Business drivers like mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing, and offshoring are spreading out the workforce and work processes. Teams draw on people from all over, even from other companies. Yet they still have to work together to generate new ideas.

Businesses are under greater pressure to innovate, and fast. So, the workplace's ability to support the activities that lead to innovation has moved way up the list. For global companies, this means providing the infrastructure that enables global teams to collaborate effectively across borders, time zones, and with outsiders.

Conversations with Gensler's workplace practice leaders and others make it clear that we're in a new era of distributed work. Given the demands that are placed on it today, the workplace is becoming a series of connected settings that support each person's workday while keeping him or her linked up with others across a larger social network.

The paradox of global work

As the geographer David Harvey observed, the connectedness that is often a hallmark of global firms—frequent travel back-and-forth and virtual communication among teams to reduce the apparent distance among work settings—heightens their differences. Moving from region to region in a multinational company, you notice how nuances of local laws, languages, and traditions shape and influence the corporate brand and culture.

As technology shrinks distance, these differences persist and are even amplified. To mitigate the resulting polarization, global businesses prefer "world cities" as locations. These cosmopolitan centers, existing and new, mediate between a global culture and the flavors of each locality. Differences are celebrated and put to work.

The workplace is gaining a similar sophistication. People want options, including the choice to be with others whose skills, knowledge, and creativity are crucial to what they have to do. "People come together because they want to and because it's important to do so," says Gensler's Jim Williamson. "The workplace is a stage on which key interactions take place."

For Tom Vecchione at Gensler New York, group work is what is redefining the physical character of an office. "Work isn't a singular thing," he says. "People come together in one place to 'group up,' because the social network lets them get things done."

Serving that network requires a mix of transparency, community, and amenity, he adds. Companies are opening up their work environments. Workbenches and shared offices are the emerging norm, driven by people's need to share knowledge. Vecchione points to a recent Gensler study of how a global high-tech company's workforce used the workplace. "Mobile workers bypassed the mobility centers and found empty desks near the people they needed to see. They wanted to be able to turn around and have an immediate conversation."

Overhearing others talking can be the quickest way to stay in the loop. Similarly, open vistas between colleagues allow a spontaneous huddle to morph into a productive session-without needing a dozen emails to plan it. "Most work settings today are containers of process," says Loree Goffigon, a leader of Gensler's global consulting practice. "They need lots of pinup space and white walls to encourage people to share thoughts and ideas as they're being developed." The best ones also let people unplug and work on their own, without distraction. That's just as important to creative work.

"My clients-in the financial sector, not just in advertising or entertainment-are asking how they can create a sense of energy," says Gensler Los Angeles' Nila Leiserowitz. "At the same time, they realize that one person's knowledge-sharing is another's noise. The iPod may be our era's closed office door-how we signal to others not to interrupt us."

Talent and the workplace

No one expects to spend a lifetime working for one company anymore, but that only makes the competition for employees' hearts and minds more intense. Companies are looking for a virtuous cycle: people's sense of belonging helps retention; retention aids mentoring; mentoring builds expertise across the company; and that expertise fuels innovation. With a dispersed workforce, the office is the main place where this happens.

As Ernst & Young's Michael Buckley points out, that sense of belonging is strongly reinforced by where a company decides to locate its offices. An industry sector like banking and finance, for example, will choose Manhattan so its leaders and traders can rub elbows. Their presence draws the young and ambitious, who are also attracted by the city's amenities-some of which suburban office parks now try to replicate.

Writing recently in The New York Times, Paul Krugman speculated that Manhattan's renewed popularity as a headquarters city is made possible by technology, which has allowed these companies to shift their back-office functions to lower-cost locations. Wherever they choose to be, though, the workplace retains its importance. Says Mark Nicholls, head of corporate real estate at Bank of America, "Looking ahead, global companies will be competing hard for talent. A high-performance workplace will be a strategic advantage for us in terms of attracting and retaining the very best people."

Strategies for building culture

The desire to create a sense of belonging means that workplace design is drawing on retail precedents. Stores are experientially designed, creating a context for the products that are on sale that speaks to the lifestyles and expectations of prospective customers. Today, most companies recognize that their offices function in similar ways to create a shared culture that appeals to workers of different ages and backgrounds. That diversity, coupled with workforce mobility, means that "there need to be cultural signposts in the office to help people quickly understand their company's social protocols," says Gervais Tompkin, a workplace design director at Gensler San Francisco.

As women entered the U.S. workforce in large numbers, the office took on some of the characteristics of home, especially in shared settings for informal interaction. In a global workplace, the metaphor of shopping may now be a more useful cultural bridge. The ubiquitous mall, for example, has emerged as the great equalizer, the one place on the planet where everyone feels at home. Retail's "customer first" ethic also captures a basic change in work's social contract. As Tompkin says, "You used to work for a company, but now you expect the company to work for you-to provide settings that help you to be productive." People look to the workplace to be hospitable and engaging. Just as music and lighting set the tone in stores, retail-like workplace design creates a "buzz" that helps foster a more dynamic office culture.

Negotiating a distributed world

A feature of distributed work is that the people involved may stay put even as they move ideas around the planet. When real and virtual blend like this, how do teams track their projects? It often falls on the workplace to make their progress visible.

One way this is happening is that technology is converging with workspace. An example is Hewlett-Packard's high-definition Halo video-conferencing room, which moves beyond the "screen" paradigm to address the needs of collaboration. It heightens the illusion of face-to-face interaction, enabling people to see nuances of body language, like facial expressions, that are crucial to understanding. Without that emotional intelligence, much gets lost in translation.

Companies as diverse as Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and Zurich Financial Services have built "collaboration centers" located apart from their everyday operations to support the direct interaction of teams engaged in learning and innovation. With a full complement of technology and amenities, they are part conference center and part hotel, blurring the line between working and socializing so their teams can bond. That nurturing is vital to turn a virtual network into a social one that can really produce.

Gary Wheeler, the leader of Gensler's workplace practice in London, believes we are about to see a surge of innovation in office design. "The fluidity of work is changing the game." The push for more effective work settings reflects the pressing need of global companies to get a dispersed, mobile workforce to innovate faster and better. That in turn "makes the workplace a much looser concept-it's where people come to seek ideas," Wheeler says.