Office Design Trends Focus on Flexibility, Productivity

The ‘80s were about gloss and prestige. The bleak climate of the early ‘90s dictated austerity. Today companies are still carefully watching real estate costs, but a rebounding economy is encouraging them to spend money transforming the workplace, this time to lure new employees and enhance the productivity of the people they have.

Emerging are offices that are more worker-friendly but that also reflect the greater demands placed on today’s employees.

“Whereas in the 1980s we were designing buildings for the chief executive, now we are designing buildings so they will be environmentally correct for the employees,” said David Martin, design partner in the Los Angeles architectural firm AC Martin Partners.

In dollar terms, that means companies are now budgeting real estate and interior design projects not only by the cost per square foot, but also by the cost per employee, analysts say. The trick is to enhance productivity without breaking the bank.

In East Los Angeles, Acorn Paper Products Co., a 51-year-old maker and distributor of corrugated boxes, recently invested $1.7 million in a major make-over of what had been a gritty industrial building, adding new offices on a mezzanine and fancy touches such as bow trusses, glazed cement floors and new furniture.

“Employees spend so much of their life here we wanted to give them a nice place to work,” said David Weissberg, executive vice president of the $40-million family-owned firm.

Before the overhaul started, architects quizzed employees about what they needed in their work areas to do their jobs effectively. Their answers, which touched on everything from lighting to drawer size, were incorporated into the design.

Employees say the new office space with its skylights, soft music and absence of clocks has made a big difference in how they feel about their jobs.

“Since we moved up here, my day goes by a lot faster,” said Judy Estrada, an Acorn customer service supervisor. “It doesn’t feel like you’re in an office building. It’s much more relaxed.”

Dailey & Associates Advertising also made a radical change, looking to inspire its creative employees and attract workers and clients who had been opting for the funky ad shops of Santa Monica and Venice. The agency recently moved its offices from a Mid-Wilshire office building to former furniture showrooms in the chic Pacific Design Center in trendy West Hollywood.

“I was looking for a way to revitalize the company,” Dailey Chairman Clifford Einstein said. “We wanted to say that we’re not a 29-year-old company at the end of our rope.”

Einstein said the agency’s old offices did little for its image with clients and provided little incentive for workers to talk together. In some cases, people who were working on the same accounts were floors away from each other. “It was physically much harder to get to people,” Einstein said. “Now we’re talking to [each other] earlier, opening up doors and ideas,” he said.

At the design center, writers and producers can take advantage of the environment. When they need to come up with inspiration for an ad with an Asian setting, they can just head upstairs to an imports showroom. Or they can go look at stemware as they brainstorm for a winery commercial.

The cost of this creativity infusion? Perhaps a little more per month than their old space, Einstein said. Although showroom rent is more costly per square foot, the agency took less space because most workers are in cubicles rather than offices.

Analysts say the traditional emphasis on private offices and executive washrooms is shifting in favor of gathering places for workers at all levels and amenities such as kitchens and gyms.

At sunglass maker Oakley Inc.’s new headquarters in Orange County’s Foothill Ranch, for instance, employees can blow off steam on the basketball court, run on the track or hop on a bike and ride up one of the nearby mountain-bike trails.

Other changes in office space are more obviously functional. Cubicle walls are coming down to encourage employees to ask one another questions. In many businesses, people are being grouped into more-flexible teams rather than organized in traditional departments. To accommodate that trend, office modules have become as easy to take apart and reassemble as Lego bricks.

“Its less of a one-butt-for-one-seat mentality,” said Ed Friedrichs, president of Santa Monica-based architectural and space-planning firm Gensler. “You don’t design things in a hierarchal fashion and expect it to stay that way for a long time.”

Some employers still prefer the top-down approach in designing offices. Countrywide Credit Industries Inc., one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders, kept all of the decision-making in the hands of a few key corporate executives, who plotted the layout and look of the company’s new Calabasas office. They kept the lavish Oriental rugs and leather chairs of former owner Lockheed Martin Corp. But Countrywide eliminated some elements of old-school thinking, including the huge executive offices (each with its own waiting room) and the high-walled cubicles that gave certain employees privacy but that blocked sunlight from the majority of workers.

“We like being able to see people, and it just feels more open and warmer,” Richard Lewis, Countrywide chief administrative officer, said of the new offices. “And since we’re not on different floors, we are now seeing each other almost every minute.”

Countrywide obtained city permits to house 750 people in the building, almost twice as many as Lockheed expected to have there when it built the facility in the late 1970s.

“The major change in the office environment is not what people are doing, but the number of people who are doing it,” said Franklin Becker, director of the International Workplace Studies Program at Cornell University.

In other words, fewer employees are doing more of the work. But many aren’t doing it at the office. More companies are allowing people to work from home to stay close to their kids and avoid snarled traffic.

“People are working much harder than they did 10 years ago. In return they are being given some greater degree of control over where and when they work,” Becker said.

Metropolitan Talent Agency in Hancock Park recently uploaded all of its client databases and other information to a proprietary Internet site so agents can also work from home or at a restaurant.

“If I don’t trust them enough to work from home, then why would I give them access to all our records?” President Chris Barrett said of the agents.

But not all employees can adapt to a nomadic existence. Just ask executives from ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day. Several years ago, when founder Jay Chiat opened the doors to the agency’s landmark building in Venice, employees were expected to check out a laptop from the “company store” and use any desk. After a period of lugging around files and working in their cars, employees got frustrated; some threatened to leave. The company has since toned down its “revolutionary” approach to office organization.

“I think what we found is that you can’t expect everyone to work within the same space,” said Bob Kuperman, president of the agency’s North American operations. “You have to build different spaces in relation to what the actual job entails. A media person needs more room to lay something out than someone in the accounting department.”

Analysts say the agency greatly underestimated how territorial most employees are. Even if employees are out of the office frequently, most still want a place to hang their jackets or display pictures of their spouses or pets.

What did emerge from Jay Chiat’s great workplace experiment is further confirmation that employees like having different places to meet with colleagues or just play.

Einstein agrees. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Does this space help workers produce more or be more creative?’ At some point, you are going to be able to put a dollar figure on these components.”

*

MORE COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE: D8-9