LOS ANGELES—A year after implementing Workplace 360, CBRE announces that 90% of employees prefer the environment to a traditional office space. Workplace 360, for the unfamiliar, is an open floor plan and hoteling-style office format that incorporates high technology and a paperless work environment. The design won CBRE a Digie Award earlier this year. The program was launched last year when CBRE moved into a new office space in Downtown Los Angeles. Now, CBRE has surveyed its employees to understand how they feel about the space a year later.
“This survey really communicates how quickly our people have adapted. The technology in place of the paper is one of the most recognizable pieces of evidence to indicate the acceptance level among our employees,” Lew Horne, CBRE's Los Angeles and Orange County president, tells GlobeSt.com. “In fact, a top executive from a large firm recently toured our space and was in awe by the lack of paper and the changed culture of the space. It's interesting to see it through the eyes of those who have never been here before.”
According to the survey, 90% of employees “would not go back to the old way of working,” while 83% of employees feel more productive in the space and 94% claimed that the space has a positive impact on their business performance. It wasn't just individual work performance that was affected, either. 87% of employees felt that the work environment helped them create new business, while 93% of employees found it easier to collaborate with others in this environment. The survey did fall short in some categories, namely private space, where 86% of employees felt they had access to private space. Although this number doesn't seem low, Horne felt it showed room for improvement.
“What we learned from the survey is that we need to continually invest in keeping technology current for our employees by offering trainings for all of the digital tools,” says Horne. “We're already implementing a response to the feedback. We also found that there's a call for more privacy features and therefore we're working with Gensler to add private workstations. What's remarkable about the space is that we've already added 50 employees in the course of a year without having to make any renovations or major changes. The office is flexible. Adding private stations will be one our biggest changes to the space, yet we won't run into nearly the same challenges in implementing the request as we would have in the past.”
Not every category, however, allowed room for improvement: 100% of employees agreed that clients were particularly interested in the model. “To date, we've had approximately 13,000 registered guests to the space,” explains Horne. “We've worked with numerous clients to take the leap after being inspired by our space—one of them is BlackLine Systems. Flexibility of design allows companies to think differently in terms of implementing other changes as well, such as new procedures or new uses of technology.”
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Kelsi Maree Borland
