The quintessential office cannot be created without simultaneously designing physical, technical, social, and organizational systems that are in harmony.

Since 1989, IWSP has explored innovative approaches to planning, designing, and managing the workplace under the banner: Workscape 21: The Ecology of New Ways of Working. Pushing beyond the boundaries of the original work on non-territorial offices, theWorkscape 21 program explored satellite offices and telework centers, home-based telework, collaborative team environments, and airline clubs.

Overview

One of the most critical decisions large organizations face is whether, how, which and to what extent to collocate organizational units as the organization grows and evolves over time. All things being equal, most companies prefer having the whole company "under one roof." But things are not equal. There are cost, security, attraction and retention, business continuity, branding, market location, technology and other issues that need to be considered. When they are, the value of a campus, or collocation, may become less obvious, though perhaps for some firms no less compelling. Using the organizational ecology framework, the IWSP's current research examines the value of collocating business units, whether in a single high-rise tower, a multi-building urban "campus", or a suburban campus.

Organizations face unprecedented pressures to respond quickly to unpredictable and rapid changes in virtually every aspect of their business: the economy, marketplace, technology and labor. Agility has become more a matter of survival than choice. At the same time, global competition has turbocharged both the pace of change and the need to contain costs. And as if matters were not complicated enough, labor demographics have generated a conflicting set of employee expectations about the nature of work that organizations must consider as they shape their firms to meet this often bewildering onslaught of external and internal demands.

Workplace Strategies for the New Economy

The Web and E-Commerce

A new challenge has surfaced. Large organizations today are struggling to better understand how to exploit the Internet and e-commerce. Reluctant at first to consider the Internet a real threat or opportunity, few organizations today have a strategic plan without the Internet as a central component. Much of the public focus is on how to transact business, how to sell and market products and services on the Web; and on stock option-based incentive systems that have created an army of under-thirty millionaires. Virtually no attempt has been made to understand the nature of the workplace attitudes and strategies that aggressive, young, Web-centric companies employ as they seek to attract and retain the best and brightest talent; and then to create the working conditions that enable them to use their potential to its fullest extent.

While most attention has been on smaller and newer Internet companies, in fact large, established companies are energetically searching for ways to incorporate the Internet into their way of working, whether by acquiring, merging, or spinning off Internet companies; or by trying to bring the mindset and energy of Internet companies into the mainstream corporate culture. In either case, large companies need to understand the New Economy and what it means throughout the business enterprise, including its workplace strategies.

Managing Uncertainty

Three fundamental corporate realities have emerged from our workplace research centered around new ways of working:

• individuals work in multiple settings within the office building;
• they regularly communicate and collaborate with others located on different floors and buildings and at sites that may be a few miles or a continent away;
• precisely where and when an organization will need space or an individual will need or want to work is difficult to predict.

One significant outcome of such work patterns is that managing uncertainty has become a major business challenge. That challenge has been further intensified by virtue of the increasing use of mergers and acquisitions to quickly acquire new expertise and knowledge, use of technology, and market presence. Making long-term workplace decisions, about whether to renovate or build or acquire space, for instance, are made increasingly difficult by the uncertainty of whether such facilities will be needed at all, and in what location and for what purpose, even 3-5 years forward.

• A large multinational bank is opening up new markets and creating a visible presence in cities around the country and world. It wants to do this immediately, but it cannot predict with much confidence whether the initial locations selected will be the right ones, or whether and/or how fast these may need to be grown over the next three years.
• A retail conglomerate with several companies in its overall corporate portfolio spins off one division whose headquarters were part of a large central campus. It has no immediate need for the space this company occupied.
• New executive leadership decides that corporate service functions should be located closer to those divisions they serve nationally and globally. They want to downsize the HQ complex and explore the financial and organizational benefits of a more distributed approach to managing their business.
• Two companies merge and in doing so determine that a one hundred and fifty thousand square foot facility in a Midwest city is no longer needed. However, additional office space is needed immediately about 200 miles away.

The IWSP works to better understand how a combination of conventional and unconventional workplace approaches (e.g., engineered modular and tensile buildings, leasing fully-serviced space or excess space from competitors, creating centralized overflow space, long-term usage policies) can help organizations better manage uncertainty.

Many companies are choosing to move to a new way of working which may encompass a new workplace design need asssistance in managing workplace change.

Despite research on change management dating back a half century, businesses are still trying to figure out how to help people adjust to change. Most research has focused mostly on kinds of organizational change from compensation plans and organizational structure to new leadership styles and the transforming role of information technology. What's missing is virtually any consideration of how changes in the workplace, the physical settings in which work is carried out, influence employees' commitment to the new ways of working they imply.

Create a new workplace, and both understanding the underlying process implications and developing and practicing the skills necessary to perform effectively become significant challenges.

The purpose of this research was to study a selection of workplace change management processes used in organizations around the world, to learn how workplace changes are implemented, the cost of these efforts, and which aspects of the process most influence employee adjustment.

Integrated Workplace Strategies

Many organizations make initial forays into alternative officing by focusing on one type of unconventional workplace approach. The choice may be home-based telecommuting, some form of hoteling or non-territorial officing, a specially-designed team environment, telework centers, or another alternative. In fact, few people work in a single location. An Integrated Workplace Strategy (IWS) conceives the workplace to be a system of loosely-coupled work settings. The diverse settings are linked by the physical movement of employees and the electronic movement of information. The IWS concept views the workplace system as dependent on and shaped by information technology, management practices and organizational culture, work processes, and workforce demographics. The IWSP research program has examined:

• the range of work settings which comprise effective workplace systems;
• the ways employees use the different settings available to them;
• when and where employees choose to work, given the opportunity to choose;
• employee responses to Integrated Workplace Strategies;
• the roles technology, organizational culture, and Change Management play in creating high performance workplace systems.

Hoteling & Non-Territorial Offices

"Hoteling" is a form of alternative officing in which employees who work out of the office for significant periods of time can call ahead (just as they do in making hotel reservations) and reserve workspace. They select an office or workstation from a specially-designated block of workspaces when they come into the company's office facilities. The IWSP calls the more general form of unassigned officing "non-territorial offices." This alternative is characterized by mobile employees who come into a central office to use whatever designated workstations are available on a first come, first served basis. The IWSP research program has examined:

• the factors stimulating this kind of workplace strategy;
• critical success factors, including physical setting, information technology,
• management practices and culture, and work processes,
• a range of organizational consequences, including employee ratings of such workplace strategies in terms of work effectiveness and communication,
• the amount of space saved; and the associated cost savings.

Collaborative Team Environments

Many organizations-in industries as diverse as management consulting, advertising, insurance, and manufacturing-believe teamwork and cross-functional collaboration are critical to developing better products and services and getting them to market faster. Providing specially-designed buildings and team environments is one way in which organizations are trying to enhance communication and collaboration. The IWSP research program has examined:

• whether specially-designed team environments actually promote more effective teamwork and communication;
• how team environments influence how individuals interact within teams;
• how different teams and disciplines communicate and interact.

New Placemakers: Unconventional Workplace Providers

Many organizations are beginning to look to unconventional sources for the provision of workplaces. This figures as part of an effort to use all existing space more efficiently and effectively, and to treat space more as a commodity (buy and use it as needed, then discard it) than as a reflection of corporate identity (the so-called "edifice complex"). Diverse organizations are responding to this demand. New "placemakers" range from firms like Kinko's-which now provides not just copy services, but also videoconferencing facilities, meeting rooms, and drop-in workspaces-to hotels. Many hotels now contract guest rooms and meeting spaces to corporations for regular, but periodic use. The IWSP research program has examined: 

• the use of hotel suites as home offices by field sales staff on remote assignments; 
• the use of hotel lobbies as meeting rooms by employees working from telework centers; 
• the use by firms of space provided by alliance partners to house employees on a drop-in basis; 
• how employees respond to working in some of these unconventional work settings; 
• how these settings function as part of an Integrated Workplace Strategy.

Telework Centers-Satellite Offices

Telework centers, also known as satellite offices, offer an alternative to working in a central office facility or at home. They can be located in urban, surburban, or rural areas. They can serve a single corporate client or be multi-tenant facilities. Their distinguishing feature is that those using them live in the same area-or, in some cases, share the need for a drop-in work area while moving among work locations. Unlike a branch office, where those working together are organizationally part of a group, team, or department, individuals working in telework centers typically have minimal formal work relationships. The IWSP research program has examined:

• the design and location of telework centers/satellite offices;
• employees' and managers' responses to working in them;
• factors which have limited their success thus far; and
• the conditions under which they are likely to become an important component of an Integrated Workplace Strategy.

Home-Based Telecommuting

Working from home, often in the evening, has been an informal work practice for a very long time. The difference today is the growing interest of organizations in viewing and supporting the home as an alternative work setting during regular business hours, and for a range of types of work. Many initially considered working at home as largely a "woman's issue:" Home-based work makes it easier for women with young children to work flexibly. Working from home, however, has become a key component of many workplace strategies, extending to a much wider range of employees and affecting both genders. The IWSP research program has examined:

• whether factors such as gender, age, and family status influence employees' reactions to working from home;
• the nature of the physical and technological support provided by organizations to home workers;
• the pattern of use of the home work setting in relation to the use of other available settings;
• the impact of working from home on work-family relationships and issues.

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