In a world where securing top talent is a competitive business advantage, employers spend many waking hours devising ways to attract and retain an exceptional workforce. A new report offers guidance on how to make work environments into magnets for talent.
Human resource professionals claim that two of their top biggest challenges over the coming 10 years will be recruiting and rewarding the best employees (59%) and creating a corporate culture that attracts the best employees to their organizations (36%). The race for talent is on.
As companies look to recruit the best and brightest from college campuses, they are overlooking one major factor in the attraction and retention of recent graduates— incorporating campus design elements into work environments to attract young professionals who have spent the last four to six years learning, growing and working within the campus environment.
In partnership with global contract furniture company, KI, we conducted new research on collegiate design as a driver of workplace design, and set out to examine how college students like to work and how companies can apply this style in their own environment. The report is titled Collegiate Design: The New Driver for Workplace Design. This new research builds upon our previous survey which confirmed that current workplace design does not respond to the needs of recently hired graduates, but this time around took corporate representatives into the actual collegiate environments.
Some survey findings –
- 89% of companies experience new hires “lost in transition” (6-12 months average adjustment period cited), yet only 16% of companies try to provide responsive spaces.
- 75% of companies surveyed recognize that collegiate design can have an influence on their workspace design, yet only 5% of companies said they actually consider attributes of collegiate design when designing their work environments.
- 90% of corporations have tried to integrate specific spaces that, in their collective opinions, mimic a collegiate environment; however, none of them had fully integrated their workplace design to truly mirror the collegiate environment holistically.
- Students like to work everywhere, and so do new hires: (park benches, soft seating, stairwells, hallways, wide-open areas, noisy environments, quiet confines) and technology is an integral part of their work styles.
- Campus collaborative spaces are more highly used by students (in multiples) than corporate collaborative spaces are used by employees (individuals).
- The words “group” and “team” are different from the student point of view.
Click here for the full report