Today’s workers and employers have focused the majority of their energy in enhancing their productivity. Several articles and blog sites have discussed “productivity hacks” while some have busted out inspirational Q&A’s with top CEOs and entrepreneurs on how they stay efficient.

There’s even apps that guide you through “focused” meditation. But there are limits to what it can do in a place that is chaotic in itself.  As a result, designers have utilized the role of smart offices by using employee data to create work environments that enhance productivity.

JLL’s Workplace Strategy Practice Managing Director, Ed Nolan, said that the workplace is supposed be the physical manifestation of an organization’s culture and core values. He adds that by thoroughly understanding the correlation of human experience and real estate, companies can create innovative offices that drive productivity, experience and business value.

Experts suggest that the following five design elements that covers everything from concentration to wellness are exceedingly detrimental in boosting employee productivity.

Facilities that make life easier doesn’t necessarily have to be something as luxurious as a roof top pool. Something as simple as vending machines that carry healthy, energy-boosting snacks can enhance someone’s experience in navigating through their workday. It’s important that organizations make staying in the office more convenient by reducing an employee’s need to go out.

Companies with an older labor force can add onsite medical services, while the younger demographics with kids might appreciate onsite childcare better.

Giving employees access to free healthy food all day can help them stay flexible as they adjust their mealtimes with their workflow accordingly.

The growing global movement of coworking spaces shed light on the advantages of open plan offices. But like the movement itself, the design has its critics – highlighting that the setup has no room for focused work.

In order for a company – or serviced office provider – to cater to the different needs of each professional, it’s important to carry a variation of workspaces. There should be enough room for team activities, casual lounges that cultivate collaborations as well as acoustical areas perfect for concentration.

The architecture of an office building directly affects its cognitive functioning. Several studies have said that enhanced employee productivity, engagement and satisfaction is only a few of the benefits brought by big windows that allow natural in. Its infrastructure plays a clear role as well. Poor air quality can spread flu and colds.

Noise isn’t just any other disturbance; studies from the World Green Building Council says that it can lead to as much as a sixty-six percent productivity drop. Companies should provide options for improving acoustical focus like private offices and phone so booths so that it can help control conference call conversations with the addition of secured privacy.

Today’s modern tools – with the help of the Internet – has made our office life significantly easier. The more organizations embed technology into their workplace, the more productive their people became.

But execution of effective design elements is the key to a successful collation. If the machine itself isn’t intuitive, employees’ valuable time can be wasted.

Honest workplace designs that reflect employees’ needs and concerns boosts engagement and productivity. Professionals put more value in organizations that genuinely show concern about them.

Learn more about offices that care and talk to us today!

Every one of us hopes to be part of a great company and wants to work in a high performing office environment. We all want to be at our best, to be with colleagues that doesn’t just challenge us but also help us grow while doing work that’s both financially rewarding and meaningful.

But success is subjective. There’s more than one kind of triumphant organization and more than one type of productive workplaces. What matters most at work is that the values that drive your employers are aligned with the values that motivate you. That the culture that defines the life within the company matches your personal style and that the people whom you work with pushes you to think, grow, and can even make you laugh.

Regardless of the industry or career path we’re taking, each one of us should reflect on the kind of environment that works best for us. Do we thrive on the adrenaline rush of competition, or do we prefer a more collaborative nature? Are we craving for individualistic achievements and personal recognition or do we celebrate collective success? Can we sacrifice our emotional and psychological well-being for financial rewards, or is doing something meaningful more important for us?

Harvard Business Review’s Bill Taylor tested out some of the world’s most creative, lively, and productive offices from varying fields. In his journey, he identified four types of workplaces and have come up with sixteen that can help professionals figure out what works best for them.

Granted there’s no right or wrong answers to these questions; there’s really no perfect place or environment for anyone. But it could help people find the best platform for them to do great work in.

This kind of workplace is one that radiates an all-for-one, one-for-all spirit that’s founded by trust, teamwork, and peer-to-peer loyalty. Of course, clients matter but this kind of office elevates the needs of their employees more. Their formula for success starts and ends with what’s right for their people.

These are the kinds of organizations who are made up of competitive professionals whose basis of success comes from their personal goals. The ideology is sink-or-swim. And though it seems like quite a rough environment, it works for some organizations such as investment banks and hedge funds as well as law firms and tech titans. In workplaces such as this, individual achievements are what keeps the company afloat.

In this kind of environment, workers worry less about their respective happiness or individual success and focus more on the collective impact they create. These workspaces carry a certain modest quality within them – a willingness to make sacrifices and go to extraordinary lengths to keep their promises to both their customers and partners. With a “mission first” spirit, their team does whatever it takes to get the job done. One good example of this is the United Services Automobile Association, the successful financial services exclusively serving both active and retired military members and their families. The organization has become a passion brand, known for its marvelous service, because their employees identify positively with soldiers and their families – putting their interests above their own. More than just another business, USAA stands for a cause.

Certain individuals – whether motivated by a sense of mission or a quench for individual achievement – are at their best condition within environments that are easy to navigate, those that have few obstacles standing in between ideas and action, where urgency defines the pace of life.  Entrepreneurship guru Bo Burlingham’s business classic Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big captures the spirit of this kind of workplace perfectly, a space where human scale matters more over massive revenue and big market shares. In an ecosystem where smaller and smaller teams can achieve bigger and greater things, size matters – and small packages can bring great things.

Nothing else compares to doing work that matters, but it also means finding a company, organization, or team with a workplace that’s right for you; and that’s what coworking spaces aim to be.

The growing international movement hopes to give everyone a chance by providing them a wide variety of workspaces that would help them be better professionals and by surrounding them with like-minded colleagues who would bring out the best within themselves. From communal areas that encourage collaboration and help cultivate healthy networks to private offices that guarantee them acoustical focus, coworking spaces is a brilliant modern office that gives you different environments all in one place.

Talk to us today and we’ll help you pick out which is best for you and your team!

Today’s architects, interior designers, as well as engineers are fully engaged in a journey of discovering the different ways our run-down-the-mill offices increase our overall efficiency while promoting collaboration at the same time. Much to their surprise, they discovered a risk that was often swept under the rug by today’s large majority: distraction.

Architectural firm, Gensler, made headlines when its 2013 US Workplace Survey revealed the detrimental role of focus in effective performance. The aforementioned study showed that whenever we are distracted at work, our capacity to focus and collaborate is immediately undermined. As a result, this specific piece of information became the ammunition of critics going against the open plan setting. Only a handful of participants reported at least an hour of heads down, concentrated work during their shifts. Their headline finding led people to wonder how professionals can successfully execute individual focused work in an office that clearly prioritizes collaboration.

Almost all industries carry complex work that requires a balance of focused individual activities and collaborative task but lead consultants of Genler decided to focus on software developers and engineers whose project require a lot of focus.

Developing software is an increasingly collaborative activity — self-organizing teams swiftly move through series of cycles. This fluid method of working splits tasks into small increments that would usually take one to four weeks with each one requiring a variation of periods of intense focus and intense collaboration. According to the interviews the team conducted within a global tech firm, it shows that about seventy percent of a developer’s time goes to individual work; some casual and uninterruptible by emails and instant messaging, while tasks like coding, testing, and debugging can only be interrupted at the expense of their productivity. At the same time, sit down conversations and brainstorming sessions are integral to a team’s progress.

The competition in today’s tech industry is fierce, with several companies prioritizing speed in marketing its services and products, and that pressure can easily inflame the problems open workspaces usually come with — it can be too loud and distracting for them. Despite of this, we don’t see it going away. The open plan setting is not going away any time soon and this is because of the mobility it offers as well as its cost efficient nature.

It became pretty obvious by then; people are doing more and more focused work but they feel ineffective at it. Solving it wouldn’t be as easy though, the organizational demand for collaboration hinders researchers from coming up with solutions as both work modes are attached by the hip. Their eureka moment came when they realized that in order for an office to be effective, it needs to serve both interests. It’s not just about the spaces anymore, how work happens matters as much as where work happens.

The participants involved in the research were situated in a brand new “agile” workspace that carries a series of of open team areas with 15 workstations each. And according to the interviews and focus groups, developers and testers said that the setup fitted their team dynamics, culture, and individual work needs, perfectly. They were incredibly satisfied. It allowed them to sit together and interact with one another amidst focused work. Its size and proximity allowed both work modes to become productive.

Unfortunately, user experience designers weren’t as enthusiastic. Their tasks required them to collaborate with large numbers of teams yet they have the innate tendency to sit along side each other, resulting to distractions. Episodically conversing with developers and testers, it became a tenuous activity that gave them less autonomy on where and how they worked within the office. And in order to cope, they would often look for more effective acoustic spaces elsewhere.

Based on the input they have gathered, it suggests that people can perform well, even in interactive situations, if they have the liberty to utilize workspaces and processes that allowed them to balance both collaborative and focus activities in real time.

Gensler’s report entitled “My Work in a We World”, enumerated four strategies in order to perfect the balancing act: choice and control over surroundings, team discipline, united code of behavior, and decision-making autonomy. Each strategy should be tailored to the organisation, the team, and the project. Taking into consideration other factors aside from the setting, it integrates team dynamics, organisational culture, as well as work polices and practices. In order for your people to truly flourish, they must have enough control over both their space and situation.

Interested in performing the balancing act? Talk to us today and we’ll give you a helping hand. Sales Rain’s spaces are designed to improve both your team and individual performance by syncing collaboration and focus in one rhythm.

The youngest demographic of today’s workforce – the Millennials – have brought a ton of change in the world of business. From the way we do business and even our work area. This generation’s penchant for autonomy pushed several corporations to reconsider the modern innovations occurring in terms of work.

And though these modifications have helped us become even more innovative and flexible, it also brought in a certain trend that alarmed companies as well as experts. More and more members of today’s workforce are becoming disengaged with their respective work with a number close to 70 percent. Some have traced it back to despite having available resources around them to familiarize themselves with the work models, there are certain employers that continue to fail in creating a fulfilling path and culture for their employees.

To make things even more alarming, a large number of these young professionals walking away from the corporate track are women. According to a Deloitte survey conducted among 7,700 millennials coming from 29 different countries, one out of four respondents plan on quitting their respective job within a year. Moreover, women are most likely than men to have left the company.

A recent global ICEDR study orchestrated during 2015 to 2016, leaders believe that the majority of women at the age of 30 leave because of the struggle they experience creating a balance between their work and their life. Yet contrary to what the study entailed, the women themselves said that there are other factors that influenced their decision to leave their respective organizations.

A few readers have argued that neither the work/life balance nor the compensation is their primary driving force for leaving, but rather the corporate environment itself have become taxing to them.

One of the most crucial factor is corporate politics – accompanied by incompatible values and toxic environment. Employees would often find themselves doing their best to dodge multiple stray bullets whenever they feel that their ethics and values is not in sync with those of the corporation. Women are frequently left burned out as they try to make a contribution to the business while making sure that their voices and opinions remain significant.

Another reason cited by the readers is impact. As most professionals would, they want to fulfill their purpose and make a difference. No matter the industry, most of us wish to give our own input into making the world a better place. We all want to leave an accomplishment of good, solid work as well as other recognizable achievements.

“Wonder Women” or ladies of the industry would often feel that their thoughts get easily drowned out by corporate noise. To them, they are helping a group of people build their dreams without being recognized for the contributions that they make in the process. Some women dream of their ideas coming to life right before their eyes. There are also certain young ladies who choose to continue their profession independently so that they have more control over their goals.

And the last most common reason is the overwhelming feeling of being undervalued or underutilized. The corporate world seldom fully recognize women’s ability to contribute, nor do they curate an environment that allows women to reach their potential and succeed at the highest levels. Whether it’s because of gender discrimination, family-unfriendly policies that take its toll on women with children or simply the overall unfair culture – when faced with these types of environment, females or workplace wonder women would make it their goal to ‘lean out’ of these corporations.

As a result, the number of female entrepreneurs expanded, globally. Over the past 15 years, women-owned firms have grown at a faster rate and would have provided an estimated of more than 5 million jobs by the year 2018.

These office wonder women are crashing the glass ceiling as they continuously disrupt the traditional corporate culture by building their own companies, taking over executive leadership roles and curating workspaces that cater to both the needs and interest of women.

The fast growth of flexible workspaces brought upon the unexpected appearance of several coworking offices globally. Though as expected, majority of them are built for co-ed occupation. But as the years progressed, the presence of niche shared offices have been observed. More and more female-friendly spaces are opening up to fill in the gaps of the available resources to women.

Providers from all around the world are now coming up with more ways to invite female entrepreneurs into joining them. Specific spaces in the US have started providing on-site child care services so that mothers of their community could fulfill both of their duties.