Monthly Archives : August 2014

It’s the end of the month, and that’s a good excuse to enjoy some fun office furniture blogs. Here are a few favorites that should be on your list to read or watch before we say goodbye to August.

Sit or Stand, You’re Still Doomed to Work!

Nikil Saval at n+1 magazine offers no mercy in this satirical review of the current sit-to-stand trend. He touts the well-known statistics about the harm of prolonged sitting and comes to a grim conclusion. “Over months or years spent in a chair, robust human substance dissipates into muck, and the longer you sit, the sooner you die.” At the same time, he ridicules the cult of the standing desk, poking fun at the tendency to glamorize it. “…people regularly invoke the examples of Hemingway, Churchill, Nabokov: figures who famously tended to stand while they wrote or read. None of them was an especially healthy individual; more to the point, none was an office worker.”

Don’t Put in a Work Order to Fix That Chair…

Enjoy the Darwin Awards of office furniture repair at “thereifixedit”. These DIY jobs are proof that anything can be put back together with duct tape and a little wishful thinking. Castors seem to be a favorite fixer upper, but one inventive worker actually repurposed the bucket seat from a car as a task chair. Sadly, the cup holder wasn’t left intact.

The Virtual Conference Room

This popular YouTube video reposted at neousa.com is a reenactment of what a tele-conference call would be like if it took place in an actual conference room with everyone present. Perhaps you’ve learned to tune out all these annoyances in the past. Be warned, now you will start noticing all the things you hate about conference calls again. On the plus side, you may get some ideas for how to get out of the next call without anyone being the wiser.

Office Furniture Motivational Speaker

Jack McCracken gives a crackerjack presentation about how office furniture can change your life. Watch him mesmerize a room full of first graders with his flow charts and graphs. He inspires with words of wisdom about how “office chairs raise you up to a higher plane.” If you don’t think this is the kind of motivational speech that kids need to hear, think again. In the immortal words of Jack, “If a kid doesn’t care about a credenza now, what happens when she’s 35 and stuck in a soul-sucking middle management job?” What indeed.

Last week, we explored the topic of hoteling or desk sharing in government workspace design. This week, let’s take a look at how mobility is changing the work environment for federal agencies. According to the GSA paper on workspace utilization, the public sector is tracking the private sector pretty closely in terms of lower usage of physical office workspace. They credit changes in technology, workforce demographics, and sustainability initiatives as the guiding forces behind this shift.

Avoiding the Office Is the New Rule

Government mandates to increase telework and reduce office real estate costs are driving a significant change in the footprint of many agencies. In fact, government organizations outstrip the private sector in telework according to the GSA survey. A full 77% of government organizations reported using telework, while that was true for only 68% of private industry organizations surveyed.

While security concerns still hamper efforts to go wireless and paperless, these hurdles are being overcome one by one. In particular, the advent of programs like FedRamp that help agencies securely transition to cloud storage and computing are creating the necessary environment to untether workers from their desks.

Where Are Employees Going to Work?

Heads down work is still occurring, but it isn’t necessarily taking place at a regularly assigned desk. Instead, employees are completing their duties wherever they find themselves. While private industry workers might have to make do with home offices and coffee shops while away from the office, government employees are often deployed to field offices or partner agencies. It might be considered a form of desk sharing that spans multiple facilities. Either way, this leaves a huge volume of workstations empty on a regular basis. In fact, between 8 AM and 5 PM on weekdays, only 35 to 50% of desks are occupied. That’s a level of waste that is difficult to ignore.

The GSA Leads the Way

The GSA took its own advice during a recent remodel of its headquarters. The agency now affords employees only half the amount of space they enjoyed before—but they have more freedom to work elsewhere if they wish.

The savings of $24 million dollars on the six leases that were eliminated in the consolidation effort is certainly a testament to thrift. Even the head of the GSA gave up his 1600 square foot office to sit at an open desk amidst his employees. Of course, his home office is probably a lot nicer. One more reason to telecommute!

If you are a government agency looking for ways to improve space utilization, The Office Planning Group can help. We can even procure GSA approved office furniture for your remodeled space. Contact us today for a consultation.

Governments are well known for being late adopters of popular trends. As entrenched bureaucracies with thick layers of rules, they must proceed with caution in making changes. This is no different in the office space planning arena than it is elsewhere. The upside is that, once a government agency finds an approach that works, they can proliferate it throughout many organizations to achieve efficiency on a massive scale. This is likely to happen in the space planning sphere soon.

Right now, federal and state governments seem to be in the midst of an ongoing experimental phase. They are juggling factors such as space availability, energy and maintenance costs, and security concerns while evaluating new choices such as mobile and alternative work environments. Federal agencies, in particular have a strict set of mandates to follow in determining how to design and utilize workspaces:

• Preserving the value of the real estate
• Meeting the needs of employees
• Promoting maximum utilization of the space
• Improving the productivity of workers to meet mission requirements

Hoteling and desk sharing are some of the techniques on the table as they seek to modernize the office while achieving all the objectives above.

Using Fewer Workstations in Government Spaces

The practice of reducing the number of available workstations below the number of employees is one way to capture real estate savings. Since not all workers are at their desks 100% of the time, it makes sense to provision only as many workstations as are really needed. Workers can reserve the type of workstation they need in advance or simply choose an available space when they arrive at the office. These practices and similar variations are called hoteling and desk sharing.

According to the Workspace Utilization Benchmark publication from 2012, “Alternative work environments including telework, hoteling stations, and desk sharing, are a major trend in today’s real estate marketplace, and offer organizations flexibility and optimal workspace usage. Additionally, organizations have noted an increase of quantitative benefits with the use of alternative work environments such as increased productivity and enhanced associate morale.”

Giving Hot Desking a Second Chance

The paper goes on to note that, while hoteling and desk sharing were tried in the 1990’s, the result was abject failure. The technology available at the time simply made it too difficult to stay productive in a constantly shifting office environment. Trying to force hoteling didn’t work. However, this way of working has begun to arise spontaneously today in response to mobile technology and a more collaborative work style. Still, hoteling and desk sharing are much less common in public sector workspaces compared to the private sector (16% vs. 48%).

According to an article by Lisa Rein in the Washington Post, it simply takes time to make the switch. The GSA itself is a good example: “With 3,300 headquarters employees, the GSA represents just a small fraction of the federal workforce. Even so, it took a full year to train everyone to electronically reserve desks and meeting rooms and give up the paper that still dominates most government work.” With the GSA leading the way, other agencies are sure to follow. Getting employees on board with a more flexible federal workspace is just a matter of time.

Stay tuned next week for more about mobile work in the Government workspace.

Coworking is a burgeoning trend among entrepreneurs, freelancers, and remote workers who can’t commute to a corporate office on a regular basis. Today, we’re seeing more and more spaces being created to meet the demands for flexible, occasional office space. Facilities that offer coworking space do have a number of benefits:

• Helping people be more productive by offering a work-like atmosphere
• Facilitating networking and creative brainstorming across industries
• Granting access to infrastructure and technology that would be cost-prohibitive for small business owners or startups
• Keeping costs low with flexibility in short term or pay-as-you-go pricing

But not everyone is sold on the benefits of surrounding oneself with other people in a setting that’s meant to mimic a regular office. In fact, the best work often gets done in a solitary setting–without interruptions from office mates.

Noise Levels Range from Busy to Bothersome

Eli at Become Nomad bills himself as a fan of coworking (since he never stays in one place long). But even he takes issue with some of the less pleasant aspects of the faux office. “Coworking places can be noisy, and this is hard if you’re easily distracted. Noise is part and parcel of coworking places. People will make calls, talk to each other, move around and sometimes distract you, although most coworkers are quite aware and respectful in the working environment.”

Rebekah Campbell at “You’re the Boss” was less tolerant of the buzz during her startup’s experiment with coworking environments. She bemoaned lost productivity from poor focus. Even though there were designated quiet areas, most coworkers ignored the rules. There was certainly no safe haven from obnoxious behavior. “Some people appeared to show off their important phone conversations by speaking as loudly as possible. Even those who thought they were sharing an idea with their small teams managed to broadcast across the whole room.”

Some Coworking Spaces Seek to Provide More Privacy

As the problems that can arise with shared workspaces become more evident, some purveyors of coworking space are finding new ways to cope. For example, the Regus chain of business centers has installed “Thinkpods” that are like tiny round cubicles with space for a chair and a worksurface to hold a laptop. Kimberly Lilley, General Manager at a DFW area Regus, says people can choose to pop into a pod to focus on preparing a presentation. Others might choose to spend most of a workday in these cocoons of quiet.

In contrast, the formal coworking spaces at a Regus feature little privacy, with desks positioned in an open layout with no desktop divider screens. However, in this instance shared space doesn’t mean shared schedules. According to Kimberly, the sales people who lease her site’s coworking offices don’t rub elbows that often. “It’s not really an issue. They aren’t all in the office at the same time.” Sometimes, the answer to the noise question really is about timing. The flexibility of the coworking culture allows workers to come and go as their need for privacy changes.