Helping People Work Better

Workplace Strategies: Real Estate Development & Property Management HQ

We enabled a development organization figure out how to best expand into an adjacent floor plate — for its development team. Not wanting to create haves and have-nots meant we needed to study how the entire 150 people worked. Interviews, surveys and observation studies generated 29,000 data points over 10 days. Through our own iOS to Tableau Data Visualization process we were able to illustrate 1:1 wasn’t working best. The final project speaks for itself — and in the end we created a new floor bespoke to the former Genlser project… in 1/3 of the space.

Workplace Masterplans: Global Enterprise Division and Corporate HQs

Learning from our extensive research and development led to the corporate policy known as Cummins Smart Office. Numerous pilots and projects were completed around the world until the opportunity presented itself to come back home. With the divisional expansion of Cummins Indy, we vetted the neighborhood sized workplace strategy programmed with help of Cannon Design and realized in the Deborah Berke Partners final pallet. Following this project, Cummins turned to our master plan for the Kevin Roche Cummins Corporate Office Building mothership — a three block long 500,000 GSF office ship. The workplace strategy didn’t find more room per se — it found better room by bringing up approximately 800 people from the basement and keeping the overall supply the same as before. The $50M multi-phase renovation included MEP, HVAC and Lighting improvements. Partners in addition to KRJDA included Cannon Design, Ratio, Axis and DBP.

Competition: The Next Work Environment

In the summer of 2020, I formed a Dream Team with industrial, UX, brand, applied research and furniture company leaders to develop a response to the WORKDESIGN Magazine’s “The Next Work” design competition. We were intrigued by the scale of problem definition and range of application basis. What we determined was that in response, we needed to scale a solution that was not dependent on place — but would work and become home where ever we are.

Healthy Working: First-ever Systemwide Health Care Workplace Research Strategies

The patient is always first — but team members are a close second. From a “big why” standpoint, we need to feel alignment between how we treat our patients and one another. And in an incredibly constrained and challenging business model, large healthcare systems have a lot of emergencies to address. In this case, workplace SAT fell below government work. Over the course of 4 years, including project management of the Gensler workplace team in Chicago, we developed a research and development point of view, strategy and received C-suite endorsement of the policy. For the next two years, we sat next to current project teams and enabled and taught how to deploy the workplace guidelines. In addition we rewrote the global systems furniture standards and RFP, leading to a new standard and partners. We also were deployed on a regional basis to develop CRE strategies for new construction, disposition, leasing and project program briefs.

Workplace Strategies: Customers on the Factory Floor

It took a new factory executive, a recent ex-pat from Lilly, to recognize making things meaningfully in the eyes of the customer starts on the factory floor. We developed the business strategies for how the company needed to evolve and how it’s growth needed a factory experience to align with its customer experience target for success. While some might view a plastics injection molding plant as old tech, this company has sights on revolutionizing the ways we use and think about the word plastic in the future. Most importantly this includes its employees.