Bringing Real Estate, IT and HR together to Improve WX
Improving workplace experience (WX) for an organization’s employees is a worthwhile goal often shared between many internal departments, but working together to achieve improvements can be an unfamiliar challenge.
To best achieve lasting WX improvements, a coordinated effort between several internal groups — Facilities and Real Estate, Information Technology and Human Resources — is essential. While these teams often interact in the course of ongoing operations, there are many ways to deepen collaboration among these teams that can benefit your organization’s employees.
Here are five suggestions that can help get you started bringing real estate, IT, and HR together to improve WX.
1. Form a WX Team.
Get everyone together! No one likes committees, so instead a WX team can function as a community of practice — a group of collaborators to explore new ways to improve WX. Ask representatives from the Facilities and Real Estate teams, HR and IT to meet to discuss how to collaborate in new ways.
Don’t start at the beginning of the next significant initiative. Seeing a multi-million dollar facility redo or IT deployment on the horizon forces WX teams to race into implementation mode. Instead, give yourselves time to understand each other’s worlds, to learn each other’s languages, and to create shared values as a team.
2. Share Your Department’s Strategic Initiatives.
What are each team’s most prominent goals? Take time to let each group share what their existing strategies and enjoy the chance to learn about what’s happening elsewhere in your organization. What initiatives are taking place? Why do they exist? Where is the focus of investments? Who is leading these initiatives? How might they change the future of your organization?
Don’t worry about interdependencies — just take the time to learn from each other, and celebrate each others’ accomplishments.
3. Look for Shared Goals and Codify Them.
What are each department’s goals as it relates to improving WX? Where do your goals intersect? Where do the initiatives overlap? Determine as a group how you can best start to work together to achieve shared goals.
4. Prototype Integrated Solutions.
Piloting or prototyping new solutions is a smart, scalable method of trying new things and learning together. Look for opportunities to undertake new approaches to workplace planning, tech deployments, and new managerial methodologies with the same test user groups. Prototyping enables your WX team to move from sharing with one another to exploring together.
5. Read WX Weekly Together!
WX weekly is your tool to enable new conversations about workplace experience. And as your organization tries new things and experiences new learnings, share those learnings with others on WX Weekly!
