HOK owes its industry-leading position not just to its talented designers, but also to its innovative analytic and benchmarking practices that accelerate the design process and demystify it for clients. In 1961, two HOK partners, William M. Peña and Steven A. Parshall, published “Problem Seeking: An Architectural Programming Primer,” the standard text on visioning for architectural programming.
The book, now in its fourth edition, enunciated a technique for simplifying and systematizing the architect’s first task, which is to envision the requirements of a proposed building or site. Pena explains that since design is problem solving, programming is “the search for sufficient information to clarify, to understand, to state the problem.”
That research-oriented DNA still finds expression at HOK, we learned while meeting recently in HOK’s Toronto office with Lisa Fulford-Roy, senior VP client strategy, Strategic Accounts and Consulting; Sharon Turner, ARIDO, LEED AP, VP; and Kevin Katigbak, LEED AP, senior associate consultant (no longer with the firm).
HOK boasts 1,800 staff worldwide, including 160 in Canada with 110 based in Toronto. Toronto has the largest interiors practice of any HOK office in the world, and is probably the largest in all of Canada. It has many clients roster in Toronto’s financial services industry, the biggest in North America after New York. The Canadian economy easily weathered the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis compared to other nations, and, to quote the Bloomberg Business headline this past May 3, “Canadians Dominate World’s 10 Strongest Banks.”
Indeed, Canadian banks are as “Amurican” (as Lyndon Johnson used to say) as apple pie. Toronto-Dominion Bank, the largest bank in Canada by market capitalization and assets, owns more TD Bank branches (with the familiar green sign), south than it does north of the 49th Parallel, and ranks as America’s sixth-largest bank.
OI: Why does Toronto have the largest interiors practice of any HOK office?
Fulford-Roy: We built expertise around the financial services sector. Doing business with these institutions generates a high volume of work. They are world leaders, so their investment in the workplace demands the strategic leadership, thought leadership, design expertise and technical excellence to be able to deliver anything from a strategic head office down to an ATM.
Fulford-Roy: We look at global trends in design. We do our own research. We try to understand how a corporation works. We collect data as part of the design process. Without it, we just have an opinion. We have a dedicated researcher who mines the data and looks at trends from benchmarking studies from our global workplace practice, and pre- and post-occupancy studies with clients to see where the workplace is going and what’s top of mind for our clients.
OI: Your office issued a whitepaper on work-style trends at leading financial services firms. In a nutshell?
Fulford-Roy: There is a greater need for flexibility and choice of work setting. They all have flexible alternative workplace strategies, often including working from home.
Katigbak: We’re looking at flexibility in the workplace, enabling the use of all the spaces in your office [including the] lounge or kitchen, instead of being prescribed to a desk or a particular space.
Fulford-Roy: Over the past 10 years, many organizations decided to increase density from a real estate point of view. Now we see that one size fits nobody. So being more productive is becoming the area of focus for employers.
Over the past 10 years, many organizations decided to increase density from a real estate point of view. Now we see that one size fits nobody.
Turner: This is based on observational studies that showed people weren’t spending as much time at their desks as their managers thought.
OI: HOK’s expertise in planned neighborhoods for large offices got a lot of press about 20 years ago with one of its first Canadian projects, the 1,000,000 square foot head office for late, lamented Nortel in the Toronto suburb of Brampton.
Turner: We’re moving away from [Nortel’s] business-unit neighborhoods to activity-based neighborhoods. You sit in areas that are conducive to the types of work that you do in a day.
Katigbak: These ideas have been around for a while. The technology has caught up and allows those ideas to be realized.
Turner: Everyone has laptops. With Wi-Fi everywhere, everyone has the flexibility to move. The phone systems travel with you. The electronic concierge books places for you.
Fulford-Roy: One of our clients developed a smartphone concierge app that lets you book a seat, multiple seats or meeting rooms. You can find where your friends are on the floor if you want to work with them. You have maximum choice to work more productively.
OI: Isn’t it a truism that Gen Y’ers like to work together at long collaborative benching worktables such as Teknion’s Marketplace?
Fulford-Roy: Benching is still there, but a lot of clients understand that multiple types of settings are better, as they provide more variety. From a wellness perspective, getting people up and moving around every couple of hours makes them more alert. A lot of studies have shown that people who are active and engaged and change settings are more able to focus.
OI: What are some zones that they move in and out of?
Fulford-Roy: Quiet zones, high-energy zones, places to do focused work. This is absolutely critical to free-address working.
Katigbak: Government organizations don’t have the capital investment in place to support the way people want to be working, and it can hold people back.
Turner: Most individuals have their own devices that are more current than what the employer provides. It used to be that the office had the latest high-tech equipment, and now most employees are more up-to-date than the office. Why people come to the office has also changed. We used to think that people needed hotelling stations to sit and work. People come to collaborate; they do their quiet, heads-down work at home. They come to see people, to meet people, to become engaged and to exchange ideas.
It used to be that the office had the latest high-tech equipment, and now most employees are more up-to-date than the office.
Fulford-Roy: There was the assumption that people who work at home were disengaged, but they are often actually more engaged [than in-office workers] when they come into the office. They want to be in the office three days a week for mentoring purposes – both ways, to receive and to give – and to feel connected to the organization, to know what’s going on, and to feel that you’re part of something bigger.
Turner: We are seeing a much greater demand for change management as well as project delivery.
Fulford-Roy: There is a real need to help clients create a positive outlook toward change. It’s quite significant. We’re asking people of five generations to change how they’re working, almost overnight, with technology, with mobility and free address in particular. We want to make sure productivity doesn’t drop and aligns with the business vision. Now most employees are more up-to-date than their office.
We used to just roll out a standard 12-person meeting room. Now, meeting spaces are furnished and equipped quite differently. They vary from casual to formal, depending on whether people will be seated or standing, lounge, high-tech or no-tech.
OI: What are some recent plum jobs?
Fulford-Roy: We just completed the executive offices for OpenText [Canada’s largest software company] in Waterloo, Ont., and their Toronto office. We did pre- and post-occupancy evaluations and surveys at a global level, which really informed the development of its workplace strategy and guidelines. The learning from all that is integrated into the design of all the company’s workplaces, which we’re rolling out.
Katigbak: We just completed OpenText’s Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Tampa and Paris offices. Our designers actually go back and learn from each project. Their designs are always evolving.
Fulford-Roy: Our designers are there to ensure brand consistency and a consistent employee experience in all OpenText offices. The company grows every quarter through acquisition, so brand alignment and a consistent employee experience is critical to their success.
OI: Any other interesting recent projects?
Turner: We’re working on Cisco’s new 100,000 square foot Toronto headquarters and customer experience center. [Editor’s Note: The Cisco project had not been photographed at press time, thus no photos]
Fulford-Roy: It will be a walking, talking, branded demonstration of how Cisco technologies can be the backbone of the building and the enabler of the most progressive ways of working in a free-address open environment.
Turner: We did Cisco’s current facility in 2004 in BCE Place. It looks very futuristic, very “Star Wars.” The new facility now looks comfortable instead of high-tech. The technology is layered in, and the office looks more like a Starbucks coffee shop. This shows how Cisco has moved on: technology is expected.
OI: It no longer needs to be in your face.
Turner: Yes.
Katigbak: Comfort is a big part of the concept at Cisco.
Turner: And a residential feel. But it’s also important that Cisco doesn’t look like a young start-up company. Professionalism is important for some of its clients.
Fulford-Roy: There’s a constant balancing of the informal and formal. Informality is making its way into most of our client solutions.
OI: Cisco shows how office design is a slower version of hospitality design. You had to change Cisco’s office after 10 years to keep it from looking tired and dated. Just as restaurant and nightclub interiors often don’t last five years.
Fulford-Roy: The new Cisco office is more like a hospitality concept. HOK’s hospitality group is the fifth-largest in the world. There is so much carry-over and cross-pollination of the hospitality look and feel into the workplace now.
There is so much carry-over and cross-pollination of the hospitality look and feel into the workplace now.
Turner: We designed and won an ARIDO [Association of Registered Interior Designers of Ontario] awards for Google’s Toronto office. We did five locations for WPP, the [London-based] global PR firm. We have a big, five-year project in Newfoundland: a new, 300,000 square foot research lab and teaching facility at Memorial University. Delta Hotels is implementing our new brand strategy across Canada.
Fulford-Roy: We’re working with RBC [Royal Bank of Canada, the largest financial institution in the country], TD, Manulife [the Canadian insurance company that owns John Hancock in the U.S.], Ernst and Young, Marsh & McLennan, Macquarie Group [investment banking], and many others.
OI: Let’s move from office design trends to your business practice. How does your office get gigs? Does every HOK branch fend for itself and find its own clients or does world headquarters in St. Louis parcel them out?
Lisa: It’s a mix, a little bit of everything. We don’t have a headquarters anymore; it’s more of a distributed leadership. We have global and regional structures.
OI: To potential clients who kick the tires at HOK and other comparable large design firms, what differentiates HOK? What sets you apart, besides still being able to bask in the glory of Problem Seeking: An Architectural Programming Primer?
Turner: Thought leadership is important. Years ago, we led in visioning and everyone followed in our footsteps. Then we led in LEED. Now we lead in change management.
Fulford-Roy: We have stiff competition in the marketplace. Our approach to evidence–based design and how we analyze data to work more effectively for clients is one area that differentiates us. Another is workplace strategy combined with change management. This is a huge area of growth for us on a global level. We’re investing heavily in our consulting team’s change management expertise so that we can partner more strategically with what our clients are challenged by right now, which is employee productivity through change. How do we help employees and managers in an environment where everyone is moving around? How do we use the technology?
Turner: We also help with employee retention.
Fulford-Roy: Because if they’re frustrated and can’t get the technology to work…
Turner: And if you reduce their real estate and don’t give anything back, employees will leave.
OI: Speaking of employee retention, what’s HOK’s in-house approach?
Turner: Our office was built on respect for the team as a whole instead of the diva who rules the roost. Younger people in the industry know they will have opportunities here to grow, to have a say, to be respected.
Fulford-Roy: We have a pretty flat management [hierarchy] and a collaborative culture.
OI: Is each HOK branch a silo?
Fulford-Roy: Learnings about a particular client are shared among the regions, but the consistency comes from the core team that manages that account and that relationship, regardless of geography.
Turner: Half of our work comes from our global relationship with HOK, and half is locally driven.
Fulford-Roy: We have to stand on our own locally. The local feeds into relationships that we can develop globally, and the global gives us relationships that feed into our local relationships. We use both platforms.
OI: Finally, why did you move into new premises [at University and Dundas Avenues, closer to the financial district]?
Fulford-Roy: When the old lease expired, we wanted to walk the talk and bring the office up to current-day best practices. We will be right on the subway line and cycling to it is more central. We have a lot of people that bike to work. And the recession forced us to get more creative and focus on core strengths.
Turner: There will be one collaboration seat for every assigned seat on the floor. Our consulting practice also doubled in size.
OI: But everything you do is consulting.
Turner: Consulting is different from designing and building space.
Fulford-Roy: Kevin, for example, who is extremely analytical, does pre- and post-occupancy surveys and makes sense of the data. We look at every repeatable process that is measurable and that can be scaled from client to client so that we can build a database of how effective we were. We can pull metrics from the process to see how it can be optimized.
We’re not writing a new textbook, but we are certifying our employees and customizing our methodology so that it can be repeatable globally around our consulting practice. Too many people deliver that service and do a shallow dive because they don’t have a methodology in place. We think it’s an area of growth for all the disciplines we work in, even stadiums and airports.
Some of the tools are still the same, but we’re going deeper and helping clients with communications, employee readiness for change, people manager acceptance for change and identifying risks for change.
OI: It sounds like you overlap roles with, say, McKinsey & Company.
Fulford-Roy: No, we’re not. They do the business model; we help people transition for change. We gather so much information and data that the pre-product work, even before we put pen to paper before we design, is so complex. We tie the business, real estate, HR and IT together. We figure out that strategy well in advance of designing the space.
You can’t look at everything in isolation anymore. It’s a web. You can’t design an ecosystem by making assumptions, you have to bring in all the experts and all the elements that will impact the design. We can design free-address all day long, but if the technology isn’t there to support it, it’s failed. Not because it’s a bad design.
OI: Do you have to win over hearts and minds, as the military cliché goes, to promote new workplace designs?
Turner: It’s the middle managers who have trouble “getting it.” If they can’t see the work getting done, then it’s not getting done.
Fulford-Roy: People managers don’t want performance to drop because it reflects on their leadership. So HR needs to get engaged in training those managers. We often see HR managers changing the whole performance review process. It can’t be based on how often you are in your chair. New ways of measuring performance are part of the conversation about the future workplace.
David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com.
