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More than a decade since the swing toward open-plan offices — and the resulting backlash from workers concerned about noise and a lack of privacy — a host of ancillary spaces are cropping up in workplaces, offering employees an escape from their (sometimes overly loud) co-workers. These private spaces include prayer rooms, wellness rooms and libraries [...] All of which prompts the question: After pulling down the walls that defined yesterday’s workplaces, are we once again putting them up? — The New York Times
Companies want employees to share what they know. After all, research has found that this leads to greater creativity, more innovation, and better performance, for individuals, teams, and organizations. Yet despite companies’ attempts to encourage knowledge-sharing, many employees withhold what they know — a phenomenon known as knowledge hoarding or knowledge hiding. — Harvard Business Review
A team of researchers have been exploring the dynamics behind knowledge sharing in work environments. While this is something many leaders encourage, their study has found that sometimes individuals within a team have certain reasons for hiding knowledge that might be able to help the rest of the... View full entry
When its spheres and three surrounding towers are completed, [Amazon] will have 10 million square feet of office space in Seattle, more than 15 percent of the city's inventory, on a campus that occupies more than 10 square blocks. That will provide space for Amazon to more than double in size, to 50,000 Seattle workers in the next decade...The spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, are Amazon's boldest statement yet in the first project it's building from the ground up. — Bloomberg
More on Archinect:NBBJ's biosphere design for Amazon Seattle HQ becomes even more organicNBBJ designs biospheres for Amazon's Seattle headquartersThis drone video takes you on a fascinating flight through the guts of Seattle's Bertha tunneling machine View full entry
For decades, bosses [in certain professions] have groomed their assistants to be the next generation of big shots by working them long hours for low wages.
Call it the “Devil Wears Prada” economy, after the novel depicting life working for a fictionalized Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor.
But now, with the Obama administration moving to require time-and-a-half overtime pay for most salaried employees making less than $47,476 a year, that business model is suddenly under assault.
— the New York Times
"The change presents more than an economic challenge for the companies that rely on the willingness of young, ambitious workers to trade pay and self-respect for a shot at a prestige job down the road."The article doesn't explicitly reference architecture, but as Archinect's past coverage on the... View full entry
Moving offices can be a pain, but it’s also an opportunity to take stock of how the company has grown and what it could still become. With this move, we’ve put an emphasis on capturing the culture, or Quartziness, that defines Quartz employees and their work: global, nerdy, creative, and so on...This diary is part of a new obsession at Quartz, also called The Office, which is exploring the future of work, from management structures to the gig economy to distributed workplaces to compensation. — Medium
From mass-scale organizations like WeWork to four year old "digitally native news outlet" Quartz, the questions of what defines work culture in a largely post-manufacturing, perennially fluid global infrastructural era are still being formulated. Quartz is currently asking how "How do you capture... View full entry
That’s not to say that all circular buildings represent some emergent 21st-century order. It is interesting, though, that past precedents have usually been buildings designed for spectatorship: sports stadiums or, more resonantly, panopticon prisons, where inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring so they’re visible to guards in a central observation tower. Take away that tower and you have the Apple campus. — The Guardian
Circles are an emerging form of office buildings (e.g. Apple HQ, Zappos, Government Communications HQ) and organizing people (Holacracy), as they convey positive qualities like transparency and open collaboration. But, as one New Zealand artist warns in his work, what sinister undertones linger... View full entry
...Napping, and the need to nap, are universal. Abundant research – at the universities of Loughborough, Pennsylvania, California and many others – shows the immediate and pronounced benefits of even just 10 or 20 minutes sleep on a tired mind... In short it is rather odd that almost the whole world, and especially the cities where so many people spend their days, have not yet found a way to incorporate napping into the culture. — The Guardian
