Author Archives: vlm

As the COVID-19 pandemic appears to finally be subsiding, the remote working environment has remained ongoing for many companies and people. Creating a work from anywhere environment, however, isn’t just as simple as providing remote connections and cloud services to employees. The best performers on your team need to be able to effectively collaborate and share ideas, and be able to resolve conflict in an environment where they aren’t face to face with customers or each other.

The Key To The “Work From Anywhere” Environment

This recent article on the Haworth website discusses this need, and reviews what is important regarding collaboration in a work from anywhere environment. Specifically, the article touches on “High Performing Teams” (abbreviated to HPTs)…individuals with specialized skills that have goals of superior results throughout the organization.

The need to furnish HPTs with high impact technology and tools for problem solving is particularly important. A company’s HPTs have a wide range of backgrounds and skill sets, and they may be partially or completely divided from each other by their physical location. Haworth offers a technology platform called Bluescape to assist employees in their collaboration, be it through setting up activities, assigning responsibilities, and following timelines.

Bluescape and other collaborative technology tools help to improve productivity and enable HPTs to work more efficiently, especially as the remote collaboration environment movement continues to grow. With the right tools in place, teams can better align their goals, and reduce the tension of problem solving.

The article also points out that companies wishing to implement collaborative technology should ensure that new technology offers sufficient advantages, encourage their leaders to advocate for the adoption of new tools, and allocate the needed resources to support the new technology.

Creating a work from anywhere environment, while obviously not an ideal or feasible goal for every company, is becoming a much more necessary part of doing business for companies hoping to attract top talent and present the best possible employee package. The key is ensuring that your top performers have all of the collaborative tools they need.

Do you need to reshape your office design for the future? Let the professionals at Bellia Office Design make it happen for you. Reach out to us today to tell us about your office design needs, and let us start you off with a free workspace evaluation!

With so many employers looking to attract top talent today, especially eager young millennials, investing in natural spaces for your employees is one of many ways to promote an attractive and positive working environment. And in addition to being a selling point for working at your company, natural spaces offer great potential for return on your investment.

This recent article from Haworth® discusses the value of building parks and functional natural outdoor spaces for employees. It gives a mention of Apple Park in Cupertino, an intricate design that offers 176 acres of landscape where there was once asphalt, with the parking garage dug out underneath. The article also discusses Facebook’s building of a nine acre park around their facility, as well as a landscaped rooftop at their headquarters.

These beautiful scenes of greenery and landscape aren’t just a new and greatly improved space for employees to work outdoors, or to take a simple break and return to the office in a better frame of mind. Those things are important, to be certain, and are proven to make a difference in employee productivity.

But Haworth® also mentions its own efforts in creating a walkable green roof at its own headquarters, and the impact it has had…not just on general employee wellness but on their reduced costs of upkeep and general maintenance of the rooftop. The new green rooftop also helps to protect the building itself from the elements, and contributes to LEED credits for the company.

The benefits of investing in natural spaces for your employees go beyond attracting and keeping top young talent. Green spaces around and even in your building also contribute to a cleaner future, reduced carbon footprint, and even possibly reduced costs of common maintenance functions. As both larger and smaller corporations are proving, when done right, natural spaces can be well worth the investment.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has likely outlasted the time period of what most of us expected, corporate employees continue to work remotely whenever possible. As this article from Haworth discusses, making your corporate headquarters attractive to employees is going to require a different approach…one that focuses on the activities that will be performed in corporate offices in the future.

The article, written by Foster & Partners architect Maria Paez Gonzalez, points out that Facebook learned early on in the pandemic that employees rather liked working from home…a survey they conducted indicated that half of them did not want to return to the office. As its forward thinking CEO, Mark Zuckerberg indicated he was planning for half of Facebook’s staff working remotely by 2030.

Similarly, other corporations, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Zillow, stated that they were restructuring their policies to enable more remote work from their employees.

While this doesn’t exactly foreshadow the disappearance of the corporate headquarters, it does mean companies will be restructuring to accommodate the wishes of employees to travel to work less. One solution is satellite office hubs…offices in remote locations from corporate headquarters…which allow for more collaboration and coworking space than traditional offices.

For the most part, the focus of corporate headquarters and their satellite offices in the future is a movement away from traditional cubicles or open-plan offices. Rather, the office will be a combination of the virtual and physical workplace, enabling what can’t be done at home: employee onboarding, meeting with clients, and social gatherings.

Making your corporate headquarters attractive to employees in the future will involve focusing on the office as a space where employees can collaborate and share ideas comfortably, both with clients and each other. It will likely involve reconfiguration of desks, conference rooms, and office technology.

If you find yourself in need of an office reconfiguring in a working from home world, reach out to Bellia Office Design today. We can help you with an office design that encourages productivity and works for your company’s future.

Source: “The Rebirth of the Headquarters” by Maria Paez Gonzalez.

Haworth continues to offer advice on using design to enhance employee resilience. The pandemic has shifted the expectation and ability of employers and employees alike. With so many office workers taking advantage of the perks that come with working from an off-site location, it’s easy to see that working from anywhere is becoming more and more acceptable.

However, burnout and stress are factors that can never be underestimated. Haworth has once again done the research needed to help business adjust to the ever-changing landscape.

Using Design to Enhance Employee Resilience Tips

Ambient qualities (air quality, noise, daylight, biophilia, and temperature) are important in buffering stress for both on-site and remote workers. However, findings show that additional factors influence the performance of each group.

On-Site Workers
Legibility and culture of the workspace is what on-site workers depend on. Things like Landmarks, visual access, architectural differentiation, and signage that enhance legibility allow for easier navigation throughout the workday. The companies culture is best experienced on-site. Finding support, alignment to the culture and trust within it are also vital to the success of on-site workers.

Remote Workers
User control and accessibility to coworkers are important to remote workers. The ease and duration of access to coworkers, along with the tools they need to engage with team members significantly improves their performance. 

How to Buffer Stress and Prevent Burnout

Work stress can contribute to burnout and vice versa—creating a vicious cycle that amplifies both. By putting certain elements in place in your organization, you can help prevent workplace stressors and in turn foster stress recovery for building employee resilience.

On-Site Workers
Resources that help avoid burnout include: 

• Creating and maintaining a constructive organizational culture
• Providing supportive qualities in the physical environment
• Challenging and constructive job demands. 

Remote Workers
Resources that help remote workers avoid burnout include comfortable ambient qualities, user control of adjusting table height and chair adjustment, and lighting. 

Support Overall Resilience
It’s clear that addressing the needs for individual performance and for those at risk for burnout is vital for individual health and performance. We’ve found that organizations that put measures in place to buffer workplace stressors can help prevent burnout. Organizations that do monitor and adjust to these variables get the added benefit of supporting resilience for the whole workforce.

If you’d like a new office design or find out more about how to improve your existing one, reach out to Bellia today and request your free workspace evaluation. We can help you and your employees love the space you’re in!

You may have asked yourself-are social spaces still important post COVID? It’s a fascinating question that the past 12 months have fostered, and Bellia has the answers. Some call it cautious, and some call it paranoia- either way, the awareness of the pandemic along with its effects on how we interact has shifted our communities to unprecedented forms of connecting. From live chat meetings to constant emails, many businesses are seeing themselves create a new way for their employees and customers to converse- but does that mean it’s the only way?

Why Social Spaces Still Important Post COVID

Lauren Rottet is an internationally celebrated architect/designer, who believes despite the changes, we need to remain socially connected. She spoke with Haworth’s Global Brand Director Kurt Vander Schuur and shared her thoughts on hospitality and social spaces. In fact, she feels social spaces are more important than ever as we return to the workplace. These spaces will have different looks and promote a new vibe, but the purpose will remain the same: supporting people in focus and collaborative work, as well as restorative activities.

“Work is coming to the hotels, and hospitality is coming to the office.”-that’s the opening sentiment she had to offer in her talk with Schuur, highlighting how the workspace has become contingent on locations available and if the location available is a set facility, these places must have a sense of geniality.

She also believes that it’s not so much we change the way we live, but we change the way we work entirely. Whether we think of it or not, a lot of our lives are based around our jobs, and sometimes our work comes home with us. This makes having a smaller workspace in your home and one at your office ineffective since you could simply work at home. Instead, she feels the office has become more than a place to do your part- it’s about communicating with others in a tactile, visceral way: to be social. People want to feel good about coming to the office since they do not have to. So why do they? They come because it’s a better environment.

With Bellia, businesses can help promote a better environment through design, furniture, and dressings to make the workplace more appealing. Please contact us here to learn how to bring your workplace a place you want to go.

It’s no secret 2020 will be known as a year of turbulent times and hectic events. As we do our best to move past the negative, we cannot ignore the effects it’s had on our personal and professional lives. Of those effects are the 2021 office design trends. The past is behind us, but we must ask- how has it changed our future? What are the new needs and routines that will come together to influence design, form, and function? 

With so many of us having related experiences, it’s no surprise that our commonalities will manifest in the workplace in how we shape the spaces we perform in. The demographics are shifting, and organizations’ culture is becoming more human-centric that keeps people comfortable, engaged, and inspired while embodying the personality of a company’s brand and culture.

2021 Office Design Trends

1. Raw Earth 

Using raw earth materials introduces the outside to the inside. Due to the unbalanced, insecure, and vulnerable feelings we may have from not having control over the situation.

2. Imaginovation

As rough as its been, the past year has offered us an opportunity to think deeper and play harder, focusing on things we might otherwise have not thought of as important. Being forced to adjust suddenly and all at once, allows new forms of creativity to converge, for an opportunity to accelerate how and why we use technology, and the ability to make space for explosive innovative concepts and ideas.

3. Yesteryears

We live in the age of experience; different designers have different experiences. Those experiences lead to varying reflections, and so design becomes a mixture of styles that personalities from every era and background can relate to.

4. Geometrical

While recreation may have been hard to navigate, it’s been a great time for organization. With new designs that strip away the accents and stick to basic colors, lines, shapes, and geometric patterns, businesses can foster the feeling of structure and cleanliness.

5. Escapism

The distance we’ve had to endure has made us feel trapped, locked, and stuck in the same location. The work space now will be utilized as a place of productivity as well as an escape from what has become too familiar. 

You can learn more about office trends in 2021 that will soon be the new norm across companies here.

To see how the team at Bellia can help, contact us using the form below.

The experts at Bellia are leading the charge on designing workspaces for Generation Z. If change is inevitable, then preparation is essential. Instead of fighting against changing times and seeking a staff that will fit a mold of your model, an upgrade to your workspace could be beneficial to productivity in the long run.  

Organizations need to think carefully about the best ways to reach Gen Z, and empower their growth for long-term gains. The ongoing pandemic has created a new set of problems regarding assurance, trust, and establishing good faith. Organizations can successfully gain the trust of Gen Z by recognizing the problems young adults and teens face as a result of the pandemic and adapting to their needs. 

In our studies, we’ve seen that members of Gen Z value being measured mainly by their work quality, rather than by who they are personally in the workplace. Gen Z prefers the work/life balance offered by more flexible work arrangements and schedules. Highly proficient at using digital communication tools and managing their work online, Gen Z is the first generation to benefit directly from growing up in a world with an online communication and connection option. With that thought in mind, we urge businesses to acknowledge a sense of trust in them as employees who can work effectively and efficiently without being present in the workplace. 

The biggest challenge brought up by Gen Zers was the inability to build deep relationships with coworkers that enable better collaboration and improved communication. Working only remotely severely limits one’s ability to fully grasp the nuances of a conversation which can hinder cooperation and collaboration. Gen Zers onboarding remotely don’t have the same opportunities for quality interpersonal communication with coworkers as those who have spent face to face, in both productive and casual conversations. This is where an organized and incentivized social time can boost morale and close the gaps on lack of camaraderie.  

Learn more about designing workspaces for Generation Z by clicking this article here.

Bellia continues to be a leader in designing workspaces that empower employees. For almost 50 years, it’s been our mission to deliver workspaces that you and your staff will be proud of, and that will increase workplace satisfaction, productivity, and ultimately your success. We pride ourselves in being “design geeks”, and will take your vision to the next level. Working with Bellia means meeting a team that is concerned with your functionality, productivity, and satisfaction. We manage each project right down to the nitty-gritty details, leaving you with nothing to worry about. 

Why Design Workspaces that Empower Employees?

68% of leaders believe that they create environments where employees can be themselves, raise concerns, and innovate without fear of failure. However, when asked if they have the same sentiment, just 36% of employees agree. Using three key elements, companies can foster a better response, improved conditions, and increased productivity that bolster the value of the staff on hand. 

Diversity in Leadership
A mixed bag pleases the masses, and the same goes for the workplace. For example, Microsoft has seen a rise of 56% in women executives, and the number of women executives in technical positions has doubled since 2016. After this growth, the company saw creative solutions in gaming consoles and video chat applications that made it easier for those with handicaps.

Comprehensive Action
Leadership sets, shares, and measures equity targets openly. Sodexo has a goal of having 40% of its top leadership positions occupied by women by 2025. To achieve this, they created the “SoTogether” Gender Advisory Board which drives the company’s gender equality strategy (one of their top five global priorities, which also include disabilities, sexual orientation and gender identity, cultures and origins, and generations) and provides development opportunities to increase the women’s leadership pipeline through mentoring, sponsorship, HR processes, internal programs, and active advocacy.

Create An Empowering Environment
In a 2019 equality report, the customer relationship management company Salesforce set a new goal of 50% of their workforce to be made up of Underrepresented Groups (Women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Multiracial, LGBTQ+, People with Disabilities, and Veterans) by 2023. The report is highly transparent, laying out numbers as well as opportunities for improvement.

Learn more about cultural inclusion in the workplace and designing workspaces that empower employees by clicking this article here.

For businesses thinking about designing workspaces for inclusion, Bellia is on the forefront for making the transition seamless. With workplaces being redesigned and re-imagined, Bellia continues to incorporate your corporate goals into a workplace design that will best suit your company.

You may not realize it, but workspace design can speak as its own language, conveying information about culture, norms, and commitment to well-being. Some people understand the language and make their way around the space without much difficulty or stress. These employees can locate other people and the resources they need to work effectively. This is called the “legibility” of the workspace. Legible spaces include a floorplan that can be easily navigated and understood by all. When a space is “illegible”, the space can unintentionally reduce inclusion and equity for some groups. Illegible space sends a subtle message that says, “You can use this space, but it really isn’t for you”, which can lead to potentially damaging higher stress levels for some groups.

Tips to Designing Workspaces for Inclusion

No work area can be completely perfect, but it’s important to consider as many needs as possible with a collaborative design process that brings employees in as consultants on making a good space great.
Using universal or inclusive design concepts can help everyone contribute fully and thrive. Some of these include:

• Providing choice in spaces and tools
• Eliminating unnecessary complexity and manipulation of items in the workspace
• Arranging tools, reference materials, and information based on importance
• Using pictorial, verbal, or tactile presentation of essential information
• Providing a variety of techniques or devices used by people with sensory limitations
• Arranging elements to eliminate physical hazards and barriers
• Providing warnings of potential hazards and failsafe features
• Ensuring tools can be used efficiently and comfortably with minimum repetitive actions and physical effort
• Providing a clear line of sight to important elements and keeping tools within reach of any seated or standing user
• Providing adequate space for assistive devices or personal assistance

It’s important to maintain the same sense of cultural inclusiveness and personal worth people would get from remote workers’ office environment. Some things that can help people feel like they belong while working remotely include:

• Ensuring everyone has the technology they need to collaborate and keep in touch
• Subsidizing home office furniture
• Setting norms among colleagues to have regularly occurring virtual touch-base meetings or check-ins
• Scheduling time for casual conversation and catching up

To learn more about the benefits of designing workspaces for inclusion, click here.

Businesses are doing their best to stay prepared as they plan for employees returning to work after the pandemic. Part of that preparation involves creating a space for employees that makes them feel comfortable while still productive. At Bellia we are used to being a reliable helping hand for businesses that aims to build a better work environment. With new studies and data from HAWORTH, we’ve been able to combine the safety measures needed with desired productivity for an optimum workspace design.

For almost 50 years, it’s been our mission to deliver workspaces that you and your staff will be proud of, and that will increase workplace satisfaction, productivity, and ultimately your success. Our focus has always been on functionality, productivity, and team satisfaction. As we all adjustment to the ongoing circumstances, our friends at Haworth have been able to identify three critical areas of focus to help navigate the return to the workplace in a COVID-19 environment:

(1) Employee Well-Being
Supporting people’s physical and psychological health to build confidence and enhance performance.

(2) Organizational Culture
Understanding and preserving your culture to empower your workforce and leverage your space in new ways.

(3) Transforming the Floorplate
Addressing facility requirements, density, and exposure while mitigating risk.

Bellia creates organic spaces that help you balance the needs of your people and space as we navigate returning to the workplace. Part of that organic blueprint is creating a solution that ensures people perform their best, supports your culture, and leverages existing products, enabling you to reconfigure with ease and reduced cost.

There’s a balance to remote work for safety purposes and in-person congregations. Living in the digital age has allowed many organizations to embrace remote work and the alternate ways of meeting that pandemic forced upon all of us. At Bellia, we believe remote work guidelines should balance personal interaction and collaboration—both virtually and physically.

Through all these changes, we want to keep the different culture variables of your workplace intact: Collaborate, Create, Control, and Compete. Returning to work in the new normal will involve careful consideration for each of these for C’s.

Collaborative culture involves a collective understanding that the changes will not be easy, but the transition is for the best. Creating this culture involves doing new things like embracing alternative ways to get work done.

Control culture involves doing things right, with a sense of security, and creating a system that seamlessly bridges different work settings.

Compete culture will have everyone doing the new things now, adjusting to the new standards with those struggling to identify where they lack and adapting to change.

To learn more about how our collaboration with Haworth is helping businesses adjust as they plan returning to work after the pandemic, download our free guide.

Return to Work Guide