Improving the Open Floor Plan Arrangement

You know you've made a real impact on people's lives when there's a parody of your work on McSweeny's.



















The question today:  Has the Open Floor Plan Office been over done?

Open Floor Plans have been revolutionary in both good and bad ways.

In many ways it has lived up to the hype.

• In most situations, it allows more people to occupy a space
• It was innovative when it was first instituted.
• It encourages people to interact.
• It appears to have a democratizing affect.  It tends to reduce territorial complaints.

It has also had unintended consequences:

• Environments can be loud.
• Limited privacy.
• Employees find ways to screen out their neighbors (headphones, for instance)
• Phone calls are difficult to make.
• Meeting rooms are impacted.
• Difficult transition for employees who are used to their own space.

If you are considering moving to Open Floor Plans, you should consider whether this will fit with the work your employees do and how can you make it more palatable.

Companies that do it right have a few things in common.

1. They provide other amenities to their staff to help mitigate the stresses that come with open offices.  
2. They provide conference rooms and phone booths that staff can book.  
3. They provide more kitchens and break rooms and other opportunities for staff to get up and move around.  
4. They also provide library resources for collections of items that staff would historically have had at their desks.

The employees at these companies tend to have roles that benefit from interaction with others.  Creative work and team project work can be helped by the proximity engendered by open layouts.  Projects that require a lot of concentration by individuals may not be improved by open layouts.  This would work well at an internet startup, but not so great in an attorney's office.

Implementing Open Floor Plans in a company that's historically used cubicles and offices can be particularly difficult.  There will be a lot of resistance.  In those situations it becomes imperative that employees see there are significant benefits for them in making the transition.  If not, you can easily alienate your workforce.

Keep your Open Floor Plans from being distracting and demoralizing by providing resources and amenities that make up for the loss of privacy and noise that comes with more people in a room at a time.

What's your point-of view on Open Floor Plans?  Do you prefer the cubicle?  How have they worked well or not worked for your office?  We love hearing your thoughts!!


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3 Simple Steps to Improving your Reporting Accuracy

Let me guess, there has been a time or two where Reporting has made you feel a lot like this:

News flash: you are not alone!  If you've struggled with accuracy in reporting there is a light at the end of the tunnel -- and Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC will help you find it!  It's no surprise that many struggle with reporting accuracy.  There are many little pieces of the puzzle that all need to be correct in order to produce an accurate report.

So, we've identified the problem, but how do we fix it?

The solution is actually quite simple. In order to get at least 98% accuracy, it is essential you follow these three steps:

1. Have a regularly scheduled employee synchronization with the HR department.
• A regularly scheduled employee synchronization with the HR department protects your data.  It assures that all employees are up to date in the system and that employee location and assets are current and tracked accurately.
2. Have a single move process that is followed.
• Make no exceptions.  Period.  It doesn't matter how large or small the move is, if you ensure that one particular move process is followed every single time a move is made, your data is significantly more likely to come out accurate.
3. Walk the floors on a regular basis.
• That means committing to update your data by walking floors once a quarter or once a year.  Whichever you decide, please: keep it consistent!  The more consistent you are, the more accurate your data will be and thus the more accurate your reports will be.

Did you find this article helpful?  Let us know what you think!  Comment below with feedback or other ways you've found help improve reporting accuracy.

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Success Story: Silicon Graphics, Inc.

What an awesome quote by Henry Ford.  We at Robert Stephen Consulting, believe in the value of hard work and finding a solution.  That's why we promise to provide our clients with exactly the type of IWMS service they deserve.  We believe in solving problems as quickly as possible and saving our clients as much money, time, and space as possible.

For years we've worked with one of the great Computer Hardware companies in the Silicon Valley -- SGI.  Back in the very early days of RSC, Bob Stephen (CEO) managed to save SGI approximately $30,000,000 in a matter of only five hours.

Here's how:

At the time, Silicon Graphics, Inc. was preparing to sell the eight buildings they had built on two different campuses in the Silicon Valley.  One afternoon, the Vice President of Corporate Real Estate came to Bob Stephen with questions about seemingly inaccurate numbers.  After about 45 minutes of reviewing the background data (drawings and spreadsheets of square footage information) from SGI's real estate company, Bob came to a startling conclusion.  It was determined that there was a dramatic miscalculation of the vertical penetration according to Bowman Standards by the real estate company. He informed the VP of CRE the square footage had been inflated, meaning the vertical penetration was never included.  Bob then walked all 8 buildings with their people from the corporate real estate company.  An hour and a half later, at the end of their walk through, everyone agreed -- Bob's number's were correct.

The VP reported back that SGI was able to increase the sale of their buildings by $30 million,  all because of Bob's knowledge of the Bowman Standards, commitment to accuracy, diligent data recording in ARCHIBUS, and ability to catch the miscalculation in square footage.

"Your problems are our solutions" - Bob Stephen, CEO of Robert Stephen Consulting, LLC.

You can read more about this success story in one of our case studies here.

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Article Review: 10 Tips to Immediately Improving your Key Performance Indicators

Did you know Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can help increase productivity and profitability? No wonder a lot of talk about how to make KPIs better has been floating around the web.  We came across this article about improving your Key Performance Indicators.  If you haven't read it, we've provided the article's main points on planning, thinking, and managing your way to a better KPI process.

1. Spend time planning for KPI implementation

2. Think about unintentional consequences

3. Limit your focus to a max of 10 indicators or metrics at each level of the organization 

4. Manage behaviors, measure results

5. Cascade indicators down from corporate goals

6. Leading versus lagging indicators

7. Use metrics that ensure the truth

8. Have metrics that both operations & maintenance share accountability for

9. Understand the components that make up the metric

10. KPI's are not forever.

Click through to read the full article for more on each of these 10 tips.  We think these are spot on and it just might help hone your KPI process this year.


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