No question about it -- 901 Cherry is a peach.

    Spurred by its growth and approaching capacity at its various leased buildings in the Bay area, Gap Inc. moved its headquarters in 1994 to San Bruno, California. The decision marked the company's first real estate project completed on Gap Inc.-owned property.

    Consider these design elements: Walking paths that wind through oak groves to invite outdoor conversations. A roof covered with native grasses and wildflowers that provides thermal and acoustic insulation, and increases energy savings year-round. Indoors, an entrance granting access to a lobby and commons area that includes a teleconference center, meeting rooms and a café. Downstairs, a full-service fitness center -- featuring an aerobics studio and lap pool -- that provides onsite amenities for the Gap Inc.'s 500 headquarter employees.

    Dilbert, are you listening? Individuals even receive clean air at their workspaces. Fresh air is drawn into the building, blown across the concrete decks and then fanned into the offices' interior breathing zones via adjustable grilles located on the floor. Like its clothing, Gap Inc.'s facility is simple, clean and comfortable.

    "The environment our employees work in is all part of what makes the Gap's formula creative and innovative," says Mickey Drexler, president and CEO of Gap Inc. "Frankly, it's what makes us feel good about our jobs every day."

    Likewise, for your employees, the office is like a second home. It's where they spend the majority of their days. Planning and designing high-performance workplaces are key elements in business planning. Driven by global competition, growth, technology, time and financial pressures, companies can no longer banish employees to their partitioned cubicles. If you make efficient use of your environmental space, HR can encourage your employees to be more creative, collaborative and productive.

    Indeed, such changes in the new millennium are for most organizations a matter of survival. They're increasingly hitting every area of today's corporations: human resources, information systems, marketing and sales -- and corporate real estate and facilities management.

    According to a survey last year by the American Society of Interior Designers, employees ranked the look and feel of their work spaces as their third most important consideration, after salary and benefits, in deciding whether to accept or decline a job.

    "People, knowledge and technology need to be integrated and supported by the physical environment to achieve success," says David P. Secan, workplace development consultant and principal of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania-based Secan Associates. "People represent a company's largest and most important asset. But corporate real estate and facilities represent the second."

    Therein lies the irony. In most situations, human resources professionals aren't more involved in facilities planning. The responsibility for such changes are usually handed over to the folks whose priorities, by necessity, are cost cutting and efficiency, says Dorothy Leonard, co-author of "When Sparks Fly." (See "Igniting Creativity" in the October 1999 issue of Workforce.) But anytime you design a work environment, planners need to bring in human resources professionals.

    HR best understands employees' behaviors, needs and functions. In the best of scenarios, human resources, information systems and real estate staff should come together as a team. By doing so, you're more likely to transform a traditional workspace design based on entitlement to one based on today's real-time, team work processes.

Nortel Networks creates its own city.
    Two years ago, Nortel Networks, a Canadian-based global telecommunications giant, moved its global headquarters to Brampton, a northern suburb approximately 15 miles outside of downtown Toronto. An older company, Nortel had evolved from manufacturing to a $15-billion-plus, high-tech, knowledge-based company. Before the move, its 3,000 headquarter employees were scattered between three different locations.

    "We weren't very productive," says Roy Dohner, a real estate prime at Nortel. "Our initial motivation for the move was to get people into one location so they'd run into each other." Serendipity often serves as a catalyst for great ideas.

    By reclaiming an old digital-switching factory, Nortel spent $50 million remaking it into a horizontal office building/cityscape complete with color-coded neighborhoods. Employees now look forward to meeting each other on the indoor streets.

    There were financial advantages, as well. A new building would have cost as much as $150 million. According to Dohner, instead of paying $75 per square foot for a high-rise office building, the company now owns its own facility that costs $10 per square foot to operate, including taxes and utilities.

    Described last year in U.S. News & World Report, Nortel is "the ultimate example of the urban metaphor that has become the trend du jour in workplace design." Since the company chose not the keep the building in the city, it put the city into the building.

    Like ancient Roman cities, Nortel Brampton Center has a recognizable plan. Its two main arteries -- Main Street and the Colonnade -- form the crux of the city grid. Intimate pathways provide access to the neighborhoods -- a euphemism for Nortel's departments.

    The city's shared amenities include seven indoor parks, a Zen garden, a full-service branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, fitness centers, basketball and volleyball courts, a physiotherapy area, a dry cleaning service, the Ooops Café and the Docklands -- the shipping and receiving area that features an imposing 20-foot tall graffiti mural created by 12 local street artists. It even has a "spirituality room" so employees of various religious beliefs can pray and meditate -- even wash their feet if they're Muslim.

    But we're not just talking about employee benefits here. We're talking about workplace design responding to business goals. To keep employees informed about their customers, for example, Nortel's shareholders' meetings can be viewed via television. Individuals at Brampton need only walk down the hall and watch the meeting with one's colleagues in the public TV areas.

    Moreover, executives such as Dohner don't occupy formal offices. He sits at a desk attached to his secretary's cubicle. If he has paperwork to do, he works at that given spot. If he has a meeting, he connects his laptop into a convenient docking station located somewhere in the facility. Otherwise, he may be working at home or out in the field. Space at Nortel isn't based on privilege, but function, he says.

Include HR on the design planning team.
    The innovative details at Nortel were realized with HR's input on the design planning team, according to Steve Parshall, who worked on the Nortel project and heads the workplace strategy division at the Houston office of architects Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum Inc. "Human resources executives and their personnel are absolutely critical to achieving a successful new workplace environment."

    At first, Nortel's employees were adamantly opposed to the Brampton move. Thus, Parshall hit upon the concept of recreating an ersatz downtown in the suburban facility. But it was human resources -- the first line of defense -- that received the brunt of the employees' negative feedback.

    Dohner says the HR director at the time sat down with him and the information systems department to create a whole communications program for the employee base. HR organized focus groups and made sure that real estate and IS reps attended the meetings. Each employee group also had representatives on the steering committee to give their input. Human resources also facilitated meetings with senior executives to discuss the ramifications of the redesign. "HR wanted to make sure they had buy-in from both parts of the organization," he says.

    "This change was difficult at first since many of us have had private offices for most of our careers," says Dale Pratt, director of corporate HR. "However, I can honestly say that I am experiencing more job satisfaction due to the closer and more productive relationships with fellow teammates." Nortel's internal customers, he adds, also see an increase in the speed and creativity of new solutions.

    HR also looked at its own departmental needs. Pratt says that human resources often needs to hold confidential meetings with clients, so a closed, private space is a requirement. However, such private space can be shared by a group of HR professionals because it isn't needed every minute of every day. "The space can double as a private meeting room or a conference room equipped with teleconferencing equipment."

    Clearly, people today will have greater choice of when and where they will work, says Parshall. They'll choose the workplace that best fits their work style. It may be at home, at a customer's location or in a traditional office building. "But the design of these traditional places will become more blurred."

    That's why real estate staff and architectural designers also need to partner with HR to understand telecommuting or home-based workers' imperatives and needs. For example, work-at-home practices often are limited by compensation and performance-review practices; amount of space assigned to people is tied to salary classifications; and locations of offices are tied to command and control hierarchies. HR can best speak to these issues and advise designers accordingly.

    "There are very deep workplace norms," says Parshall. "If we just change the workplace without changing the norms, human nature will not accept the change." That viewpoint applies not only to larger companies such as Gap Inc. and Nortel Networks, but smaller companies such as New York City-based Osho International and newer ventures such as San Francisco-based NextMonet.com.

Integrate aesthetics with your company's vision.
    Osho International is a relatively small and unique organization. It's a literary agency, internet design center and copyright administrative office that licenses rights to the works of Osho, a contemporary meditation teacher. Formerly housed in a public gallery space in London, it moved its international headquarters to Manhattan in 1997.

    "Our aim was to create a physical space that reflected the underlying philosophy of the company," says Klaus Steeg, president of Osho International. "Meditation, we believe, is not a specific ritual or practice, but a state of being relaxed, centered and aware of one's feelings and actions every moment." So in that sense, everything can be a meditation -- even work, he adds.

    With a small staff of six employees in New York City, 10 agents worldwide and an Internet design team of 30 in 12 countries, Osho International wanted to retain the aesthetic quality of the gallery with the functional qualities of an office space.

    To accomplish that vision, Osho International hired New York City-based Dan Rowen Architects. "We wanted a firm with a minimalist or Zen sensibility and the flexibility to work in an unusual situation," says Steeg.

    Publishing offices in the past have been notoriously cluttered with piles of paper and overstuffed filing cabinets. Osho International wanted to defy that messy legacy. Located on the 46th floor of a large mid-town Manhattan office tower, the company's new location has become a meeting place both for its internationally based staff and for its clients.

    "We connect with publishers around the world in this office and also have created an exhibition/presentation space," says Steeg. Flexibility is the key word at Osho. There are no doors in the office. And rather than building individual cubicles, employees are provided larger work spaces -- with the understanding that they will keep their noise level down in respect for their nearby colleagues.

Rethink your use of space.
    Open space also is a major feature at NextMonet.com -- a new online gallery that features an extensive selection of original contemporary art works for sale on the Internet. The site offers more than 4,500 pieces of art including paintings, sculpture, photography, drawings and prints.

    Its 38 employees work in an industrial warehouse in SoMa -- a gentrified area south of Market Street in San Francisco. Says Marian Kwon, director of marketing: "Our open space encourages collaboration, and it's also egalitarian. No one has a better spot than anyone else." Indeed, CEO Myrna Nickelsen's desk is the same size as her employees' L-shaped work stations, and is situated along the side wall in view of her entire staff.

    Even with the open space, phone calls are rarely a problem, says Kwon. Because NextMonet is an Internet company, much of the business is conducted online.

    Here, too, aesthetics serve to inspire and motivate the employees who range in ages between their 20s and 60s. For example, the walls are decorated with original artwork that changes every other month. And because the warehouse is located near the local flower mart, desks often are adorned with fresh sunflowers, lilies, amaryllis and daisies.

    Clearly, an aesthetically pleasing environment doesn't have to cost as much as Nortel Networks' and Gap Inc.'s renovations. NextMonet.com is an example of more modest physical arrangements. Organizations can thus use simple and inexpensive design elements to foster employees' perceptions that the organization cares about them, says Wally C. Weimer, manager of process and measurement technology product line at Richland, Washington-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

    Weimer conducted a study in 1995 that established improvements in staff performance after workspace renovations. In one such area, a windowless mezzanine environment that was a former pipe gallery, researchers documented reductions in staff turnover and absenteeism after the makeover. Moreover, the increase in staff productivity was so dramatic that the cost of the renovation ($1.5 million) was recovered in less than two years. In order to justify renovation expenses, design teams need to consider such measurement tools.

Establish measurements for success.
    The private sector isn't the only place where one observes environmental work redesigns. In fact, the main theme of the new work environment for U.S. Vice President Al Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government (NPR) is interactivity. NPR worked with the General Services Administration (GSA) to translate their work criteria of teaming, workspace flexibility and telecommuting into a new office environment.

    Again, HR was very much a part of the planning and evaluation process, according to Lois E. Bennett, a space planning project manager for the GSA. In its Adaptable Workplace Lab, which conducts research on workspace design, the agency went beyond planning to also establish concrete measurements for success:

• Hard-data measurement of the environmental performance of new building systems: airflow, temperatures, carbon-dioxide levels, acoustical and light levels, and energy use.

• Soft-data measurement: how the end users perceive the performance of the building systems, furniture, organizational change and effectiveness (customer satisfaction).

• Product/process re-engineering: partnering with suppliers to assess how or why certain products do or don't work.

• Individual effectiveness: combining instrumentation and questionnaires (hard and soft measurements) to assess some measure of individual productivity.
  Clearly, as companies increasingly acknowledge the relationship between the physical environment and human activity, HR has an enormous opportunity to enhance employer innovations and employee creativity.

    "I certainly would think that human resources departments would want to get involved," says author Leonard. "Today, you have to design a workplace where people can gather. There's no question about it. Working in sterile quarters is the absolute pits."

Workforce, February 2000, pp. 38-46 -- Subscribe now!