Open space plan is THE thing in innovative office design today. But when the bottom line is: ‘kiss your private office/cubicle goodbye,’ many employees become anxious, angry or heartbroken. And are messages that ‘it’ll be good for the team’ or ‘seniority is not recognized by having a private office” really consoling to anyone losing privacy?  My experience is that most employees do not want to lose their domain—even if it is a cube—for the sake of innovation and creative encounters with their fellow workers.

For a transition to open space plan to really work, you can’t just have a great interior designer.  You need a company culture that is adequately open-minded, flexible and innovative to adapt to the changes it brings.  I have found that the cultivation of company culture is far more crucial to the success of how the employees interact than actual physical proximity.  To take advantage of innovative physical changes to an environment, management must take care to cultivate a culture that has an open communication style and permission to interact without consequence.

Permission to Adapt

The idea of permission to interact and permission to innovate became more clear to me when I read the recent article in the Harvard Business Review, “Who Moved my Cube?” by Anne-Luare Fayard and John Weeks. Fayard and Weeks discuss Open Space office design that is “explicitly intended to promote informal interactions,” describing how “management broadcast the message that employees should find opportunities in the new space for ‘impromptu meetings’ and creative encounters.’” They cite research that indicates that Open Space Plans do not necessarily promote increased productivity, and studies that show that employees in open-plan spaces, aware that they may be overheard, have more-superficial discussions than they otherwise would.  The article goes on to profile several companies and how “the Power of Permission in an office [where] people generally deem a space to be a comfortable, natural place to interact only if company culture, reinforced by management, designates it as such.”  What becomes clear is that proximity does not necessarily promote interaction, creativity or productivity.

I was recently asked to design an Innovation Center for a tech company just outside of Washington, DC.  I created designs for a flexible space, housing both permanent offices and an Open Space Plan with workstations, temporary creative brainstorming areas for client and meetup/cloud spaces, and a first class kitchen for casual and creative interactions.  We also included private spaces like telephone conversation rooms and flexible conference rooms.  I worked closely with the client designing through needs, existing parameters, LEED requirements, lighting and heating, and ideal space planning for a truly sustainable environment.

An Ideal Open Space Plan LEED Silver Plan - Includes indoor-outdoor meeting spaces, oxygenating plants throughout, flexible conference rooms, flexible meeting areas, temporary and permanent movable workstations, glass-front private offices, community kitchen and a focus on traffic flow for impromptu meetings and informal conversations.

Innovate or Stagnate?

This company promotes itself as a leader in its field; but, my conversations with management mostly centered on how their market share is quickly being swallowed up by younger, more aggressive companies, marked recidivism, and on their inability to attract GenX and GenYs.  And no wonder.  At their grey-beige main office, I felt like I’d stepped back in time 15 years and into the movie Office Space.  Employees seemed genuinely oppressed, if not depressed.

Designers are in a unique position to have relationships across a wide spectrum at a company with the likes of CEO’s, CFO’s, HR staff, Operations Managers, and a variety of support personnel.  It is always of great interest to discuss a vast range of employee’s concerns and needs during a project.  It tells me a lot about the culture and it becomes clear who is calling the shots.  During the Washington DC project, everyone acted genuinely excited by the prospect of having a flexible, modern space for pet projects.  However, in turn, each senior staff person took me aside and made it clear that I was going to design a “nice office” for them, with plenty of privacy.  The open space plan was fine for everyone else, but they personally weren’t going to have it.  They were too important for this innovation business.

Light affects our circadian rhythms, also known as our biological clocks. Sleep/wake cycles are influenced by light as well. High quality illumination helps maintain a natural hormone pattern in the bloodstream, helping your employees feel awake and alert. By simply increasing their exposure to wide spectrum lighting, employees can feel more energetic, maintain work efficiency and performance, and even get sick less often.

High Quality Lighting Enhances Performance

Inadequate or inconsistent lighting can create a host of issues; chief among them is eyestrain.  Studies show that over 60% of workers list eyestrain as a primary complaint of user discomfort that substantially reduces productivity.  Other studies reinforce this strong relationship between light quality and productivity. Moreover, low, inadequate or narrow spectrum lighting can create lower energy and lack of concentration.  The aesthetic impact of lighting is apparent in any environment.  The mood of any given space can be established through lighting.  A good lighting design creates an environment of professionalism, productivity, and creativity that reinforces your company’s aesthetic.

Strategic Design

Mission Blue strategically utilizes the psychological and physiological impact of light.  We integrate lighting solutions that promote employee wellness, motivation and productivity.   Our lighting designs engender a professional, positive workplace atmosphere that reinforce your organization’s image and culture.

Who is Mission Blue?

Mission Blue Design  is an award-winning interiors and identity design firm based in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, CA.   We work closely with each client to thoroughly understand their needs and to develop solutions that are unique, appropriate and artistic responses to each project we develop.

-Tom Peters (from his book, Liberation Management)

At Mission Blue, we believe to be the best and most productive, cutting-edge organization, you must arm your employees with excellent working tools, inspiring environment, ongoing training, support, care, and opportunities to stretch, learn and grow.

Mission Blue Design’s solutions transform the workplace so that is a pleasure to come to work everyday. Our goal is to make your office environment motivating, productive, fun and professional. Do you want to attract the best employees, maximize employee effectiveness, and mitigate attrition? Mission Blue helps you capitalize on your competitive edge through a well-designed workspace that will help your organization compete in today’s market. We create a workplace that has it all: privacy and collaboration, efficient use of space with flexible, adaptable furnishings and importantly, the independence, comfort and image inherent in a private office. Remember, better doesn’t necessarily mean bigger, it simply means smarter design.
The most important step in developing a high performance and happy workspace is to design into these fundamental attributes:

• Reflect the goals and culture of the organization
• Maximize multi-directional and clear communication
• Inspire high employee engagement
• Balance privacy and collaboration
• Serve the needs of multiple generations and work styles in
the same workspace
• Create a healthy, positive environment where people thrive

Organizational Culture
The holy grail of organizational design is developing and sustaining a powerful cultural identity with clearly defined values and purpose. We support this goal by creating an environment that reflects the shared vision of your company while allowing each individual to express their unique strengths and creativity.

Employee Engagement
The number one measure of leadership is engagement, or how employees care about what they are working on. Engaged employees are more productive and work well individually or collectively. Our spaces promote positive attitude, enthusiasm, team spirit, healthy energy, ambition to contribute to the organization, and ingenuity.

Different Thinking, Different Working – Boosting Productivity
Space design can support a variety of working styles. While one person may need social interaction to achieve maximum productivity, another employee may do the best work in a private environment. Function and flexibility are keys to fulfilling maximum efficiency for employees with different work styles. We concentrate on space planning and furnishing design that provide ideal levels of acoustical, visual, territorial, and informational privacy for each employee.

Multi-Layered Work Places
Well-designed areas for concentration and areas that invite collaboration are essential for multi-layered work places. We also provide support for leadership development, multitasking, team building, changing technology needs, and organization. We analyze where people talk and what impacts the quality, tone, depth, and length of interactions. Since different spaces elicit different interactions, it is important to recognize that valuable encounters often take place in transitional spaces like hallways, coffee bars, or outside a stairway. The furniture in your transitional or in-between spaces can encourage impromptu exchanges and have direct impact on the quality and productivity of the resulting interactions.

Building High-Performance Teams with The Well Designed Office
The effectiveness of a team depends on the level of understanding and acceptance between its members. Interactive spaces are key to camaraderie, shared vision and positive employee dynamics. Group spaces that provide powerful team meeting essentials such as dry erase walls, cork walls, modular furniture, open space, LCD projector, audio conference, high speed internet, and video conferencing stimulates team collaboration to envision and execute a more powerful future.

The Bottom Line
The office environment is crucial to the overall long-term success of your organization. Space coalesces your company’s vision, supports healthy organizational culture, and maximizes employee effectiveness. A user centered, flexible office boosts the productivity for an expansive and engaged employee. Space can support, enrich and stimulate the mental functions of thinking, memory, imagination and learning, which are your untapped priceless assets.

WHAT’S NEW AT MISSION BLUE

Mission Blue Partners with Sage Alliance to Define and Facilitate High Performance Workplaces that Maximize Human Potential

Mission Blue Design is a proud partner of the SAGE ALLIANCE, whose mission is to support leadership, high performance teaming and maximizing human potential at work. With the support of Sage Alliance, Mission Blue more effectively designs work spaces that inspire creative thinking, high productivity, powerful teams, and engaged, healthy and committed employees.

The most common complaints about today’s poorly designed offices include lack of space, inadequate lighting, too few quiet areas, uncomfortable workstations and bad layout and ergonomics and design for communication and performance.

According to the Gensler U.S. Workplace Report, design and research added value calculates that U.S. companies could generate as much as $330 billion a year in added revenue if they would provide high-performing work settings.

Mission Blue Design Transforms Offices for a More Dynamic Work Force

The following considerations are crucial to smart, sustainable design:

-Productivity

Organizational effectiveness today means using space more wisely. This means cutting costs and designing for flexibility to enable space to change as work groups and projects evolve. Wise use of space also means creating the right context for concentration, learning, communication, and collaboration—the building blocks of productivity.

-Privacy not isolation

A growing trend is to break down the hierarchical space. Executives are no longer confined to executive suites located on a different floor; they move right into the center of the office space and integrate with the rest of the workforce encouraging creativity and teamwork. Employees feel more connected with other employees and management; and proximity makes them more effective during the day.

-Information and Communications Technology

Rapid development of communications and information technology requires a workplace designed for maximum communications capability and flexibility. The link between workstations and data/com networks is critical.  Advances in office furniture products and system enhancements that keep pace with changing technology are critical to the high productive and competitive office.  Office design that ensures maximum operational and systems flexibility is critical to interfacing with new technologies.

-Flexibility

Office furniture and site design that is easy to erect, dismantle, and move is crucial to accommodate quickly changing needs such as technology advances, staff members that are added or positions that are removed.  Expansion and contraction of work spaces are crucial to teams and projects as workers are able to move easily as critical needs are assessed.

-Health

Prevention of occupational injuries and illnesses and the elimination of exposure to hazardous materials (e.g., volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and formaldehyde, and lead and asbestos in older buildings) is key to long-term employee health. Providing good indoor air quality and adequate ventilation, ergonomic work places to prevent work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSD) and excellent lighting are crucial factors in maintaining high productivity and employee moral.   For example, the primary function of light in the office is to support work. The ultimate criteria for a successful office lighting solutions is to facilitate productivity and user satisfaction. No matter how esthetically pleasing or how well it conforms to a set of quantitative values, if a lighting design does not support the work, it has failed.

-Sustainability

In the past two decades organizations, work practices, and the workforce have changed dramatically. Technological advances, demographic shifts, and continual demands for innovation have created pressures for the workplace to catch up with the necessary efficiency required to remain competitive. Workplace quality affects job satisfaction and makes a company more competitive. Companies can easily save money and the environment by utilizing LEED standards for energy efficiency, health and well-being and excellent design for employee moral and retention.

MaryAnne and I grew up outdoors in nature, with a love of hiking, backpacking, camping, skiing, surfing, biking and all things athletic. Our backgrounds divide and merge in interesting ways, bringing a great strength to the partnership. MaryAnne is a positive and powerful leader and get-it-done kind of woman. She acts with full commitment to any goal or intention. We were in the Sierras skiing (she was boarding) last week and I was reminded how pedal-to-the-metal she in everything she does. Her style is all out, get it done, and she does it fairly and honestly with panache and beauty. She snowboards the way she does everything; innovative, assured, clear, direct with brilliance, beauty and grace. I am proud and excited to be her partner as well as her sister.

Healthy, Positive, Transformative and Sustainable Design

Both MaryAnne and I hold degrees in art and are lifelong designers. While we have created green interiors in the past, initially our goal in working together was to create healthy, aesthetically beautiful environments that cultivated people feeling clear and healthy. Our goal was also to design with as little impact as possible on the environment. After much thought, late nights, discussions and careful analysis, we created Mission Blue Design together and expanded our vision. The concept of MISSION BLUE DESIGN is to generate Live, Work, Play and Learn environments that are healthy, positive, transformative and sustainable. Our work goes beyond the concept of green interior design and encompasses human potential and conscious global awareness with environmental and social sustainability. We seek to help our clients have minimal impact on the earth and its inhabitants while enlivening human engagement, restoring and sustaining resources, and substantially raising the quality of life for all. We seek to innovate and generate new ideas and design directions, consistently challenging the status-quo in all that we do.

Click here to see how we applied some of those ideas and directions to solve design challenges and create healthy, positive, transformative and sustainable interiors.

The Role of Blue Design and Innovation in the Global Evolution Beyond Green

There is a lot being written on the subject of design, design practice, and sustainability. This is a very exciting time for designers because we are being called upon to offer pragmatic advice

and persuasive arguments to the impassioned calls for action worldwide. Innovation goes well beyond green design and must integrate what we call Blue Design. This term was generated by Adam Werbach of Act Now in his speech at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club titled “Birth of Blue”.

The Four Streams of Sustainability

Blue Design incorporates four streams of sustainability: environmental, economic, social, and cultural. Addressing these four streams is critical to long-term health of both the inhabitants of any space and the planet as we integrate the interior environment with the eco-environment. We are excited to immerse ourselves into this globally conscious 
soon-to-be mainstream way of design. 

This blog is meant to engage our readers. We are open to your thoughts and comments.

Thanks for tuning in. Feel free to post comments or questions to get the design dialogue started.

Kathleen and MaryAnne