by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
(featured in Contract magazine, May 2015)

Today’s cutting-edge office interiors for technology companies—open, creative, and amenity-rich—seem to be universally envied. This new paradigm perhaps even signals the future for traditional fields, like banking or law. Before accepting the tech office trends as the de facto basis for every future workplace, it is worth pursuing which features provide meaningful enhancements to well-being, culture, and productivity and which are just passing fads.

How tech companies really work
To understand the way tech spaces work at both a functional and cultural level, we first need to look at the drivers that have gotten us to this point in office design. Everything changed with the smartphone. Having a pocket-size supercomputer liberated the workforce from desks and office buildings. For tech-enabled workers, and indeed for most of the first-world population, the problem is no longer getting access to information or connectivity; it is filtering massive amounts of interactions.

Other drivers for tech workspaces are new collaborative and information-sharing models, including open-source product development, coworking, virtual or augmented reality, and rapid prototyping—all of which are influencing the pace of innovation and the way teams need to work now: fast, smart, connected, and collaborative. 

The design of built spaces has already been influenced by Millennials’ preference for democratic team structures, so it’s not surprising that the individual workspace is less of a status symbol. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the open among Facebook engineers, and many other tech CEOs don’t have assigned desks. Tech companies also use different ways to measure performance. Netflix, for example, empowers employees to largely manage their own time, provided they meet their job responsibilities. It’s what you produce, 
not where you are, that matters.


• Focus on wellness and sustainability. Providing bike storage supports a healthier commute. A place to exercise or meditate, height-adjustable desks, good ventilation, access to daylight and outdoor spaces, and toxin-free construction materials are all essentials of a healthy workplace. Operable windows can reduce both heating and cooling costs. 

Food also plays a key role. At the office of Kaiser Permanente’s Thrive group, healthful food and snack options are supplemented with regular cooking and nutrition classes to help staff make better lifestyle choices. When employee wellness is a driver for office design, increased productivity usually follows.

While these concepts may seem like obvious positives, industries outside of tech have been slower to follow suit. Implementing collaborative design principles in traditional organizations often involves concerns about maintaining information privacy, navigating and managing regulatory requirements, and breaking down reporting structures. Since shifts in demographics and mobility will eventually affect every industry, it’s time to adapt or be left behind. Creating a more progressive workspace means asking hard questions and challenging the entrenched hierarchies and models of corporate workflow and space utilization.

Clients expect creativity, competitive pricing, speed, technical proficiency, and competent project delivery, so designers are positioned to have the most strategic impact at the front end of the project. When a client hires a designer, one key consideration should be the designer’s ability to listen and then synthesize what they learned. Understanding an organization’s culture is a designer’s most valuable contribution.

Design is too frequently perceived as a commodity, and built space as a mere operational expense. To demonstrate tangible value, successful designers shift the conversation toward the role interiors play at a strategic level. This means emphasizing not only how a space will look or function but how people connect to it emotionally. Beyond merely looking cool, the best tech workspaces truly engage employees and amplify the organization’s culture, ultimately impacting the bottom line—and that should be the goal for every office interior as well.

by Sascha Wagner, IIDA CID LEED AP
swagner@huntsmanag.com
@swagnr

The Bay Area’s economic recovery is again being linked to investment in startup companies. Focusing on improving or creating entirely new technologies or services, these startups are not all large-scale endeavors. The federal government’s Small Business Administration states that small businesses start up at a rate of over 500,000 a year and account for 75% of all new jobs in our current economy. Recent commercial leasing reports for Silicon Valley and San Francisco show continued activity by startup companies in web technology, apps and gaming, and life-science sectors. While this activity seems to be stabilizing as this year draws to a close, the overall outlook continues to be positive. But let’s not confuse this with the tech gold rush of the late 1990’s – it is different this time.

As a result of the game-changing economic downturns of the dot-com bust, the 2008 stock market adjustment and the resulting “great recession”, the approach to seed funding, operational oversight, and cost control of startup companies now definitely (and thankfully) has a more sensible and conservative note. While the process of designing space for startups is a different game today, some fundamental keys to success have remained unchanged. Let’s look at some of the best practices:

– Create Learning Opportunity for Everyone –

Today’s startup leaders are often younger and/or first-time entrepreneurs and thus relatively new to the process of selecting and designing office space that reflects their company culture. This is a good thing. By nature, startups are just beginning to define their culture, so early planning with the real estate and design team offers the opportunity to identify and realize a company’s values through the evaluation of work styles and work settings.  Statistics show that second only to salary, the physical work environment is the largest contributor to employee satisfaction and retention. It’s simple – great space equals happy and productive employees.

Explaining the often complex design and construction process to a client is an important first step.  Projects are most successful when this dialogue is collaborative and continues for the duration. This builds critical trust between all involved parties and facilitates continuous learning.  So while clients learn about how space impacts their business, design consultants learn as much as possible about the client’s business model in order to support their vision with creative design solutions.

-   Choose the Best Setting -

How a startup actually intends to use their space greatly impacts the type of real estate to consider in the first place.  For example, wider column spacing or more room between the building core and window line may allow users to sit in larger groups and to reconfigure workstations more easily.  On the other hand, several segmented “neighborhoods” can allow for privacy between certain critical functions (e.g. a high energy sales area vs. a heads-down engineering area).  Knowing which model best supports a user’s needs informs the space selection from day one.

Touring existing spaces with a design professional is a helpful tool envisioning a variety of work environments, and gives clients a better sense of what to expect in their own project. It also provides an opportunity to understand a range of costs associated with certain levels of construction. Test-fit planning in multiple buildings gives clients the opportunity to confirm their program well before starting lease negotiations in earnest. When architects are part of the team up front they can add significant value to this process. Creating a good design in a space wrought with challenges is par for the course for talented designers, but why not select a space that is aligned with the client’s intended work style in the first place?

 – Return of the Spec Suite –

One current market trend is the proliferation of pre-built spaces complete with partitions, ceilings, lighting, and finishes, offering the ability to bring space online quickly. Especially for startups, this race to occupancy is often the primary determining factor in a real estate decision. Through creative design, these environments can often be re-purposed in exciting, non-traditional ways without much added cost.  For a tech startup, private offices become huddle rooms, conference rooms become engineering bullpens, and training rooms can become all-hands meeting or demonstration rooms.

In most cases, startups are developing and testing disruptive or innovative technology as it goes to market.  As a result, spaces frequently need to support quickly changing work styles.  While pre-built spaces can be limiting in some ways, creatively adapting them can save costs and time, which is critical to emerging companies.

– Get Real on Schedule, Budget, and Program –

Clients who have never built out office space can be shocked at how long the process takes. Early schedule feedback from architects and contractors can help align a client’s expectations with the realities of construction. Too often, aggressive timeframes sound good from a leasing perspective but can only be accommodated by incurring some financial or functional penalties.

Similarly, developing a realistic project budget from the onset helps the design team formulate better solutions to client objectives. Knowing “what you get for the money” helps to prioritize needs versus wants, and even prior to that, enables the real estate broker to negotiate better lease terms based on those priorities. A budget should also take into consideration possible future modifications to the space. Most startups grow exponentially, so accommodating flexibility is paramount.  This is particularly true for electrical and HVAC infrastructure which can typically make up 30-35% or more of a construction budget. Cloud computing and off-site data storage services have liberated many office spaces from large IT infrastructure requirements. However, adding two or three times the amount of people into a space over time must also be considered in planning for cooling and electrical plug loads. Retrofitting a space later on is usually far more costly than planning for future needs up front.

Startup clients are likely to have fluctuating program needs. Through a visioning session, the design team learns how the users anticipate working in both the short term and in the future. Anticipated changes in work styles may inform what level of build-out actually needs to be done initially, and what should be phased in later.  An early determination of the number of offices, conference rooms, collaborative areas and open office space is often based on staff headcounts and growth projections which have not been fleshed out. Designing these spaces for multiple future uses builds in immediate flexibility.

– Be Innovative and Open to New Ideas –

The best companies recruit the most talented employees, and these are often people who seek out the most innovative work environments.  Therefore, the workplace should foster creativity and knowledge sharing.  Startup employees often hold multiple roles and are not fixed to traditional office workspaces, such as private offices or individual desks. As a result, space needs to perform multiple functions, which presents the chance to introduce flexible and often mobile design elements in architectural and furniture products that allow for easy reconfiguration. But with mobility comes a new set of challenges.

One of our recent startup “incubator” clients desired a highly-flexible open office with fully moveable workstations.  The challenge was bringing power and data cabling to desks that would be relocated on a weekly basis. Through our collaborative process with the client and the contractor’s pricing input on several options, the design team developed a solution incorporating laboratory-style pull-down power/data drops. Being open to all ideas and exploring them rapidly as a team is a success strategy that is akin to the business model of many startup clients themselves, and is often expect