Business Style: June

Community Comments

Your Office, Your Self

By Jeanne Winnick Brennan and Carol McCain

Whether it is your personal workspace or your company’s conference room, completely private domains are disappearing from the office landscape, and that means you and your colleagues often are performing your duties on stage. Architects are designing more windowed conference rooms with gobs of natural light and great views, edging out many corner offices. The shared natural light now flows through floor plans filled with glass cubicles for everyone to enjoy. With so much on view, what message does your environment convey about your company, your colleagues, your work product and you?

Curb Appeal
Clients, prospective customers and business associates who pull up in front of your company’s front door automatically receive a message about your workplace. If your carpet is worn or stained, chairs are tired looking and the whole reception area is rather lackluster, it doesn’t take long for a visitor to get the message that the company has lost its sizzle and its resources. Conversely, an office more richly appointed than the industry norm can be unsettling.
    Lionakis Beaumont Design Group of Sacramento and Modesto provides commercial architectural, engineering, planning and interior services. Valerie Hoffman, associate principal for the interior design group, asks clients at the very start how they want their company to be perceived, so the right message is delivered.
    “Imagine you are on a plane, and the pilot appears before takeoff wearing a clown costume instead of an expected uniform of navy blue and white to indicate authority,” says Hoffman. “It’s the same with the corporate office. You expect Nike headquarters’ image to be a fun, cool place to work, but at the Bank of America you don’t want to feel like they’re having fun with your money. Instead, you appreciate an atmosphere that conveys responsibility.”
    The East Sacramento firm of Reynolds Gualco Architecture Interior Design is known for its residential custom-home design, as well as its remodeling work that preserves the original character of a home when blending it with updated features. To give clients an idea of just how creative their design impact can be, founder Debbie Gualco moved the firm about 18 months ago to a 1915 English Tudor-style firehouse that blends the technical, edgy feeling of a modern workplace with a vintage home. With 18-foot ceilings, skylights and two stories of large windows spilling natural daylight into their workspace, Reynolds Gualco employees have natural lighting, one of the most important tools of their trade, readily available no matter what time of day or year.

True Colors Shining
“The sun produces a full spectrum of color, which studies indicate boosts productivity,” says interior designer Denae Baggs. “For us, being able to see true color and nature through our windows while at our desks provides us with design inspiration.”
    From the reception area, clients see the light-filled room, which once housed the fire engine. However, for presentations and design review, Gualco employees meet their clients in the conference room — a cozy living room with its original fireplace, bay windows and window seats, which together provide the warm feeling of the home that once housed firefighters. 
“Our reception area is design-oriented, but our conference room says, ‘Come into our home and see how we’re taking care of your home,’ ” says interior designer Katie Smith.
    Early in the design process for office space, Hoffman asks a series of questions about the client’s corporate culture that gets communicated internally, as well as externally. Do employees often work in teams, use shared technology, work independently away from the office, devote most of their time to analytical research, need complete privacy, or need to be part of an ongoing collaborative process? It’s important to realize that one size won’t fit all in a work environment, but an overall specific style reinforces a cultural identity.
    The function of the company culture has to be addressed when determining the workspace. “In creative work like software development, advertising, public relations and design, where the thought processes and energy feed off each other, it’s important to have work systems like cubicles or stations that foster that collaboration,” says Hoffman. “On the other hand, technical writing, legal and fiscal analyses are tasks better suited for more privacy and quiet areas.”
    When working in a small to medium-sized company, there is greater flexibility for novelty arrangements. For example, Digitas Chicago, a subsidiary of the Boston-based Digitas Inc., an interactive media agency, has 100 employees housed in 28,000 square feet and has provided 20 kick scooters to make the intercubicle commute between three distinct “neighborhoods” of communal areas and workstations more fun and much faster. It’s a common site to see riders stream by en route to a meeting.

Functional Forms
As technological innovations change the way we do business, workplace design has had to keep pace with form following right behind function. The creation of the first portable office cubicle in 1968 by Bob Probst, a designer with the Herman Miller furniture company of Zeeland, Mich., revolutionized modern-day workspaces. Intended to introduce some privacy into what was often a sea of open desks, the cubicle provides many flexible configurations for offices of all types.
    With personal workspace getting smaller by the decade, portable work systems are here to stay. Because cubicles are considered movable furniture and are not accounted for as a capital expense, they can have a five-year depreciation schedule rather than a 30-year timeline for fixed assets such as walls.
    The design possibilities of today’s workstations have proved to be practically limitless. Current trends have brought cubicles to lower heights for easier conversations and more team collaboration. When made of transparent materials, current workstations enhance natural daylight, lower energy costs, and eliminate visual barriers to keep information flowing at the high-speed internet rate everyone now expects.
    Whatever your pied-à-terre in the work world looks like, remember it speaks volumes about you. Wireless laptops, along with cordless and cellular phones, make everyone more mobile, and with increased collaborative working arrangements, your office space could be reduced to more of a home base for when you’re in the area.
    With that in mind, your compact and transparent location may provide limited options for personal statements and your decorating style. Even if your workstation of the future is more of a mobile desk and chair on wheels, it’s yours and should reflect your professional style as well as your company’s culture.   

• Share
  • Digg This
  • del.icio.us
  • Newsvine
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Furl It
  • !Y My Web
  • Google
• Email
• Print

Recommend This

Community Comments