Fran Ferrone and Priyanka Agrawala of Mancini•Duffy’s Center for Workplace Innovation to Present at NeoCon East Expo and Conference

What: Fran Ferrone and Priyanka Agrawala will be presenters at the upcoming NeoCon East exposition and conference in Baltimore, Md. As part of the session, “Don’t Waste a Good Crisis; Hurricane Sandy as a Catalyst for Change,” Ferrone and Agrawala will cite examples of how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation, companies were forced to work in ways foreign to their corporate cultures, and offer  insight into how clients can build a more flexible workplace. Additionally, Mancini•Duffy’s Center for Workplace Innovation will explore how design professionals can incorporate new roles, methods and disciplines into their practices that will help clients make better decisions to future proof their work environments.

When/Where: Baltimore Convention Center, One West Pratt Street, Baltimore, Md., on Wednesday, October 29 from 9:30-10:30 AM. For more information about the conference or to register, visit: https://reg.neocon.com/neoeast/.   

Who: Fran Ferrone is a senior associate and the director of the Center for Workplace Innovation at Mancini•Duffy in New York City, where she helps the firm’s clients prepare for, communicate and manage change by aligning design solutions with business drivers. She has more than 25 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies in the U.S and abroad, developing meaningful performance metrics and building high-performance workplace management teams.

Priyanka Agrawala, PMP, LEED AP, is an associate and strategist at Mancini•Duffy’s Center for Workplace Innovation. Her background in facilities planning and architecture affords her a unique understanding of organizational culture, the workplace, and how they impact each other. Her combination of micro-planning, detailed modeling and data computation allows clients the invaluable opportunity to “test drive” scenarios in advance of committing to a final decision.

Why: NeoCon East is the East Coast’s premier design expo and conference for commercial interiors.  For two days, the biggest names in the industry come together to learn and educate about the latest innovations, make lasting connections, and discover new materials and products. 

Fran Ferrone

Priyanka Agrawala

Mancini•Duffy Survey Shows Most Worker Productivity at Start and End of Day Points to Changes in Office Space Design, Policy and Protocols

Findings Also Indicate That Workday Preferences and Needs Differ Between Generations

Mancini•Duffy, a leading architectural and interiors firm, has released preliminary findings from The Coordinate, its survey on workplace trends. The survey indicates that working hours peak during the beginning and end of the day, where employees are not only more productive, but also give their employers a bonus by extending the workday during commuting time.  

Additional findings point to patterns in work days as well as work hours.  According to Mancini•Duffy’s Director of Workplace Innovation, Fran Ferrone, “Mondays are for planning, Fridays are for cleanup, and most meetings occur mid-week. We see this as not only impacting decisions about space, but about policy and perks; potentially, in a big way.”

 

The differences between ways in which generations see the workday are even sharper:

• Younger generations make exercise a priority throughout the workday.
• Older generations place importance on face time (vs. FaceTime) more than their younger counterparts.
• Gen X and Y value their downtime – reflecting the trend toward project-based (vs. fulltime) work.

These findings are from the first in a series of surveys being conducted by Mancini•Duffy this year to test the hypothesis of “the dissolution of the traditional workweek.” Complete results (and their implications) will be published in early 2015. To participate in the Coordinate survey, visit: http://www.cvent.com/d/d4q2kp. Contact CWI@manciniduffy.com for additional information or questions about The Coordinate.

Health and Wellness are Key Features in Office Design

Mancini Duffy's Center for Workplace Innovation contributes to NeoCon2014 Trends to Watch.  Click here to access the press release.

Revisiting Collaborative Spaces: Stay Engaged, Stay Awake!

Being a new mom, I recently found myself talking with a group of friends about lack of sleep. From there the conversation quickly turned to how to get the best sleep, and then to the best places to sleep. Some of the more interesting crowd favorites included:  the library, the theatre, on the train, or at church/temple/place of worship…  But the one that caught my attention the most was: in the office, during meetings!  It was also concluded by common consensus that such sleep-worthy meetings were always the ones that involve a large group (10+ people) and that last a long time – factors that generally mean that only some of the people present get to contribute.  As for the others?  They simply get some shut-eye.

Now, being a workplace consultant constantly finding ways to make the places where we do our work more productive – especially collaborative spaces, which are seen as the most important part of a physical office space – I was forced to ponder this phenomenon.

Even though we might be seeing an increasing need for small, informal, and dynamic collaborative spaces, the need remains for presentation rooms and enclosed meeting rooms able to host larger groups. Apart from the fact that meetings of such size and nature should be carefully planned by the facilitator to maximize engagement, how can we, as designers, lend a hand? There’s a lot of research, buzz, and momentum behind the design of incidental, informal collaborative spaces, but it seems that the spaces for planned collaboration/meeting aren’t given as much attention.

Maybe we should approach the design and utilization of meeting spaces differently.  Instead of a meeting space being designed based only on the capacity it can seat – which is the usual practice – what if it’s based on the type of collaboration and nature of the meeting? That is, what if spaces were designed with a specific function in mind?  For example, a presentation room would have shorter sight-lines to the presenter, while an interactive brainstorming room might have reconfigurable furniture, and multi-directional screens and whiteboards. And then a room could be chosen by users not by its description (“12-person,” etc.), but whether it’s a presentation room, a brainstorming room, a work session room, a review room, etc.

Of course, this would mean that the conferencing needs of the user group would have to be profiled in as much detail as possible at the onset of a project in order to successfully provide the right mix of such specifically designed collaborative spaces. Also, since these meeting spaces would most likely be shared by various groups rather than be “dedicated,” their location would have to be carefully planned in relation to the floor plate and main circulation paths – they would have to be easily accessible and able to work with changing business requirements and team sizes. And maybe we could also take a few cues from biophilic design principles in order to make the collaborative spaces more productive.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this topic, and I’m certainly open to more discussion. Feel free to respond to this or email me separately. In the meantime, here’s to a good night’s sleep.

“Work Reworked”

Women typing social security cards, circa 1937. Not exactly the way we work now – thank goodness. Photo from the blog Old Picture of the Day.

Have a look at the article “Work Reworked” by Kriston Capps in the current issue of Architect for insights from Mancini•Duffy’s Center for Workplace Innovation, including the curious findings that “most office space is unoccupied 40 to 70 percent of the time.” Quoted in the article are design principal Alan Dandron, IIDA, LEED AP; T. Lee Trimble, AIA, our KPMG point person; and tireless strategic planner Priyanka Agrawala, FMP, LEED AP, who wrote her graduate thesis “Alternative Workplace Strategies” while getting her Master of Science in Facilities Management at Pratt in 2007.

The New Space Metric: “Space Utilization”

Image courtesy of kevinzhengli.

The current economic turmoil has forced organizations to re-evaluate their second most significant operating expense: their real-estate footprint. In an effort to build leaner and more agile portfolios that respond quickly and efficiently to unpredictable changes, more and more organizations are adopting or exploring strategies like consolidation, densification, and flexible/alternative ways of working. The parameters for workplace efficiency and capacity, therefore, have changed. No longer is the critical space metric the number of square feet or square feet per person, it is now space utilization or occupancy rate.

Space utilization or occupancy rate is defined as the percent of time space is occupied. The effort now is not to minimize space per person, but to achieve 100% space utilization. In view of the new workplace strategies being adopted, measuring space utilization is not only considered imperative to building a business case for implementing these strategies, but also seen as an important tool to assess and allocate space where and how it is needed. There is also a need to not view this as a one-time study, but as an ongoing effort to track real-time data in order to re-balance space across teams and functions, since business needs and processes are now more volatile than ever.

There is a huge gap between perceived space utilization and actual utilization. In a webinar entitled “Getting Strategic about Space Management” presented on July 15th by Phil Wee, Manager, Occupancy Planning, and Curtis Knapp, Global Director of Occupancy Planning for Jones Lang LaSalle, it was stated that JLL identifies an average of 26% more vacancy than initially reported by their clients. Per Maureen Moody in her article “Mastering All You Survey” in the June 2010 issue of FM World, Cerys Jones, Director at Cochrane McGregor, a UK-based workplace consulting firm, and Bernard Crouch of Gunnersbury-Consult report that the perception of space utilization might be 60%, but surveys could show as little as 28%. This translates into a large potential for gaining efficiencies.

A number of data collection technologies are out there in the market today and, depending upon the level and type of detail of the information required, the right technology can be easily selected. The technologies can be broadly categorized into four types, in order of the detailed information provided: video-based, sensor-based, observation surveys, and in-place reservation/checking-in systems.

All technologies come with built-in reporting, which might reveal statistics on occupancy by rooms, departments, floors, traffic in specific areas or between certain groups/teams, maximum usage showing patterns, and actual usage vs. reservations. Video-based and sensor-based technologies are able to record intensive data over a larger period of time and are very accurate, but might have a “big brother” feel to them, as well as being expensive solutions. Human observation methodology is still the most popular, since it is the easiest and cheapest, but organizations are increasingly choosing to use more sophisticated technology to get exhaustive data.

Irrespective of the technology selected, organizations are realizing that tracking space utilization gives the real picture of how space is being used, which in turn helps inform better workplace decisions and can also result in huge cost savings.