Much of the change is a result of the by the current recession, as The Wall Street Journal has reported. Corporate real estate managers are shrinking their firms' workstations and overall footprint in order to stay competitive and reduce overhead. But even more pertinent, says Andrew Laing, managing director of the workplace consultant DEGW, New York, is pure innovation in how office users get the job done. New terms such as activity-based work, along with co-working, mobile officing, and distributed workplace models, are being used to describe the brave new world of workplace.
“These are important trends that grew out of an urgent need to update our current conception of workplace—a change of mindset enabled by the latest mobile technologies,” says Laing, adding that sustainability, global reach, and worker diversity are also driving the change. “The whole idea of work and workplace is being transformed. Now developers and designers of office buildings face enormous challenges in what they should provide to organizations and end-users.”
Berenice Boucher, a director with DEGW (www.degw.com), points to the forecast Worldwide Mobile Worker Population, by Framingham, Mass.-based marketing and analysis firm IDC. (For IDC's definition of various types of mobile workers, see: http://www.workshifting.com/downloads/documents/IDC_MobileWorker_excerpt_0_0.pdf.) “According to the report, the worldwide number of mobile workers is projected to grow to 1 billion by year-end 2011, up from about 759 million in 2006,” says Boucher. The lion's share of those mobile workers will be in Asia; other salient facts include:
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The United States has the highest percentage of mobile workers—68% in 2006, a figure that is expected to reach 73% in 2011.
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Western Europe has the second-largest mobile workforce (47.8%).
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Japan's mobile workforce is increasing at the fastest rate (8.5% compound annual growth rate, 2006 to 2011), despite zero growth in workers.
For Building Teams, the challenge is to adapt office facilities to the new technologies and work styles as fast as possible. Adding pressure to this mandate are studies like the recently released U.S. Workplace Survey, conducted by Gensler, the largest U.S.-based architecture firm. Among its key conclusions: top-performing companies have significantly higher-performing work environments than average companies.
What this means, according to Gensler, is that workplaces must successfully support four main modes of working: focused work, collaboration, learning, and socialization. High-performance workplaces receive the best marks from employees on design elements such as layout, air quality, furniture comfort, storage, and privacy/access. When done right, the study concludes, employee ratings of the workplace features correlate directly with fundamental, bottom-line business measures of company performance and profitability. (For more on the study, see: http://www.gensler.com/uploads/documents/2008_Gensler_Workplace_Survey_US_09_30_2009.pdf.)