Workplace design at Microsoft

I am a big advocate of well designed workplaces, so I was interested to see this post about the Workplace Advantage activity at Microsoft.  One of my favorite principles is to provide a flexible environment that the teams can change easily to suit their evolving needs and I have written about my experiences in this area before if you want to check them out.   I do agree though with many of the comments on this post that workplaces need to have different zones that allow people to work quietly in isolation when they want to and to do adhoc and intensive collaboration in other areas when that’s needed.  The relative degrees of quiet work and isolation change over time as do team sizes hence the need for flexibility.

Recently though I have been working from home and I have realized the benefits of Workstation design as well as workplace design,  so I think it’s also pretty important to provide some way for people to dock laptops into different styles of workstations and to work in private “offices” when they need to.  In my case I like to work with three screens which is now easy to provide in shared work areas for laptop users by using devices like these from Matrox.