Many organizations are looking to compress workspace, or reduce or make better use of unassigned workspace.

But offices on the cutting edge don’t just shrink – they rethink!

Seems like everything is getting smaller these days. From thinner newspapers to bite-size hamburgers to dwindling stock market returns, super-sizing is yesterday's news. Offices are no exception.

Businesses are looking for ways to cut real estate costs, the second largest expense on the books after salaries. Many figure the easiest way is to make individual offices, workstations, and cubicles smaller so that more people can work in the same amount of space, or less.

"Everyone is looking to shed or transition space,” says Mark van Summern, AIA, principal at Perkins Eastman, Stamford, Connecticut. “We're seeing it across the board."

"Companies want to do this fast, but they also want to do it right. That's the struggle. Because a workplace that doesn't support the work that needs to be done, even if it's a smaller one, is still a waste of space," says Robyn Baxter of Applied Research & Consulting, the workplace consultancy at Steelcase.

As a result, designers, real estate executives, and facilities managers are crafting new approaches to office environments. Many of these strategies have little to do with assigned personal offices of any size.

Collaborating Everywhere

The urge to purge space is widespread because almost every company, whether it has recently cut staff or not, has empty workstations. For example, Intel studied workspace occupancy and found that 60% of their workstations were empty at any given time of the day. Most studies concur that the typical workstation stands empty 40%-60% of the time.

Reduce Real Estate Cost article