IDEXX, Unum Group go beyond the cubicle with open office spaces

Photo / Tim Greenway Kathy Shafer, senior director of worldwide facilities at IDEXX Laboratories in Westbrook, works on her laptop at the Synergy Center, which offers unique spaces where employees can work.

Photo / Tim Greenway Paul Larkins, director of corporate planning and construction at Unum Group, says the company is “energetically trying to modernize the office.”

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By Laurie Schreiber

When the design for the latest expansion at IDEXX Laboratories Inc. was underway, among the company's considerations was how the workspace could best support the company's culture.

IDEXX, a publicly traded manufacturer and distributor with more than 2,300 employees in Westbrook, had its new $35 million Synergy Center designed to LEED Gold standards. The company also wanted its office space — the configuration, feel, technology and furnishings — to reflect and support new ways that employees engage in their work.

It identified key drivers that define new ways to think about workspace, including:

Flexible and collaborative work environment

Health and wellness

Employee-focused spaces

Sustainability

Support for growth

The company wanted to do away with the old-style rows of cubicles and high partitions. Instead, it arrived at a plan that largely revolves around open workspace with strategic configurations of different types of individual and group areas, with senior managers working in the open rather than dedicated private offices. The hope is to foster collaboration and mobility and reduce the need for more square footage, to accommodate a growing workforce.

“We actually have been able to have a much more flexible work environment that allows employees to work anywhere and not be tied to a desk, which is seen as a thing of the past,” says Kathy Shafer, senior director of worldwide facilities. “Being tied to a desk all day isn't a desire of the workforce now, so we want to make sure we're addressing that.”

Today's largely paperless office operations helped the transformation.

“We don't necessarily have to allocate space toward old-fashioned file rooms and rows of file cabinets,” she says. “That's a contributor toward being able to grow without necessarily adding space.”

The office of the future

Companies are increasingly moving away from isolating rows of cubicles and having managers behind closed doors. Instead, they are opting for a mix of open and collaborative space, with designated areas for meetings or quieter conversation, within layouts that recognize the various needs of different types of work. The change addresses the potential for today's technology to allow employees to carry out their work no matter where they are.

IDEXX and Unum Group, two of Maine's largest private employers, are among the companies changing the way people think about workspace.

It's not just about division of space. The total approach is about furnishings, colors, light, sound and other aspects that foster engaging places to work and also become a good recruiting tool for new employees.

Stashing employees in rows of cubicles and management in walled offices is a thing of the past, according to Dean Strombom and Sven Govaars, architects in the Houston office of Gensler, the global architecture, design and planning firm. Strombom and Govaars spoke in May at the Maine Real Estate & Development Association's conference about the “Office of the future.”

More than 30% of American employees feel engaged or inspired at their jobs, Gensler research showed. Eighteen percent are unhappy or disengaged. A bit more than half, 52%, are somewhere in the middle. They do their job and go home, but they are “pretty much checked out day-to-day,” said Strombom.

That 52% represents significant opportunities for rethinking the workplace from a design standpoint, he said.

“It's about the people who work in the building,” Strombom said. “If there's something we can collectively do to improve the lives of the people in the building, there's a lot more value to be gained.”

Toward that end, Gensler identified workplace factors to consider. They include mobility, ergonomics, air quality, lighting, color, texture and acoustics.

Gensler “walked the walk” when it leased a third floor in Houston and tested ideas, said Strombom. The result is a mix of personal, collaborative, mobile and common spaces.

Gensler and Strombom also went mobile. “It wasn't easy,” said Govaars. “For the first two or three weeks I was wondering why I didn't have a space I could call my own. It took a while. You have to go through the change that you want to see other people go through.”

With the 108,000-square-foot Synergy Center, IDEXX has new opportunities to think about workspace, says Shafer. In the latest thinking, mobility is key.

“In the past we would have people assigned to desks and typically in cubicles, 8-by-8 feet in size, with tall walls. Now we have employees who have the opportunity to choose whether they want to work at an assigned desk or be mobile. They can work in the café, at a table outside sitting in an Adirondack chair or on the patio enjoying the view,” says Shafer, who herself does not have an assigned desk.

“I have a backpack, like a lot of people,” she says, speaking by phone. “I spend some of the day in a work area, some in meeting rooms and, right now, I'm in a private room to have this telephone conversation.”

Technology has made flexibility possible, Shafer adds. The building is equipped with WiFi. Meeting spaces are equipped with flat screens that allow employees to plug in their laptop or other devices to present work. Documents are shared electronically — no printouts necessary. Tools like video conferencing and Skype connect colleagues at IDEXX's 90-plus sites around the world.

IDEXX still has private spaces for conferences, client meetings and the like. But they're not the dedicated spaces of the past, and they come in various configurations: Some meeting spaces are in the open space, others are enclosed rooms, some glass-walled, others drywalled.

“We're not just stamping out the standard layout and standard furniture,” says Shafer. “We look at each function and how employees operate, and work with them to come up with designs to help them accomplish the ways they need to work.”

Other elements of the new workspace include sit-to-stand desks, natural light and brighter colors.

Another key change is the addition of fitness centers, health clinics, healthy meals and break areas equipped with games — all designed to foster mental and physical health as an important aspect of work. Sustainability initiatives, such as EV charging stations, composting and onsite community gardens are also featured.

Collaborative spaces and huddle rooms

Unum Group has tackled many of the same issues as IDEXX.

“What we've done so far is around energetically trying to modernize the office,” says Paul Larkins, director of corporate planning and construction at the Unum Group. Unum has about 2,900 employees in Portland and 10,000 at more than 110 sites around the world.

Unum's existing floor plan in Portland consisted of a large open space divided by partitions and enclosed offices. The company brought in strategy experts to help develop a toolkit, visited other companies to review innovations, and started implementing changes last year. Like IDEXX, Unum worked with employees, allowing them to define various needs for space. That includes a mix of open and enclosed collaborative spaces, individual-focus spaces, huddle rooms, learning rooms and presentation rooms. Furniture styles vary from area to area. For example, some collaborative spaces within the open area are equipped with high seating and counter arrangements — in the style of an island in a kitchen — around a white board or touchscreen.

The thought was that flexible environments lead to better productivity, aided by technology.

“We still have a high percentage of people in dedicated spaces,” he says. “But we think, over time, we'll pull that back as teams morph into new teams or groups. As that happens, the need to be anchored to one space in one place won't be as great. Given the work-life balance we're able to achieve through technology, people should be able to work wherever they're most productive — at home, at a client site. Demand around dedicated office space should decline as connected collaborative space increases.”

How space fosters creativity and engagement

At Kepware Technologies, a software developer in Portland, change started in 2008.

“Our space was battleship gray. We definitely compensated for that,” says Brett Austin, senior vice president at Kepware, which was acquired in January by PTC, an Internet of Things company based in Needham, Mass. “We wanted to have our space be more creative, collaborative and engaged, and allow us to work differently.”

With the recession rolling in, the timing for a move wasn't good. Instead, the company contracted with its landlord to phase into new space in its existing headquarters, and worked with Portland-based Workplace Transformation Facilitation founder Lisa Whited to think through function and appeal.

“We have a lot of software developers, so we wanted to be more collaborative. But we also needed to be careful of impacts on their ability to function,” Austin says. “We didn't want to disrupt that by swinging too far from closed to open environment.”

The result? Almost all private offices were eliminated in favor of an open plan with workstations. Senior management also works in the open.

“Our work station walls went from 6 to 7 feet high to sometimes no walls. The south-facing side was offices, all drywall and doors except for sidelights into each office. That came down, and glass went up in its place. We have one or two offices now, and they're all glass. Our meeting rooms are primarily glass. We're very transparent as a company, and we wanted the space to reflect our culture.”

Meeting spaces range from large conference rooms to one-person “telephone booths” for private calls. “Huddle rooms” with screens accommodate teleconferences. Spaces are customized: Marketing is relatively open, with lots of conversation; web development assistance is buffered by glass walls so engineers can scrutinize technical issues. Other changes included sound-masking and multi-stage lighting.

“We put more thought than I ever thought we would into the lighting system,” says Austin. “It used to be we had two on-off switches. Now we have banks of lights that give our teams much more personal control.”

The workplace of the future is not only for existing personnel but for recruitment. And change is ongoing.

“When we started in 2010, I thought, 'This will be a two-year process,'” says Austin. “But there's new technology and furnishings and systems available today that wasn't available in 2011 — so we tweak.”