About Investigative Workplace Briefing

The evolving challenges of contemporary workplace strategy

Organisations want premises that enable them to achieve their higher strategic and cultural goals, and that continue to evolve with their needs.

Yet, our research identifies that in many instances, property professionals encourage them to begin at precisely the wrong point: the property itself.

Marcus Hanlon is executive general manager, property operations, at the giant property trust ISPT, and has responsibility for a commercial and industrial property portfolio worth $11 billion.

In an interview conducted for The Urban Developer, Hanlon says, “I think too many times when people are looking at relocating, it’s still driven by technical facets [yet it] can’t be seen as a property initiative, it’s got to be seen as an organisational and cultural initiative, in which property is just the enabler.

“The property people should be on the second line, as none of that conversation is around square metres or rent or floor-plate size or fit-out.”

Intense, technologically enabled creative team interaction is increasingly critical to the effective delivery of modern knowledge work.

The physical place in which work is undertaken is itself becoming a strategic actor.

Attaining the goal of a better workplace design must no longer rest in the domain of property experts alone, but instead involve the knowledge of a growing number of concerned stakeholders.

As such, its briefing processes must engage the high-level workplace rationale of the C-suite’s strategic vision makers.

But, as simple insurance, their vision must cascade down the organisation to draw on the insights of those throughout the hierarchy.

This is the essence of investigative workplace briefing.

Strengthen the workplace through collaborative enquiry

Investigative workplace briefing delivers improved workplace designs by getting inside the minds of those who work within them.

It is a managed, collaborative, social workplace exercise.

It couples active enquiry with the understanding that in any organisation there is more intelligence than ever gets put to use.

Within any knowledge business, there exists experience and insight whose potential for contribution isn’t just lying around waiting to be tripped over.

Instead, for maximum benefit, it must be sought, guided and made explicit.

Investigative workplace briefing probes this undervalued resource.

It uses targeted questions and sense-making practices to develop and refine a company’s vision for its future place of work.

Why is participation important?

There is a lot at stake for those wishing to protect their investments in their workspaces, workforces and workplace practices.

In this, the knowledge, experience and insight of those in their workplaces are their best guides in what it takes to create a workspace worth turning up for every day.

Teams that fall in love with a captivating problem are substantially more likely to create more successful outcomes than those that fall for particular solutions.

And acting to capture diversity of opinion in answer to any challenge is likely to yield the best results and present the greatest potential for creative breakthrough.

Because the workplace is a social entity and matters to them in practice every day, it offers the potential for them to build something great together.

In this way, investigative workplace briefing captures the creative potential of a workforce beginning to think differently about its premises.

How is this work executed?

The investigative workplace briefing method connects investigative journalistic enquiry with the use of social workplace technologies.

It draws on techniques I have adapted from my first-hand experience of documenting a major software development at the Commonwealth Bank.

The bank spends a lot on its technologies’ use in sharing and developing its knowledge base from the minds of its workers.

It invests in them because they work, and investigative workplace briefing uses these same tools to root out what briefing managers most need to know.

It uses journalistic, sense-making and publishing practices established over centuries to elicit and build on first-hand worker knowledge.

It hands over summarised reports for validation by appropriate experts and use by managers to ensure delivery of the desired workplace outcome.

It provides knowledge and insights that give architects and workspace designers new and invaluable material to work with.

But most importantly, because its currency is knowledge, investigative workplace briefing can be applied at any point over the entire cycle of property occupation.

What is the enduring benefit of investigative workplace briefing?

When they move to new premises and new ways of working, leaders often create workplaces in the hope of realising new knowledge flows.

Workplace strategy almost certainly fails unless it provides an enabling space optimised by design and working systems that can deliver them.

Aligning the accumulated workplace experience in pursuit of a greater organisational goal, investigative workplace briefing can muster better use from the brains across an organisation.

And it can deliver future-oriented workspaces and practices capable of evolving in step with the distinctive potentials of the knowledge-creators they are built to contain.