“Floor plans are becoming denser and businesses are now able to function more productively in an office environment with less overall real estate,” says Steven Cascone, director of design for office design and consulting firm Mayhew and Associates Inc. of Toronto, which undertook the Markham office redesign project.
Mr. Cascone says that the design trend for offices is to include homey touches, such as lounges with comfortable sofas and chairs and eating areas with access to WiFi, in order to attract workers in their twenties who were accustomed to working in groups while in college or university.
Many younger staff think nothing of working at the office until midnight, “as long as they have those comforts of home in the work space,” Mr. Cascone says.
When Mayhew's designers looked at the Markham project, they tailored all of the new workspaces to job functions that range from managerial to engineering to general office staff.
“We went through an elaborate consultation process with each manager of each department to make sure the design met the needs of the individuals working in the space,” Mr. Andrews explains. “Mayhew got a good understanding of the duties of each of the positions, the amount of desk space they needed, the amount of storage they needed and any kind of fixtures on the workstations that would help facilitate the duties of the job.”
The new Markham office allots less than 185 square feet of total space for each employee, factoring in workstations, enclosed offices, hallways, foyers and other common areas. That's down from 200 square feet each at the Markham Civic Centre.
Yet the new space has a more open feeling, Mr. Andrews says, because there are fewer filing cabinets and none of the cubicles has overhead storage bins, which tend to block light.
The Markham Civic Centre office space, staffed by about 450 workers, will get a similar makeover this year.
Markham's compact cubicles, priced at $2,500 each, or about half of what the town has paid for workstations and furniture in the past, contributed to overall cost savings, Mr. Andrews says. “The beauty of the way we've laid out the office is that all of our furniture is modular. It's all pieces that can be dissembled and reoriented in a different format if we grow in the future.”
Markham has clued into a key factor that is dominating office design these days, and that, Mr. Cascone says, is flexibility.
“People are changing, work habits are changing, businesses are changing,” he says. “The space should be as fluid as their business.”
Top 10 FEATURES wanted by clients
1. Access to natural light
2. Better air quality/circulation and temperature control
3. More meeting spaces
4. Open areas that accommodate employee collaboration and teamwork
5. A greener, more sustainable office environment, such as reusable interior architectural wall systems, materials with low VOCs (volatile organic compounds), materials with high recycled or biodegradable content, and products with “Cradle to Cradle” environmental certification.
6. Increased flexibility of furniture components, such as mobile tables, furniture systems consisting of a limited kit of parts, etc.
7. An aesthetically pleasing environment that would attract and retain highly skilled labour
8. More staff amenity spaces, such as lounge areas, cafeteria and fitness facility.
9. The ability to work away from an office or workstation through wireless technology
10. Incorporation of outdoor elements within office space, such as living walls
Source: Mayhew and Associates
Trends in office design
- Alternative work strategies, such as the ability to function away from the office, or the use of shared work settings
- Smaller individual workstations
- Increased meeting and collaboration spaces
- A “greener” office environment
- More flexible work areas, such as a formal meeting room that can be reconfigured into a training room or other purpose
- Increased use of natural light
- Inclusion of colour and texture in office decor
- Source: Mayhew and Associates
