Employees Test Drive
New Office Layouts
Behind a gray door in an abandoned shopping mall in Fort Worth, Texas, RadioShack Corp. has launched an ambitious experiment -- with its workers as human subjects.
The company turned a defunct retail computer store into a freshly decorated office, fitted with open-plan cubicles, low file cabinets with cushions on them for informal chats, and wireless Internet access. Then it had a group of employees work there for months. Video cameras recorded their every move.
Experts trained in workplace anthropology conducted interviews and focus groups. The workers kept journals about what they liked and disliked about the office.
The point? To determine whether this special office setup -- dubbed the Idealab -- was a success before rolling the prototype out across a new four-building RadioShack campus on the grassy banks of the Trinity River here.
"We're putting a $200 million investment on the line," says Nina Petty, vice president for corporate real estate, referring to the cost of the company's new headquarters. The Idealab, which cost around $400,000 to build and operate, is "our insurance policy" on the investment, she says.
For over a century, experiments on workplace design have shown that layout and lighting have profound effects on productivity. But many real-estate managers focus instead on squeezing bodies into ever-shrinking cubicles, hoping to keep costs down. "Office space is the most squandered resource in the modern economy," says Frank Duffy, a co-founder of DEGW, a London company that does design studies for companies, including RadioShack.
Now, as the economy expands, competition and outsourcing demand that businesses be creative about how they house their most-expensive workers. Some, such as Office Depot Inc. and FMR Corp.'s Fidelity Investments, along with the U.S. General Services Administration, have devoted major resources to researching office environments through focus groups, by mining human-resources data and observing work behavior in different office layouts. But few have been as ambitious as RadioShack and its mock office.
Fully functional at about one-third the size of a floor at the new campus, the Idealab was designed, as was the entire new headquarters, by architects HKS Inc. of Dallas. Housed in a former shopping mall, the office is downstairs from RadioShack's soon-to-be vacated headquarters, a pair of interconnected 19-story towers that Ms. Petty calls "dysfunctional and hierarchical." Back in 1978, the company, then known as Tandy Corp., was a conglomeration of retailers, including Color Tile, Pier One and Bombay Co. The idea was to keep the business units separated vertically, preventing what the company called "cultural contamination."
When the company consolidated around the flagship retailer and changed its name in 2000, management felt it was time for an office that better reflected the new operation. "I was so intent on creating a building that didn't have these barriers,' says Leonard Roberts, chief executive. The 900,000-square-foot headquarters, about the same size as the old space, is supposed to flatten the hierarchy and connect, rather than quarantine, colleagues.
The idea of an open office plan certainly isn't new. But RadioShack's stab at it represents the latest thinking and permutations in office design. Instead of the 22 entrances and five parking lots at the current headquarters, the new complex has one parking garage and a single front door for all 2,400 employees that spills onto a "main street" corridor connecting all departments. Executives will be on the middle floor of the central building, a departure from their current top-floor, marble-clad suite with private elevator.
With the Idealab, RadioShack hopes to avoid the pitfalls many companies have faced when migrating from individual offices to cubicles. The test began in the summer of 2003, when RadioShack moved its store-design department into the lab. The group of a few dozen workers was picked because of their diversity of ages, functions and tenure. Some worked collaboratively, while others did more heads-down work.
What they all found was a collection of multicolored cubicles scattered around the floor alongside small enclosed "focus" rooms. There is also a conference room, a home-style kitchen with a large island, and various nooks and crannies for workers to trade notes and ideas. (The one thing missing in the Idealab is a bathroom; workers have to go into the abandoned mall for that.)
The first thing for managers to get used to was the lack of offices. "I was pretty resistant," says Karen Welninski, a manager who spent seven years in a private space. She spoke about her Idealab experience to colleagues at a RadioShack town-hall meeting in April: "In our building today, executives have corner offices. Why? Because they worked for them to get there. So why am I now getting a cube again?"
She and her fellow guinea pigs kept journals and were interviewed, alone and in groups, by RadioShack's design team. Video cameras were trained on different parts of the office to see which areas were used and which were ignored. Every few weeks, the desk configurations were switched around, as were the desk surfaces and filing systems. Workers tested different desk accessories such as lamps and telephones.
After four months, results came in. Much of what was learned validated the ideas HKS and the other consultants, DEGW and furniture maker Steelcase Inc., suggested before building the lab -- namely, that given transition time, the groups would adapt, and even thrive, in the new environment. Ms. Welninski was a prime example. "I would say it took me ... at least two months to really kind of adapt to it," she says.
The experts also learned what didn't work. The video cameras showed that people didn't use the small focus rooms in the back. Support staff said centralized copy rooms with multifunctional machines were too far away. People wanted simpler machines closer to their areas. Computer technicians wanted whiteboards on wheels instead of extra storage.
From a bottom-line perspective, RadioShack says the Idealab saved the company around $1.5 million by preventing design mistakes before they were built in the new complex. For example, spaces for vending machines in the kitchen areas were too low, a mistake that wouldn't have been discovered until the Coke machines arrived across the entire campus. The length of a decorative lighting element in the common area was deemed too long. "On 18 floors, that adds up to thousands of dollars and wouldn't have been as attractive as it could have been," says Mark Hill, a senior vice president.
Wood tables in the conference room showed pen indentations, so a switch was made to a more durable laminate. A leader of the project, Tim Abbott, says the digital lighting-control panel in the conference room was scrapped simply because "I can't work it."
Flooring vendors installed six types of carpets and three types of raised floor panels in the Idealab free of charge. "We'd stomp on the floor and it felt hollow," says Becky Smith a project manager, "so we picked the floor tiles made of concrete." Workers from other companies who toured the space recommended, based on their experience, two ice machines and two refrigerators instead of one.
The research in the Idealab was vigorous, but it falls short of being scientific. Like many workplace studies, it suffers from something called the Hawthorne Effect, named for a study in the 1920s and 1930s that found factory workers increased output simply because they knew they were being watched.
But RadioShack says getting rank-and-file workers involved in the design was part of the point. The company used the lab as an internal marketing tool, shuttling nearly the entire staff through it on tours. From there, the 70 or so departments talked about what aspects of the Idealab design they wanted applied to their "neighborhoods" at the new facility. Says Ms. Petty: "Each group was able to get the right things, versus the cookie cutter approach of throwing the same cubes at everyone."
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