Does Workplace Design Equal Job Performance? November 05, 2008
By Margery Weinstein
Looking to decrease your workforce's workspace? Not so fast. While few of us can afford cushy office upgrades, a workplace redesign can make a big difference, according to Gensler, a global design and consulting firm. The Gensler 2008 U.S. Workplace Survey shows "top-performing companies are embracing a fundamental restructuring of work through workplace design that places as much emphasis on collaboration, learning, and socialization as on individual 'heads-down' work." Here are some highlights from the report:
• Companies providing workplaces that are more effective for knowledge work are seeing higher levels of employee engagement, brand equity, and profit, with profit growth up to 14 percentage points greater than those with less effective work environments.
• Thirty-six percent of the average office is ineffective or ill-suited for the activities of today's knowledge workforce. In fact, employees believe they could increase the quality and quantity of their work by an average of 25 percent by improving workplace areas to better support all four modes of work (focus, collaboration, learning, and socializing).
• Providing space for collaboration pays off. People at top-ranked companies consider collaboration twice as critical to job success as average companies (43 percent versus 21 percent) and spend 23 percent more time collaborating than average companies (36 percent vs. 29 percent). Socializing was almost three times as critical to employees at top-performing companies who spend 16 percent more time in that work mode (20 percent vs. 7 percent).
• Gensler's survey not only measured what people spend their time doing, but where they do it in the office and how effectively work spaces support them, creating a workplace efficiency rating for all survey respondents. According to this measure, top companies design workplaces that are 80 percent effective, and average companies only achieve 64 percent efficiency. Drilling down to workplace effectiveness for specific work modes, 86 percent of top-performing companies ranked their spaces effective for collaboration versus 72 percent at average companies, and up to 14 percentage points higher for focus, learning, and socializing.
• Eighty-two percent of top company respondents reported they were satisfied/highly satisfied with their workplace; only 43 percent of average companies land in the same range. Respondents who rated their workplaces more effective had higher levels of job satisfaction, with those in the highly effective range (91 to 100 percent) reporting three times the job satisfaction as those in the 0 to 40 percent effective range.
Editor's Note: What's your company's workplace design like? Any ideas on ideal office spaces, and how to know if yours is a disaster? Join the discussion on Training Day.
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