Creative Class

The emphasis is shifting … to right-brain metrics that focus on how the workplace enhances people’s ability to generate compelling new services and products

– Barbara Dunn of workplace design firm, Gensler

Ensuring each employee can be as productive as possible has become essential to many employers. Demographic change along with the rise of the knowledge economy and new types of work has resulted in a talent shortage in numerous industries. Substituting extra people for low employee productivity is often no longer an option (if it ever was the most effective one).

Increasingly, successful companies are redesigning their workplace strategies to make employees more productive as well as to enhance attraction and retention rates.

And it’s not just leading-edge software or Internet companies like Google. Today a wide variety of companies are changing their workplaces including banks, accounting firms, engineering companies, consumer goods firms, and others that rely on employees to be innovative, creative, or just plain smart.

This Creative Class Exchange feature will detail workplace changes happening at specific companies, in particular industries, and/or in notable cities. Workplaces where changes are more limited will also be touched on.

Over the past six years as part of my research role in the commercial and investment real estate industry, I’ve been investigating and monitoring trends in corporate workplaces. I’m delighted to have been asked to share some of my most intriguing findings with this blog’s readers.

Look for my posts on Mondays. I also hope to hear from readers about their workplaces. You can comment directly after my posts, or reach me via my own blog, All About Cities.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.