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May/June 2015 • $5

Workplace Design Revolution Liberating Employees from Cube Farms and Silos

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Ten California Buildings Rated “Outstanding”

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10 California Buildings News • May/June 2015

Workplace Design Revolution Liberating Employees from Cube Farms and Silos Genentech is one of the world’s most amazing companies. Its biopharmaceutical products have helped untold millions of patients. It’s a renowned people-oriented company, frequently listed as one of the best companies to work for in the country. So when Genentech planned a new facility in South San Francisco, it took special pains to ensure that it would be designed to be as productive as possible. So its facilities team turned to its employees. They surveyed them, intensively studied their best work habits and designed accordingly. The result is Genentech Building 35 or “B35” as it is known on the sprawling campus. It’s a facility so unique that it attracted California Governor Jerry Brown who proudly appeared to cut its ribbon on opening day May 21.

It is designed to inspire interaction, innovation, collaboration and seamless community. It’s destined to be known as one of the world’s most work-facilitating environments, surely to be emulated by organizations that want their architectural design to add value to the work they do.

“For us, employee wellbeing can be directly influenced by a building’s architecture,” Carla Boragno, vice president of site services at Genentech, told California Buildings News. “We designed Building 35 with architectural components that encourage discovery and make positive connections between employees and their workspace. B35 represents the intersection of sustainability, wellbeing, collaboration and choice.

It provides our employees with a variety of spaces to spark their best thinking, while delivering on our commitment to the environment.”

B35 employees do not have designated offices, but can work in diverse “neighborhoods” that are equipped with personal storage areas, flexible meeting spaces of various sizes and casual seating options.

As teams and work assignments change and become more comfortable with new collaborative technologies, the teaming zones can be adapted to provide workspaces to fit the work. Each floor features a community atrium bridge and pantry. Light floods in from every direction, stimulating imaginations, saving energy costs, giving the facility transparencies designed to promote collaboration.

The interiors give you a sense of both greatness and intimacy. “It isn’t about a building. It’s about the way we work…The very same things that inspire creativity — community, interaction, flexibility, greater use of technology, sustainability and natural light— also make good business sense,” according to Genentech.

11 California Buildings News • May/June 2015

B35 will accommodate about 1,500 employees in its seven-story 255,000 square-feet area on a hill overlooking the San Francisco Bay and mountains to the west.

In addition to its employee productivity values, B35 was designed to be highly sustainable. A LEED Gold-pursuing structure, it uses 29% less energy than the national energy standard for new office buildings. The architectural firm was Perkins+Will, and it was engineered by Arup and built by Webcor Builders.

As Genentech facilities researchers recently told a raptly attentive audience of the International Facility Management Association of Silicon Valley, the B35 design principle answered the question: Where is work best done? Planners began thinking of B35 by using terms

like towns, hubs and neighborhoods —with collaboration a paramount objective. Research was conducted in other settings on the 61-building campus, then used to develop B35.

Genentech commissioned studies of its employees and found there were five generations whose style of work needed to be accommodated. Rather than forcing the five to adapt to a single work style, they quickly learned that they needed to create flexible environments to suit varied styles. In their survey they learned that collaboration was extremely important, so they designed B35 to permit different types of meetings, from corporate boardrooms with interactive monitors that permitted distance conferencing on a global scale to a living-room setting with lounge furniture. Mobility was also seen to be important, so workers are given mobile technology and are able to plug into communications outlets throughout the building.

An important result of the B35 planning process was the realization that, since employees are often away from assigned desks in traditional work settings, buildings often waste space. That means companies often pay dearly for real estate that they don’t need. With its new design, B35 can accommodate 58% more people than a traditional structure of the same dimensions. This fact alone could have a major impact on commercial estate.

(Continued on page 26) Opposite page: Open atrium: many of the buildings features were designed with employee well-being mind, including healthy café choices, air quality meters and healthy construction materials. This page: Center photo: The B35 Neighborhoods provide employees with flexible workspaces that enable collaboration and inspire innovation.

Lower photo: building’s atrium brings in lots of natural light and a view of the bay. Photo credit: Genentech.

Top photo: interior view of the building.

26 California Buildings News • May/June 2015

Workplace Design Revolution (Continued from page 11) A Workforce Design Revolution Has Begun The authors of Change Your Space, Change Your Culture report on what is becoming a “revolution in the workplace.”

Their efforts draw wisdom from a multidisciplinary coalition called Change4Space, comprised of some of the world’s leading companies and organizations in the greater buildings sector. These include firms like Haworth, Balfour Beatty, Google, the U.S. General Services Administration, Autodesk and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Contributing research were executives at IBM, General Dynamics, Jones Lange LaSalle, Cushman & Wakefield, CBRE and many others.

“The workplace becomes the catalyst, the stage, and the enhancer for new values to emerge and grow,” say Change Your Space authors.

“The walls are coming down,” says MindSHIFT thought leader Rex Miller, Haworth’s Mabel Casey and Balfour Beatty’s Mark Konchar, who wrote Change Your Space. It is a manifesto with a mission: “Topple institutional disengagement and, thereby, liberate people to discover their best way to work.”

As this primer for more efficient workplace design proclaims, “When you change your space, you change your culture.” The authors explain, “The workplace becomes the catalyst, the stage, and the enhancer for new values to emerge and grow.”

A more engaging workplace, they say, can have a $1 trillion positive impact on the economy. They say that by not realizing that a person’s life is integrated, American business loses that sum of money each year. “Personal health, safety, marriage, family, commuting, finances, and other burdens are integrally related to our ability to achieve and produce.” The whole person is negatively affected by traditional structures, they maintain, saying, “For decades we have been building the structures of our lives as silos, cubicles, bubbles, and other isolating pods, cultures of disconnection.” The result is costly absenteeism and employees who show up for work but don’t perform well.

The toxic bottom 20 percent of employees costs U.S. businesses $550 billion a year, stress drains another $300 billion, chronic health conditions balloon to over $1 trillion, and working in sick buildings adds another $60 billion.

That totals 13 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product,” they say. They define “toxic” people as those sociologists say impose a drag on good work in many ways. Buildings that stimulate engagement, they maintain, will reduce toxic behavior and boost the number of people who get excited about achieving workplace goals.

The authors suggest that buildings not be viewed as “sunk costs,” but rather as assets. “If we could see (buildings) as the way to shape culture, we might begin to understand that (they) grant a great return on investment,” by spurring productivity. “The new office,” they say, “is a place of revolution — the deposing of the exhausted forms and structures born in the industrial age. That crumbling age is being replaced by a new workplace and new ways to organize, create and collaborate.” n

Like the spaces shown on these pages, buildings that stimulate engagement will reduce toxic behavior and get people excited about achieving workplace goals. Photos courtesy of Steelcase.

27 California Buildings News • May/June 2015