Investing in office design is an investment in your employees. Companies are discovering that purposeful design of office spaces is increasing employee productivity and improving employee performance, which yields more profit and saves money over time.

The meeting notification on your desktop signals a strategy session that’s starting in an hour.

You shift into focus mode as you review notes from meetings prior. A silent, uninterrupted brainstorm produces the ideas you’ll bring to the table.

Ahhh. The morning routine.

You take a shower, read the paper, brainstorm the best way to navigate traffic on your way to the gym, catch a bus to work and then settle into your cube so you can focus intensely on a deadline-driven project.

The days of cubicle farms and divided offices are numbered, if not a distant memory. Companies are increasingly opting for more open, fluid workspaces, complete with shared tables, comfortable couches and cozy reading nooks.

Why the surge in popularity of this type of design? How do today’s employers...

Once upon a time, “looking something up” required a trip to the library. For the average American, those days are long gone. In today’s high-tech age, information is readily at our fingertips. We are using and processing that information quite differently than we did even a decade ago. In a world dominated by screens and....