Articles

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 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. They provided a framework for thinking about cultural differences and intercultural collaboration in globally distributed 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.

Our spring Tertulia, on April 24, 2008 featured Michael Joroff, Senior Lecturer, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Mattias Bergman, Principal of the Infrastructure Solutions Group and Anthony Townsend, Institute For The Future.

Eric Richert, principal of 8 Corners Consulting and the former director of Sun Microsystem’s Open Work Practice, prepared a research paper that analyzes the work practices and success factors that managers and employees use to work at a distance. It aims to provide answers to the question: "What do we do 
to make distributed work situations work well?”

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

Our third in a series of New Ways of Working white papers focuses on how the workplace is being impacted by changing workstyles such as distributed and mobile work. If fewer and fewer workers come to the central office to work, how will these offices be used in the future? Is the centralized office as a place to work an artifact of the 20th century? If the office has a future, what direction will it take?

Our third symposium was held on July 29th through 31, 2007. The theme was Sustainability through New Ways of Working. The program was an "energetic" and stimulating one, with energy consultant, Hal Levin, presenting the results of his review of total system approaches to sustainability. Follow-up panels on organizational behavior, urban development, location planning, workplace strategies, and technologies also took place. In addition to Hal, participants included energy experts from VTT and Dr. Suvi Nenoen from Helsinki University of Technology, principal investigator of ProWork: Workplace Productivity, a new Tekes-sponsored project.