Design for the Changing Workplace

by the WBDG Productive Committee

Last updated: 01-28-2010

Overview

In this electronic/information age, work teams form and reform to meet organizational needs, technological innovations, and changing business relationships. Buildings and interior spaces need to be flexible to anticipate and support this changing nature of work. Within the past few years, designers have sought to create a new generation of "flexible" buildings and workplace environments within buildings that have infrastructures and structures that fully support change while sustaining new technologies, and multi-capable individuals and teams.

The changing nature of work means greater mobility for workers, a multiplicity of workspaces within and external to buildings, greater use of geographically dispersed groups, increased dependence on social networks—and greater pressure to provide for all of these needs and behaviors in a leaner and more agile way. Workplaces have responded with many new options, including more teaming and informal interaction spaces, more supports for virtual individual and group work, more attention to integrating learning into everyday work experience, greater flexibility in work locations, and more focus on fitting the workplace to the work rather than vice versa. Many workplaces are also incorporating spaces that encourage relaxed engagement with colleagues to reduce stress and promote a sense of community.

Recommendations

Design for Flexibility

• Provide flexibility for delivering power, voice, and data.
• Provide distributed, vertical cores, satellite closets, and generous horizontal plenum spaces with relocatable, user-based services to ensure technical, spatial, and environmental quality in the rapidly changing electronic office. See also WBDG Productive—Integrate Technological Tools.
• Provide systems that are controllable and adjustable by the users without burdensome reliance on outside contractors.
• Incorporate sustainable design principles, which can help achieve flexible spaces.

Support Mobility

• Consider wireless technology and mobile phones to enable workers to move effortlessly among spaces as their needs change.
• Provide a multiplicity of spaces for individual and group work.
• Provide connections to internal networks and to the Internet throughout the workplace. See also WBDG Productive—Integrate Technological Tools.

Enable Informal Social Interaction

• Provide multiple places to meet and greet.
• Consider providing informal workspaces in cafeterias.
• When designing cafes and coffee nooks, locate them centrally along well traveled pathways to encourage use and interaction.
• Design the circulation system with informal communication opportunities in mind.

Design for a Variety of Meeting Sizes and Types

• Provide enclosed rooms to support groups of different sizes.
• If open informal spaces are used, make sure that they are separated from individual quiet spaces.
• Consider sharing meeting spaces among private offices.
• Provide visual display technologies and writing surfaces for group work.
• Consider the use of dedicated project rooms for some types of group work.

Support Individual Concentration

• If open spaces such as pods or bull pens are used, provide attractive acoustically sound rooms for individual concentration as needed.
• Locate concentration booths close to work spaces.
• Zone space for range of quiet and interactive needs.

Support Stress Reduction and Relaxation

• Consider spaces for relaxation and playfulness.

Emerging Issues

Increasingly, compatible and packaged building components are available on the U.S. market that meet these goals. Several vendors market systems comprising raised floors, plug and play wire management components, and demountable wall systems as a single package.

Open controls protocols such as LonTalk and BACNet, which allow communication between different types of building systems (HVAC, lighting, security, fire alarm, and power), are being adapted to an increasing number of products. This will enable a wider range of cost-effective possibilities for user control over a common network.

Relevant Codes and Standards

• ANSI/TIA/EIA-569 Commercial Building Standard for Telecommunications Pathways and Spaces
• ASTM E 1334 Practice for Rating the Serviceability of a Building or Building-Related Facility
• ASTM E 1663 Classification for Serviceability of an Office Building for Typical Office Information Technology
• ASTM E 1679 Practice for Setting the Requirements for the Serviceability of a Building or Building-Related Facility
• ASTM E 1692 Classification for Serviceability of an Office Facility for Change and Churn by Occupants
• Department of Defense:
• DG 1110-3-122 Design for Interiors, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• MIL-HDBK 1190 Facility Planning and Design Guide
• TM 5-805-13/AFM 88-4, Chapter 9 Raised Floor Systems
• U.S. General Services Administration:
• GSA Facilities Standards for the Public Buildings Service, P-100

Major Resources

WBDG

Building / Space Types

Applicable to all building types and space types, especially those regularly occupied or visited.

Project Management

Building Commissioning

Tools

Building Life-Cycle Cost (BLCC), LEED® Version 2.1 Credit / WBDG Resource Page Matrix, LEED®-DoD Antiterrorism Standards Tool

Organizations

• Telecommunications Industry Association—The leading U.S. nonprofit trade association serving the communications and information technology industry

Publications

• Green Federal Facilities: An Energy, Environmental, and Economic Resource Guide for Federal Facility Managers
• High Performance Commercial Buildings—A Technology Roadmap (PDF 581 KB) by U.S. Department of Energy. 1999.
• The Integrated Workplace: A Comprehensive Approach to Developing Workplace by Office of Real Property in the Office of Governmentwide Policy of the U.S. General Services Administration, May 1999.
• Sustainable Building Technical Manual, DOE
• USAF Environmentally Responsible Facilities Guide