Search results

The purpose of this study is to understand how unassigned workspaces translate into an effective workplace. This is achieved by examining employees and their understanding of how unassigned workspaces impact their engagement, satisfaction and desire to stay with their workplace.

Two workplaces designed on the strategy of 100% unassigned workspaces are analyzed as case studies to understand this phenomenon. Mixed methodology, primarily qualitative method with a survey nested within is used for this study. Grounded theory, one of the strategies of qualitative research methodology is applied as a method for analyzing the data. The study is aimed to reveal the participants' perspectives and interpretations of their actions and physical environment on effectiveness in relation to the unassigned work environment.

The information afforded the development of an overarching theoretical scheme for integrating spatial categories and describing the employees' experiences of their work environment from the various perspectives. The research reveals that unassigned and flexible spatial attributes contribute positively to employee satisfaction, engagement and retention. However, some of the goals surrounding the culture of trust and autonomy such as privacy, personalization and lack of control are compromised in these environments.

The insights obtained from this study will provide designers, architects, facility planners and managers a new design tool to aid in making the unassigned workspaces model more effective.

This study bridges the gap while documenting how unassigned workspaces translate into an effective workplace for the employees to be productive, engaged and satisfied.

The world of business is changing as never before. Faced with unrelenting pressures to achieve and maintain a competitive position, businesses are developing new work processes and channels to market, which render obsolete previously accepted practices for the deployment of workspace. Consequently, managers of workspace have to make a paradigm shift from their traditional transactional and reactive focus to one which is strategic and proactive. At its heart is an accommodation planning process that links effectively the strategic and tactical components, and in so doing ensures the close alignment of provision to the ongoing needs of business through time. Additionally, the performance of the work environment is subjected to rigorous evaluation, where the principal assessment criterion is the extent to which the work environment not only supports, but adds value to, business processes through enabling people to work anytime, any place and anywhere.

The purpose of this paper is to explore shared workspace and professional learning community (PLC) interactions in schools. The collaborative culture and PLCs were parts of the school culture. The collaborative culture of each school was designed to ensure teachers share intellectual and physical contributions in learning to investigate the impact of teaching and learning on students. The workspace overlap for teachers was part of the culture of each school and a function of the PLC interactions. PLCs provided opportunities for collaboration and therefore opportunities to share intellectual and physical workspace.

A grounded theory research approach was taken to this investigation, primarily because of the common experiences of educators in schools (Creswell, 2013). Collaborative process between educators in schools was qualitatively investigated as a function of PLC interactions. In all, three communities, five schools, and 70 educators were purposefully selected to participate. Data were collected, including semi-structured interviews, observations, artifacts, and researcher field notes.

The workspace interactions include shared leadership, decision making, teaching and learning practice, and accountability measures. Attributes and characteristics of effective collaboration and PLCs greatly affect the outcomes of PLCs. An emergent framework is provided that includes attributes of effective collaboration and the characteristics of effective PLCs that merge into intellectual and physical shared workspace.

This paper focuses on the connections between PLCs, school culture, and professional educator collaboration. This paper proposes to provide a unique model called the shared workspace. The model combines the intellectual and physical aspects of group members to ensure the effectiveness of collaborative systems that promote quality practice in schools through functional PLCs as part of a positive school culture. This paper further offers extensions to the shared leadership concept (Carpenter, 2015) in how schools, administrators, and teachers should work together, thus more collaboratively through a continuous improvement process of the school as a workplace and a learning organization.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive framework that covers the major dimensions of performance-oriented office environments including involved actors and performance parameters on the one hand, and the processes and success factors of implementation and change management of such workspace projects on the other hand, with their interaction to be considered as well. This framework can serve as a first guideline and rough “checklist” to support such projects, both in research and practice.

The framework was developed and refined by combining international literature analyses, industry experience from the authors and application of first conceptual ideas to a pilot project. The methodology of the whole endeavor, not only this paper, is a grounded theory approach, acknowledging the intermediate state of prior theory regarding workspace change projects. The framework will thus be further developed with additional case-based empirics in the future.

The framework addresses the design parameters (the content) of (re)developing performance-oriented office environments as well as the management (the processes) of this (re)development including its implementation. Due to the considerable number of dimensions and factors relevant for workspace projects in addition to their interaction and dependency as well as the individuality of situation and stakeholders, the probability of workspace project failure is high. Knowing the parameters of workspace change project success and measures to be tracked and checked during the design and implementation processes of such projects is therefore imperative. Suggestions for operationalizing the relevant factors are made. Equally important is to understand and address individual emotions and concerns of those being involved in or affected by the change situation, and to inform and include them adequately. The comprehensive framework provides a respective first overview.

The framework is conceptual, based on many sources. Yet, the exhaustive inclusion of all research on the many relevant factors is neither feasible nor intended. The paper rather tries to be comprehensive on the dimensions to be considered and to only exemplarily concretize how to handle this complexity in a manageable and practical way. Future research needs to test and adapt the proposed framework, to detail key performance indicators (KPIs), indicators and processes suggested, and to develop an according planning and controlling system.

The paper pictures key aspects for the effective design and change management of holistic workspace projects. KPIs as well as leading indicators are introduced that can be used to measure the various dimensions in an ongoing process throughout all phases of the project, enabling the organization to anticipate or at least rapidly react to problems arising. Accordingly, success factors for managing workspace change are collected and structured along the workspace dimensions including actors and performance.

The originality of this study lies in the approach to comprehensively integrating design and change management parameters of workspace projects, the explicit performance orientation and the inclusion of the multitude of actors (i.e. users, facilities management, Human Resources, ICT). Instead of the design and its implementation only being supported by change management, the organizational environment and its needs – like way of working, organization models, performance priorities and change capabilities – are driving the design, which constitutes a new approach in the design activity.

The purpose of this paper is to explore educator collaborative inquiry in the shared workspace in professional learning communities (PLCs). Specifically, this investigation was part of an ongoing investigation of well-established PLC collaborative interactions and self-directed learning of educators as part of the shared workspace as a component of school improvement.

A qualitative design was used for this investigation. Participants were purposefully selected to provide qualitative data on existent, well-established PLCs and their practice as educators in the shared workspace. Qualitative data were collected about participant perception. Data were collected from each participant by conducting semi-structured interviews, observations, and the collection of document and artifacts.

Findings from this ongoing investigation point to positive collaborative physical interactions and intellectual discourse that lead to educator learning through the collaborative inquiry process.

Theories on PLCs and educator job-embedded professional learning are unique in this paper. The concepts of PLCs and the collaborative inquiry process have been well developed but not in the context of the shared workspace. Recent literature on effective collaborative inquiry educators undergo in PLCs as a continuing professional development model provides a foundation for the work done in this ongoing case study. Sustained collaboration and continued professional development of teaching innovations as a product of the collaborative inquiry process in the shared workspace are underdeveloped as yet but further developed in this paper.

Office workspace is more than a place but one of the essential resources in business organizations. In recent years, research in office workspace management has become an increasingly important scholarly focus. However, there is a dearth of bibliometric studies to date on the subject. This study aims to explore a scientometric analysis of office workspace field.

The title/abstract/keyword search method was used to extract related papers from 1990 to 2018. A total of 1,670 papers published in Scopus were obtained and subjected to scientometric data analysis techniques via CiteSpace software.

The results revealed the active research institutions and countries, influential authors, important journals, representative references and research hotspots in this field.

While this study focused on office workspace management, the findings hold useful implications for the built environment in general and facility management in particular, being a sector that encompasses multiple disciplines involving building, office assets, people, processes and technology, which enable effective functioning of the built facilities.

This is probably the most comprehensive scientometric analysis of the office workspace field ever conducted. This study adds to the so far limited knowledge in the field and provides insights for future research.

Many corporates in India are constantly adapting real estate benchmarks to reduce the workspace maintenance cost. However, anecdotally benchmarking the experience of clients while designing the workspace maintenance policies is not adequately taken into consideration in India. The focus of this study is on benchmarking workspace usage based on client usability.

The research is descriptive in nature. A structured questionnaire was sent to Information Technology (IT) companies in India to collect data through SurveyMonkey. Stratified sampling was used to collect a sample of 697 respondents which was also verified using G* software. The data collected was analysed using descriptive statistics and partial least square–structured equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to investigate the mediating effect of benchmarking the workspace usage on portfolio optimization and client satisfaction.

The structural model results obtained through the bootstrapping technique show that benchmarking workspace usage for real estate management positively impacts client satisfaction in the Indian IT workspace. The findings of this study support the full mediation effect (97%) and indicate that benchmarking practices are necessary for developing strategies for optimal portfolio asset utilization and are essential to survive in the current competitive business environment.

The findings of this study were influenced by the feedback from the top 100 IT clients in India. The research findings vary according to the cost-benefit analysis of adopting benchmarking measures in small and medium-sized IT companies which still benchmark the workspace usage based on cost-saving measures. Also, very sparse research has been conducted in the workspace management domain of IT firms, so the results of this study can further be used as a reference to explore this area.

The study provides useful insights into how benchmarking in the workspace management domain of the CRE industry can be applied to address portfolio-related challenges, divergent client needs and improve workspace usability following energy-efficient policies. Practitioners can use this study as a guide to develop more effective workspace management policies.

This study may guide other firms to benchmark their current workspace usage and evaluate the impact of their workspace management policies based on the theoretical framework of value-added balanced benchmarking criteria.

This research adds value to the limited literature available on the impact of technology-enabled portfolio optimization techniques through benchmarking which can reduce workspace usage and enhance the usability of the workspace.

The purpose of this study is to describe the success story of a software company, Adobe, in redesigning the workplace environment from cubicles to a connected collaborative workplace, which helped the organization optimize workplace usage. The goals were to design an innovative work environment to optimize the usage of the office portfolio, improve workplace service quality and infrastructure facilities of the portfolio, increase employee productivity, reduce technology costs, engage employees in a better way to enhance employee satisfaction, align workplace design with the brand, mobilize technology and enable a globalized workforce to facilitate higher productivity.

An exploratory research design method was adopted using the purposive sampling technique to collect data through semi-structured interviews with a team of nine property professionals from the operations team responsible for workspace redesign at Adobe in India.

The main observations of the corporate real estate (CRE) manager were on what value parameters drive workplace redesign and how different software companies were creating strategies to manage workplace design or redesign change for optimal use of the organization portfolio. To discuss the CRE strategies of global software leaders, IBM and SAP were pointed out in this case.

The number of interviews were limited. The related parameters for workplace transformation are not necessarily complete. However, the parameters are regarded to include the most important aspects of workplace redesign.

This study provides useful insights into how benchmarking in the workplace transformation function of the CRE industry can be applied to address portfolio-related challenges, divergent employee needs and improve workspace usability following energy-efficient policies. Practitioners can use this study as a guide to develop more effective workspace designs.

This study may guide other firms on successful workspace design initiatives that may overcome many obstacles in the workplace transformation process to have their intended impact on workplace efficiency and employee satisfaction. The case can be used as an inspiration for developing specific user-focused innovative workspace design in practice.

Adopting the theoretical background of the person–environment fit theory, this study adds to the understanding of the operational model of a digitally connected workspace designed as per real estate needs and strategies to manage the CRE portfolio of the company.

Auditory and visual distractions originating in the workspace have been shown to negatively impact the performance of knowledge workers on complex tasks. The paper aims to theorize that an adaptable workspace (AW) can mitigate the negative impacts on performance.

A conceptual multi‐attribute utility model is presented to facilitate decision‐maker's choice between a static and an adaptable workspace. A mathematical model is presented to evaluate the net present value (NPV) of deploying AW in a knowledge organization. The significance of valuation model is an integration of costs of distractions into the NPV calculations. Negative impacts of distractions are modeled as performance costs. The model also captures the costs of deploying AW so that a comparative benefit of adopting AW over a static workspace is recognized.

The significant positive results for NPV justifies investments in AW over a standard open workspace with the exception for distraction‐free work environments. These calculations can be performed to compare a number of alternatives so that an informed decision is made for the type of a workspace to be designed.

Auditory and visual distractions originating from workspace surroundings are only part of the complete list of distractions in a workplace, but are considered for this model because these are cited as significant problems in knowledge organizations. The model variables are identified based on the existing literature; further development is proposed for future research.

Research to quantify the value of elimination of distractions can have practical and valuable applications for facility decision makers, architects, engineers, and knowledge organizations.

In the near future work will no longer be a place, but a range of activities that can be conducted virtually anywhere and at any time. This paper gives a comprehensive view of the critical management issues that need to be considered when providing a responsive and effective human support service to underpin a wide variety of transient work patterns, undertaken at different venues and at dispersed locations. In the future, facilities management may need to move nearer to the core of an organisation’s business in order to support the “free‐style” deployment of its human resources to working practices that are increasingly space and time flexible.