Category Archives: WorkVitamins

What are WorkVitamins?

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In 2001, Martin van der Linden developed a new architectural methodology while working as an assistant researcher at Tokyo’s Waseda Univeristy. Martin believed that architecture should be a catalyst for change in innovative environments, and his methodology – called WORKVITAMINS – was based on this idea. But designing innovative and inspirational spaces from the inside out is not an easy task: descriptors such as poet, artist and great lover must be earned by the one being described, and the title of innovative workspace is no different. Therefore, Martin crafted a closed-loop system with four distinct steps:

Initiate: setting the tone and direction for the project using a Shared Workplace Vision,

Analyse: Understanding the specific place-related needs of the organisation. Finding the gaps between an organisation’s ideal conditions and its current situation,

Change: Testing creative ideas to address the issues discovered during the analysis,

Implement: the realisation of steps 1 through 3 and the design and construction of a truly innovative workplace.

Architecture is space created for human activity. The role of an architect designing a workspace is to provide the users with a variety of spatial choices that will accommodate their changing work needs. Architecture that starts with WorkVitamins encourages authentic experiences at work.

 

Sit less

That office work has it’s pains is a well researched fact: various office related injuries or repetitive motion injuries such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome have been well documented. As most of us a are spending more and more time behind computers problems like:

  • neck, shoulder, and lower back pains
  • headaches
  • irritability
  • difficulty sleeping
  • deteriorated vision
  • eye strain
  • eye irritation
  • red eyes
  • blurred vision

are all becoming part of our jobs.

I have always advocated to clients that having a diverse work environment, diverse in terms of design as well as seating, will benefit communications and help staff to perform their specific tasks at hand. A recent study however even shows that diversity of seating, and better non-seating arrangements will be beneficial for the staff’s health:

“Prolonged time sitting suppresses your immune system, which may increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. And your blood isn’t circulating as it should when you’re sedentary for long periods of time. When blood doesn’t flow thru your veins up to your heart, it could lead to dangerous blood clot. It also has metabolic consequences – increasing your resting blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Researchers say the metabolic effect may explain why the association was strongest for cardiovascular disease mortality in the study.”

Some of these studies date back to the late 1950’s when

“…a study found that people with sedentary jobs (bus drivers) were twice as likely as those with active jobs (mailmen) to develop cardiovascular disease. More recently, extended daily TV watching and time on the computer–which, like desk jobs, involve long periods of time sitting still–have been linked to a greater risk of metabolic syndrome, a constellation of health problems that can lead to diabetes and heart disease.”

Another reason to have standing height tables with bar stools or exercise balls instead of chairs in the office.

Or you could try the Office Walker:

Walk and Code from 8th Light on Vimeo.

ROWE

If you look at your own day at the office, don’t these office maths make sense?

8:00am
• Enter the office building.
• Drop your stuff in your office and head to the coffee maker.
• Chat with a co-worker about last night’s game
• Make coffee – it’s already empty
• Look for creamer – where is the damn creamer?
• Go to the supplies cabinet. Find old creamer and dump it in your coffee. Gag a few times and complain to everyone around you.
• Get sidetracked on the way back to your office. A co-worker wants you to check out their new truck. “Nice wheels” you say.

9:00am
• Plop down in a meeting.
• What’s this meeting about, anyway?
• Listen with one ear while daydreaming about the weekend.

9:30
• Update meeting participants about your project (START THE CLOCK)

9:35
• Go back to daydreaming. (STOP THE CLOCK)

10:00
• Go to the bathroom
• Run to next meeting

10:05
• Chat with co-workers while waiting for everyone else to show up

10:15
• Start meeting
• Solve issue with last night’s logistics snafu (START THE CLOCK)
• Give update to team on upcoming shipment

10:45
• Blackberry rings – step out of meeting to take a call from child’s school. (STOP THE CLOCK)

11:00
• Go to your office

11:05
• Begin looking at emails (START THE CLOCK)

11:10
• Get interrupted by manager – asks you what you think about this crazy weather. (STOP THE CLOCK)

11:30
• Head to non-working lunch

1:00
• Back in the office.

In a Traditional Workplace, it looks like that dude already put in 5 hours of work!

In a ROWE, all  that dude did was put in exactly 40 minutes of work and wasted 4 hours and 20 minutes displaying presenteeism.

Next time someone says, “I put in 60 hours last week!” you can roll your eyes, because they are probably using Traditional Workplace Math.

via ROWE

The smell of fear

A smell you sometimes smell in offices is fear. It seems now that humans can actually smell this according to this article in The Guardian:

“People can unconsciously detect whether someone is stressed or scared by smelling a chemical pheromone released in their sweat, according to researchers who have investigated the underarm secretions of petrified skydivers.”

The research was funded by US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the military might want to use it as a weapon…

Dr Lilianne Mujica-Parodi at Stony Brook University in New York State stated that: “We demonstrate here the first direct evidence for a human alarm pheromone … our findings indicate that there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally, ‘contagious’.”

Yet another reason to inject some WorkVitamins in the office!

Where am I?

You are a business person, world-wide head of facilities of a large global corporation. You are on a tour, visiting many of the branch offices around the world. Your corporation has a global agreement with hotels, furniture suppliers, real-estate agents, airline companies, ad agencies, architects, coffee providers, telephone systems. When you step out of a taxi and walk, suit case in hand through security gate of the branch office you are a little confused, doesn’t the building look the same as yesterday? Wasn’t that the same coffee shop on the ground floor? The same glass box structure, elevated to great heights, the same revolving door entrance, the same curved reception counter, the same Barcelona chairs are waiting for you, and well, obviously the company logo is the same. Yesterday you were in Bangkok and the heat outside was thick like a wet blanket clinging on your shirt. Today  you landed at a foggy and cold, autumn airport and you had to wear a raincoat. But inside the office tower were you company has this branch the temperature is set at an equal 23 degrees throughout the whole building. Despite the difference in temperature in this country and Thailand you noticed that the temperature inside this building is almost equal to interior temperature of the office in Bangkok. As you walk through the office, you walk past identical office desks, chairs and storage units, identical to the ones you were walking past on the other side of the globe only a few days ago. The office looks efficient, with its neat rows of organically shaped desks and low partitions. You can see the grey skyline stretching for miles outside, notice that it has started to rain again and feel relieved you took your umbrella with you. Inside the office the spaciousness continuous, with its glass partitions that divide but do visually not separate the various meeting rooms, private offices and other enclosed spaces. The office is colourful, walls are painted in bright orange and blue to contrast the greyness outside. People are busy at work, some are sitting behind their computer screens, writing emails, inputting data, on the phone or running towards appointments. The buzz of activity gives you the comfortable feeling that business is going well here. You step into the meeting room and are greeted by colleagues whose faces or names you recognized from the video conferences or internal email memos. As you drink your coffee with the familiar logo on the cup, and listen to the report in English while watching a presentation on the screen, your eyes skim to room and all of a sudden you …

forget were you are.

In your mind you go through your travel schedule: tomorrow you will continue to Brussels, after that Copenhagen and finally Rome. When you started your trip you were anxious to visit all  these branches and were feeling a strange combination of anticipation as well as discomfort which one has when visiting new, unknown places, countries where you don’t speak the local language. But after your first stop in Japan, this, at the same time nervous and exiting feeling has disappeared, and the trip has become one of routine. In the hotels, the airports, the taxis, everyone you meet speaks English. The breakfast buffet at each hotel is always the same: the same choice of fruit, the brown, white and pastry breads, the same selection of eggs, and even the choice of Japanese breakfast was available in almost each hotel you stayed in. But where are you … now? You look around the room, people are wearing Armani suits, Prada glasses, scribbling with Montblanc pens in their Moleskine notebooks. You start to sweat, your heart is racing, you feel dizzy, you forget about the presentation, this is ridiculous, you are trying to remember,  but you just don’t know where you are.

The presenter, a pretty asian lady in her early thirties, dressed in a black one piece, opens up a Powerpoint presentation titled “Presentation for John Candy, Head of Facilities Worldwide”. You realize you have seen this opening slide 12 times now. After all you have been to twelve cities in 20 days, and as you sit in this meeting room on the same type of chairs you sat a few days ago, in a similar kind of meeting you feel as if it the people have moved while you and the city remained in place. A tall blond man with a Brooklyn accent asks you when you would like to see the new premises, your are lost are lost, lost for words.  But more than being lost for words you feel you are lost in space…

PinkCow presentation

I’ll be speaking at the PinkCow next Thursday.

Pink Cow Connections #64: WorkVitamins, Bringing Perspective to the Office:

“Maximizing your working environment assets. Productive spaces to improve your business.”

Anyone who has worked for a typical Japanese corporation has horror stories to tell about the workplace. The rows and rows of small, steel desks with files and paper stacked above and below, the colour tones of Stalinist grey evenly distributed throughout the whole space except for the yellow smoking room , the artistic coffee stains on the carpet, the direct translation of the company’s hierarchy onto the design (buchos on the window, kachos on the end of each row, last hire at the end of the row), the blinds that are consistently closed and despite the top location of the office allow no views outside, etc.. etc… Is it any wonder that Japan has one of the world’s highest suicide rates? Studies have shown that the work environment has a significant influence on our well being. The work environment is business’ last frontier, as companies should stop to treat their work space as a warehouse crammed with stuff and staff. It is time to view the work environment as a powerful motivational tool to create a place where people enjoy working in, encourages communication and team work. The workplace can either hinder or encourage this.
During the presentation Martin will show an analysis of a typical office and the potential for change. He will explain about the methodology he created called WorkVitamins, which through a series of 5 steps has helped his clients to implement a work environment where work can actually be fun. At the end of the presentation he will also briefly discuss a book he is writing on the subject, including the growing influence that the internet has on our rapidly changing definition of what work is.

More here

Man, woman, space.

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What do men, women space and comfort have in common?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article which you can find on his website called listening to khakis:
Not long ago, two psychologists at York University, in Toronto-Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals-conducted an experiment in which they had men and women sit in an office for two minutes, without any reading material or distraction, while they ostensibly waited to take part in some kind of academic study. Then they were taken from the office and given the real reason for the experiment: to find out how many of the objects in the office they could remember. This was not a test of memory so much as it was a test of awareness-of the kind and quality of unconscious attention that people pay to the particulars of their environment. If you think about it, it was really a test of fashion sense, because, at its root, this is what fashion sense really is-the ability to register and appreciate and remember the details of the way those around you look and dress, and then reinterpret those details and memories yourself.
This idea-that men eliminate and women integrate-is called by Meyers-Levy the “selectivity hypothesis.” Men are looking for a way to simplify the route to a conclusion, so they seize on the most obvious evidence and ignore the rest, while women, by contrast, try to process information comprehensively.”

Meyers-Levy notes that:

“Females generally attempt to engage in a rather effortful, comprehensive, piecemeal analysis of all available information. On the other hand, men are more selective processors of information, who tend to pick up on single, highly salient or personally relevant pieces of information that are quickly and easily processed. They disregard the rest.”

I think this is an interesting idea, especially when you think about sexualizing space, dividing it into male or female space. At this presentation by  Andres Duany the discussion is about the de-sexualization of space. 

“Family rooms instead of dens. Clean garages. Women in cigar bars and boxing clubs. American females have commandeered, or at least infiltrated, nearly every part of the private and public realm. After the terrible centuries when interior space was overwhelmingly male, a balance was gradually achieved, culminating with the house plans of the first half of the 20th century. Now has the balance tipped too far? If the New Urbanism provides a place for everyone, should it also program specifically for male activity, however abhorrent? Are sheds and rear alleys enough?”

WorkVitamins: The book

I have started writing my book on WorkVitamins, so far it are going to be 28 chapters divided into 5 sections. Section one will be trying to address the fundamental question of why we work. The second section will deal with the concept of the office, why we have offices as we have them today, while part 3 deals with the ever increasing individualization of employees and the way employers view, or miss to view this change. The fourth part will be about the physical changes in the workplace and part 5 will be an explanation about our methodology: WorkVitamins, and will bring all this together.

So far the writing was going quite well, I had written 5 chapters. But yesterday I noticed that I accidentally overwritten one chapter (chapter 11 on individualizers). I was rather pleased with the chapter. Writing does not come easy to me, but this one was going so well. Now, it is all gone, and I am wrecking my brain thinking what I have written…( I am following the advice to get first a draft out and then to start the re-writing). I am also writing in a non chronological order thinking I will end with the first part. As I continue writing I will also look at sites on creative writing.    Â