In a previous post we advocated for alignment between an organization’s workplace strategy and its unique combination of current realities and business strategies, as well as its brand, values and culture to ensure the workplace is tuned and tailored to that unique organization.
We feel just as strongly that organizations and their consultants should invest in a robust needs analysis process (what the industry calls programming) to understand how those business strategies roll down into a tangible range of business-critical activities--both for individuals and their teams—that are necessary to produce the positive results leadership is after. That we seek to understand both the nature of important work functions and the unwritten rules that drive behavior.
And from there, that we apply all we know about supporting high performance for both individuals and teams.
Using interactive tools including interviews and focus groups, workplace strategists identify the most business-critical processes an individual or a team contributes; and within those critical processes, the most critical activities individuals and teams engage in to deliver successful outcomes. Probing those activities also identifies where work is being done (both within and outside of office) what people and technology resources are needed, and how a given process may evolve over time as things invariably evolve. Through this process, use case patterns, like commonly held meetings, are revealed which help designers and consultants to develop the full range of needed activity-based spatial, technological and behavioral aspects--the more common of which we can then ‘standardize’—as well as the ‘hacks’ to those standards some users will need to make to support unusual processes or personal needs and preferences. That thoughtfully address diversity and inclusion.
And in this probing, designers and workplace strategists can try to uncover the organization’s unwritten rules and assess whether those behaviors are aligned or not with the organization’s aspirations, goals or strategies.
Challenge: Applying Performance Science
The hurdle waiting for us after we’ve convinced an organization to invest in thorough needs analysis is to apply all that we now know about individual and team performance. Some of those things we now know are much easier than others. LEED and WELL standards spell out very clearly what environmental factors and self-care choices correlate to wellness or individual cognitive performance—things like daylight and views, good hydration and exercise. Science also identifies environmental factors that correlate to team performance: enabling a team to create a sense of ownership and spatial identify for their team’s space correlates to their effectiveness as a team.
The more difficult factors to integrate are those that make the case for the unwritten rules that govern how we treat each other. Science has identified the top six factors that correlate to knowledge worker productivity and they are largely about interpersonal dynamics:
- Social cohesion amongst the team
- Perceived supervisory support (the belief that my boss has my and my team’s back)
- Information sharing
- Goal clarity
- External outreach (to be open to updating one’s mental models or approaches)
- Trust
Calls to Action
Organizations: do not listen to the voices who try to convince you to skip a thorough needs analysis process. That’s terrible advice. A robust needs analysis process will create greater understanding of the processes and behaviors that then become the basis for workplace design and engender support among the employees that participated in the interviews and focus groups. Way less “change management” will be needed, because most workers will understand the tradeoffs that need to be made and feel good about their contributions to the quality of the resulting designs. Also consider how to weed out dysfunctional and transplant supportive unwritten rules aligned with those factors known to correlate with performance.
Designers and workplace strategists: demonstrate to your clients the power of investing in effectiveness efforts like needs analysis and applied science.
