Am I the only one who feels like workplace design is up for grabs these days? Work from home or come back to the office? Open plan or a return to partitions or walls? Desk sharing or jealously guarding my personal territory? On the one hand, we have so many more choices about how, where and when we work thanks to ever-evolving technology, as well as more autonomy given cultural shifts in expectations of work, employers and workplaces. And on the other, it’s really hard to know what to do to get the best outcomes.
Following the popular trends and doing what everyone else is doing may feel like the best option. But benchmarking other organizations can only tell us what’s commonplace—it doesn’t tell us what’s right for our particular organization with our unique set of circumstances.
If nothing else, the negative headlines about open plan, for example, should demonstrate that it’s not a universally great approach.
So how DO we get it right?
The Purpose of Workplace Strategy
Workplace Strategy is powerful and takes a holistic look: to see each organization as a unique and an interdependent eco-system of activities that is constantly adapting over time. The end result is a strategy that echoes this dynamic: a workplace that “fits” now and can also easily evolve over time. As we say in our [whitepaper], “Workplace strategy involves creating an ecosystem of spatial and behavioral norms designed specifically to support key business processes and organizational management practices—which in turn help organizations achieve their business goals"
As complicated as that may sound, we’ve figured out over time that the best workplace strategies consider four key (and highly interdependent) areas: Alignment, Effectiveness, Efficiency and Adaptability.
Alignment
Alignment is about setting context and direction: what’s the organization’s culture – what are their current social norms (what we’re calling unwritten rules) and their future aspirations and expectations? What is their business strategy now and for the next few years? What’s their current workplace like—who gets what and why?
The underlying big idea behind Alignment is that of “fit” or consistency. The workplace should reinforce their culture and aspirations. The process of developing the strategy to reflect those things is also its own form of alignment when the organization actively participates in translating their behaviors and functional requirements into their unique, tuned and tailored workplace design.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness is about enabling a worker/a team to do their best work. To be engaged, productive, healthy and committed. It suggests we look for those activities that are critical to the business of the organization, and probe for what’s needed to support them spatially, technologically, behaviorally. And that we share the best available science and best practices about [knowledge worker performance.]
Efficiency
Wise use of space and other resources is still important. We can no longer afford to have spaces sit empty or badly underutilized. But the space-saving approaches that many organizations use to reduce space may also be undermining productivity, and that’s not good math, even if the savings are easier to quantify.
Doing more to understand how best to support solo and teamwork will help us identify potential ways to maximize utilization. Some workers/teams can and should give up having a permanently assigned seat, while for others, the disruption, reduction in productivity, and sense of disenfranchisement they experience may not make desk sharing cost effective.
Adaptabilty
This is about ensuring that the workplace can evolve and adapt over time to keep up with the organization. About designing for change. We’re talking physical flexibility approaches like modularity, interchangeable kits-of-parts, and plug-and-play infrastructure. We’re talking operational approaches, like budgeting for annual change vs. waiting until a lease expires or a move is necessary. And user-based approaches, where workers are enabled to self-perform a select set of adjustments, rearrangements or repurposing as they need to.
