By jed.link@ifma.org There’s good news for business owners, executives and facility management professionals facing tough decisions about which workplace designs will best meet their needs. It’s now easier than ever to harness the remarkable power of science to inform specific workplace strategies. Workplace Evolutionaries (WE), a community of practice within IFMA, has teamed up with the IFMA Foundation to produce a comprehensive research-based document to demystify modern workplace strategies with scientific data, analysis and research. “Applying What Scientists Know About WHERE and HOW People Work Best,” by Dr. Sally Augustin, PhD outlines hundreds of scientific workplace strategy guidelines, each supported with complete citations. “Applying What Scientists Know About WHERE and HOW People Work Best,” is a product of Workplace Strategy Summits, industry polls and surveys and a remarkable amount of expertise derived from first-hand experience. This piece not only informs contemporary debates about workplace strategy, it sets the stage for the workplace of the future. The full report is available for download in the IFMA bookstore, online at: http://www.ifma.org/marketplace/store/product-view/applying-what-scientists-know-about-where-and-how-people-work-best The variety and detail of the content in this report is suggested by the breadth of the publication’s table of contents, which includes: General Studies Implications of Sensory Experiences Worker Experience and Basic Architectural Forms Psychological Factors Affecting Worker Performance Workplace Design and Worker Behavior (General) Particular Workplace Configurations and Their Repercussions National Culture and Workplace Design The more than 50-page report includes relevant excerpts from studies, reports and articles that can be easily referenced by facility management professionals. Full bibliographical information is included for each excerpt. For example: Research indicates that people think more creatively when ceilings are 10 feet high than when they are 8 feet tall.
Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu. 2007. “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use.” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 174-186. http://assets.csom.umn.edu/assets/71190.pdf People are significantly more like to collaborate when there is a 100-foot increase in the overlap of their functional paths. Functional paths are the routes people travel at their workplace, getting their job done. A press release related to this project indicates that the increases in collaboration was 20 percent for each 100-foot increase.
Felichism Kabo, Yongha Hwang, Margaret Levenstein and Jason Owen-Smith. “Shared Paths to the Lab: A Sociospatial Network Analysis of Collaboration.” Environment and Behavior, in press. http://eab.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/07/20/0013916513493909.abstract The report was published with support from the WE Research Team and the IFMA Foundation.

Source: Facilities Management