A credibly COVID-safe office seen also to boost smarter workplace wealth creation will get attention
Those providing workspaces — landlords, agents and tenants — are all suffering as more formerly daily commuters decide they prefer the relative COVID-safety of working from home.
Yet, as its backdrop, the coronavirus crisis will also accelerate entirely new ways of working, and forms of workplace, for other, more purely commercial reasons.
In part, it will do this because it is also the trigger that in every workplace can expose and put to work the power of the emergent, transformative, human, wealth-creating capability now present in every organisation.
This is also the capacity that can deliver safer and better-performing, value-adding, knowledge-focusing spaces in which to work.
So, because it has critical applications in attracting and keeping the most valuable and talented employees’ minds on the job, if they are to have any chance in fighting back, the question all with interests the continuing functioning and profitable supply of workplace must currently seek to answer is, what do such safe spaces look like in the minds of their users?
In any earlier time, it would have been impossible to reach into the collective consciousness of those across any organisation to gather and synchronise its answers to this question.
The cost of this would previously have been that many powerful new ideas and opportunities would simply never have been revealed to be explored and developed.
Yet, as our use of and familiarity with the potential of the social internet grows, we have reached an age of unprecedented opportunity in making the best use of intelligence across the web-age business.
Workplace knowledge, insight and learning that was once out of reach is no longer beyond our grasp.
And with this, we can open a pathway to more effective, focused and creative, shared team reasoning, cross-disciplinary understanding and collective intellectual growth to drive rapid business learning, appropriate organisational adaptation and new wealth generation.
The universal, profit-advancing human resource ready to be applied in every workplace
Driving this potential for change — although it is still a force unrecognised and unorganised in most organisations — we’ve now arrived at “peak social internet literacy.”
This entirely naturally occurring capacity’s practical applications are also easily demonstrated, as this marks a point at which every employee in every business knows how to use social media to write online, upload and share material and to make comments about those items uploaded by others.
Through it, management can now tap into diverse perspectives and intelligence that was previously both unknown and unreachable.
Now, under deliberate investigation, a business’s previously unknown intellectual aptitudes can be reported, examined, challenged, reiterated and repeatedly refreshed at low to no cost.
Against this, it is clear that no longer does any company have any choice about whether it competes for, and on, the growth of its aggregated intellect, and in its agility and speed of response to change.
By amplifying this naturally occurring capability through the use of the mirroring, private, internal Facebook-like technologies now available within every workplace, we now have a way of listening and digging in detail to understand the health and safety concerns and interests of those who will occupy a workspace.
And the new kind of organisation that occupies it will also benefit when offered an unprecedented class of reward-focused workplace accommodation that contributes to speeding the growth of its money-making capabilities.
As such, the greatest foreseeable workplace opportunity presents itself to landlords able to understand this and to learn how to help those who occupy their spaces get smarter, more adaptable, more productive and more competitive, safely.
Therefore, making the space in which work is to be performed an enabler to enhance the money-making potential of the tenant business now makes far better sense than moving that company, giving insufficient intellectual consideration and planning to the what-ifs of its working configuration, into an untested workplace and simply hoping for the best.
Such thinking must focus as much on the constant redesign of the evolving organisation itself, adapting in rhythm with what is changing outside, and the knowledge it must contain, create and develop, as it does on the space it occupies.
In this lies the true birth of the discipline of workplace strategy, because this new proficiency has such massive implications for organising knowledge, and in the design and accommodation of organisations to optimise its constant competitive creation, flow and growth.
The aim for the workplace, both physical and virtual, must now be to remove friction in the transfer of knowledge by more closely integrating processes and spaces, through purposeful design, to be more tightly interwound to the imperatives of the money-making machine they serve.
Against this, the space given to work is no longer a passive ingredient and, possibly location aside, like all others connected by the internet, workplace is being driven to become an information business.
What more could you know about your workplace environment?
When it generates data, we can derive a knowledge profile of every workplace and greater work community — think: central business district office tower — to understand whether its configuration either hampers growth or accelerates progress.
And when the human inputs for what is known can be understood, these can also be altered and experimented with to test for new results.
Through this, we can build a far superior understanding through which to manage, investigate and experiment with the relationships of the spaces they occupy to the creativity and knowledge-creating productivity of the individuals who work in them.
And, because the focus of a knowledge-engineered office can assist a business to learn and grow, it therefore yields information of value to every landlord, tenant and agent.
To this, we must apply study if we are to make rapid advances in adapting people and technology to the optimal workplace delivery of new business and wealth.
Using this proliferation of data, those commercial property owners able to reconceive their future business as being not just as in leasing space but in helping their customers do safer, better business will shift forever the business model terrain on which the commercial workplace will be fought.
For the landlord capable of branding, and justifying its reputation for, owning and operating knowledge factories that deliver this safety and knowledge outcome, the queues will be long.
For this first-mover, there most likely also awaits an outsized reputational and learning advantage — and maybe even survival.
Those thinking only as old-style landlords will also miss out on developing their own critical mastery of wealth-creating knowledge and its accommodation, and, as I have written elsewhere, against the use of better data, it is the cancer of ignorance that will kill others.
As architects with a distinctive and unique skill set, interest and study in organisational design and learning and first-hand experience in managing professional social workplace content, we at Shiro Architects are able to promote a sophisticated briefing methodology — see outline beneath — and a knowledge of how to use social internet literacy to develop the design and management guidance that delivers this workplace result.
And, reflecting the dictum that we shape our tools and then our tools shape us, we know how to apply it to feed the qualitative, social enquiry and feedback that matches and synchronises the evolution of the employer organisation in step with its own workplace.
This is a new kind of business that deliberately puts its place of work to work to function harder and with greater precision as a factory for its creation of new knowledge.
In short, Shiro can help you benefit from creating a workspace that has the unique proposition of feeling as COVID-safe as it can be in the minds of its users, because it is explicitly designed around their concerns, at the same time as being both measurably more knowledge-productive, attractive and modern.
Contact me, graham@shiroarchitects.com, to bring about the design for your business of a safer physical workplace that fits and performs better for your business in every dimension that matters most to those who will pay for and work in it.
Workplace design briefing for more reliable wealth creation
Through Shiro Architects’ unique design recipe, our briefing exercise focuses, in summary, to understand:
- Employees’ perceptions of COVID-safety and what about their own business’s current workspaces and ways of working, and experiences of using the common spaces in the building outside their offices, makes them uneasy about the possibility of contracting the coronavirus, and what actions they and the landlord could take to make them feel safer in this environment.
- What about the workplace they work in, and the ways in which they work could improve their current employee experience (EX).
- What about the workplace they work in they believe could grow the collective intelligence of their organisation to make its business smarter, more competitive and more prosperous.
- What about the design of the spaces in which they work could remove obstacles to improve the daily productivity and creative workflow of their office and enhance its ability to stimulate business growth through the generation of new wealth-creating knowledge.
- What about the design of their workplace could be amended to future-proof it to aid new thinking and adaptability in managing change in business process, culture and strategy.
Where does “social internet literacy” come from?
Of course, I can’t claim to have “created” social internet literacy any more than anyone else can claim to have invented reading, writing, typing or listening (and, granted, others may refer to this latest emergent human-productivity capacity differently elsewhere — I just haven’t found it). However, to the best of my knowledge, and unlikely as it sounds, even to me, because of my long-standing fascination with workplace social technology-driven organisational learning, I believe I may be among the first to have identified and articulated its presence as a pervasive, potent, largely under-realised and increasingly valuable management resource.
My professionally published writing on workplace strategy and the application of “social internet literacy” to building and workplace design
Based on my own original research, I was commissioned to write The Evolution of Workplace Strategy into a Discipline of FM for the January 2017 issue of FM (Facility Management) magazine.
More recently, in September 2019, I published Social Media for Managing Property Customers (not my choice of headline), also in FM.
And then, in February 2020, I then published A Matter of Intelligence (again, not my headline), specifically on the application of social internet literacy to the future shape of a smarter workplace in InDesign magazine.
About me
As a journalist, I have made a living from researching what is as yet unknown and reporting it back to readers who are interested in and can use and learn from its content.
I am a former sub-editor (a key editorial sense-making and quality control role in professional media) on the pages of The Australian Financial Review newspaper group, and my sensitivity to the need for internet-driven digital-age organisations to learn and develop is inspired by my MBA (Technology) from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. This qualification focuses on creating and managing the businesses of the future, addressing changes driven by advances in digital and networked technology.
As a consequence of my education, I am particularly interested in the need for networked, wholly connected businesses to adapt to learn fast, and in reporting on the unexpressed knowledge to be found in every workplace that can enable this.
My proposition is to apply my first-hand workplace insight of what I describe, gained both in professional media but also from working, at the corporate coalface, using the relevant workplace social technologies, for similar knowledge-seeking purposes, in its 200-strong software development team on a major software transformation project at the headquarters of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
A former client working for the nation’s largest bank says this of the value of my work
“At CBA, Graham was tasked with building a curated knowledge base for a critical and complex project the bank was undertaking. I served as Graham’s boss during this period and have seen Graham use this project experience, combined with his MBA learning, to evolve a new understanding about how organisations can build ‘corporate memory’ and embed learning processes to better guide leadership insights.
“Based on the many conversations I have had with Graham since, I have seen the passion and knowledge Graham brings to the topic of workplace knowledge capture and organisational learning, grow and mature such that Graham is now an authority on the topic. Effective digital learning is an essential capability to acquire for any organisation hoping to have a prosperous future.”
Source: Brian Davis, technology innovator, founder Software Symphony and senior software architect at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
About Shiro Architects in a few words
Our practice’s work presents a mix of commercial, hospitality and multi-residential projects, and our design director Hiromi Lauren’s exceptional skills are based on her 20 years of working closely with the internationally renowned, multiple award-winning Australian architects Harry Seidler and Associates* (where Hiromi was one of his favourites).
Her Seidler experience aside, Hiromi is also an award winner for her personal architectural achievements, having, on establishing Shiro Architects, won the 2017 Queensland prize for commercial architecture for her own first building in her own right, the Gold Coast KDV Golf and Tennis Academy.
As a practice, our firmly held view is that architects should always prioritise making money for clients by making better use of space, while delivering beautiful, practical built solutions.
* Harry Seidler and Associates designed these familiar landmark buildings, among others:
Cove Apartments, The Rocks, NSW
Horizon Apartments, Darlinghurst, NSW
Meriton Tower, George and Kent Streets, Sydney, NSW
The Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre, Sydney NSW
Alliance Francaise, Clarence Street, Sydney CBD, NSW
Australia Square, Sydney CBD, NSW
