No More Filing Cabinets in the Future Office Space Perth.
If future office space Perth follows the worldwide colourful and activity based office designs no-one will have their own desks – they will simply have a storage locker. Mail will be received at a central point and distributed to each person electronically, so there will be no need for filing cabinets. Even executives for the most part will have no desk or fixed working area. Instead they move from office space to office space with their laptops, able to choose from a variety of hubs designed to support different tasks.
Remember the ‘open plan office’ revolution? Larger companies adopted the open floor layout because it saved space and enabled better employee inter-action. Now we have moved on. Now its all about a dedicated and specially designed area for a particular activity. Perhaps office space Perth will never be the same.
Activity Defines the Office Spaces
According to Veldhoen + Company, a specialist consultancy in ‘activity based working’ styles, mainstream is ready to adopt the latest in office space trends. The whole premise of designing around specific business activities is to make the employee a traveller through a diverse choice of spaces.Their locations can change day by day or hour by hour. It would be great to have this flexibility in our serviced offices Perth but our tenant requirements usually opt for privacy and there is no demand for the open layout design. things are changing with the even more open trend to co-working, so perhaps it will become mainstream in the future.
If are lucky enough that your employer has embraced the open activity based workspaces, whether meeting clients, working on group projects, researching or writing, holding company staff training sessions or simply getting together to exchange views, there will be a special environment just right for you.
The office space styles can be identified as ‘the garden’ or ‘ the library’ to replicate the settings in which business is done outside of the single office space environment.
Embracing Change in Office Space Layout
No doubt moving from the traditional top-down hierarchy concept of management is challenging for executives and staff who quite like having their own office spaces, personalised with awards and family photos.
Not everyone may want to work in what could be likened to a giant luxurious cafe, but staff are more willing to accept these radical changes when they see that their managers and directors also no longer have their own offices or special furniture.
The serviced office space Perth layout comprises seven single offices with unobscured windows and excellent natural air flow. The business people in the centre find it easy to network amongst each other, while having the ability to stay totally private within their office suite.
Activity Based Working is Becoming Mainstream
MacQuarie Bank BFS Team were the first Australian company to adopt the concept for their new building in Sydney. Images of their glamorous and modern offices are worth looking at on the ABC National Radio By Design gallery section of their website.
Commonwealth Bank HQ last year incorporated the concept and now Bankwest will follow the trend when it relocates in Perth CBD next year.
Nokia Beijing have embraced the changes with their new offices designed by M Moser.
No comment on creative office design would be complete without mentioning the Google and Facebook offices. They make the work places look like play spaces.
Google Offices on Video
Approval Rating
Reports are that from a productivity perspective people really feel that the new activity based office space design is providing them with lots of choice.
Veldhoen note that fifty-five percent of the people say they have a more productive team culture, and 93% of the people say they wouldn’t go back to the old way of working. Supporters say it engenders integrity, friendliness, openness, respect and helpfulness.
Benefits:
- Saving in real estate costs
- Employee empowerment
- Improved client service
- Creation of more meaning & learning in the workplace
- Access to people, resources and knowledge
- Knowledge sharing
Disadvantages:
- It’s harder to withdraw or hide
- The movement of others through the spaces can be distracting
- It’s noisier in the larger rooms
- You must consider other people in your vicinity
- There no fixed ‘home’ base
Could your business cope with the new activity based layout? What problems can you foresee? Will office space perth follow these trends and change to this new open plan?
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10 Responses to “Office Space Perth Colourful Trends”
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Thanks Julia for the interesting post. This trend really fits with working ‘in the cloud’ – I wonder how people manage though to be completely paperless. I have been trying to get there for a long time now but still manage to have a desktop littered with notes and bits of paper!
It seems a lot of this new trend is all about feeling good where you are working – with different sensory inout for different needs. Want to be creative, get into the flow with water, greenery .. want to create systems – be surrounded by the right colours and the feel of structure.
Having been at your serviced offices in Perth I have to say the feel there is very cool. eco -friendly – efficient use of space, and the design, layout and colours make the place a very attractive space for productive work.
Hi Shazar,
Thanks for your visit. I love that my own office surrounds are not ‘ordinary’. But the examples I’ve studied here are really ‘out there’. It would be fun each day to get that creative corner which is just right for your mindset.
I’m with you on the bits of paper – we would have to carry them around until we learned not to keep them. I’m not quite there yet with electronic copies of everything – I like to flip through papers to find that quote, that link, that article I need. And where would be stash the chocolate bars?
Julia
I like the sound of employees constantly moving around from office space to office space, meaning that they have no real set workplace. This adds great variety and means that you turn up to work everyday not really knowing what environment you are going to be working in. This can only be good for your motivation.
Hi John,
Thanks for commenting – when you see the wild designs in these examples you can imagine what they do for inter-action and creative mindsets. I wonder do you start fighting for the best spots after a while?
I had the fun of visiting the Google offices in SF long before they went public – to me they were a total mess, but the kind of mess that young people like to work in – beanbags and cereal dispensers and kids sleeping overnight, so it wasn’t like ‘work’.
Thank you for this wonderful idea, truly. It is nice that we are already moving on with the traditional cubicle type office space just wishing that this could be implemented to majority of different companies. I agree that this helps improve quality of work life drastically
Thanks for your visit. I agree – the cubicle type of office has a very forbidding appearance compared with this new system.
It must be stimulating for working when you have various spaces to choose from each day. People i know who work in these open offices say the environment allows young staff to easily access more experienced colleagues without a formal appointment. They can get help with their projects interact with other staff members more quickly than before.
Dear Julia,
great to read your post about flexible work spaces! It is amazing how google and co managed to turn “theory” into reality – one day I must to see the google office here in Zürich!
I also work in a company where they introduced the flexible work space system a few years ago. Although it is not as fancy as google with coffee garden and library-like-cafés I believe it increased the communication between the employees and surely they found a way to safe real estate costs.
Although there still are some colleagues who actually print contracts etc for documentation reasons, most of the people have hardly any paper “floating around”. My locker has only one small and half empty folder. The rest of the space is used for tea bags, little snacks and my gym bag so that I am always ready to work out in the in-house gym.
As an employee I highly appreciate the flexibility in work place and working hours and respond to it with a high work commitment!
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
So good to get your personal experience. There are many YouTube videos of the Google office in Zurich and how they went about creating it. It’s great to see that a large balance sheet can translate into benefits for employees.If you do visit, take your camera and send us some photos to update this article?
As for your locker – well, I can’t quite get my head around not having paper files.I find leafing through papers faster than opening a lot of emailed documents. Many emails have a repeated subject line that is often out of date. How do you deal with finding the document you need in a hurry?
Do you tend to take the same seat each time you go to work? Do you work on different floors sometimes or are you obliged to stay in one specific part of the office area? We could learn a lot from your experience.
Hi Julia,
I surely will tell you about the experience if I should be lucky enough to visit the Google office in Zürich one day!
Regarding the storage of emails I have developed a system that gives me the structure that I need in my Inbox. When I receive Mails that I might need later and the subject line is not cleary associated to the content, I change the subject to a more specific one. I also have a very clear structure in the Inbox folders – so for me searching for information in my Mailbox is faster than walking to the locker, getting the right folder and looking for the right piece of paper.
Just like many colleagues, I try to get the same seat every day – if possible. This might be the natural desire for stability. The company has assigned an area where the teams should be located so one can find other team members in the same area. If – for some reason – many employees work in the head office instead of home office or at the clients site, there are not enough spots for everyone and some team members have to go to another floor due to a lack of tables in “our area”. However, this rarely happens and usually I can sit in my favored few spots.
HiSarah,
Maybe that’s the difference – I come from the old system, relying on a paper trail to unearth documents.
How do you change the sbuject line without re-sending the email to yourself?
Yeswe must have this – I could learn from you. But the most important find-ability help will be to re-name the subject line. At the same time maybe add a key word to the text? Certainly at this stage I could get to my locker faster on many occasions!