As we move into the new year, it’s a great time to reflect on the past and think about what we want to achieve in the coming months. At Rightsize Facility, we’re excited to continue creating beautiful, functional spaces for our clients, and we’re also looking forward to experimenting with new design trends and techniques.
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With holiday gifting season upon us, many of us are still wondering how to shop for the people in our lives. Thinking of how to boost morale in your office? Adding some flair to your workspace just might be the answer. We’ve put together a holiday gift guide with some suggestions from the team at Rightsize Facility!
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November is now recognized as National Gratitude Month. In conjunction with the holiday season, this is a time when we pause to give thanks for the blessings in our lives. However, gratitude is something we should be expressing in the workplace all year long.
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Office design is being reimagined after worldwide shutdowns prohibited working from the office. NeoCon is the world’s leading conference in commercial interior design — paving the way for innovative and emerging office design trends.
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Office design is being reimagined after worldwide shutdowns prohibited working from the office. NeoCon is the world’s leading conference in commercial interior design — paving the way for innovative and emerging office design trends.
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I think by now almost everyone has heard the news about Elon Musk requesting all his employees to return to the office or quit. Below are the two emails he sent to his teams in full:
First email:
Subject: Remote work is no longer acceptable
Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.
If there are particularly exceptional contributors for whom this is impossible, I will review and approve those exceptions directly.
Moreover, the “office” must be a main Tesla office, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties, for example being responsible for Fremont factory human relations, but having your office be in another state.
Thanks,
Elon
Second email:
Subject: To be super clear
Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Moreover, the office must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned.
The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence. That is why I lived in the factory so much – so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, Tesla would long ago have gone bankrupt.
There are of course companies that don’t require this, but when was the last time they shipped a great new product? It’s been a while.
Tesla has and will create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth. This will not happen by phoning it in.
Thanks,
Elon
This was headline news, and all sorts of op-ed pieces ran with folks chiming in and providing their two cents on the matter. To be honest, I think he said what most all Founders, CEO’s, Presidents, and other C-Suite executives want to say. Get back to the office. But the current wellness culture, the great resignation, and a variety of other factors outside of their control prevent them from saying it. The Great Resignation has led to the Great Resistance, and it has become a battle of wills between senior management and everyone else.
Believe me, I’m the first to beat the ‘Inspire Engagement, Don’t Mandate Attendance’ drum, but I also think he makes some interesting and insightful points. Tesla, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., and other tech companies did not become the innovative giants they are today by leveraging a remote workforce or by collaborating over Zoom over via a conference call during the pre-internet startup era. We’re seeing that an office is no longer a productivity tool. An office is a connectedness tool.
The office is a way for people to get to know each other and to be able to share thoughts, ideas, and experiences in a way that makes everybody better. It builds trust and Rick Warren once said, “The most essential quality for leadership is not perfection but credibility. People must be able to trust you.” Trust builds speed and productivity because it feeds into collaboration, connection, loyalty, and, ultimately – results and innovation.
A workplace leader’s role should not be to control people and stay on top of things or mandate all their staff to be in the office for forty hours a week, but should be to guide, energize and excite their staff. I’m sure there was a time and still are times when Elon and others are energizing and exciting their employees with innovative breakthroughs and ideas, but a lot can be said for having some tact and compassion and meeting people where they’re at and not where you expect/want them to be.
As Ken Blanchard described, “The test of your leadership is not what happens when you’re there, but what happens when you’re not there.” Don’t follow Elon’s lead but instead, be an empathetic and compassionate leader and meet people in the middle and be open to having some flexibility with your teams. Build trust and it will ultimately generate the connectedness, productivity, and innovation we’re all seeking from our workplace environment.
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Offices are literally the physical heart and soul of a business and there is no better place for casual interactions, collaboration, innovation, and creativity. Leaders understand their inherent value, but right now, they also recognize that they need to reconfigure and, in some cases, redesign their spaces. They need to make them into destinations where people want to come to. These updated spaces need to provide areas for employees to converge, thrive, learn, grow, inspire, innovate, create, and collaborate. Not via Zoom or Teams from a spare room or home office, but together in a physical space.
Convincing remote employees and those working from home (WFH) to return to the office, even just part-time, will be critical for the future success of businesses. In order for this to happen, offices need to become destinations and provide an experience. Places that people get excited about coming into and that they fear missing out (FOMO) if they don’t come into a physical workplace.
The office location, size, design, layout, and how they make us feel are some of the issues that will need to be addressed as we look toward the future. The office is evolving and becoming more agile — it has to! More office workers are expecting flexibility in where they work. Recognizing this coming shift is the easy part. Understanding how workplace strategies need to adjust is the challenge.
Going forward, people want more flexibility, including virtual options and collaboration spaces. Layouts are becoming less focused on individual workstations and trending more toward incorporating cozy, Resimercial design elements with lots of collaborative spaces. There is also an increase in the proliferation of amenities and the incorporation of biophilic elements and access to fresh air. Technology has become even more important and we’re seeing tech-enabled everything along with the prioritization of health and wellness at the forefront of post-pandemic design.
The end result of all of this is the creation of a new future for the workplace – The New Workplace Ecosystem.
By definition, an ecosystem is a group of interconnected elements, formed by the interaction of a community with its environment. We can think of the New Workplace Ecosystem in much the same way. It will be a suite of places and spaces that provide the best environment for the work being performed. Different workers and teams have various needs for how they work, when they work, and where they work. Thinking through how we work each day reveals how we work best, matching our behaviors and experiences to the places and spaces that support them most effectively.
There are essentially six styles of work being performed by your employees on any given day, and your workplace should provide spaces that support each of them. Those styles are – research, focus, connection, growth, nurturing, and spaces for meetings. Each style of work is also tied to your furniture along with your desired spatial arrangements. Different companies require different configurations to tailor to their employee’s needs, and the designs incorporated have the ability to foster both connection and community. The result is spaces that are engaging and inspiring, that deliver creative and human-centered solutions, and also support organizational needs while activating the engagement of your team.
Your employees aren’t the same as they were in March 2020, and your office design shouldn’t be either. It’s not as simple as having three work options – remote, hybrid, or in-office workers. Your employees don’t think or work in the same way they did when they left the office, and your layout needs to evolve. Going forward your office needs to be a destination – a collaborative and social hub but with space for private work. It needs to be visually attractive and reflective of your firm’s environmental and social beliefs with a focus on wellbeing. It needs to become an ecosystem that enables productivity and can also be leveraged as a recruitment and retention tool.
The new era of work calls for a very different style of office than the traditional spaces of the past. That said, a dramatic reconfiguration or redesign may not be needed. Making a few strategic, relatively simple changes can help to improve your workflow, increase employee satisfaction, and raise productivity levels. Your physical office spaces will continue to play a central role in the new workplace ecosystem. Offices will always be a place for people and teams to come together to work individually, but also to do group work and to connect. It helps to build relationships and improve company culture, and most importantly, the #1 purpose for coming into the office – collaboration.
Local coffee shops, parks, libraries, coworking spaces, and other ‘third-places’ or alternative spaces play a crucial role in the new workplace ecosystem. Younger generations view these spaces as terrific options for when they want to have some flexibility and get some remote work done. They enjoy having the autonomy to change their working environment on a day-to-day basis or simply on a whim.
They see these alternative spaces as an extension of the office and another way to potentially attract and retain talent. That said, depending on your organization’s current office footprint, these types of environments might be easier to access than you think. In fact, they may already be available within your office building. Just having the ability to get outside the office and get work in a common area of the building or in a café, terrace, or amenity lounge is all you really need. It provides your employees with a sense of autonomy while also encouraging departments and teams to collaborate and optimize their time together.
When all is said and done, work is a collaborative process, and we can create a thriving community by designing workplaces to optimize productivity, connection, innovation, and well-being. The workplace ecosystem of the future will be an integrated environment that centers on remaining human, helpful, and holistic while offering openness, convenience, and flexibility.
Your team members will arrive at their own conclusions about what is the right spatial mix for them, whether it’s from home, the office, or a third/alternative space. Right now, successful organizations have the opportunity to reconfigure and transform their workplace arrangements and policies. The focus should be on providing more flexibility, offering multiple locations that enhance work styles and the overall well-being of your employees.
To be successful in the New Workplace Ecosystem we need to remain flexible and focus on creating innovative and inspiring spaces as well as offering work arrangements and options that match our employees’ preferred work modes. We should be embracing this opportunity to develop new styles of working and always remember that successful workspace design is not just a skill, it’s much more than that. It’s your culture – and you can’t put a price tag on culture.
For assistance with creating your New Workplace Ecosystem strategy, contact Rightsize Facility today.
From October 4th to 6th, the Rightsize team attended NeoCon 2021, located only a few blocks away from our downtown office at theMART in Chicago. It’s North America’s most important gathering of commercial interior design experts, where manufacturers present and discuss the latest solutions and strategies for the workplace.
We wanted to share some of the top workplace trends we saw at NeoCon 2021.
Mental health and workplace wellness have been brought into sharp focus. Employers have started to realize the importance of creating comfortable spaces that support these values and bring happiness to their staff. There are some design solutions that can create a comfortable space not only physically but mentally, too.
Rather than restricting employees to an assigned desk every day, employees will have the choice to work in a range of settings which can flex from one project to the next based on collaboration needs and the tools required.
Now is a great time to incorporate these trends into your workplace. Connect with one of our workplace experts to discuss which options will work best for your employees and the environment you want to create.
A happy employee means a thriving business. Learn why allowing dogs at your workplace might increase worker productivity.
If you’re a dog owner, chances are you want to spend as much time as possible with your pet. Today, an increasing number of offices are becoming dog-friendly, so whether you bring along your buddy or enjoy the company’s mascot, chances are you’re going to find your day at work much more enjoyable. And with International Dog Day just around the corner on August 26th, we wanted to highlight some of the benefits of having a dog-friendly office environment.
A dog friendly office is a highly sought-after company perk and potential employees, particularly millennials, take the ability to bring their dog to work into consideration when deciding whether or not to accept a position. Studies have shown that people are more focused and more engaged with their coworkers and even show a greater willingness to work longer hours. Dog-friendly offices also help relieve stress and team members feel more at home and relaxed.
Workplaces that allow dogs also tend to see higher levels of employee satisfaction and employees maintain higher morale when dogs are in the office. Happy employees are more likely to encourage a positive atmosphere of teamwork and open communication and people simply enjoy going to work more at dog-friendly offices. Their happiness extends into other areas of their work life and improves productivity.
Additionally, the research shows that employees of dog-friendly businesses tend to work longer hours and have fewer absences. If employees have their dogs with them at work, they don’t have to worry about leaving as soon as the clock strikes five to feed them or get home to take them for a walk. It also saves them from having to spend money on doggy daycare and dog walking services.
Not only that, but real-life experience has proven that customers who interact with an employee’s pet have positive feedback about the whole company and its service. Having pets at the office makes your company look more approachable to potential customers and future employees. I mean, who wouldn’t like to work in a place where a dog is treated like a part of the team?
Right now employees everywhere are weighing their options and over 40% of the workforce is considering leaving their jobs this year. You need to do everything you can to make your workplace and office as attractive as possible and this includes have a dog-friendly office policy and opening things up to all your team’s four-legged friends.
Meet some of our furry friends at our downtown Chicago office.
