FALL 2002
By Tom Kapusta, AIA
FROM OFFICE & COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE MAGAZINE • FALL 2002
Commercial Office Design – Three Hot Topics
By Tom Kapusta, AIA,
TKA + Partners, President
Architectural and interior design solutions change with the times, and in the last year, “the times they are achangin’”! This article will address three hot topics of commercial office design that seem to be prevalent in today’s commercial office environment.
Perhaps the most playful and positive topic covered here is design of the corporate call center, a common office building type justified by the consumers’ demand for customer care, and the corporation’s drive to attract the most pleasant “customer care representatives.”
By now, we consumers have all experienced the pleasure of calling the technical service department of our computer company, the billing department of our department store, or the privacy protection department of our bank. Did you know that your call for “personal service” is probably being routed halfway across the country, or across the northern border to a Canadian province? Your store or bank has probably established a West Coast, Central States, and East Coast center to better answer the need to have 24/7 customer service for you. The result is a large call center, full of young and many times temporary employees, who have the dreaded task of sitting in traditionally small desks and pleasantly answering a daily quota of calls from customers who are almost always confused, disappointed, and potentially irate.
If there was ever an opportunity for an interior design to enhance the image of our clients, this building type is it! Our design needs to make the customer care reps happy, and if they are happy, the company’s image is happy, the irate customer becomes happy, and the corporation keeps that customer, which makes the shareholders happy! Therefore workspace design has suddenly become very important!
Architecturally, first impressions of a building can give the employees an immediate jolt of positive mental attitude. The building entrance or entrances to the suite should represent the culture and personality of the organization. In the photo on page 16, the elevator lobby employs a curved feature wall that leads the visitor one way to the receptionist, and leads the employees the other way to the employee entrance, through the coffee bar café, and past the mail pickup station. Materials were chosen to represent the strength and stability of this world leader in communications, using stone flooring underfoot, a curving grid of metal wall panels from left to right, and modern metallic ceilings overhead. Accented with bright colors and indirect lighting, the entry sequence tells the customer care rep that “I have arrived, and am happy to share the best of my company with my customers.”
Moving into the work environment, we provide light-hearted spaces and amenities for stress relief, so our happy rep can break away from the calls for a fast game of foosball in the game-room, a cup of java while viewing the daily news, or a meal with friends in the self-serve lunchroom. For those who would like to take care of some personal business, there is a cyber-café to go online, private phone rooms for private calls, a quiet room to read and relax, and even a group of lactation rooms for the new moms so common to this age group.
With all these amenities, what is it like to actually do work here? Well, the details of a happy rep’s workstation are equally important, and we like to give the workgroup users some choices. Furniture systems provide options that could numb the senses, but offer the designer many opportunities. Panel heights can provide complete privacy for supervisors or include glass for eye contact with reps. Low panels work for groups of customer care reps on technical teams, but allow undesirable background noise for reps working solo. Work surfaces are at a premium, so space-saving devices such as paper-flow managers, storage drawers, overhead bins, and headsets give our happy rep the feeling of more space to personalize their work environment.
Perhaps most important to the pleasant rep is attention to ergonomics, allowing them to adjust work surface heights for seating or standing, adjust seat and arm heights for posture, adjust keyboard and mouse surfaces for wrist relaxation, and set lighting locations and levels such that screen glare is minimized and eye fatigue is eliminated. All of these issues and more are discussed and presented in detail to encourage input and feedback from the group.
With attention to all the above details, we are finding that customer care centers are inspiring places to work, helping to make all telephone transactions as pleasant as possible for customers and customer care representatives.
Perhaps not as pleasant as the successful call center is the newest need for security design in the workplace, our second hot topic. At the time of this writing, it is almost one year after the events of September 11 changed the attitudes and optimism of not only all peaceloving people worldwide, but also changed the attitudes and optimism of many design projects. Equally influential is the negative effect left by our recessing economy and business collapses such as those of Enron and Arthur Andersen.
While access to corporate suites has always been controlled for those who are invited to attend, the events of the last year have driven us to design now for controlling those who are never invited to attend, such as terrorists, angry stockholders, and disgruntled former employees. Who would have thought that newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal would feature an architectural office solution, with four-color pictorials, describing the design solutions for bulletproof boardrooms resembling the “panic rooms” in the film of the same name? Yes, executive boardrooms are being designed to double as panic rooms, and are remodeled with bulletproof walls from floor to deck, sliding doors with four-point locking systems, presentation screens that double as video monitors that can show closed-circuit TV images outside the room, and built-in storage units that hold flak jackets, oxygen tanks, and gas masks. This is certainly a new trend in architectural design, and with only a few examples completed to date, we hope to cover this topic more thoroughly in future articles. Look for security issues to take on a stronger presence in corporate executive offices.
Lastly, perhaps the fastest-growing area of interest to the office design profession is that of indoor air quality. Our firm has just completed a four-phase build-out of a full floor office suite that was made “more interesting” by the discovery of significant mold colonies living in the exterior wall of our full-floor client. Specialty consultants were brought in; temporary walls were built to isolate occupants from the exterior wall; workstations and offices were relocated; negative air pressure was introduced in the “mold zone”; all mold was abated during after-business hours; and the exterior wall was demolished, discarded, and rebuilt to our new standards for moisture rejection, including new thermal- broken windows and low-voc, (breathable), paint. All of this was accomplished while the floor was still occupied.
Two words of caution to those of you who may be faced with a mold abatement project: Standards of care must be maintained, and communication with the building occupants must be forthright. In our fear that occupants would not return to their workspace until after abatement was complete, we endeavored to find temporary space to work out of during abatement. Luckily, the client did not feel the need to move out, while our air quality consultant glumly yet wittingly asked, “Where are you going to find temporary space that doesn’t also have mold?” According to him, mold is present almost everywhere to varying degrees, and building owners and managers will need to have a regular mold control or removal program in place for the varying degrees of mold present.
Certainly, not all levels and types of mold demand the extensive measures of protection that we provided in this example, but good interior design, wall design, and specification of building products are essential to minimizing the chances of new mold growth. Watch for indoor air quality to become a higher priority in future design projects, and insist that your architectural design team understand all aspects, from selection of materials, to quality assurance of the construction details, and appropriate engineering of humidity and ventilation.