NewWOW is pleased to announce our newest member organization: The Business Innovation Consulting Group (BICG). BICG is a global strategic consulting company with headquarters in Madrid and offices in Barcelona, Stuttgart, and Buenos Aires. Their services cover a range of disciplines and industries. Principal offerings include New Ways of Working, Urban Development and Urban Clusters.

For more information about BICG, see: http://www.bicg.com/

Download a free copy of our new report, “What Every Senior Executive Needs to Know about Distributed Work.”

This 12-page report condenses years of experience into a quick read and provides guidelines for designing a distributed work program for your organization.

Symposium 7, planned for June 7 through 10, 2009, will address Change Management for New Ways of Working. This theme follows the result of our 2008 Alternative Workplace Benchmark Study, which found that the top two barriers concerned change management: "Manager Concerns," and "Organizational Change." An overview of the topic will be followed by a series of discussion groups on aspects such as: types of changes required, change management strategies and tactics, and measuring success.

NewWOW is pleased to announce our latest member: HOK. Please welcome HOK’s David Rush, Jim Rice and Steve Hargis to our community.
David provided a description of the company: "HOK is a global architectural firm that specializes in planning, design and delivery solutions for buildings and communities. Through its collaborative network of 29 offices worldwide, the firm serves diverse clients within the corporate, commercial, public and institutional markets. HOK is committed to developing resources and expertise to help lead the world toward sustainable communities and building environments. Founded in 1955, the firm’s expertise includes architecture, engineering, interiors, planning, lighting, graphics, facilities planning and assessment, and construction services."

The theme of our January 2009 symposium was Generation Y and the Workplace. It featured an in-progress report from the OXYGENZ research team of Maria Puyabaraud of Johnson Controls, Jay Brand and Sally Augustin of Haworth, and Simon Russell of IDEA. The OXYGENZ research seeks to understand how important the workplace is to attracting, recruiting and retaining Generational Y workers. The team created an engaging online survey which visually creates their ideal workplace and provides an original way to reach this group. Go to www.oxygenz.com to take the survey.

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has joined NewWOW. GSA's representative to NewWOW is Kevin Powell, Director of Research, Office of Applied Science, GSA, Public Buildings Service.

Kevin’s group, the Office of Applied Science, currently has 20 Active Projects in three key research areas:

• Adopt sustainability practices and high performance building strategies
  
• Improve workplace effectiveness
  
• Optimize building delivery, energy efficiency and operations.

NewWOW commissioned a research paper, Intercultural Collaboration in Global Teams by Professors Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton. This paper was presented at the 5th NewWOW Symposium, held July 13-16 2008 in San Jose, CA.
The authors describe the challenges and opportunities in intercultural collaboration and the impact of culture on best practices for globally distributed work teams.

NewWOW’s fifth symposium was held July 13 through July 16, 2008 in San Jose, California. We explored the impact of culture on best practices for distributed work groups. Our keynoter was Professor Pamela Hinds of Stanford University, who also wrote a research paper on the subject for the Symposium. Her research helped us understand how culture could affect perception and acceptance of distributed work practices, and by implication, whether different work practices would be needed when distant teams included people from different cultures.

NewWOW welcomes several new members in the network: Nokia, CUH2A, Applied Materials, Cisco Systems, RTKL and Stanford University.