This paper describes an approach for planning workplaces in an integrated fashion by defining, analyzing and improving key aspects of an organization in order to improve its performance. It also addresses the attendant issues which characterize this type of problem:

• How do you define better productivity or performance?
• At which level should you attack the problem?
• Who should be involved in its definition and solution?
• What is the role of leadership?
• How do you measure success?
• What are the obstacles to implementation?

This paper is based on the efforts and experiences of the members of the R&D Workplace Performance Consortium, comprised of a select group of high technology firms centered in the Silicon Valley, who have been wrestling with and, in some cases, succeeding in dealing with these issues. While the Consortium members share many issues with other "non-high tech" companies, they are at the forefront of dealing with performance. Due to the competitiveness of their businesses, they are willing to embrace new approaches to the workplace to support or enhance performance or to achieve other strategic advantages.

What is Productivity?

If we are trying to improve knowledge worker performance, it is necessary to define it. The definition of the American Productivity and Quality Center is, "the relationship between what is put into a piece of work and what is yielded (output)." The application of this broad definition presents a challenge since everyone defines outputs differently, especially for the "knowledge worker," whose work is characterized by intangible, ill-defined, and uncountable outputs, processes, linkage to the company’s strategic objectives, performance criteria, and high independence. " Finally, the quest for some kind of generic measurement(s) for group performance is a further challenge.

As we reviewed the organizational performance literature, it soon became very obvious that each situation is unique, and that performance must be defined in terms of the goals and objectives of the specific group versus the individual. In corporations today, it is generally the group, whether it be called a "department," "group," or "team," that is the basic work unit. Management goals and objectives are defined by group, and increasingly, with the interest in quality management techniques, such as process improvement, performance is measured by groups. The American Performance and Quality Center recommends that performance be defined in terms that are most relevant to the group’s outputs and that a "Family of Measures" be used. "To determine how well an organization is functioning, its leaders must not restrict their focus to just one indicator--one individual, one department, one product, one process, one expenditure, one measure of success. They must examine an entire family of measures." Using this approach, performance includes a wide range of possibilities: from the excellence of the product or service, budget, keeping on schedule or time-to-market, to customer satisfaction. For example, performance for a software engineering group may be:

• Perceived quality of the software
• Staying within the budget
• Timeliness (keeping on schedule)
• Customer satisfaction

What Affects Performance?

Factors, which directly or indirectly affect individual performance in some way, and by extension affect team performance, range across the spectrum of the workers’ physical and social environment:

• Personal
• Organizational/Management
• Process-related
• Technology
• Physical Environment

Personal Factors

• Technical competence in performing the job.
• Motivation to work performance, especially since "the work of knowledge professionals happens inside their heads." Compensation, recognition, leadership, physical environments and just about anything else that affects mood can also affect motivation.
• Work Strategies: taking initiative, networking, self management, teamwork effectiveness, leadership, fellowship, perspective, show and tell, and organizational savvy.

Organizational/Management Factors

• Participation in determining how employees are managed and how their workspace is arranged.
• Independence and initiative in doing the work.
• The lack of obstacles to effective work, e.g adequate resources and tools, clear mandate, lack of interference.
• Clear performance expectations and feedback to keep workers on track and not go off on unproductive tangents.
• Few and focused meetings and the lack of interruptions to concentrated, focused work.
• Compensation/Incentives.

Process-Related

• More effective and efficient processes, supported by the right kinds of technologies.

Technologies

• Production tools: computers, appropriate software, printers, scanners, copiers.
• Communication tools: telephone, fax, modem, networks, video-conferencing.
• Automation: computers and other technology to duplicate and even enhance processes performed by workers, e.g. workflow software which automatically pulls and sends information as necessary in a work process.

Physical Environment

• Spatial comfort: the most important physical factor that affects performance. Includes amount of workspace, adequacy of storage, furniture/equipment arrangement, furniture comfort and ergonomics.
• Control of general office noise levels, distracting conversations, equipment noise, and other audible distractions.
• Privacy, including phone privacy, visual privacy, and freedom from interruptions.
• Air Quality: air movement, air freshness, ventilation, odors, humidity and warmth.
• Lighting: glare, brightness, colors, daylighting.
• Support space: availability and adequacy of quiet rooms, large and small meeting rooms, resource centers, lounge areas.

Integrated Workplace Planning Approach

Because performance is affected by such a wide range of factors in the workers’ environment, it is necessary to design the workplace comprehensively, considering the various factors as a system. This is not a new idea. Over 35 years ago, Eric Trist and Fred Emory coined the "socio-technical systems" (STS) approach which "considers every organization to be made up of people (the social system) using tools, techniques and knowledge (the technical system) to produce goods or services valued by customers (who are part of the organization’s external environment). How well social and technical systems are designed with respect to one another, and with respect to the demands of the external environment determines to a large extent how effective the organization will be. Thus every organization is a socio-technical system, but not every organization is designed using the principles and techniques that have come to be a part of the socio-technical systems approach." Much of the efforts of the STS proponents have been to improve work group performance in manufacturing settings and has not reached out extensively into knowledge worker performance.

Currently, the STS perspective is being used by researchers such as Professor Wellford Wilms of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Systems to understand how teams perform effectively in settings as varied as the New United Motors plant in Fremont, California to Hewlett Packard’s R&D laboratories. Wilms used ethnographic research methods, integrated his team into various organizations, worked alongside the employees at their jobs, and made detailed observations about what people said and did. He found that while some teams work in spite of the context, whether it be the management culture or tools and processes, teams that "thrive" do so because their social and physical environment provided nurturing conditions for them.

Franklin Becker, Professor at Cornell University, describes a similar approach as the "Integrated Workplace Strategy," a way of " rethinking how work was being done and creating organizational, technological, and workplace solutions that supported the way work could be done effectively." This approach is based on viewing the workplace as an "organizational ecology,’ which "seeks to consider these elements of a workplace system as part of an integrated workplace strategy that defines a total workplace in two distinct ways: through the scope of the physical settings considered and through the social process used to plan and manage--and link-- the physical settings through time."

And so, settings and work settings in particular have been long viewed as a system of people, things and their relationships and that need to be planned as a system to achieve the goals of the group, although successful applications of this approach have been "spotty and results mixed." But recently as corporations continue to push for more value from their assets and greater performance, there has been a surge of interest in considering the place of work, i.e., the real estate and facilities location and characteristics, as an important part of the ecology or system. This approach is especially relevant as corporations explore new workplace approaches by rethinking how, when and where people work.

New Integrated Workplaces

Planning an integrated workplace can result in solutions which change, not only the physical work setting, but the other parameters, such as behaviors, processes, technologies and other resources, in order to achieve the goals of the planning effort. Each of the resulting solutions are idiosyncratic. There is no single approach or ideal integrated workplace or "Office of the Future." Any such endeavors are doomed to fail, because approaches must vary as much as there are different corporate intents, different group goals, objectives and constraints. But these solutions do share common themes:

• The Personal Workplace: Specific characteristics of the personal workspace are driven by the functional needs of the occupant for high performance and the informal organizational culture. This is contrasted to "space standards," which defines personal workplaces by organizational or group status. In addition, the change of behavior is considered a "design variable." For example, promoting behaviors for an open office environment: lower voice levels, no use of speaker phones, using other support areas for confidential conversations or focused work, or redefining what in fact is really "confidential" or "private."
• Multiple Work Settings: More focus on supporting the productivity of individuals and groups in areas other than the personal workplace. Information technologies for continuing to support workers with information, whether it is data or voice, whenever and wherever the worker is working.
• Informal Interaction: Recognizing that productivity is not only the result of individual work and formal interactions, but that, often, really important gains result from spontaneous, informal interchange.
• Teaming and Remote Teaming: Changing groups from hierarchical or individual-based organizations to team-based organzations and providing team rooms, project rooms, and more meeting areas of varying levels of formality or informality.
• Alternative Workplace Strategies: While mostly appropriate for workers who spend a great deal of time out of the office, such as consultants, auditors, and salespersons, most corporations are exploring or piloting radical strategies such as telecommuting, hoteling, office-sharing and virtual officing.
• Whole Life Needs: Supporting high performers means making their lives simpler and better. Free soda, abundant lunches, expresso and cappucino bars---the attention paid by these companies to make their workers happy sometimes seems to be at the point of spoiling them.

The Integrated Workplace Planning Process

Planning the workplace for performance and dealing with all the disparate elements as a system is a radical departure from simply "planning a space," or dealing with each element separately. Going through a process which systematically considers the business context and workplace elements is highly recommended. The process necessarily includes tools and technques from diverse fields, such as organizational analysis, socio-technical systems analysis, strategic planning and facility planning.

1. Establish goals and approach to the project and the project team.

Meet with the overall leadership and, second, meet with the specific group to define overall direction and goals, planning approach, schedule, identification of the appropriate team members. This step is important and difficult because of the scope of possible changes and the elusiveness of the level of the problem.

The composition of the planning team is often the most important early decision. It must include individuals whose scope of responsibities encompasses the range of possible workplace changes. Its membership should involve leaders with the authority to make changes regarding business organization and processes, information technologies, human resources, and real estate and facilities. Often, additional expertise should be engaged, such as corporate risk, taxation, and purchasing.

2. Defining desired organizational goals and outputs.

This may be based on an organizational business plan, interviews of key managers, or a workshop and should be focused on the performance goals and objectives of the organization. It is not unusual for the organizational business plan to be either non-existent, far too sketchy to be of much use, or simply outdated, and it must be defined in this process. For many fast-moving high-tech companies, the rule,"If it’s written down, it’s out-of-date," usually holds. But at the lower organizational levels, such plans are increasingly outcomes of continual quality management or other similar processes and can be capitalized in this process. Existing organizational goals and obejctives have the advantages of having (probably!) prior buy-in and historical metrics, which can be the basis of measuring organizational performance.

3. Understanding and Assessing the existing organization and workplace

The existing organization can be understood by reviewing its structure (the organizational chart), business processes, and job designs. Process mapping of groups, tasks, information flows, skills, and resources is an way to gain this understanding. Tour of existing space, review of floor plans and technology plans and interviews with key individuals will provide information about the workplace and other softer aspects, such as communication patterns, morale and motivation, and management style. A group can be understood using an Organizational Profile Map which maps the characteristics of a group against a range of organizational, technology and work setting variables. The resulting group profile can be readily compared against other profiles within the organization.

4. Identifying obstacles to improved performance

Critique the existing organization and workplace by identifying obstacles to achieving performance goals and objectives. Obstacles may be caused by any elements of the organization or workplace. Again, the proper level of the problem has to be respected. It may be true that the president of the company is an "obstacle," but changing that condition is probably out of the scope of your mandate! Most obstacles may be also perceived as an opportunity. The obstacle "There is a lack of cross-group interaction" suggests an opportunity "Improve cross-group interaction."

5. Develop, evaluate, and select workplace options.

Create workplace options which capitalize on the identified opportunities. Some workplace options may resolve multiple obstacles and capitalize on multiple opportunities. For example, a central meeting hub could support more serendipitous interactions, informal group meetings, and meetings of the entire group. The options should be evaluated using the previously developed criteria. Costs analysis should not only include harder costs, such as technology facilities/equipment and services, but also softer costs such as increased work hours due to process improvements. These latter costs usually have to be estimated, and, if so, should be discounted very conservatively in anticipation of the "doubting thomases." Other costs, which are not normally considered, may have to be included, such as tax implications, training costs, and insurance/corporate risks.

6. Implementing the planned changes.

The implementation plan should identify key management and organizational support, training, and personnel/human resource issues. The implementation plan establishes the appropriate steps, specific tasks, resources, and timing. The changes may be piloted with a smaller subgroup in order to evaluate its effectiveness before rolling it out to the entire group, or in some cases, it may be a full implementation program. A Communications Plan for informing and involving workers in the change is critical. The failure of many workplace change efforts is the failure to communicate rather the failure to develop a good solution.

7. Evaluating the results.

Monitor and evaluate the result of the workplace changes. The evaluation should consider the impacts of the changes on the group’s performance, the effectiveness of the workplace in supporting performance, and satisfaction with the planning process itself. This step is expanded below in the section, "Measuring Performance."

Other Considerations

The integrated planning process has some unique characteristics, which make the planning processes very "wicked" and fraught with difficulties.

Redefining Performance

What is "better performance" varies from company to company and from group to group. As John Igoe, Director of Real Estate and Property Development of Octel notes, "Octel is more interested in performance than sheer square footage reduction....The goal is not to cut space usage; the goal is to make the employee more productive." In Octel’s case, the driving force is the need to be first in the market, which has decreased dramatically in recent years. As Igoe relates, "The life cycle of a typical product in the 50’s was 10 years, in the 80’s five years, now its 6-8 months." Frank Robinson, VP of Corporate Real Estate and Services for Tandem Computers, has similar concerns. "We’re faced with the challenge of reducing time-to-market for our products. The time frame that used to be 24 to 36 months has been pushed back to 18, 12, sometimes 9 months. Unless the time taken to assemble the group in their workplace shrinks too, we [i.e., Corporate Real Estate and Facilities] become a stumbling block."

In the case of Tandem Computers’ sales group, better performance equates to more time spent with the customers. "The key for our sales and service people was to bring a customer back to our computer showroom to sell hardware," says Tandem’s Frank Robinson. "Today the customer doesn’t care what the box looks like. He has a problem. He needs a solution to the problem. Our people are spending far more time out with the customers understanding what the problem is. The offices have changed not because we dreamed up a way to change their world, but from our saying ‘let’s take a look at how they’re doing their jobs today."

Vice President for Human Resources and Corporate Services, Debra Engel at 3Com is redefining and extending performance beyond the normal realm of specific group outputs to include more sophisticated meanings. An example is the concept of "organizational capability," which is the ability of the organization to incorporate and instill:

• Superior values;
• Superior experience and knowledge;
• Superior learning; and
• Superior processes and systems.

Organizational capability is another edge to differentiate companies from their competition. It is an aspect of visionary companies which "build an organization that fervently preserves its core ideology in specific, concrete ways....Visionary companies translate their ideologies into tangible mechanisms aligned to send a consistent set of reinforcing signals. They impose tightness of fit, [and] create a sense of belonging to something special through practical, concrete items.

Defining the Level of the Problem

Integrated workplace planning can include high business and organizational planning and change efforts, such as re-engineering and business process improvement. While these possibilities should not be automatically excluded, the danger is that they may be beyond the authority of the client group or project mandate and the capabilities of the planning team and may diffuse the efforts of the planning team. But on-going business planning and change efforts can be leveraged with great effectiveness, especially since the physical aspects of these changes are very often overlooked.

Setting the Goal of the Process

Keep the goal of the workplace planning in mind, which is, most of all, to support the group’s mission or business plan. It is not to develop to cut costs or even to develop an alternative workplace strategy, although they may result! As Igoe of Octel observes, "Octel is more interested in performance than sheer square footage reduction. The goal is not to cut space usage, the goal is to make the employees more productive." The planner should not have any preconceptions of the solution, since the solution may be to do nothing or to improve the social aspects of the group, without doing much to technologies or the workplace. Garcia of Adobe concurs, "Facilities people sometimes want to be evaluated on the basis of costs. A lot of facilities people don’t spend enough time with the rest of the organization, besides simply saving money on real estate or operating the facilities. Because they’re not participants in some of the other kinds of decisions. If you spend a large portion of your time thinking about increasing performance, at the end of the day, people will look at you as having a contribution to solving these problems."

Planning for Change and Unpredictability

Most high-tech companies (maybe all!) are faced with increasing rates of change and turbulence of their business environment. They in turn are forced to react with corresponding speed and unpredictability. Groups and teams are organized and reorganized, groups grow at high, but unpredictable rates, workers are moved constantly (as high as one and a half or higher per year, based on the total number of moves divided by the total number of employees---what is known as the "churn rate"). Abe Darwish of 3Com, a company that has been growing at 30-40% per year recently and experiences 110% churn, recommends, "[You have to] anticipate the future and prepare for a high degree of churn. Design your facility for change. You can’t rule out change, you have to be prepared, from operations to design, you have to be ready from the beginning." All this is expensive and unproductive. It is expensive to change furniture, technologies, carpets. In some companies, it may cost as much as $2,000 to $3,000 per move! Since it may take from one day to two days to accomplish moves, the costs of unproductive time can be even higher, not to mention the time it takes for the worker to settle into their new space and become comfortable and effective again. All this, notwithstanding impacting group performance such as time-to-market and scheduling. Hewlett-Packard/San Diego has reduced the average time per move from 11 hours to just about 3 hours at one of its new R&D buildings. The productivity savings is far more, since the disruption to the relocated engineer is much greater--in the range of 40 to 60 hours per move! Given that the churn rate is about 300% per year and that there are 400 workers, the savings of productive time is about 48,000 to 72,000 hours per year. This was achieved by "universal planning," planning and designing space for change by anticipating them. Workstations, furniture/equipment, technologies and other resources are designed to accommodate most future possibilities and standardized (or "universal"). Moves are therefore reduced to "box" moves rather than reconfiguring the workplace and all its components.

Participation

No one likes to be "planned at" or even "planned for," especially when the plans involve changing important aspects of their lives. IBM summarily notifying some of their workers that they no longer had personal space and had to work out of their homes or share hoteling space is an example. While successful from a point of view of reducing real estate costs, this action had far more damaging human relationship costs. Most significant workplace changes involve meaningful changes of a workers life---management styles, evaluation methods, communication patterns, work location, information technologies, hardware/software, and personal "territory." Darwish of 3Com is convinced of the importance of participation, "You enhance your performance if the business unit fully participates in the solution. You can’t use one solution and apply it universally. Part of performance enhancement is getting the user involved, in space, information systems, human resources planning. What that means is that we as facilities solution providers can’t expect to provide a solution and enforce it universally. You have to customize it. You have to have buy-in." While businesses may not subscribe to the ethical view that it is users’ "right" to participate in decisions that affect their lives, they should heed the advice that their participation not only informs the process for a better solution, but makes it far more likely that the participants will be motivated to make the necessary changes for a successful outcome.

Thoroughness

When you start changing parts of a complex workplace ecology or socio-technical system, many adjustments may have to be made in order to stabilize the new system. It is important to be thoroughly consider all the possible factors which may be upset due to the changes. In the case of a telecommuting program at a major interstate bank, the payroll tax consequences had to be seriously considered since many of the telecommuters would be working at their homes, which are located in a different state than where the corporate pays payroll taxes.

Cultural Change

The fact that people do not like to change should not be underestimated. Change is painful to most, even if they know it might be better for them! As mentioned before, participation in the planning of the change makes a big difference. While full participation in the change process is ideal, it is usually not possible for all affected workers to participate. And so constant communication to all involved is necessary so that they understand why the workplace is being changed, how it is being changed, and the extent and timing of the changes. As Tandem’s Robinson cautions, "If you view it as a real estate project, you’re only going to get so far. You have to view it as a workplace solution project. Real estate is the easy part, the technology is more difficult, and the human behavior side is the hardest. Never take for granted [the resistance to] behavior changes."

Leadership

Leadership from the top can make all the difference in changing the workplace. Leadership is not telling workers what to do, but rather motivating and showing them what to do. In other words, to "walk the talk." When Pacific Bell wanted their executives to give up their private offices so that they could increase the density of the headquarters, there was little enthusiasm until the CFO decided to "walk the talk" and move out to a cube. After his move, it was a race between the other executives who would be the next out on the floor. Needless to say, this was an important symbolic gesture since other spaces of the workers were being changed to shared, teamed or hoteled spaces. "Leaders are no more or less than a manager of transitions."

Measuring Performance

The measurement of performance and the contribution of the workplace to performance has been perceived as a major stumbling block by the R&D Workplace Performance Consortium. If you can’t measure the improvements, it is very difficult to convince management to invest monies in the change of the workplace when those funds could be spent for more marketing or R&D development. As Bamesberger observes, "Where [getting buy-in] gets tricky is proving that these changes have actual value. Gaining credibility. Nobody expects direct causal linkages. We should expect some intervention that we are responsible for [which] is at least intuitively linked to some enhanced business outcome."

What would be ideal is to have measures of performance of groups which can be taken from readily available information (i.e., information that is collected in the course of doing business anyway). As an example, Eric Richert, Director of Design and Construction of Sun Microsystems, uses the proposed "Information Productivity Index," which is proposed as an index of the value added of information systems to a company . The IPI is defined as:

Net Income - Costs of Equity

_______________________________

Total Costs of Sales, General Operating and Administration and R&D

Unfortunately, we remain far from agreement on any similar measure for productivity and workplace effectiveness.

In the absence of such an ideal measure, we have been exploring the Family of Measures approach described earlier, the technique developed by the American Productivity and Quality Center. These measures can be defined quantitatively or qualitatively. One is not necessarily better than the other. Logically, all quantitative measurements ultimately have to translate to a qualitative scale in order to have meaning. For example, how much "better" is beating the budget by 10% versus 15%? This can only be determined by assigning a value scale to being 10% and 15% under the budget.

Performance can also be defined in terms of direct and indirect measurements. Some desired characteristics of products or outputs of a group work process can be measured directly. Or, characteristics of the group, which correlate to performance, could be measured in order to determine performance. For example, the lack of interruptions and distractions may be an indicator of the performance of knowledge workers who require "flow."

Correlating improvements of organizational performance to specific changes of the workplace is another difficulty. It is clear that since, as we described, workplace performance may be the resultant of many kinds of changes (new management, processes, technologies, desks, chairs, etc.), the correlation of specific workplace changes to performance is impossible due to too many "intervening variables." But since we are assuming that performance is the result of the interplay of many factors, perhaps the point is to see how and if performance was improved as a result of all those factors, instead of just trying to understand the impact of an isolated factor.

Performance and workplace improvements can be analyzed as two axises. The first axis is the change in performance, using the APQC approach. The other axis is the group’s assessment of the performance of discrete characteristics of the workplace. If both group performance and perceived performance of the workplace improve, we can be fairly confident that the changes as a whole contributed to improved performance. For example, if too frequent interruptions were identified as a barrier to better performance, and the workplace was changed to deal with it, and the group perceived that there were less interruptions as a result of those changes, then this change probably contributed to improved performance.

Actually measuring performance and workplace improvements as a result of workplace changes is a rarity. It is not because of lack of interest but rather due to the inexperience or lack of expertise in performance and workplace measurement techniques of those dealing with workplace changes. It is still regarded by some noted researchers in the field of workplace planning as "not relevant" because of the measurement difficulties and the improbability of correlating performance to specific workplace changes.

Their views notwithstanding, a few companies have had success dealing with this difficult area. At Hewlett-Packard as part of their Headquarters Renewal Project, the performance and satisfaction with changes of the workplace were evaluated using pre- an post-move surveys of 122 workers. The change included:

• Increasing the overall density and team spaces by sacrificing independent, personal space;
• Updating and thoroughly utilizing integrated information technology and taking advantage of state-of-the-art adaptable workstations.

The results are convincing that both performance and satisfaction with the workplace environment were significantly improved.

Performance was measured using three indicators: rating from excellent to poor, the group’s performance to:

• Produce quality services/products;
• Produce services/products in a timely manner;
• Produce services/products within budget.

The perceived performance in all three parameters increased in the range from 32% to 30%.

Satisfaction with the workplace was surveyed in the categories of the personal workspace, meeting spaces, and technology. While the perceived change in satisfaction with the workspace varied from .25 out of a scale of 5 to 3, respondents were uniformly more satisfied with the changed workplace. The greatest perceived change was with the meeting spaces (39%), followed by personal workspace (38%), and then technology (31%). Among the specific indicators, improved ergonomics and work surfaces were rated significantly better than the others, while the adequacy of the workspace was last.

These results are not surprising since the main business change driving the workplace changes was the emphasis on teamwork and cross-group synergies. There was an emphasis on increasing teaming and meeting areas at the expense of individual workspace areas. The quality of the furnishings, equipment and technologies of the individual workstations were significantly improved.

We can conclude that performance was significantly improved, along with satisfaction with the workplace. While we cannot say for certain that the workplace changes led to the improvement in performance, we are fairly confident that they did since these changes were specifically addressed barriers to better performance.

Implementation Challenges

Improving workplace performance in this integrated fashion is difficult to achieve in the corporate environment. First, organizational issues are not usually tackled in an integrated fashion. They are not defined as problems in that way, nor are integrated solutions sought. Second, an integrated approach to organizational performance does not typically have a corporate "home" or champion. For example, The Information Technology group will address it as an information problem, Human resources will address it as a personnel issue, and Real Estate/Facilities will address it as a physical issue. Third, we do not have a good way of defining problems and solutions in a way which cuts across disciplinary boundaries. These problems can be solved to some extent by working with cross-functional project teams to integrate and leverage corporate-wide initiatives, e.g., linking technology initiatives with real estate occupancy costs reduction initiatives. But a hopeful sign is that some of the leaders in these disciplines are beginning to understand, appreciate and even advocate the necessity for an integrated workplace approach.

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About the R&D Workplace Performance Consortium

The R&D Workplace Performance Consortium pools the resources and knowledge of managers and researchers to investigate the role of the workplace in supporting knowledge worker performance. The Consortium is comprised of leading edge, high-technology companies in the Silicon Valley and Bay Area.

The Consortium investigates these issues primarily through a series of quarterly workshops and seminars that feature round-table discussions, case study presentations by consortium members or guest discussions by leading thinkers and researchers in the area of workplace performance. The workshops are facilitated by Joe Ouye of FT/SYSTEMs.

Membership in the Consortium is limited to a small number of corporations and is available for an annual research contribution. For further information, contact Kathryn Laeser at FT/SYSTEMs.

(510-763-7200), by fax (510-763-1817) or electronic mail: laeserk@workplayce.com.

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