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Change matters PDF Print E-mail
Written by Morag Girdwood, 2007   

Morag Girdwood argues that assumptions about workplace change are still too often out of step with the reality, and puts forward the case for 'flexible buildings' in order to keep pace with evolving requirements. 

What factors are influencing changes in office density?

How can property development and design help to cut costs?

As long ago as 1965 Gordon Moore was framing the idea that now bears his name. Moore's Law predicted that chip density, and therefore computing power, would double every two years. By the 1970s that had been amended to every 18 months. The law is still seen as a useful benchmark even if latest predictions show that it will cease to be relevant after 2019 when circuits are built at the atomic level.
 
Of course, this is the usual kind of stuff we hear about technology all the time. It is the clanging noises made by change in computer culture that never quite conveys the subtler changes of culture and context it heralds. The shiny new gadgets are born into a world that has yet to work out what it wants from them and into a place with people, cultures, ideas and surroundings that develop at a different rate.
 
It is this mismatch in pace that lies at the heart of one of the great paradoxes that face facilities managers. The Gordian knot you must continually unravel is tangled from the often conflicting timescales for change in property and architecture, in interior design and fit-out, in organisational structure, technology, workplace law and the needs of individuals. How do you square off having a 10-year commercial lease for a building which, if you take average figures, will experience 15 generations of technology, at least two changes of senior management, a similar number of restructures and dozens of pieces of legislation during its lifetime?

Understanding the challenge


The scope of the problem is apparent when you consider that over the relatively short period of the past three or so years, office densities in the City of London have increased from around 15sqm per person to around 10sqm or less per person. They have done this while large amounts of space have remained unused, so this suggests that something structural rather than cyclical is happening within the office market. And what is happening is that the inhabitants of the buildings are changing the way they use them. They are using less space to support more people. The reason they are doing that is to save money. And the thing that allows them to do it is new technology.

The scale of the opportunity for organisations to save money on their property has been illustrated in a report by the economist Roger Bootle. He argues that across UK business, around £18 billion has been lost annually through the inefficient use of property and claims that dealing with this could increase gross trading profits by up to 13 per cent. What's more, new working practices could save £6.5 billion a year and a 10 per cent reduction in FM costs could save £1.3 billion annually.
 
Firms are now increasingly aware of this and are taking advantage, most obviously by fitting more people into their buildings. While city centre office buildings are still designed at 12-17sqm per person when based on typical densities laid out by the British Council for Offices, IPD and other researchers, market evidence suggests that more and more organisations are now using 10sqm per person or even less.

One of the reasons for this is that people are far more likely to be away from the office and firms know it. So, as firms become more aware of those sorts of issues, the more likely they are to make more use of desk sharing, drop-in zones, breakout space and so on. Individual workspace is on the decrease but that is being replaced to a large extent by other types of space, quiet rooms, multi-functional rooms and so on. That is inevitable anyway because the nature of work is changing to become more collaborative.

The market has changed at the obvious level of mobile technology, creating a mobile workforce, but also at the static level where flat screens have been a powerful force for change. These developments have flattened workstation footprints by around 20 per cent and allowed more people to work in the same space.

Some property developers are getting this but many are still producing speculative buildings based on old standards. This failure to adapt is apparent at a macro level. For example, the 2006 London Office Policy Review has anticipated that there will be 500,000 new workers in central London in the 20 years to 2026 and has calculated, based on an occupational density of 17sqm, that it will need getting on for 9sqm of additional space to accommodate them. Unfortunately they have failed to factor in the impact of changing planning methodologies, technologies and lifestyles that will make a nonsense of that figure.

Built-in flexibility


The answer to these conundrums of course is to build flexibility into the building at every level. At the property level, this obviously means a change in contractual terms, notably in the length of leases and the provision of lease breaks.

Varying levels of flexibility must also be apparent through the rest of the building in terms of its design and management. In the past this has meant dealing with churn, that old bugbear for facilities managers. Churn, defined as the proportion of employees who move within the office each year (and the costs associated with those moves), is traditionally a consequence of having dedicated workstations of various sizes and in different layouts depending on job grades and job functions.

So if we take an idealised view of the office as a sort of flexible, drop-in centre for a peripatetic, democratised and technologically literate workforce of self-motivated knowledge workers, it should be theoretically possible to eliminate churn. The office stays the same and people move within it. That would be nice and would solve many of the problems of the varying rates of changes discussed earlier, but churn rates of over 50 per cent are still common: the ideal is some way off and is - quite possibly - unfeasible.
 
Even without the issue of churn, flexibility is needed to cope with change. Flexibility must be hardwired into the building at a macro-level. Not only must floorplates be capable of accepting a wide range of work styles and planning modules, servicing must be appropriate and anticipate change.

That doesn't mean just in terms of technology and telecoms but also in terms of basic human needs such as having enough toilets to deal with changing occupational densities. It means having a HVAC specification that can deal with the different needs associated with different numbers of people and different types of equipment.

At an interior design level, most talk of flexibility in the past has centred on the need to reconfigure office furniture. The past few years have seen office furniture systems respond by becoming either lighter and more mobile or, paradoxically, more rigid, notably in the form of bench systems that are almost architectural in their scale and are based on the notion of the mobile worker we described earlier.

Other elements of the interior that were once considered static or semi-static are also having to offer far larger degrees of flexibility. These include lighting, storage and partitioning products, as well as carpet.

The issue of flexibility has become more focused as the demands placed on products like these have changed. For example, carpet is now routinely expected to define space, portray corporate identity, comply with legislation such as the Disability Discrimination Act and act as an aid in wayfinding. It must do all this and be able to adapt as the organisation changes. This would be very difficult and wasteful with traditional systems, but some firms have responded to changes in the demands from facilities managers with innovative products that allow carpet to be reconfigured quickly and cheaply.

This is the level of flexibility now demanded by facilities managers who have the task of dealing with a level of complexity that was completely unheard of only a few years ago. With the impact of Moore's Law likely to be felt for some years yet, the need to respond to and anticipate change will continue to be a defining feature of the FM landscape for a very long time.

About the author

Morag Girdwood is Marketing Director at Milliken Carpet Europe. Please visit www.millikencarpeteurope.com


 
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