, jeans-wearing culture with some very slick, sophisticated amenities for clients and visitors of all varieties.
The project was recently featured in an article in Interiors & Sources Magazine. Check out the article here.

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With more than $290 billion in assets and approximately 55,000 employees, PNC is one of the largest financial services companies in the country. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, PNC also has more LEED certified buildings than any other company on Earth. When it opened in 2001, PNC’s Firstside Center in downtown Pittsburgh was the nation’s largest corporate green building at 650,000 square feet. And with the recent opening of PNC Place in Washington, D.C., PNC currently has over 100 LEED certified projects in its real estate portfolio. Gary Saulson, Director of Corporate Real Estate for the PNC Financial Services Group, is responsible for the direction of PNC’s sustainable strategies. Overseeing approximately 30 million square feet of commercial real estate, Saulson has impressively helped transform PNC into an industry leader in corporate sustainability. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Saulson about PNC’s sustainable and workplace strategies.  
“Our simple task is to build environments where employees can thrive and customers can do their business”, says Saulson, who explains that PNC has an internal Product Review Committee that tests and reviews all products that go into their offices. The Product Review Committee is represented by people from across the bank: including people involved in Operations, Energy, Sustainability and Finance. They also work with manufacturers to beta test products, including conference tables, chairs, light fixtures, restroom faucets and hand dryers.   
Saulson believes it makes good business sense to “do our homework” on the products they purchase and implement into their workplace standards. He explained to [...]

I recently met some representatives from SERVCORP, a company that rents office space to individuals and organizations that are looking for an office presence but do not want to commit to their own costly lease. Having a strong personal interest in workplace trends, I decided to check them out. SERVCORP is an Australian company that recently broke into the U.S. market by setting up shop in a few cities, including two suites in high profile, class A buildings in downtown Chicago. Recently I had the chance to tour one of their suites and I have to say their operation is very well put together. They offer rentals of both Executive Office and Virtual Office space. Their tagline “Everything But The Office” seems to sum up a growing trend in where the future of physical office space is headed. I found this succinct promo video for the company which highlights the idea of having a “big business infrastructure, without the associated costs”.
Two of the more prominent workplace trends these days are the continued growth of a mobile workforce (less people in offices) as well as companies reducing their overall real estate portfolios (less space being rented). This recent Wall Street Journal article is just one of dozens of recent articles reporting the reduction in office footprints in this country.

That being said, what will eventually become of all the corporate real estate out there? Will the soaring skyscrapers, the greatest of corporate status symbols, be reduced to nothing but ghost towns? In ten years will my corporate headquarters simply be [...]

One of the reasons we started Work+Place was to share HOK’s workplace expertise – developed over the past 15-or-so years.  While our experts have been sharing their latest and greatest thinking – everything from the obesity epidemic and the impacts of Mexican drug cartels on the workplace to research, potty humor, and workplace pranks, we thought it might be fun to dig back into the annals of HOK’s workplace experience and see what we could find. 
As you can see from the graphic above, we’ve had lots of experience with single project and full accounts, giving our team a rich set of data to mine.  This post is the first in a series highlighting our thought leadership through publications.  Keep an eye out and see what we’ve said and how our thinking has evolved.

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Healthy Workplace
I was reading the Trust for Public Health’s annual report titled “F as in Fat”, which reveals some sobering statistics about America’s obesity and diabetes rates among adults and children. According to the study, adult obesity rates increased in 28 states. 38 states have adult obesity rates over 25%. What’s startling is that in 1991 no state had a rate above 20%.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited on a trip to the Haworth corporate headquarters in Holland, Michigan. The environment at One Haworth Center embodies the company’s commitment to good design and sustainability. We were able to meet with members of their “Ideation Group” who explained aspects of the research they perform finding ways to see how the built environment affects people. Scientific research has found that the arrangement of furniture and interior space affects human behavior. Haworth wants to change people positively. The company uses a variety of research tools including: psychology of existing workspace, organizational culture, social network analysis, and individual work style analysis. Haworth also looks at the different types of organizational cultures which are: collaborative, creative, controlling, and competitive. All together the visit was educational, enjoyable, and truly inspiring.

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