Where should I sit?

When Cigna HealthCare began dispersing workers from its corporate office, executives soon realized the workers often had no place to work when they occasionally returned.

In the past few years, Cigna has learned that home is not the only office for teleworkers. Sometimes, teleworkers need an office at the office - even if it's not their own.

Some 2,100 of the company's 40,000 U.S. employees are formal members of the firm's E*Work program. E*Workers give up personal office space to work from home full-time, or share on-site space with a colleague. Another 8,000 Cigna employees telework informally, retaining their offices and working remotely as needed.

But on days remote workers would head into a corporate office for meetings or presentations, they often found themselves scrambling for a random desk to make phone calls or get some reading or computer work done between meetings.

In Phoenix, as with a dozen other U.S. cities, the company set out to create suitable workspace for remote workers, says Lynne Kelley-Lewicki, director of Integrated Workscape Strategies with Cigna in Bloomfield, CT.

When a tenant in Cigna's Phoenix office building vacated 1,700 square feet of office space, Cigna took over the space with plans to launch a pilot program. Cigna executives in Kelley-Lewicki's department collaborated with E*Work team members, considering teleworkers' work patterns, spatial and technology needs, and team working requirements.

The E*Work Touchdown Site was designed to serve a variety of needs; it includes a reading and concentration area, a computer room, a phone/work area, and a small training or collaborative area. Wheeled furniture fosters collaboration, equipped with desktop computers and network connections for workers with laptops. A storage room holds office supplies, and workers store their belongings in one of 36 lockers. They bring their own padlocks and remove their belongings at day's end.

"We recreated the full infrastructure for the employee," Kelley-Lewicki says.

In May, Cigna unveiled the Touchdown Site. To enter, an employee logs on to the "Phxmesa" coded directory in the company's Outlook program, which has been altered to double as a reservations system. Comments provide a text description of the space available, including Group Work, Individual Work, Small Tables or Team Area. Based on their needs, employees reserve the appropriate space, whether it be for team meetings and collaboration, private computer time, or just a quiet space to work between on-site meetings.

The site is open to all Cigna employees, though remote workers take priority. All space is reserved on a first-come, first-served basis.

Cigna says the Phoenix site will be joined by a dozen similar facilities in New England, South Carolina, Chicago, Denver and Midwest - markets where office space is at a premium. While most Cigna offices have teleworkers, new centers will be developed as needed in new E*Work markets.

"Workers don't want random seats," Kelley-Lewicki says. "They want something fixed, safe and productive. This creates a much more flexible work environment."

RELATED LINKS