Designing for workplace creativity attracts better workers

Published in

Workplace strategy

6 min readMay 12, 2016

To inspire greater creativity and learning within their organisations, business decision-makers must institute workspaces capable of encouraging enhanced collaboration. And if designing for creativity attracts better workers, those spaces must conform to the needs and interests of those born to expect workplace mobility and flexible work styles.

These are among the views of Brian Walshe, general manager end-user computing at Dimension Data, a large, high-end enterprise-computing vendor serving some of the nation’s biggest corporations.

Walshe may not be an architect, but he works at the sharp edge of corporate workspace innovation and technology thinking sweeping the workplace.

From his perspective, he says businesses are “absolutely” moving towards embracing collaborative activity based working (ABW), and towards implementing the technologies that facilitate it.

The evolving place of work

Most managers will now be broadly familiar with the concept of ABW workspaces, in which individual workspaces are removed and workers, enabled by mobile devices and laptops, claim desk and meeting spaces on a first-come, first-served basis.

“Now, you’ve got the professional services firms all going at it hell for leather, and you know that partners in big accounting firms don’t spend money unless there are some very tangible rewards.

“So, when you see the KPMGs and PwCs all going to ABW in a very big way, completely retrofitting their offices, you know something important is happening. They are not doing this because it’s more funky, they are doing it because, first, it can better utilise the space they have today, and, after salaries, rent is probably the second biggest expense they have.

“But, secondly, the generation now coming into the workforce have an expectation that the environment they are going to work in will be the same as those they’ve become used to at uni.

“Kids coming into the workforce have a different way of communicating and a different way of connecting. Talk to a teenager, and you will discover that they communicate in one of two ways: they text people or they use video.

“I see my 14-year-old daughter come home and she gets into a five-way Skype video conference, walking around the house with her iPad. I swear to God that my two teenagers [are now so advanced in their use of mobile technologies that they] don’t really understand that their mobile phones can actually make voice calls.”

We must adapt to these trends in the workplace, Walshe says, “Because great collaboration only comes from having great communication.

“In a couple of weeks, I am hosting an event we use to describe the workspaces of tomorrow to CIOs. Its topic is ABW, where are you up to, and it’s raising a lot of excitement.”

The workplace is on grass

Walshe says, “Much workplace automation now focuses on how you book a desk, how you find what spaces are available, and how you book rooms when you need to.

“There is also much work being done on systems that allow people to do their work from their smartphone on the tram on the way to work.”

But, it is in universities, Walshe says, that the change in the way work is done is especially evident.

“In a lecture theatre that holds 400 people, in which they used to get 300 people into a lecture, they now might have just a dozen attending. Everyone else is watching it online, they will watch it in real time or they will watch it by video streamed later.

“I was with the CIO at one of the universities in South Australia as we walked through its quadrangle, and there were students everywhere, lounging around on the grass, all with their iPads or tablets watching lectures.

“The lecture theatre may be just 50 metres that way, but they’d rather sit out here and watch it like that. So now, one of the challenges we have lies in providing bandwidth.”

Meeting by screen and sofa

When the office is set up to facilitate it, meeting the needs and expectations of that incoming graduate generation in its workspace will make it far easier to encourage collaboration across the organisation.

For effective ABW, Walshe says, “There need to be plenty of meeting rooms, of different sizes, all with large screens that you can project onto so all present can see what is going on.

Most importantly, however, to those providing the technologies of the modern workplace, Walshe says, “My message to IT is that you have one of two choices here.

“That is because when the discussion starts, it’s not going to be about technology, but about where the furniture is, what kind of furniture, how many meeting rooms, what kind of rooms there are.

“The building properties group will look at doing ABW because it is the way of reducing the rental cost, or HR will look at doing it or the business will look at doing it to increase productivity.

“No one turns around and says, well, how much wireless do you need?

“But, from an IT perspective, you really want to be on the front foot and involved or you are going to be dragged into it at the last moment when things aren’t the way people want them to be.

“No one will ask, how are we going to do this, how are we going to do that, are we going to have enough of this, or are we using the right applications?

“But, when IT gets involved early, it helps lead the conversation rather than just following it, and what we’ve seen is that people use the money they are saving on the rental and real estate and put that back into a technology refresh.

The conversation, as Walshe alludes, must become one of optimising the potential of collective intellect by improving both the spaces available, and its enabling technologies.

The iterative learning of ABW

Walshe observes that, “ABW creates a constantly evolving workplace and a constant feedback loop where you look at what works and what doesn’t, and you can move things around.

“When your productivity tools better support flexible working by being easier to access, that will facilitate better collaboration and improved productivity among your teams.

“And, as an appropriate response, IT departments are suddenly providing people with better laptops, smaller, lighter, better screens, better applications, more up to date stuff.

“What I can tell you is that ‘choose your own device’ is now the way people are going and that is when IT says it is going to give you a choice of devices. People don’t want to bring their own device if you are going to give them one.”

What Walshe says accords with another recent interview, with the innovation director of a major Australian financial institution, who asserted that by using the new technologies of the cloud, the formal workplace could in effect disappear.

As a response, within the institution’s headquarters, the director had set up his “minimum viable office”, or MVO, a playspace bedecked with whiteboards facilitating ad hoc new product creation, whose great success had been to compress time to market in developing and testing new products.

Rising above the minimum

So, the technology-enabled MVO might be a good way to start for companies wishing to jump-start creativity and fast learning.

However, at some point they are also likely to wish to execute its newly enabled ways in a more persistent state if they are to benefit fully from the emergent ways of working.

If your own organisation needs a more comprehensive, focused strategy to develop and implement workspaces for tomorrow in its business, where will it begin its journey?

As architects, we must understand how the spaces in which the people and technologies coming to drive workplace transformation can perform most effectively, because a great deal changes when employers decide to introduce more ad hoc working styles to their workplaces.

And, because the matter of driving learning from the design of corporate facilities is of no minimal importance, who else are they going to turn to when it comes to redesigning their spaces?

The purpose of the research you are reading, and of the other stories contained on this site is to ensure Shiro Architects is ready for the task.

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About this post

This post was originally published at shiroarchitects.com.

About Shiro Architects

Workplace strategy is where building design, modern technology and new ways of working come together to deliver the future of work. Through dedicated research, we aim to understand how to create workplace-design briefings that satisfy the evolving needs of occupants, owners, investors and developers of commercial office space. For organisations looking to use relocation to kick-start change in the ways their teams think and learn, we champion the use of sense-making workplace social technologies applied to this purpose.

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