Today, the office is so much more than a nine-to-five, particularly when it comes to recruiting new talent and retaining valuable employees. In fact, in August 2019, the Harvard Business Review stated that a positive work environment—particularly one in which their workplace focuses on health and wellbeing—shows that current employees are 18 percent more likely to stay at a job while 30 percent are more likely to accept positions with companies that show their commitment to employee wellbeing.
While many companies are looking at increasing employee wellness in the workplace, it was a clear goal for healthcare provider Novant Health as they reassessed their previous office space and began the design of their new location.
Of the previous office, Melissa Williams, Corporate Design Project Manager for Novant Health, stated, “[Novant] had about 90 8’x8’ tall-panel cubes that created this dark space which didn't let light into the center of the office. Everyone was really confined, and people stayed in their [cubicles or offices].”
Additionally, the team was split across two floors, minimizing the frequency of collaborations, particularly when it came to unplanned interactions.
So, when Williams and the Novant team began collaborating with Karen Dann, Furniture Solutions Account Executive with Staples, they envisioned an open floor plan that allowed natural light to penetrate to the interior of the office while providing a variety of working environments from traditional workstations to small group clusters.
With all of Novant's employees on the same floor with an open floorplan, the environment has quickly shifted from siloed individual workspaces to encouraging the team to think of the entire floor as their space.
Williams said of the change in mindset for employees: “You have a workstation, but you need to think of the entire floor, the entire space as your office. You don't have to sit down at this L-desk every day; we've created an open environment. You have 20,000 square feet of workspace now.”
“One thing that's cool about the space is the variety of all the different meeting areas,” explained Dann. Fun-but-functional seating is staged across the floorplan and upholstered in bright blues, yellows, greens, and oranges to draw attention to them, from high-backed soft seating huddled within enclaves to tiered seating and easily movable poufs lining a wall for a wide variety of meeting sizes. Between workstations that can accommodate two employees in an expanded cubicle, sofa-benches have been incorporated to provide more relaxed spaces for meetings, desk-side chats and heads-down work. “There's such a variety from finishes to furniture to textures,” says Dann.
Project Details
Headquarters:
Charlotte, NC
20,000 sq. ft.
50 Employees
Partnerships:
Staples, Furniture Solutions
KSQ Architects
Hayden Design
Vannoy Construction
Product Solutions
Seating:
Acuity®, Clarity®, Evo™, Normann Copenhagen, Park™ by Norm Architects, Peak™, Reflect®, Retreat™, Rise™, Rock™, Scooch™, Seek®, Vicinity™
Workspaces:
Involve®, Stride®
Tables:
Altitude®, Aware®, Belong®, Harvest™, Park™ by Norm Architects, Recharge™, Transfer™
Storage:
Involve®, Radii™