The open office trend may be on its way out as major employers, including Microsoft and IBM, realize the value of team spaces and private areas like phone-booth-style and isolation rooms that allow workers to concentrate and collaborate. New layouts aim to create a "diversity of spaces," highlighting the best of open floor plan and private office designs.

Major League Baseball's new diversity fellowship program hopes to boost the number of roles for women and people of color in the corporate part of the industry. Twenty clubs are participating, hoping to change "the salary structure to make it attractive to a broader audience and to make it so that we are competitive in the job market," said Renee Tirado, MLB's vice president of talent acquisition, diversity and inclusion.

The success of the community giving garden at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota in Eagan, Minn., prompted more than 20 other area businesses to plant gardens, and now the network annually produces more than 10,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables for local food banks. More than 65 BCBS employees are involved in the garden, and some workers, who get paid time off for volunteering, have become active volunteers at local food banks.

Traditional hierarchies in organizational leadership are breaking down, resulting in an uncertain future of leadership "that will be more fluid, less rigid" and more distributed, Bob Johansen writes. "Shape-shifting organizations will disrupt traditional organizations and in some cases, overlay or blend with them," he argues.