Employee Well-Being Is a Competitive Edge, Too. How Is Office Design Supposed to Help? | Our Offices, Part 4

Whether the goal is to calm nerves, stoke enthusiasm or raise output, a cup of coffee — or a small corner full of plants with a good view, where a person can unwind — sometimes works better than a raise.

Amazon is building a new headquarters in downtown Seattle. At the center of the cluster of staggered towers sit three transparent, interlocking spheres. These high-tech greenhouses, known as the Amazon Spheres, are due to open in early 2018, planted with every kind of greenhouse species worth keeping.

This is Amazon's attempt to motivate employees with the natural landscape inside its own buildings: "Amazon employees will be able to walk beneath a tree canopy three stories above the ground, hold meetings with colleagues in rooms walled with grapevines, or eat a kale Caesar salad beside an indoor stream."

Margaret O'Mara, an associate professor of history at the University of Washington, sees the Spheres as a Walden Pond under glass. She said: "This is a return to nature. It is a cathedral away from the noise of the city." But Ihab Elzeyadi, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, doubts it does any more good than letting employees look at a small potted plant on their desk.

Still, more and more companies are trying to make their workplaces sustainable and better for the body and mind of the people in them. What is at stake is collaboration, engagement, corporate culture — and, more to the point, efficiency and output.

Mars Drinks, the beverage arm of Mars, once commissioned a research firm to run a global study of 3,800 people. It found that how much a company cares about collaboration, engagement and well-being tracks closely with productivity: companies that have all three are usually more productive.

Ilana Gershon, an associate professor of anthropology at Indiana University, made a related point in an article on "why so many people love job-hopping": an economy in which people change jobs constantly has upended the old relationship between employer and employee, and changed both how employees feel and the mood of the workplace. "Once companies decided that employee loyalty no longer mattered, entrepreneurs needed a new way to help employees form an emotional bond with their work."

In Ilana's view, "Being a good manager today means helping your subordinates learn the skills they will need to land a better job at another company later on. The best managers understand this."

For the employee, a job that strengthens their hand in the next move is a job worth caring about. For the employer, once that concentrated enthusiasm has been used up, there is no need to carry long-term obligations — pensions, say, or other employee benefits. It can hire new people at the lowest wage it can get and turn as many positions as possible into short-term ones.

Ilana writes, "Working out of passion means putting your energy into the task in front of you. Companies need to cultivate employees' love of their tasks, because that brings in more revenue and also helps employees pull off the next move."

Companies are catching on. Rather than chase output alone, they shape how employees behave by designing the experience of the office: using daylight, views, ventilation and terraces to bring nature indoors; planning an office building as a green building from the first drawing; or, like Amazon, putting up three greenhouse spheres. Apple did something similar, bringing in the arborist Dave Muffly to ring its spaceship-shaped new headquarters with a green belt of more than 8,000 trees.

More and more companies put internal cafés and other informal gathering spots in their offices. Having a coffee in a place like that means far more than drinking a beverage. Using the environment to prompt and shape how employees act and feel is growing more popular, and it can reach team spirit and corporate culture. Whether the goal is to calm nerves, stoke enthusiasm or raise output, a cup of coffee — or a small corner full of plants with a good view, where a person can unwind — sometimes works better than a raise.

We worked through offices of different fields, sizes and shapes to see what today's workplaces are designed for. Five trends showed up most often, and most office design can be filed under one of them:

• Cutting the office to fit how the company actually collaborates, with an eye on efficiency;
• Balancing collaborative work against privacy;
• Smart offices that improve the employee experience;
• A focus on well-being and sustainability;
• Using design to explain the company's culture.

This is the fourth piece in the series. Through three cases, we look at how an office can be built around well-being and sustainability.

Building a campus where no Samsung employee is more than one floor from greenery

Among the tech headquarters rising across Silicon Valley, Samsung's 100,000-square-meter campus went to NBBJ, the American architecture firm many tech companies court.

Like the many American companies that go in for "localization" when they open a foreign market, Samsung arrived in Silicon Valley and tried what the big American tech firms do: build a headquarters campus that would refresh its image.

It had to be a green building, one that made the case for sustainability. It had to hold work and leisure in good balance. And it had to take a more active line on a humane working environment, the way Apple and Facebook have.

It had to shake off the stereotype of an Asian company if it wanted to attract people who have their pick of jobs in a fiercely competitive tech market.

The new headquarters is a tower, an amenities building and a garage, on the edge of the intersection of North First Street and East Tasman Drive in San Jose, California. It holds 2,000 employees.

Glass and white metal wrap the whole facade; the ring-shaped structure and the transparent glass together let employees on different floors see one another. Plenty of people have called it a giant glass doughnut. Jonathan Ward, a design partner at NBBJ, explains: "We wanted to give people a surprise. Compared with a traditional, sculptural building, this design is bolder — geometry on the outside, gardens and flowing lines inside."

Inside the glass curtain wall is a roomy atrium planted with every kind of vegetation, so that a visitor feels they have stepped out of the urban jungle into quiet countryside. It also serves as a sports court, an art shop and a coffee bar.

Rare for a high-rise workplace: no Samsung employee is more than one floor from greenery. Amenities such as food delivery and the fitness center sit at the center of the building.

In designing this R&D center, NBBJ again set out to create an atmosphere of open collaboration among specialists from different fields, engineering chance meetings between departments to spark innovation — the same approach it used on headquarters for Alipay and Tencent.

On one shared floor, for instance, the staircase up to the sales area is very wide, so that R&D and sales employees will run into each other there. The chairs and sofas on every floor come in bright red, lemon yellow and orange, and make room for unplanned conversation.

Even so, in a report in The Atlantic, the architecture critics Christopher Hawthorne and Mark Lamster, along with Karrie Jacobs, founding editor-in-chief of Dwell, sounded tired of and skeptical about the way big companies talk about spatial innovation spurring creativity.

Glass windows run down both sides of the office space, with easy views of the mountains around and the city skyline.

Inside, the office building is open and roomy; every employee gets a white desk that rises and falls at the push of a button, so they can find the most relaxed, comfortable posture to work in.

Open-plan areas of various sizes sit on every floor, which inevitably raises the problem of distraction and lost efficiency — but both the company and the designers would rather talk about the benefit to innovation.

Study after study says that being close to nature helps creativity and relieves stress, so NBBJ put three open-air gardens on different floors, filled not only with potted plants but with seating to rest on.

The gym takes up the tower's fifth floor, with the latest equipment, classes, trainers and showers. The garden terrace can double as a yoga studio.

Scott Birnbaum, a vice president in Samsung's display business, likes the Chill Zone best — a colorful employee lounge with sofas, coffee, tea, a convenience store, foosball, ping-pong and pool tables, and board games and Lego besides. Another glass-walled room holds sleep pods, which offer back massages, with music and colored lighting on request, as well as naps.

Roy Malatesta, Samsung's senior director of human resources, has gone so far as to describe working on the campus as "like Christmas every day."

The R&D headquarters is, of course, also a highly energy-efficient building. A row of solar panels on the garage roof supplies renewable power; the tower's facade is shaped to take in less heat, which lowers the cost of cooling the building; large areas of clear glass let daylight reach deeper into the floor plates; and trees and water features tie the building to its surroundings.

China's first office with zero electricity, zero water and zero emissions

Glumac, an architecture firm from Portland, Oregon, has long pushed sustainable design in the built environment. Over nearly 50 years, on projects large and small, it has tried to create building systems that get the most out of energy and do the least to the environment — and it would rather talk about technology than design.

In the words of its founder, Dick Glumac: "Sustainability isn't just a professional achievement for us. At Glumac, it's a core value."

The Shanghai office was the firm's 11th branch worldwide. On completion it became the first facility in East Asia to earn LEED v4 Platinum certification, and China's first office with zero electricity, zero water and zero emissions.

Glumac came to Shanghai in 2011 and chose the Rockefeller Mansion on Yuyuan Road, a house more than 100 years old with 600 square meters of floor space.

In turning the residence into its Shanghai office, Glumac did what it could to make sure the space used green materials and no hazardous chemicals.

Saving the energy the building consumes also took a very involved design process: getting the most out of daylight to improve energy efficiency, installing low-consumption equipment, and putting renewable generators inside the house.

Lighting is usually the biggest energy drain in an office; lighting alone accounts for nearly 30% of total consumption. Given the office's long, narrow shape, operable windows and skylights bring in plenty of daylight. Glumac settled on a lighting control system that manages daylight and electric light together.

To make the most of the daylight falling on the open office area, Glumac installed nine Radio Powr Savr™ wireless daylight sensors. They send radio signals to dimming modules, which adjust the lights to the strength of the daylight available. Lamps near the windows dim while those farther in stay bright, so brightness stays even across the whole office. All the sensors are wireless, which cuts installation and commissioning time and cost.

To deal with air pollution, the Glumac office also has a built-in system that monitors indoor air quality in real time: oxygen, volatile gas emissions, PM2.5 particulates, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and humidity. The readings go straight to screens in the office and can also be pulled up on a phone, so staff and visitors can tell at a glance whether the air around them is healthy.

The office also collects nearly 500 cubic meters of rainwater a year for reuse, cutting energy consumption by 50%.

Solar panels on the roof feed the whole building and the campus grid.

Five air purification systems and a green wall filter out the pollution that is hard to bear outside.

There is a composting toilet, too: a device in a corridor closet near the restroom heats the waste to make the compost denser.

Beyond the level of its sustainable design, the office is full of designs and products that feel like the future — the "carpet in the sky," for one, which is really a set of Cloud acoustic panels hung below the ceiling. They are an answer to the acoustics of offices with exposed ceilings and of meeting rooms, and they keep the office quiet as well as good-looking.

Every Glumac office around the world has a trick of its own when it comes to sustainable design, its own energy-saving invention.

The Portland office, for example, sits in the Standard Insurance Center, a 1968 building in downtown Portland. Glumac gave it a deep energy retrofit — water-saving fixtures, light sensors, eco-friendly materials — and it now uses more than 50% less energy than an ordinary office.

The Los Angeles office is in the Aon Center downtown. With no direct access to clean energy, Glumac instead ran a heat-exchange retrofit off the waste heat from the data center on the building's fourth floor. That waste heat far exceeds what the Glumac office needs, which gets it to "net-zero energy."

Alongside Glumac's cases, the research department of Cushman & Wakefield offers a set of survey figures on why green office towers have the edge:

• Fresh air raises work efficiency by 11%;
• Good daylight and open views raise work efficiency by 23%;
• A better working environment improves working memory by 25%;
• Natural light and operable windows in a property raise work efficiency by 18%.

"A campus that inspires and creates optimism and hope"

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decided to move to a new headquarters in Seattle, its chief administrative officer, Massa Chloe, said that the new campus, along with its visitor center, should give the foundation's mission a physical presence.

"We have great goals — eradicating polio, halving child mortality and famine in Africa, overhauling America's education system. Now we have a place that will keep us connected while it helps us and our partners reach them."

Its new home was meant to play that part, to be a "campus that inspires and creates optimism and hope." The all-glass facade was designed in the hope that a transparent building would strengthen public trust in the mission.

A parking lot of nearly 50,000 square meters became neighborly streets lined with seating, public art and all kinds of plants.

The separate buildings on the campus all connect to one another and serve meetings and events. At the center is a tree-shaded plaza, lanterns hung overhead and a deep pool below. This is real green space, planted with native and non-native ferns, native evergreen huckleberry and forest groundcover.

A rainwater system is the key to keeping that complicated ecosystem alive. When it rains, drainage channels gather all of the water, and reusing it keeps the campus ecologically healthy.

Design research led the team to split the office space 40% private and 60% open, with the aim of giving every employee a healthy, connected place to work.

Each floor's area matches that of a typical downtown Seattle office building, but the long, curving office wings make for a very distinctive working environment. The floor plate is 19.8 meters wide rather than the conventional 36.5, which keeps employees within 9 meters of daylight. That cuts lighting costs and encourages more face-to-face contact.

The 60% open, 40% private split serves collaboration and hierarchy at once. Each work zone holds 20 to 25 employees and comes with a range of meeting rooms and informal seating areas, to make an intimate, integrated team space.

Shared equipment and simple amenity spaces encourage the exchange of ideas, while modular furniture, column-free spaces, raised floors and demountable partitions make later changes easy.

Inside, the foundation's campus is designed around the idea of simple craft, giving employees a humble, quiet atmosphere to work and collaborate in. It draws on the skills of people who have benefited from the foundation's work, tying the design to the foundation's idea of local roots and a global mission.

The conference center, which receives guests all year, has one wall lit end to end; its honeycomb wallpaper is the work of Tibetan Buddhists, and its hand-woven carpets were made by village women in India from locally grown, locally dyed wool. Reclaimed Seattle timber went into custom tabletops, chairs and stools, making an ideal space for group activities and collaboration.

At the level of the building alone, its environmental strategy cuts drinking-water use by 80% and energy use by 40%. Even Greg Nickels, Seattle's former mayor, praised it: "The Gates Foundation will embody two of Seattle's main civic values, environmental awareness and building a healthy community. It will be an important part of downtown Seattle."

There were dissenting voices as well: "This is certainly a perk for the Gates Foundation's own staff, but does a foundation headquarters really need to cost 500 million dollars?"

Image sources: NBBJ, Pinterest, Glumac