Jean:    From a business plan, there are related issues, on of those being the retention of people. Is there a relationship between space and retention?

Jessica Hickey:    For the new call center sites we are currently constructing, we did what we call a "mining study." We worked with two groups and said, "You have this existing space and what's wrong with it? If you could, what would you do with it?" What resulted were successful projects. They took into account their traditional view of space and deliberately shifted metrics and ratios from offices to open workstations. We looked at different types of furniture for theses are people that are using three, four, sometimes up to six CPUs at their workstations. They talked about storage and all the time they spend reconfiguring their cubes. We worked through a scenario that "we can give you a cube that can do pretty much everything you want it to do. But there's a trade-off, you can't move the shelves." They agreed. One of the things that they really needed was to get together in triage with a computer and work through the customer problem and the best solution.

The hard questions to ask involved the trade-offs to get what was desired. The total site must come out to a certain metric of square footage per person. All the people bought into the metrics. The team would say, "Okay, we really need one more training room." Then we would say to them, "What is everyone willing to give up to get that training room?" Negotiation occurred within the team, with the architect very much involved in the front and back. These people are expectant of receiving service, and we feel the need to give them choices as to how the facility could serve them. It worked a lot better to have them work together as a team. The projects are a success.