Millions of people’s daily lives are directly affected by where-the places-they work each day. Organizations of every size and description spend significant time, money, and energy to create workplaces that will help attract and retain top notch staff, enable them to work creatively and productively, and to do so in an efficient and economically viable way. In planning, designing, and managing their facilities organizations cannot afford to guess about the best ways to plan a campus, to layout offices and workstations, to support teamwork and collaboration, to manage uncertainty, or to find the right mix of individual and common space.
The IWSP was founded on its belief in the value of evidence-based design (EBD): Using research to systematically test working assumptions about the costs and benefits of different workplace strategies. As part of its ecological systems approach, a distinctive characteristic of the IWSP research is that it examines how the nature of workplace settings, information technology, organizational culture and practices, and work processes interact to create high-performing workplaces. Both the nature of the processes used to implement innovative new workplace strategies, as well as a range of organizational outcomes, from cost and space utilization to employee performance and satisfaction, are typically measured in IWSP studies.