CHANGE YOUR SPACE, CHANGE YOUR CULTUREAuthors Rex Miller, Mabel Casey, Mark Konchar

A survey from IBM asked 1600 CEO’s: What keeps you up at night?

INNOVATIONTheir answers centered on one topic:

Inside organizations there’s an even bigger problem:

70% of all employees are disengaged50% of workspace is wasted

The reality is that disengagement is costing businesses an estimated $1 trillion a year.

A quality culture at work leads to

Engaged workers find solutions together.

When smart teams collaborate they discover breakthrough ideas.

INNOVATION

COLLABORATION

ENGAGEMENTIf we’re not in the CULTURE business, then we’re not in the INNOVATION business either.

We’re using ideas more than half a century old to design buildings full of disengaged people.

Private offices – 80 years old

Average age of an office building – 60 years old.

Cubicles – 50 years old

Our industry is stuck. We’re having the same conversations focused on:

acousticslighting

budgets

standards

ergonomics

82%PEOPLE

.05% 5%

10%

Design Facilities

Technology

3%

Operations & Maintenance

PART OF

When we create buildings, the costs that get squeezed the most are associated with the facilities.

However, the biggest costs are hidden under the surface.

%Engaged

Kind of Engaged

Disengaged

Toxic

Complicated

Roles and responsibilitiesLinear

PredictableCause and effect is calculable

Complex

Network of commitmentsIterative

AdaptableCause and effect are unpredictable

For the first time in history – today’s workplace spans at least three generations.

1946

1930

1964

1980

2000

Greatest1930-194611% of the population

Boomers1946-196425% of the population

Gen X1965-198014% of the population

Millennial1981-200027% of the population

iGen2000 -23% of the population

Digital NativesGrew up with mobile devices.

Technologically SavvyGrew up during the most rapid change of the media landscape.

Digital ImmigrantsDigital media is a second or third language.

• Space is less about a dedicated office

• Go to work to connect, collaborate and interact

• 77% of millennials plan to live in US urban cores

• 64% of college-educated millennials choose first where they want to live, and then look for a job

• Majority in the workforce by 2020

NEXT GENERATION

It’s time to change the conversation. We have to design and build workspaces for how life happens at work.

NPR Headquarters – Creating one central area where employees can interact with each other fosters staff interaction and creates a feeling of a more connected organization.

Agility

Engagement

Culture

Innovation

Collaboration

Resilience

We have to shift our focus.

[ [Square, Inc.

There is no silver bullet for creating effective workplaces of the future. Workplace solutions must meet the context of an organization’s culture.

Zendesk

Space testaments: getting to the context.

Balfour Beatty’s new Seattle office developed a story that helped them understand their office culture and how they wanted their new space to reflect, support and nurture the unique culture that drives them.

Using symbols that represent

culture to identify space.

Making a direct connection to each person.

Creating transparency and enabling privacy.

Creating a sense of permanence and ownership.

Connecting culture and space.

Space becomes the context for culture, and culture has the power to release (or constrain) engagement, creativity and productivity.

MetLife Corporate Retail Headquarters – For MetLife employees, the buildings establish a progressive new culture and more effective, democratic work process that communicates the company’s core values: openness and transparency.

Engagement and innovation in the supply chain.

A quality culture at work leads to

Engaged workers find solutions together.

When smart teams collaborate they discover breakthrough ideas.

INNOVATION

COLLABORATION

ENGAGEMENT

The value you get out of engagement is innovation.

Engaged teams work together to innovate and find where value really lies.

The conversation changes from cost to value.

Golden nugget ideas and supporting data.

70% of employees are disengaged. Of these, 20% are actively toxic. The cost of this is more than $1 trillion per year.

By 2017 the new average space per worker will be 151 square feet compared to 175 in 2012. Stresses companies moving to smaller but smarter space.

Companies with low engagement suffer from a 32% decrease in operating income, almost 4% decline in net income and 11% reduction in earnings.

CBRE spent $180 per square foot in the new LA space, approximately 50% more than conventional Class A finish out. At the same time CBRE will save hard costs of over $9 million over the life of the lease. They shifted from offices, cubicles and conference rooms to over 16 different kinds of configured spaces.

Emerging evidence says that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office. The data suggests that creating collisions - change encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers improves performance.

A company invested several hundred thousand dollars to rip out the coffee stations and build fewer, bigger ones – just one for every 120 employees and one large cafeteria for all employees. In one quarter after the switch, sales rose by 20% or $200 million.

Space effects culture – it is where culture happens. Culture is the catalyst for engagement, collaboration and innovation.

Legacy culture gets in the way of change. Changing space disrupts the old to allow new ways of working to reshape culture.

Happy workers are 22% more productive. Happy workers are 28% less absent, which mean 12.3 more days and $619/year per happy employee.

How it all came together...

Balfour Beatty Fairfax, VA

CousinsAtlanta, GA

NRELGolden, CO

GoogleMountainview, CA

HaworthHolland, MI

NeoConChicago, IL

Change your Space,

Change your culture

How Engaging WorkspacEs

Lead to TransformaTion

and groWTh

ReX MILLeRMabel Casey

Mark konChar

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$32.00 USA / $38.00 CAN

BUSINESS & ECONOMICS/General

Recent studies have exposed some scary and dangerous realities about the workplace:

•More than 70 percent of the workforce either hates their job or they are just going through the motions

•Half of all office space is wasted

The dimensions of this crisis sparked a high drama pursuit for answers. Like big city detectives, leaders from well-known and respected American companies raced to stop the killer of collaboration and creativity. Then they discovered strategies to turn the workplace into a landscape of innovation.

This book is the outcome.

We know that employee engagement is the key to innovation; workers must care about the job at hand. But what do you do when dreariness and disconnection are baked into the workplace? How does business change the culture, leading to places of creativity, resiliency and growth?

The leaders behind this story learned that the answer has been hiding in plain sight, that office space itself can be the portal of significant change. Months of original research and fieldwork all led to the breakthrough insight that business must redesign the spaces where old and dangerous habits live.

The authors expose deadly flaws in the way office space is commonly approached, bid, and designed. The whole process has been trapped in the sclerotic thinking of space as “sunk costs.” Which leads to the practical conclusion that design is not important, only minimizing the cost of design. That has led to workplaces as soul-killing environments of stressed, fragmented, and disengaged workers.

However, by designing space as a flexible, open, and engaging workplace, employees reconnect with the work.

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Photograph: © Haworth

a new vISIon of the pRoduCtIve and InnovatIve woRkSpaCe

“We’re leaving behind a complicated world that operated like a machine, to a much more complex world that operates more like an ecosystem,” he states, in a nutshell, the big idea behind workplaces that work in a hyper-connected world.”

—Susan S. Szenasy - Publisher / Editor in Chief at Metropolis Magazine

This is a fascinating exploration of the multiple ways our work environments are hinder-ing or helping us get things done. Rex Miller has done a remarkable job of chronicling the significant changes afoot in our culture and their impact on consciousness–a terrific treaty on the power that form has on function.

—David Allen, author of Getting Things Done

This book is an excellent treatise on a topic that has been long underserved. Every CEO should be personally involved in the design of the work environment, and this is the book to read if you want to understand why that’s important, what you should care about and how to proceed.

—Dave Gray, author, The Connected Company

Change Your Space will transform the way you think about workspace. An insipid work-space is worse than a lost opportunity; it is a lodestone in a world where companies must innovate to survive. This book offers actionable insights and real world exam-ples to demonstrate how and why your workspace is critical for forming, shaping, and retaining the sort of team and culture required for success. I found it so compelling that I’m planning to incorporate the book into my “Building Innovation Teams and Cultures” MBA course at Kellogg.

—Joe Dwyer, Partner at Founder Equity and Digital Intent; teaches innovation at North-western University Kellogg School of Management

REX MILLER, the principal and thought leader for mindSHIFT, is widely recog-nized in the science of workplace inno-vation. He is winner of the 2009 CoreNet Global Innovator of the Year award. Rex helped create the mindSHIFT consor-tium of top executives from America’s largest construction and architecture

companies and their unprecedented investigation into how the workplace can create—or undermine—culture shift. They discovered that space, engagement, and culture shift go hand in hand. But until Change Your Space, Change Your Culture, the space-culture connection has been a well-kept secret of major innovators like Google, Cummins Inc., and W.L. Gore. This book reveals how they do it.

MABEL CASEY has led Global Mar-keting and Innovation for Haworth, Inc. since 2006.  She and her team are focused on driving Haworth to-ward deeper alignment with customer needs and exploring how business leaders can utilize their spaces to support the people, culture, and

outcomes of their organization. Mabel has more than a decade of executive-level experience in the contract furnishings industry. Haworth improves workplaces with award-winning furniture, interior architecture, and technology solutions to support collaboration, innova-tion, and culture transformations. Research and design drive a deep understanding of agile workplace needs and are at the center of the company’s strategy.  

MARK CONCHAR is the Chief of Enterprise Development for Bal-four Beatty Construction and Kon-char leads the company’s national Capability Center team. This team supports the company with re-search and development, learning, technology improvement, energy per-

formance, public-private partnerships, federal con-tracting and legislation, strategic marketing and client advocacy. Balfour Beatty Construction is an innovation leader, sits in the top three of US General Contractors and is part of Balfour Beatty, a global investment and infrastructure firm based in London.

For more information on creating engaging work places visit:http://bbc.lookbookhq.com/InnovateSpace

Haley Smithhsmith@balfourbeattyus.com

t. 615-872-1176