Culture. It’s a
word of many uses. In science, medicine, anthropology, even cuisine. It’s also sociology,
and the way it interprets our ability to interact with each other. Every action
requires a cultural memory to succeed. Where we were born, how we were raised,
how we conduct ourselves in all situations.
Culture is principals, values, beliefs, and it impacts not only
ourselves, but where we work as well. And companies have egos, just like
humans. Competition breeds it.
Every company
has complexity, in that many people from any background are brought together
each day, with the intention to perform their best efforts as a group to help
each other achieve and prosper. The larger the company, the more complicated such
efforts are. That’s where corporate culture comes in.
All companies
have a culture. Whether it originates from the top, the middle or the bottom,
it’s there. Ordinarily, corporate culture begins with a founder. He or she
brings a philosophy, an attitude, and a way of thinking, to start a business.
Those hired tend to agree with their boss – else they wouldn’t be hired. Henry
Ford is one example. Steve Jobs is another. Culture can come from the middle.
Say a company has lost its leadership. That happens in war, when a draft or
voluntary service deprives a company of top management. In World War II, many American
and British companies were run by those in the middle – women, elderly males,
even teenagers, ran the factories. Culture can emanate from the bottom too. In
many companies, unions and especially those in Communist countries, workers
made policy, and elected their bosses.
Today, corporate
culture is expressed in various ways. Unions are diminished. Democracy is more apparent
as technology becomes significant – those with technical skill are free to
leave when the culture of the company courting them better suits their nature.
Office work must appeal, to hold on to a company’s most valuable asset – which
goes home at the end of the day. Everyone knows about Google, or Apple, and any
other corporation where you can bring your dog to work. But what of the other
workplaces, the 9 to 5 operations that must create an atmosphere that most
workers, if not all, can look forward to arriving at each morning.
That’s where
corporate culture comes in.
“At Google, we
design our workplace to build community, to increase velocity, and to inspire
and motivate, while eliminating friction and focusing on employee health.”(1)
Case4space’s
research says:
“A healthy culture is the key to engagement,
innovation, resiliency and growth” (2)
·
“More
than 70 percent of the workforce either hates their job or are just going
through the motion.”
·
Half
of all office space is wasted
·
The
number of people who suffer chronic disorders – caused or exacerbated by the
workplace –is alarming, scandalous, and exorbitantly expensive.” (3)
Warren Buffet
has said that “Culture is hard to measure and it can’t fit in a spreadsheet.
For that reason, investors, particularly those with a value bent, often totally
ignore it. That’s a mistake.”(4)
Simon Sinek,
author and TED presenter, is quoted as saying; “Humans don’t do their best work
when they’re stressed out.” He makes the case that the stress of the workplace sets
our adrenal system on overload, degrading our health and has caused the rise of
chronic diseases in our time (5)
Rex Miller, in “Change Your Space, Change Your Culture,”
(Wiley,
2014) says, “American
business loses a trillion dollars a year because we do not know that life in
integrated. Personal health, safety, marriage, family, commuting, finances and
other burdens and crises are integrally related to our ability to achieve and
produce.” (6)
Sustainable Design
Brian Barth, author of
The
WELL Building Standard Has Arrived
- An Inside Look At The Next Generation
of Sustainable Design, tells the story of Paul Scialla, of Goldman Sachs. Seven years ago, he
thought; now that we’ve learned to design buildings that are healthy for
the environment, isn’t it time to start designing them to be healthier for
people? “Sustainability’ was being used and felt there was a bit of a gap in
thought,” he says.
Scialla talked
to architects and designers, health experts, real estate professionals, and
scientists in fields ranging from ergonomics and acoustics to sociology and
psychology. He learned that humans spend an average of 90% of their time
indoors and that indoor air quality in approximately 70% of buildings is worse
than outdoor air quality. Some connections are straightforward—most people have
experienced the off- gassing of new carpet or wall finishes, for example, and
understands that the release of harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can
lead to headaches, nausea, and fatigue. The wavelength of light used to
illuminate our workspaces during the day can lead to sleeplessness at night;
the design of stairwells can entice us to use them or predispose us to head for
the elevator; even the color and texture of wall coverings can influence
whether we feel perky and productive throughout the day or bored and
disengaged.
“Real estate is the largest asset class in the
world with $150 trillion value, globally,” Scialla says. “What if we looked to
intelligently infuse that with the fastest growing, and arguably most important
industry—health and wellness—in itself a $2 trillion annual spend?” Scialla
formed Delos: a research
platform, technology incubator, and wellness real estate company. The Delos
advisory board is comprised of political and cultural thought leaders,
including former HUD secretary and U.S. senator Mel Martinez, CEO of U.S. Green Building Council Rick Fedrizzi and
actor Leonardo Di Caprio.
WELL Building
“We’re linking
health effects to solutions through elements,” says Nathan Stodola, director of the WELL Building Standard and a
mechanical engineer by trade. “For example, a number of cohort-based studies
show that people who walk 3,000 steps more per day will have certain benefits
to their cardiovascular system over the long term, while other studies show
that when you design spaces like ‘X’, you’ll get people to walk more.” 102
performance metrics were established in seven conceptual arenas: air, water,
nourishment, light, fitness, comfort, and mind. Our modern healthcare system focuses on
addressing health after sickness has already struck a person. But with the
increased prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular
disease, and cancer—not to mention the immense costs of treating these
ailments—the healthcare community has put more and more emphasis on
lifestyle-oriented and preventative approaches to health. The WELL
Building Standard provides a way to apply this line of thinking to the
built environment and has emerged through a rigorous three-part peer review
process. A committee of scientists, each with very specific areas of expertise,
was convened to establish minimum benchmarks for the quality of water, light,
air, and other components of the built environment that directly affect human
health. A team of design and construction industry professionals analyzed the
implementability of the standards, giving feedback on the best way to
incorporate them into current building practices. Finally, a medical review
board gave suggestions on how the standards could be implemented for the
greatest leverage on public health outcomes.
Delos launched
a two-year pilot program in which a number of projects were designed and built
using the standard, which provided real world feedback on what it takes to
implement the criteria across a number of building typologies. There are now offices
in Pittsburg, condominiums in Manhattan, hotel rooms in Las Vegas, restaurants
in California, Colorado, and Illinois, and more that show how healthy
buildings look, feel, and function in these contexts. CBRE, the world’s largest
commercial real estate development company, built a new global corporate
headquarters in Los Angeles as part of the pilot program in 2013, becoming the
first office space to do so. Other pilot projects tested the concept in the
retail, multi-family, institutional, and mixed-use sectors, including sites in
Melbourne, Shanghai, Mexico City, and New Delhi. As of early 2015, nearly 15 8
million square feet of what has been termed “wellness-infused” real estate
has been built or is registered for certification— about 30% of it overseas.
In 2013, Delos
launched the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) to administer the WELL Building
Standard, which is now available to the general public. IWBI is partnered with
the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI), the organization responsible for LEED
certification according to the standards of the USGBC, who is now providing
third-party certification for the WELL Building Standard.
IWBI is not a
for-profit or a not-for-profit company. It is structured as a Public For
Benefit Corporation B-corp, a new corporate structure in the US that is
intended to balance profitability with public benefits. IWBI will direct at
least 51% of net profits toward charitable causes related to its mission of
health in the built environment. IWBI is collaborating with the USGBC to build
the William Jefferson Clinton Children’s Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, an
orphanage and model for resilient construction techniques that will be built
according to LEED and WELL building standards.
The LEED-WELL Connection
The LEED-WELL
connection emphasizes that project managers seeking LEED and WELL certification
will experience a highly streamlined process in registering and certifying
their projects. There are about a dozen metrics where WELL overlaps with LEED
and the Living Building Challenge. A project can be certified as WELL
Silver, WELL Gold, or WELL Platinum, and the web portal for uploading
information for one automatically populates the relevant fields for the other. LEED
has become a straightforward business case based on the dual benefits of
reducing energy consumption for both the environment and the bottom line. Where
LEED pays for itself in lower utility bills, the payback for the modest
investment in the WELL Building Standard comes in the form of human capital,
which has significant fiscal implications in itself.
Translating
those figures to square footage costs, annual operating costs in an office
building could be $3 to $8 -per- square-foot, while corporations could spend around
$300 to $800 per square foot on their employee expenses (salaries and benefits).
“Occupant
satisfaction in the building is as big a part of the WELL Building Standard as
overall health,” says Stodola, citing poor acoustical performance and thermal
comfort as the two biggest areas of complaints in the office space. If air
quality, lighting, ergonomics, and overall health and human comfort are
improved, average employee sick days will go down and productivity will go up.
Version one of the WELL Building Standard is optimized for office spaces,
especially Class A owner-occupied buildings that are likely to pursue LEED
certification.
IWBI is in the
process of developing precise standards for retail, sports arenas,
institutional environments, multi-family housing, and healthcare facilities,
but in the meantime, the first WELL AP classes are forming to educate design
professionals on using the standards in practice. CBRE recently published the
results of an employee survey given after one year in their LEED Gold,
WELL-certified office space in Los Angeles: 83% of employees say they feel more
productive in the new building; 90% would recommend the new space to
colleagues; 92% feel the new space has a positive effect on their health and
wellbeing.
Haworth, an architectural interiors
manufacturer using the WELL Building Standard, is carrying out similar
studies at their Mexico City, Shanghai, and Los Angeles showrooms. “We’ve
built process maps to calculate the time it takes to conduct typical work tasks
and have developed statistical methods to see if any of the changes to the
physical space had an actual impact to speed and time of business processes,”
says Dr. Mike O’Neil, senior
researcher at Haworth. Haworth is also collaborating with Delos to develop
monitoring devices that will collect real-time data on performance measures
like air quality and how people are actually using the space and “beam that
back to the headquarters to make sure we’re in compliance over time,”
O’Neil says.
The WELL
Building Standard is about operations as well as physical design;
recertification will be required every three years. “WELL will look similar to
a LEED Gold or LEED Platinum building because of the biophilic design where
you’re bringing nature into the space, but for me the biggest difference I see
is in behavior and workplace culture,” says Steven Kooy, global sustainability
manager at Haworth. WELL may be a new way of building, but there is one
person who has extensive experience with what it’s like to inhabit a
WELL-certified space.
The New Status
Herman
Miller’s publication, WHY, in an
article written by Drew Himmelstein,
reported that when the Sears Tower was completed in 1973, the upper floors of
the world’s new tallest building were designed with recessed spaces that
intentionally maximized the number of corner offices. Architecture firm
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill bet that offering more plum office assignments
for top executives would make the upper floors, with their already prime aerial
real estate and expansive views, even more desirable for business tenants.
Forty years ago, such offices were in such high demand that architects looked
for ways to add more corners onto buildings. It’s striking, then, that for many
of today’s top companies that once essential feature of corporate facilities is
increasingly obsolete. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t have a personal office;
he works in an open workspace with other employees. Count Jack Dorsey of
Square, Gilt Groupe’s Michelle Peluso, and Virgin’s Richard Branson are among
other chief executives who’ve joined the office-less class. In 2015, some of
the most eye-popping, up-to-date offices from Silicon Valley to Sydney, embrace
designs where entry-level employees brush elbows (and espresso cups) with
executives.
“Status is a
fundamental human motivation—it’s evidence that the group values us,” says
Tracy Brower, Director of Human Dynamics and Work at Herman Miller. Traditional
offices found plenty of ways to reinforce those motivations, giving high-status
employees private offices with better views and guarding them from the rest of
the staff with administrative assistants. But why has the tide turned on this
approach? Brower explains: “On the human side, you’re challenged by the
difficulty of connecting to other people and to work—providing that essential
feeling of belonging—and on the facility side, you’re being asked to extract
greater and greater value from every square inch of real estate.” In other
words, an assigned private office—closed off, and underutilized—sounds ideal
until you look at the bigger picture. “Status used to separate us from others.
Today we better understand that you actually experience status within
groups—this also contributes to why we’re seeing more and more open office
environments.”
Brower was
part of a team that researched what motivates people at work as part of the
development of Living Office, Herman Miller’s new approach to realizing
higher-performing, human-centered workplaces. They identified six key human
needs—security, autonomy, belonging, achievement, status, and purpose—and are
using these to help guide organizations toward purposeful choices in office
design.
The Chicago
staff of CBRE, a commercial real estate services firm, recently moved into a
new light-filled office occupying three upper-level floors in a tower in the
city’s central business district. Most of the office’s sit-to-stand desks are
in an open workspace that provides clear visibility of other coworkers and the
sweeping views outside. The private offices, which are unassigned and called
“Offices for a Day,” are plated with glass and are available for any employee’s
use through a reservation system. In the corner spaces, there aren’t desks at
all, but areas designated for collaboration. No one has an assigned desk. The
space couldn’t be more different than the company’s previous location, which
consisted of perimeter offices and workstations divided by high panels toward
the center of the floor, according to Lauren Brightwell, senior project manager
at CBRE. The office got little natural light and overlooked a parking garage.
Even so, Brightwell says, some senior executives were reluctant to move.
In order to
recognize individuals who once had the status of a private office and to
showcase their accomplishments, a prominently located media wall now displays
employees’ awards and achievements. These are effective ways to reinforce
status without relying on traditional office design, Brower says. “The physical
environment is only one set of factors to consider,” she adds. According to
Brower, status can also be conferred holistically through managerial methods
(like providing mentoring and increased leadership opportunities), and access
to updated technology, tools, and resources.
Healthier Outcomes
Building
employee relationships company-wide can be incredibly valuable to a business,
according to Scott Doorley, creative director at the Stanford d.school and
co-author with Scott Witthoft of “Make Space, A Guide for Designing to
Encourage Creativity”. When the Macquarie Group, an investment bank, redesigned
its headquarters in Sydney, Australia, it was driven by similar product
concerns, according to Amanda Stanaway, a principal at architecture firm Woods
Bagot, who was the lead interior designer on the project. Macquarie’s offices
had previously grouped its employees by department, creating what Woods Bagot
terms “command and control silos,” where employees had assigned areas they were
expected to work in during office hours under the watch of the team’s managers.
But the bank was concerned that the rigid design, which kept employees in
different divisions apart and placed managers in visible positions, hindered
the speed at which the bank could bring products to market, Stanaway says. If,
for example, the financial services team developed a product without ever
collaborating with the tax experts, the product might easily have unforeseen
tax implications and need to be reworked.
In Macquarie’s
new offices, no one has assigned desks or offices, and employees naturally
group themselves based on the project they are working on at the time. Each
employee has a locker and access to a variety of workstations that facilitate
both individual and collaborative work. The result is a client-oriented office
culture that also saves money by using space efficiently—a priority in
Australia, where commercial office space is at a premium. (11).
On the other
hand, in an article in the Washington Post, on December 30, 2014, a personal
essay by Lindsay Kaufman said, Google got
it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. Workplaces need
more walls, not fewer. “A year ago, my boss announced that our large New
York ad agency would be moving to an open office. After nine years as a senior
writer, I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long, shared
table. It felt like my boss had ripped off my clothes and left me standing in
my skivvies. Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet
remarkably oppressive. Nothing was private. On the first day, I took my seat at
the table assigned to our creative department next to a nice woman who I
suspect was an air horn in a former life. All day, there was constant
shuffling, yelling and laughing, along with music piped in through the PA
system. As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my
frequent bathroom trips. At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I
felt judging my 5:04 departure time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase
their best noise-cancelling headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue.”
Despite its
obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers
across the country. Now about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low
partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association.
Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google,
Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted
architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world,
housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an
early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and
fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of
New York, making the “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and
accessibility to the city’s chief.
These new floor
plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. But
employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study
found that many works in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead
to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices
said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than
30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy. Meanwhile, “ease of
interaction” with colleagues — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent
of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices
were least likely to identify their
ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study,
researchers concluded, “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction…was
doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”
The New
Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined
that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on
work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back,
innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention
spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Furthermore, a sense
of privacy boosts job performance, while the opposite can cause feelings of
helplessness.
Kaufman
continued, “As the new space intended, I’ve formed interesting, unexpected
bonds with my cohorts. But my personal performance at work has hit an all-time
low. Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each
other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
It’s like being in middle school with a bunch of adults. Those who have worked
in private offices for decades have proven to be the most vociferous and
rowdy. They haven’t had to consider how their loud habits affect others, so
they shout ideas at each other across the table and rehash jokes of
yore. As a result, I can only work effectively during times when no one else
is around, or if I isolate myself in one of the small, constantly sought-after,
glass-windowed meeting rooms around the perimeter. If employers want to make
the open-office model work, they have to take measures to improve work
efficiency. For one, they should create more private areas — ones without
fishbowl windows. Also, they should implement rules on when interaction
should be limited. For instance, when a colleague has on headphones, it’s a
sign that you should come back another time or just send an e-mail. Headphones
are the new closed door in offices. And please, let’s eliminate some music
that blankets our workspaces. Metallica at 3 p.m. isn’t always compatible
with meeting a 4 p.m. deadline. On the other hand, companies could simply join
another trend — allowing employees to work from home.”
So what is it to be?
Rex Miller
says “Part of a leader’s job is to provide a safe place for employees. A safe
place is marked by relief, hope, focus, and achievement.” He goes on to comment, “Many people go to
work with their life in shreds. They are barely hanging on. Whoever you are and
wherever you work, people around you seriously struggle with special needs
kids, long commutes, economic pressure, teenager and marriage problems, health
challenges, single parenthood, aging and infirm parents. Many people are
stressed before arriving at the workplace. Ignoring these real-world problems
is a very expensive mistake. The toxic bottom 20 percent of employees costs
U.S. businesses $550 billion a year, stress drains another $300 billion,
chronic health conditions balloon to over $1 trillion, and working in sick
buildings adds another $60 billion.”(9)
There you have
it. We’ve heard from experts –social scientists and CEOs aiming to reform our
sometimes backwards approaches to workplace harmony, and an employee who
doesn’t agree with the professionals.
Culture is
indeed as the thing that distinguishes a happy workplace from an unhappy one.
But as mentioned before, culture is what culture does. It’s all relevant and no
iteration of it is the same as another.
(1)
Change Your Space, Change
Your Culture- http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118937813.html
(2)
Case4space
(3)
Rex Miller, Change Your
Space, Change Your Culture
(4)
Warren Buffett, Change
Your Space, Change Your Culture
(5)
Simon Sinek, Change Your
Space, Change Your Culture
(6)
Rex Miller, Change Your
Space, Change Your Culture
(9)
Rex Miller, Change Your
Space, Change Your Culture
WHY,
a Herman Miller publication
