Commercial Development
 |
A virtual office design gave WTS management more visual details about their new digs than a blueprint could.
|
Workplace of Future is Linked to Strategic Plan
October 1, 2009
As reported in the pages of In Business magazine.
The changing nature of the professional office practically forces executives to analyze whether their current building corresponds to the way their company works today. Things are changing so quickly that managers may not even realize the cultural shifts occurring within their own walls, but with each succeeding graduating class, new and more technologically enabled hires are added to the workforce, and they have much different expectations for their work environment.
With more than one year to go on their leases, not to mention a slow economy, management might be more inclined to engage in facility planning for when times are flush, or they may be looking for low-cost ways to tinker with their space, but fewer of them view office design as a discretionary expense. That's especially true today, when organizations want to know down to penny what it's going to cost before they pull the trigger on a new office or renovation.
"I don't think anybody really considers it a luxury anymore," said Robin Stroebel, owner of InteriorLOGIC. "It's really a process to enhance the value of your office space — to visitors and staff — to maximize your investments. It's a core need."
Collaboration Proclamation
The trend toward fewer private offices has been underway for several years, but the recession has given companies a new reason to ponder the benefits of spaces designated for collaborative work. There are very few upsides to the staff restructuring we've seen in this recession, but unless organizations can sublease the resulting empty office space, they might as well look for opportunities to use that space for collaboration.
The business drivers could include a need to accommodate the innovative process or staff recruitment and retention, but the key to any office design is linking space needs with your company's strategic goals. These questions have to be answered before any strategy can be translated into physical space. "After awhile, organizations have to take stock," Stroebel said, "so it's important to re-evaluate what a company looks like."
One organization that has taken stock, and did not wait for an economic recovery to make a substantial space investment, is WTS Paradigm, a developer of window and door manufacturing and sales software. Nathan Herbst, president of WTS, values his new 11,100-square-foot office on Greenway Boulevard in Middleton. The space, which features collaborative work areas, was designed with the company's functional, cultural, and employee recruitment and retention considerations in mind.
"Our company is a software company, so almost every cost we have is related to the employees that work here," Herbst said, noting the company has more than 40 software developers. "What we want to do is always have a culture and have the staff from different teams be able to communicate with each other. We didn't have that in our old space."
The old 8,500-square-foot office was never designed from scratch for WTS, but according to Herbst was "kind of a mishmash of offices strung together for us as we kept growing." The new office has a common area with a circular lobby, cafeteria, conference rooms — all of which double as collaborative work spaces and as the sites of staff events. WTS has a lot of younger staff members, so amenities like high-definition TVs (to share more business data with employees, including software quality metrics), and Xboxes (for after hours bonding) have been added. The space was not only designed for the needs of software developers, but client groups as well because some customers bring 10 or 15 people on one trip.
"We just see that working for a number of different events," Herbst said. "It's also about day-to-day needs, kind of keeping everybody together. Also, when we bring customers in, it's about having a little area you can kind of cordon them off in, but they can find their own personal space as well."
On the surface, an office move in this economy might appear extravagant or risky, but WTS took advantage of reduced prices for building materials and office furniture, and the opportunity for favorable rent.
"We would like to act like we're not cheap," Herbst mused. "We completely did this due to the recession."
WTS also relied on technological advances. Almost every office design or construction firm has building information modeling software that gives commercial tenants a virtual, 3-D walk-through of their new office. BIM is considered a powerful tool for companies engaged in office design, especially since they may only build anew or remodel once or twice.
The systems allow prospective building owners to see how their office is being set up with work stations, furniture placement, and other details. "If you want 64 work stations, here's how it looks with 64 work stations," said Dennis Lynch, general manager-VP of southern operations for Miron Construction. "You can see how big the various elements are and what they look like in relationship to the glass and front door, and how it's all going to flow."
According to Herbst, BIM gave him a broader perspective that blueprints could not have provided. "You never really know, when you're looking at the plan view, the top-down view on blueprints, what it's going to feel like to be in there," he said. "Being able to get different perspectives — walking into the lobby and walking into the cafeteria — was really helpful."
In the Interim...
If you're holding off on substantial office design until the economy improves, there are plenty of low-cost ways to spruce up an office or improve energy savings, and they have taken on sustainable meaning. Say your rent is triple net, meaning a tenant pays their pro rata share of the building's operating expenses, including taxes, insurance, or utilities, there are changes that can, over time, save both tenant and landlord money. Since these are variable costs, your landlord might be willing to invest tenant allowance money.
Chris Hackner, business development manager of new construction for Focus on Energy, which provides financial incentives for investment in energy-saving changes, said the low-hanging (inexpensive) fruit to install includes:
- Overhead florescent lighting, which has a big impact on commercial businesses, can be upgraded with a simple fix. Just retrofitting from a T12 florescent light to a higher-performance T8 florescent light could save 40% to 60% on lighting costs. The eight in T8 signifies the diameter of the bulb, so a T8 is 8/8 or one inch in diameter, while a T12 is 12/8 in diameter.
They are all florescent bulbs, so they emit roughly the same amount of light, but the T8s require less wattage. "The high-performance T8s with electronic ballast is really what you want to go for, compared to what you might have in a 20-year-old lighting system, which might have T12s with magnetic ballasts," Hackner said.
- Occupancy controls also are a relatively affordable lighting upgrade. "If you've got a bunch of offices that people occupy only in the morning, or you're in there for 10 minutes in the morning and then you've got meetings all day long but you might leave your lights on all day, occupancy sensors have the ability to turn those off so that you're not burning electricity while you're not there," Hackner explained.
- Beam lighting can be applied in exterior offices that don't need the lights on because enough daylight is coming in. Sometimes tenants can control that with a combination of occupancy censors and daylighting censors. "If enough light is coming in, it turns the lights off, or steps them down if you have a dimable ballast," Hackner said. "If you have what's called step lighting, where you have three lamps in one fixture, it might turn off one or two of the lamps." Energy savings from occupancy controls and beam lighting are hard to quantify, but it comes down to how much the controls are used.
Hackner isn't the only system control advocate. Lynch (Miron Construction) said the use of motion detectors to monitor lighting in every room, not just conference rooms, now is a prerequisite for most of Miron Construction's largest jobs. "If I was staying in an office, I would look at doing that," he said. "The payback is pretty long, but from a use standpoint, it's really a good way to monitor your lighting."
- LED (Light Emitting Diodes) lighting is more energy efficient — more watts per electrical input — but not cost effective for general lighting. It is, however, more cost effective for "task lighting" in individual workspaces.
- Computer management software shuts off computers at night — particularly valuable for large companies with thousands of computers — and also "phantom loads" caused by mobile phone or laptop chargers.
Basically, anything that you can do automatically is considered an energy-saver, Hackner said, and the weak economy is helping to spread public awareness of such automatic controls.
"With everyone's bottom line being more important to them than ever because of the economy, we see people looking at energy use as a pretty important part of their equation," Hackner said. "With this down economy, we're finding ourselves very busy because people are looking to us for help."
Also for a brighter office, low-VOC paints not only cause less toxic odor, they are less disruptive. "We use a lot of that when we do renovations of existing space," Stroebel said. "People are using half the space while the other half is renovated."
Stroebel also is a fan of carpet tiles, which are comparable in cost ($28 to $32 per yard) to rolled carpeting, does not require the smelly glue that rolled carpeting does, and individual squares can be replaced when stained or worn. There is little debate about low-VOC paints, but not everyone one is a fan of carpet tiles, including Lynch. He said companies actually pay a premium because it's labor intensive to cut the carpet into squares. In addition, spot replacing with new tiles never looks good when the rest of the carpet is dirty or worn, and its best applications is limited to certain high-traffic areas.
To hold onto tenants, landlords are more willing to consider such investments, and some tenants aren't waiting. Stroebel recommends planning for new or renovated space 18 months to two years before a lease expires.
"The overriding factor here is that businesses have been making low-cost changes for over a year," she said.
Sign up for the free IB Update — your weekly resource for local business news, analysis, voices and the names you need to know. Click here.
|
ADVERTISEMENT  ADVERTISEMENT  |
Sign up for the
