Nordicum - Real Estate Annual Finland 2014 | Page 40

The Perfect Cut
Skanska’s new workplace concept cuts down on square metres
and boosts productivity to a new level

Emerging from the recession, more and more companies are looking at their ways of working with a critical eye. While
strong trends such as remote and mobile working challenge conventional thinking, a race is on to update the entire
concept of today’s office.

Photos: Sini Pennanen

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mong the pioneers in this field, we
find Skanska, an organisation which
maintains that the offices of the future will be central nodal points at which coworkers can get together in different constellations – find ways of working that suit their
organisation, themselves, and their families
at that precise moment.
Jorma Lehtonen, Managing Director
for Skanska Commercial Development Finland, says that it is high time that companies recognise how dramatically the ways of
working have changed over the years.
“Companies must abandon the old philosophy of simply having people sit by the
desks. It is much more effective to provide
workers with different types of space that
they can utilise.” This means, for instance,
that an office should feature silent rooms
for work that requires intense focus, livelier
rooms for teams and projects, phone booths
and “hot desks” for someone just popping
in and out.

Wanted: Dynamic Space

Jorma Lehtonen,
Managing Director for
Skanska Commercial
Development Finland.
38 Nordicum

Adding a good degree of flexibility into the
office is not exactly a new idea. In fact, the
evolution of the office has herded people
from individual rooms to cubicles and towards more open pastures. All the while, the
number of square metres has diminished –
along with the satisfaction of the employees. Skanska is looking to change all this:
“Under our Activity Based Working
(ABW) concept, the space is simply used
more effectively and more creatively – and
this will bring savings to the company as
there are less square metres. Furthermore,
giving the employees the premises and tools
to do their work in a fun way will boost
employee satisfaction and productivity,”
Lehtonen says.
The numbers are impressive enough:
according to research, work satisfaction increases by 20–30 % when moving from conventional office to ABW. At the same time,
when there is a designated space for every
function, the productivity of the work can
increase as much as 20 %. And the bottom