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."

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.

The theme of our next symposium will be Generation Y and the Workplace. It will feature a in-progress report from the OXYGENZ research team of Maria Puyabaraud of Johnson Controls, Kate North, Jay Brand, and Sally Augustin of Haworth, and Simon Russell of IDEA. The OXYGENZ reseearch seeks to understand how important the workplace is to attracting, recruiting and retaining Generational Y workers.

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’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.