Like Borges once wrote that good readers are as difficult to find as black swans, architects must feel the same about the people occupying there buildings. There is a classic example of the Belgian Art Noveau architect Henry van de Velde whose design aspired for a “total” piece of art. The Germans have a word for it: Gesamtkunstwerk.
van de Velde, an artist by training, would design absolutely everything in his houses. He went to great pains to make sure nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a spoon or a fork would displease the eye. Art after all was serious, sacred as he had written in “voie sacree” in1894. For his own house, built in 1895 he went as far as to design the dresses of his wife Maria Sethe. This was architecture and life inside celebrated as a magnificant, all encompasing, total piece of art.

After one of van de Velde’s houses was finished, his client invited him to the new house for dinner. Upon arrival van de Velde gave his client a frowning look. “What was wrong? ” asked the client, who during the course of the design process of the house had become very aware of van de Velde’s allergic reactions against anything not-artistic. “Look”, the client would proclaim, “I am even wearing the slippers you designed.”

“I can see that!” van de Velde yelled, “but these are the slippers for the bedroom. Can’t you see they are competely out of place here?!”

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs shows some resemblance to Herzberg’s. The key to motivation according to Maslow is based on the notion that certain needs require a basis for development. Maslow however extends the needs to 5 hierarchically ranked levels. In his book Maslow Motivation and Personality he describes a hierarchy of personal needs, a ladder (or pyramid) of unsatisfied needs where lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be. On the bottom of the ladder are the basic or psychological needs such as the most elemental biological needs like oxygen, sleep, water etc… When these needs are not fulfilled we might feel sick, pain or discomfort. Once we have reached a satisfactory level of basic survival needs we want to protect what we have attained, such as the security of a family and a home. Adults have little conscious awareness of this need except in times of calamity. Social or belonging needs are halfway up the ladder, people are collective creatures and will gather in organizations, bars, sports and work groups, etc…all needs to overcome feelings of loneliness or alienation. Identity or ego need is the need for self-respect, and includes status, recognition, attention, reputation, confidence, independence, freedom and respect from others. If these needs are satisfied the person will feel self-confident if not low self-esteem or inferior complex are felt. According to Maslow the ego needs are never fully met, which accords for the constantly setting of new goals to ourselves. The last need called the Self-fulfillment or self-actualization need is what Maslow described as “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”, gaining a sense of accomplishments, reaching an individual’s fullest potential.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
1. basic needs: food, water, oxygen, sleep.
2. Security needs: family, home, job safety,
3. Social needs: group membership, feeling of belonging to a team, a club, friends
4. Identity needs: status, recognition, reputation
5. Self actualization needs: search for knowledge, esthetic experiences

These motivational needs and their hierarchical interrelationships are equally relevant in a work environment. (Figure 3) Even though the basic needs such as desks, chairs and air-conditioning in the office might be taken for granted, people notice the difference when something unusual happens, for example when the lighting breaks down or someone is assigned to a new desk that is smaller or bigger. The change will have a psychological impact on the individual.
Investigating these needs of the workers in their work environment we will find on the lowest ladder the office such basic items as the creation of an environment to work in, with a surface to work on, a place to sit and other technology required to do the specific tasks. Security needs include visual as well as acoustical privacy, the ability to store personal belongings and the ability to create a desk or space employees can call their own. Considering the time spend in the office, the social needs play an important part in the organizational culture. With increasing demand on teamwork and group based activities the social culture that the work environment provides and supports is becoming more and more important. Even though companies are increasingly becoming flatter in their hierarchical structure, identity needs such as status and differentiation still play an important role as a motivational element. Finally, employees look for self-fulfillment in their work. In selecting a company to work for people will look at the corporate values that this company has and judge whether these values coincide with their own.

All these needs can be found in an office environment as well:
1. Basic needs: (proper) light, temperature, desk size
2. Security needs: acoustical and visual privacy, storage, meeting space
3. Social needs: a feeling of belonging, office community, space for social gathering
4. Identity needs: Status, recognition
5. Self actualization: identification with company values, sense of accomplishment, branding

We have finished ValueCommerce’s office this weekend. Here some photographs of the new office.

Entrance corridor

Table football and picnic bench

One of the team spaces

A variety of seating areas are scattered around the office including these low tables

Sliding doors create privacy for meeting areas

Meeting area

A glimpse into the client’s meeting room from the reception corridor

The “transparent meeting room”, one of many themes we used for the meeting rooms.

Over the next fews days I will write down a summary of some ideas regarding motivation. Let’s start with the Two Factor Theory by Frederick Herzberg.

Herzberg wrote 1959 a book called “The Motivation to Work” with research colleagues Bernard Mausner and Barbara Snyderman. The book is a study on 200 Pittsburgh engineers and accountants. It looked at the factors that cause job satisfaction as well as the factors that cause dissatisfaction. Interestingly the authors found out that satisfaction and dissatisfaction should not be treated as opposites. The opposite of satisfaction is simply no satisfaction, not dissatisfaction. (The Stones were right) Where managers would believe that motivation requires rewards, the book points out that workers get motivated and thus feel rewarded through the responsibility they can get from their job and the connection to their work itself. The main idea in the theory is the division between two factors: Motivation factors that lead to satisfaction and Hygiene factors that if not fullfilled lead to dissatisfaction.
What people want from their jobs are Motivation Factors:

Challenging work

Exciting place to work

Varied work

Promotion chances
Hygiene factors are the base for the motivation factors. These need to be present, but will not cause higher job satisfaction. Salary is thus not a motivator but forms the basis for motivation factors to start. Hygiene factors are:

Status

Security

Salary

Personal life

Company policy

This idea of a hierarchy of motivation factors is further developed by Maslow, discussed tomorrow.

What make peoples get up in the morning and (here in Japan) commute for one to two hours in packed trains? Trains with up to 400% over-capacity during the morning rush is the norm rather than the exception in most trains into Tokyo.

So what does motivate us to get to work? First of all what is motivation?

Wordnet gives the following description:

The psychological feature that arouses an organism to action toward a desired goal; the reason for the action; that which gives purpose and direction to behavior

but also

the condition of being motivated

And

the act of motivating; providing incentive.

Or

What I want,
Why I want it,
How I want it,

Pretty complex questions. As if we are asking ourselves this every day before we get crushed in the train. But we should ask ourselves these questions! Unfortunately most of us don’t.
WorkVitamins! At least you should go to work at a place that motivates! Who wants to be Dilbert?

Forgive me for the silly tittle, the Financial Times today reported about the positive aspects of games. With the battles between Sony and Microsoft’s XBox heating up, some interesting news about the more positive side effects of gaming. Not that I am interested in games whatsoever, but FT noted apart from the jobs and the economical benefits, the fact that gaming seems to improve staff productivity, and is used for training. Gaming: a WorkVitamin!
We have never used games for our projects, however or we have been installing darts, snooker tables, golf putties and recently table football (in the US called foosball). The staff loves it! We are suggesting inter-departmental competitions.

I googled the positive aspects of gaming and found a very interesting article on the features in games that contribute to motivation in games. Take table 2: Motivation and change the words player to worker and you have the basis for the design of a work environment with happy, motivated staff.

I was in the Netherlands last week and visited Interpolis’ head office in Tilburg. Inside a non-descript building various Ducth designers have transformed a home-like workspace or a work environment that feels like home. The basis for the design is a concept that Interpolis developed with Veldhoen + company. Interpolis’ work environment is based on a concept called Helder Werken (to work in a clear and transparant way) and is not limited to the workspace only but also incorporates the way the staff communicate among themselves as well as with their clients.

The whole office is completly free address, for the 2600 employees only 1600 workplaces have been installed. The reasoning being that most of the staff anyway spend considerabe time away from their desks anyway either in meetings, at their clients offices or working from home. A number of employees spend a few days working from home. Being a completely free address office, the staff decide to work wherever they feel the space can support their working needs for the day. This could be a brain storming environment, a more formal meeting area, a group or team space or a more isolated “cockpit” , a tiny private office to do some concentrated work. The project started in 1995 and in 2003 a new element called Tivoli was added. Interestingly the various themes of the recent addition, although radically different in design outlook, all follow the same principles as the rest of the office. The brief asked to create spaces that would be very different in look and feel so that the staff could select to work in their favourite environment. Marcel Wanders, Atelier van Lieshout, Piet Hein Eek, Jurgen Bey, Irene Fortuyn, Mark Warning, Ellen Sanders and Bas van der Tol all created very atmospheric and radically differrent environments loosely scattered around a long narrow space on the 2nd floor of one of the office wings. It seems that Kick van der Pol, Interpolis’ CEO likes to work in Marcel Wanders’ Stone House, a collection of organically shaped rooms. My ambassador, one of Interpolis’ staff who volunteered to show me around, preferred to work in Atelier van Lieshout’s Garden House. The very different design means that there is something for everyone and every occasion. Some meeting rooms are more for interviews (dimmed light, comfy chairs) while other are more intimidating. However there are also spaces that are not popular such as the one created by Piet Hein Eek which has been redesigned recently and will be open soon. Following the logic of Veldhoen + company that space should be used in the economic way possible: space wasted is money wasted. Interpolis shows that office design and alternative space use are a process rather than a final product.