Experts trained in workplace anthropology conducted interviews and focus groups. The workers kept journals about what they liked and disliked about the office.
The experiment was designed to determine whether this special office setup — dubbed the Idealab — was a success before rolling the prototype out across a new four-building RadioShack campus on the grassy banks of the Trinity River here.
For more than a century, experiments on workplace design have shown that layout and lighting have profound effects on productivity. But many real-estate managers focus instead on squeezing bodies into ever-shrinking cubicles, hoping to keep costs down.
Now, as the economy expands, competition and outsourcing demand that businesses be creative about how they house their most expensive workers. Some, such as Office Depot Inc. and FMR Corp.'s Fidelity Investments, along with the U.S. General Services Administration, have devoted major resources to researching office environments through focus groups, by mining human-resources data and observing work behavior in different office layouts. But few have been as ambitious as RadioShack and its mock office.
Fully functional at about one-third the size of a floor at the new campus, the Idealab was designed, as was the entire new headquarters, by architects HKS Inc. of Dallas. Housed in a former shopping mall, the office is downstairs from RadioShack's soon-to-be vacated headquarters, a pair of interconnected 19-story towers. Back in 1978, the company, then known as Tandy Corp., was a conglomeration of retailers, including Color Tile, Pier One and Bombay Co. The idea was to keep the business units separated vertically, preventing what the company called "cultural contamination."
When the company consolidated around the flagship retailer and changed its name in 2000, management felt it was time for an office that better reflected the new operation. The 900,000-square-foot headquarters, about the same size as the old space, is supposed to flatten the hierarchy and connect, rather than quarantine, colleagues.
The idea of an open office plan certainly isn't new. But RadioShack's stab at it represents the latest thinking and permutations in office design. Instead of the 22 entrances and five parking lots at the current headquarters, the new complex has one parking garage and a single front door for all 2,400 employees that spills onto a "main street" corridor connecting all departments. Executives will be on the middle floor of the central building, a departure from their current top-floor, marble-clad suite with private elevator.
With the Idealab, RadioShack hopes to avoid the pitfalls many companies have faced when migrating from individual offices to cubicles. The test began in the summer of 2003, when RadioShack moved its store-design department into the lab.
The experts learned what didn't work. The video cameras showed that people didn't use the small focus rooms in the back. Support staff said centralized copy rooms with multifunctional machines were too far away. People wanted simpler machines closer to their areas. Computer technicians wanted whiteboards on wheels instead of extra storage.
From a bottom-line perspective, RadioShack says the Idealab saved the company around $1.5 million by preventing design mistakes before they were built in the new complex. For example, spaces for vending machines in the kitchen areas were too low, a mistake that wouldn't have been discovered until the Coke machines arrived across the entire campus. The length of a decorative lighting element in the common area was deemed too long.
Flooring vendors installed six types of carpets and three types of raised floor panels in the Idealab free of charge. The research in the Idealab was vigorous, but it falls short of being scientific. Like many workplace studies, it suffers from something called the Hawthorne Effect, named for a study in the 1920s and 1930s that found factory workers increased output simply because they knew they were being watched.
