Open Space Design Fosters Innovation at UTO

From Cubes to Open Space

What’s All the Collaboration About?

Fostering Strategic Innovation, Operational Excellence, and Community Delight

by Sandy Johnson and Tristan Ettleman
Photos by Allyson Caballero

Next time you’re in the USB building, take a peek in 2650 and 2654, where the Cloud First and Development teams are now co-creating. These are the first two of three large spaces in UTO that are getting a makeover.

The transition from the old 2000s office layout to the new open space offers collaborative, open style work areas with sit-stand desks and small open meeting zones. Fewer cubicle walls and more free flowing space supports both seamless teamwork and individual accomplishments.

Glass replaced the walls in USB 2650 and 2654 making the area much brighter and more inviting. Large monitors on rolling carts and wall-to-wall-to-wall whiteboard film invites in-person discussions and telepresence work sessions.

Is this relevant to the work UTO does? Absolutely!

“The UTO positive core is informed by ASU’s commitment to innovation and adaptation,” ASU CIO Lev Gonick says. “We know that our physical spaces are vital to the creative process and to our daily productivity. The new open collaborative spaces in USB are experiments in enabling creative output, transparency, and collegiality.”

As wrinkles are ironed out, staff are settling in and taking advantage of what open collaborative space offers.

Does it work?

Greg Holmes, a Cloud Cost Analyst at UTO, said he was “hesitant at first - I was used to working within the finance/budget section and not directly with development staff. I also thought having 30 staff packed into an open office environment would be overwhelming since I was accustomed to a quiet cube environment." Now that he’s working in the new space, however, he feels differently. “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the ease of the transition. The staff has been great to work with and the open space has been relatively quiet.”

He finds its biggest benefit is that it is much easier to collaborate and ask emergent questions quickly in person rather than rely on virtual communication. “Having been with the department only six months, I feel far less isolated than I did when I first started. For all the semi-privacy and other advantages a cube can provide, I feel much more part of UTO operations in this collaborative environment.”

Tori Poshkoff, who was accustomed to working in an office with an open floor plan before moving into a USB cube, found it to be a big advantage. “My neighbor and I would be working towards a similar end goal and if I hit a snag it was easy to just spin my chair around and ask how they got over it,” she says. “They could just roll over see what I was doing and easily go back to their desk to compare. Didn’t have to carry our computers back and forth or look at one screen.”

She also found the common arguments against open spaces to not really pose an issue. “Noise wasn’t usually an issue, others are very considerate,” she said. “I never found that privacy was an issue. I don’t think being in an open environment provided more or less distractions than being in a traditional cube.”

Construction continues as a third area in USB gets a facelift this year.

With a target completion date of April 30, the large window to window area between 2603 and 2679 is shifting from cubicles to open space. The addition of 11 AV enabled collaborative meeting rooms and generous hoteling space will offer additional flexibility in conjunction to increased relationship-building interactions, and improved employee health.

People working in open collaborative office environments are more active, whether at a standing desk, moving around the space or walking to a collaborative space. Staff will spend more time moving in an open space rather than in the traditional cube and desk. Anxious to move into the area is the UTO core leadership team.

And that’s not all. If you know the UTO, you know that it doesn’t stop here. The ITSM team recently moved into a newly reconfigured collaborative space in the Brickyard Artisan Court. Take a minute to visit the team on Mill and join them for lunch on the balcony!

Stay tuned for more on UTO Space activity. For questions and or input on open space visit #workspace on Slack.