Means of escape

Carole Hendry is a Manager of Fun. She must be, it says so on her business card. Carole is also sales support manager for the Glasgow office of web-based "career management" firm Monster.com, but it's her role as company social secretary that seems the most important job.

So what, I asked, does a Manager of Fun do? "I organise the daily staff breakfasts, the free cans of drinks, and discounts for Glasgow nightlife, like cinema and theatre tickets" she enthused. "I'm doing bonfire night next week".

It would be easy to dismiss Monster's approach to staff motivation – with its free handouts of monster-ware baseball caps, tee shirts and fleeces, not to mention as many bags of crisps as one can eat – as nothing more than a cheesy reaction to the firm's predominantly youthful employees. But that would miss the point.

"Yes, we are a young, funky, dynamic and passionate company" admitted Monster's 40-something-going-on-16 Vice President of Telesales, Nicolette Pollock. "But telephone sales is a demanding job. Our staff make 65 cold-calls a day for three hours at a stretch, so we make every attempt to make the job interesting and fun. We give them a great product and the best telephone technology we can find, and we try and motivate them with things that will ultimately make them more successful."

Many of the said things designed to both amuse and keep staff productive stemmed from the fertile brain of Monster's originator, Jeff Taylor. He who is always full of "monster ideas" had the wacky notion of translating the company's fantastic web graphics into the three dimensional design of its 2200 m2 European sales centre.

The firm did not have a totally free hand, being forced to work within a one-size-fits-all speculative Category A office and a tight budget. Even so, the distinctive Monster vocabulary has been put to good effect by interior designer, Interdec. This shows not only in entertaining partitioning, designer luminaires and Gobo theatre lights, but more crucially in the treatment of the workspace.

For a start, Monster has avoided serried ranks of desks by opting for a more asymmetric layout of high quality units. This provides a modicum of acoustic and visual privacy, the latter enhanced by bespoke desk partitioning consisting of wave-form frosted glass. This gives a hint of the person sitting opposite without being a totally impervious barrier.

But it is the relaxation areas where Monster has really departed from the norm. Along with a smoking room and functional training room, the company has provided what it calls a Monster Den. Here are the scatter cushions, bean bags, table football, and satellite television which staff can use whenever they want. It's effectively a means of escape, the ying and yang balance between work and play which the company believes is crucial for motivating and keeping staff.

"Let's face it," said Interdec director Mark Alcorn "this could be anytown, any country. The raised floor, the 1500 mm modules and the Category A lighting are all icons that say, hello, I'm a speculative office block, and nothing more than that. The question is, what can you do to make it better?"

What Interdec has done is provide a glue between the bland office environment and the client's strong corporate image. In turn what Monster has done is to use its strong corporate image to encourage a sense of belonging among its staff.

Free crisps and beer on Friday may be small tokens, but taken together with the interior design and liberal use of Monster imagery, it has generated an environment where enthusiasm, staff productivity and company loyalty are mutually dependent. Simple, but effective.

The BT Cellnet approach

A tad over two hundred miles south, the Leeds headquarters of BT Cellnet is further evidence of the way worker power is developing the design of the productive workplace.

This is Leeds City Office Park, a British Gas Property site which is now home to two virtually identical office buildings housing BT's telephone sales and customer support operations. Stafford Taylor Building 1 was occupied by BT in July 1998, while BT's new subsidiary BT Cellnet 100 moved into Stafford Taylor Building 2 in August 2000.

The buildings were designed by multi-disciplinary practice Foggo Associates to a strong environmental brief: a concrete structure with exposed ribbed soffits, strong external solar control and low energy hvac. Both buildings feature two open-plan office wings linked by a large central atrium.

  In fitting-out the first building, Oscar Faber added chilled ceilings and boosted the refrigeration capacity to cope with 24 h occupation – a system that Foggo's adopted when the firm was reappointed to do the entire design for Stafford Taylor Building 2.

By virtue of the two-year gap between the buildings, BT was in the enviable position of being able to undertake a post occupancy survey of the first building and import the lessons learned into the design of the new one. When it came to listing those things that made them productive, staff placed the image and spatial quality of the working environment high on their list, along with the staff restaurant, vending facilities and office decor.

The result shows itself in a variety of ways. Instead of Monster.com's beanbags, BT Cellnet has fostered a more executive atmosphere, with high quality office and atrium furniture, extensive vending and tea-making facilities on each floor, plus break-out areas of comfy sofas which staff are free to use, either for relaxation or for informal meetings.

And when you want to escape the building's atrium sofas, then there is what the staff have christened the Titanic – a high-level wedge-shaped platform overlooking the atrium which has been kitted out to look like the prow of a liner, complete with timber desk rails, deckchairs and coastline murals.

Staff have also signed up to BT's strong environmental commitment: recycling bins abound for virtually every office waste imaginable, from paper recycling to coffee cups, cans and toner cartridges.

While this reinforces the environmental credentials of both buildings, it's difficult to know whether coffee cup mashers encourage BT's staff to feel benevolent about their employer. But building manager Richard Marshall reports that recycling of the cups and cans has gone up from 30% to 70% in 18 months, so clearly the staff are responding.

BT is also experimenting with new ways of working. The call centre in Stafford Taylor 1 is a 24 h facility, and to facilitate the use of a single desk by three people, BT gave each telephone operator a smart attaché case for storing their work materials and telephone headsets.

In the second building, BT has introduced Work-Out, a voluntary scheme for its customer services managers designed to encourage more staff to work from home. In return for giving up a permanent office desk, Work-Out staff are given a fully-equipped home office, complete with a choice of furniture, a dedicated BT server link, fax machine, printer and a desktop or laptop computer.

The desks in the workout areas are more traditional than other departments, partly because they don't need to be anything else, but also because they are not designed to be "owned".

"When you make a decision to join Work-Out, you have to make a decision in your own mind that you will come in, do some work, and then go" said BT training manager Tracy Dixon. "That's why Work-Out is more rigid".

BT was careful not to make promises to staff it couldn't keep, which caused a problem when it movedf into the first building on the site. "Expectations were lower for the second building as BT only offered things it felt it could deliver" recalled Tracy Dixon. "It defined what we were going to have, and then provided a bit more than we expected."

BT's post occupancy study of Stafford Taylor Building 1 also showed how important it was for staff to have some control over their environment. As a result the windows in Stafford Taylor 2 are kept openable. "It's important that we have the ability to open windows. It makes you feel you are not in a shell" said Tracey Dixon. "When you can open them, you don't tend to want to, but when you can't, then you do".

Not all the details were successful. The sight of people eating sandwiches in the atrium was distracting to staff working in the offices, so the glass on the atrium elevations has been frosted to maintain visual privacy.

Glare has also been a problem. As Carillion building manager Richard Marshall observed, "It doesn't matter how good the building is or how impressive it looks, if you...can't see the computer screen because of the glare, it overrides everything. The only thing they are concerned about is the job and the fact they can't do it."

The automatic daylight-linked lighting controls on the first building have also given way in the second building to a simpler occupancy-sensed lighting system because staff were distracted by changes in lighting levels. Interestingly, there are more complaints of noise distraction in the second building, which has been put down to the harder desk surfaces which may increase sound reflectance.

Squaring two circles

While Monster.com and BT Cellnet may be two very different buildings and contexts, they share the demanding function of telesales and customer support. Clearly not many offices have 24 h working, and not all sedentary computer-based activities are as demanding as those found in a call centre.

That said, what these two extreme examples demonstrate is that the things which make staff motivated, loyal and ultimately productive has less to do with the building services (which are rightly taken for granted when they work well) and far more with proactive corporate culture and attentive facilities management.

The design of the productive workplace might begin with stable environmental conditions, but it certainly doesn't end with them. It's less to do with comfort provision, and far more to do with the alleviation of discomfort.

At Monster.com, the firm has taken staff welfare so seriously it calls in masseurs every other month to give staff a neck massage as they sit at the desk. At BT, the quality of the break out areas, on-floor kitchenettes and liberal use of comfy sofas in the lobbies is a sign to the staff that their employer cares as much about their welfare as it does about the revenue.

While the "correct" temperature, humidity and lighting levels are very important, ultimately they are not deciding factors. Good acoustics, glare control, attentive facilities management and what one can call means of escape are equally if not more important to staff satisfaction. And, of course, these things can only originate from a management culture that recognises that happy staff are productive staff, and the best ambassadors a company can have.