Library

Member Judith Heerwagen has contributed a paper on building sustainability: Green Buildings, Organizational Success and Occupant Productivity.
The paper examines these questions: What are the key green building features and attributes? How do these physical elements affect the physiological, psychological, cognitive, and social functioning of building occupants? Can green buildings affect high-level organizational outcomes, such as profitability, customer satisfaction, and innovation? If so, what are the linkages?

NewWOW’s June Langhoff examined over seventy research papers to pick the best – and settled on 28. These papers discussed the issue of the productivity of remote virtual teams. The summaries in this whitepaper contain a synopsis of the article and online links. These papers, as well as several others, were the basis of Langhoff’s companion research paper, An Overview of Remote Virtual Teams & Productivity: A Research Synopsis, which is also available in this library.

June Langhoff investigates the latest research on productivity and virtual teams in this March 2006 NewWOW white paper. She finds conflicting reports on the productivity of remote virtual teams. Some researchers have witnessed design breakthroughs of startling proportions, such as the jet engine design project at Dassault Aviation. Others maintain that it is impossible to achieve real innovation in a culture of distributed teams. Which interpretation is correct? Are virtual teams the final answer to organizational creativity and economic growth? Are they another management fad? Or are they an economic necessity in an era of global off-shoring to reduce cost, but with few or even negative impacts on creativity and little or no proof to back up enthusiastic claims?

Authors Judith Heerwagen and Kevin Kampschroer, describe a new program initiated by the US General Services Administration that aims to understand better the linkages between the workplace and organizational effectiveness. This program was motivated by the desire to bring the federal workplace into better alignment with the technological, organizational and demographic shifts that characterize work today.

Jacqueline Vischer, a professor in the School of Industrial Design at the University of Montreal, reviews theory and research bearing on stress in the workplace and explores how current theory might be applied to the relationship between worker behavior and physical features of the work environment. This paper was originally published online in Wiley InterScience.

This case study describes VTT DIGITALO, a new office building designed for VTT Research of Finland. The authors, Tarja Häkkinen and Maaria Nuutinen are research scientists at VTT. The study examines the facility for sustainable construction, sustainable workspaces and new ways of working. The authors ask the question: to what extent does the built environment and work space solutions support innovative way of working?

This is our third New Ways of Working white paper. It focuses on how the workplace is being impacted by changing workstyles such as distributed and mobile work. f fewer and fewer workers come to the central office to work, how will centralized offices be used in the future? Is the centralized office as a place to work an artifact of the 20th century? If the office has a future, what direction will it take?

This whitepaper analyzes analyzes the adoption of Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) technologies at the enterprise level. It presents a case study of Oracle Corporation, which has succeeded in achieving a high level of adoption of their own Web conferencing solution throughout their organization and explains how they accomplished this.

This paper, a chapter in an upcoming book about virtual teams, explores how data of various kinds can be applied using a decision process to determine when and how distributed work can benefit organizations, teams, and individuals, and describes the data-driven methods used successfully at Sun Microsystems, Inc. to make business-focused decisions about distributed work options. It is based on the experience of the authors, Anita Kamouri and Eric Richert, at Sun Microsystems.

Based on the pioneering work of GSA's Workplace 20.20 program, this paper is an excellent overview of the impacts of the physical environment on users and organizations. It examines the question of how the physical design of the workplace can enhance collaborations without compromising an individual’s productivity.