How To Use Social Technologies To Enhance Your Workplace Design Briefing

We’re bringing workplace design briefing up to date, because your organisation contains more knowledge, experience and insight than ever gets put to use, and a corporate relocation or fitout is the perfect time to reconsider what work is to be done in the future, how, and by whom, to get better use out of the brains across the organisation. But, just because the media that can best capture the potential of that knowledge and insight might be social doesn’t eliminate the need to act like professional publishers if you want to maximise the return on your people’s ideas. Here, for non-publishers, is a short how-to about how to approach it. Its practices are well suited to communicating and managing change across the entire process of workplace relocation, design and fitout.

About this post

After almost 20 years as a sub-editor on newspapers and magazines, I spent half of 2013 working on an editorial brief to organise technical documentation on a major web-technology project in the activity based working environment of a Big Four Australian bank.

As the project’s communication vehicle, the bank’s development team uses the Atlassian wiki, Confluence, a first-class team documentation tool used by technical teams around the world.

I’ve been interested for many years in how such social workplace technologies can be used to capture knowledge and drive organisational learning.

I am extremely grateful to the bank for the opportunities its limitations as a publisher gave me to understand how this could be performed more effectively to build knowledge across its workplace.

How will your organisation use its new workplace?

When they plan to relocate, modern leaders often aspire in their use of new workplaces to introduce new technologies and ways of working.

These new ways may aim to cultivate increased employee engagement, productivity and collaboration among an emerging generation of workers with new expectations of the nature of their work and of their organisations.

And those leaders may also wish to use this impetus to reshape their organisation’s cultures.

For precisely such reasons, within an emerging discipline increasingly becoming known as “workplace strategy,” the process of workplace design briefing is steadily becoming ever-more complex.

Even on apparent post-occupancy project completion, what is introduced into the modern workplace is not a static state but one that is dynamic and necessarily in constant evolution as the nature of work itself contorts both within and around the organisation.

Against this background, organising its knowledge for maximum effect is one of the biggest challenges any internet-era business faces.

This has the consequence that any project from which your organisation intends to learn needs to be documented as a platform to service that purpose.

The institution of technologies capable of providing an iterative feedback loop and therefore of building on the best of the brains within your enterprise, provides all the more reason to get this right.

Accordingly, we wish to introduce a new form of workplace-design briefing as a possible trigger for bringing those greater aspirations to reality across the organisation.

The method we advocate is both structured and highly flexible, as a relocation or office fitout provides one of the best possible opportunities to draw fully on the infinite reserves of creativity, experience, know-how and common sense your organisation contains.

This assertion is based both on first-hand experience and research Shiro Architects is conducting into workplace strategy and its implications among those who have been there before.

Our research is conducted among those with responsibility for making key property decisions in many of Australia’s largest corporations.

The briefing method we advocate marries timeless professional publishing practices with the same collaborative, social workplace technologies as are already in use in many of those same organisations.

For the benefit of those who have not worked in a professional publishing environment, what follows describes some of the necessary steps in the process of making sense of a chaotic brew of knowledge and contribution.

We apply it to communicating and managing the arc of change across the entire process of fitout and relocation.

It also provides a prime opportunity to initiate a platform fit for deployment across all of an organisation’s future workplace learning.

Use workplace-design briefing to trigger new thinking across your organisation

Increasingly, while few occurrences stress an organisation to the same degree as a relocation, among the reasons many organisations may have for moving may also be the goal of introducing more flexible, mobile styles of working.

Among our interviewees, Marcus Hanlon, executive general manager, property operations, at the giant property trust ISPT, now has responsibility for $11 billion worth of commercial and industrial property.

Hanlon was also a key initiator in the National Australia Bank’s move to flexible ways of working for 4800 staff at its 700 Bourke Street, Melbourne, headquarters and says adapting to new ways of working presents a “root challenge for an organisation”.

He is also among those who tell us that typically when looking to relocate, companies’ decision-making processes are still too often driven by technical factors, such as looming lease expiries and needs to change location, reduce rent and bring down the number of square metres occupied.

Yet, he says the transformation of the workplace, “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.”

Where in most organisations knowledge is typically neither captured or applied optimally, used strategically, the process of relocation can itself be viewed as an opportunity to launch a knowledge-strengthening initiative across an enterprise.

Get started: Set your workplace-design briefing’s publishing agenda

However you are going to document the work to be undertaken within your relocation project, you are going to find it necessary to define its scope to break it into recognisable chunks.

An index or table of contents (TOC) establishes a starting point, which might sound like common sense, but experience tells us that when publishing for knowledge capture in a social milieu, as at the bank, the reality can be very much otherwise.

There is certainly a new discipline to be built around the organisation of social content if that material’s purpose is to drive learning, and we aim to outline some of those rules here.

Why publishing social content requires new principles

When we describe online publishing technologies as “social”, we imply in part that the creation of their content can be near-instantaneous and fluid, more like conversation.

When material is created purely for social purposes, imposing order on it might be unimportant.

The upside, when applied to organisational knowledge is that new contributions, often shared between those who might not work together or know each other, can make quickly for great leaps in new understanding and insight.

But, clearly when called upon to perform in writing in the workplace, not everyone is well suited or dedicated to becoming a reporter, an editor or a creator of high-quality social documentation.

Those without a love for creating and curating content are especially unlikely to give much forethought to creating it before they start.

We can also predict that without proper guidance, or checking, not all contributors will be equally diligent about the consistency with which they tag, reference and index their own contributions.

For all the upsides, then, of thoughtful participation, in business, this makes for significant challenges, as effective, reliable indexing and search are really important to the collective learning experience.

Success ultimately will result from the quality of rules or guidance applied to contributions at the beginning, as in a world awash with information, the reader’s attention needs to be drawn to that which matters most.

If such simple rules of publishing are unobserved, the consequence may be that instead of capitalising on the rich and diverse perspectives of those across the organisation, the quality of your documentation suffers, is then misunderstood and left unread, or worse, over time, completely ignored, and with it the principles of creating quality documentation lost.

Yet, if a small number of simple editorial rules are built in, all documentation initiatives can improve markedly over time.

To organise knowledge more effectively, use a wiki

Based on its research and experience, Shiro Architects advises that applying professional publishing practices to a social, conversational method of workplace-design briefing can pay dividends when using workplace social technologies, such as wikis.

Wikis offer a first-class method of documenting and disseminating structured, shared knowledge across an organisation in a manner that is entirely consistent with the aims of managing the increasing complexity of workplace design briefing and defining workplace strategy.

Their use is also entirely consonant with the goals of driving innovation and organisational learning.

We suggest this not just because we think it’s a good idea, but because thousands of other organisations do, including some of the biggest corporate names in Australia, including the bank I worked at.

Its project budget was part of a schedule of technical development work worth an annual $400 million.

Why big organisations use wikis to manage major projects

Wikis are a bit like the software equivalent of loose-leaf document binders.

They comprise shared pages that may be endlessly reordered and relinked, and that anyone can create and edit, making them excellent vehicles for teams to build on the knowledge of others.

They are cheap to construct and maintain and can be utilised via the cloud, making them easy to access via any web browser.

Wikis create a platform for enquiry, and they build project history by recording who contributed what and when.

They slip neatly and unobtrusively into the workflow as questions asked of an organisation’s people by email can be linked to the specific wiki page in which they are required to submit their responses.

In the managed process we champion, those responses are then read by an editor, and where necessary checked for sense.

Using wikis, conversations properly seeded by appropriate questions and/or guided by imagery can stimulate the responses necessary to root out what managers most need to know when redesigning a workplace.

This dialogue can be monitored to probe for meaning, and edited to generate detailed reports.

Quality insights properly documented can give architects and workspace designers new and invaluable material to work with, beyond the superficial and readily known and visible.

And curated, digestible reports for use by managers and teams can become ready tools to assist understanding and decision making, and to precipitate further reflection, learning and intelligent contribution.

They create a space, where necessary, such as at the close-out of a project, in which to reflect on lessons learned.

More importantly, they are especially well equipped to addressing issues of change management, as they allow for consistent and dependable, centralised communication about all manners of concern to stakeholders before, across and beyond any relocation project’s physical implementation.

Most importantly, they can be adapted to any learning a business must undertake if over time it is to remain competitive.

Adopt a process for commissioning the new written material required

Good publishing process typically consists of conceiving an idea, deciding what is important to the reader and planning the ways in which that idea might best be explained.

In any medium, this process usually involves an “editor” (a decision maker) in commissioning a “story”.

Specifying what needs to be included in any document then prioritises what gets written, how this relates to other documentation and how and when the work is to be completed, and by whom.

The story brief might also specify who at subsequent production stages will verify the information’s accuracy and completeness.

A system of labelling might also indicate a document’s degree of completeness (draft, complete, on hold, and so on), and another might suggest future dates at which content might be reviewed again for its accuracy and currency if it is to remain on the system.

The consequence is that if you want order, you need someone to play the role of commissioning editor to determine what is to be produced, and how, and what is to be culled.

Make what you need to publish explicit

Your publishing mechanisms need an overarching plan, and probably the number one message all future knowledge-system builders must learn is that if you don’t know or don’t express what you want, you can’t expect to get great documentation as a result.

Moreover, when you don’t specify what you want, you can’t expect someone else to guess how to turn what gets produced into what you want.

Like anything else, effective publishing follows rules, and one of, if not the first, may be to answer, what is the goal of the documentation?

If you can’t do this for yourself, you need to find someone with appropriate knowledge and experience to help you.

If you can specify the rules determining the priorities of content creation, you can offer guidance to writers and set expectations for quality and consistency which can feed back into improved system design, and hence, that of a better workspace and better executed strategy.

To ensure it meets need and expectation, every word that is written must be reviewed

If you aim to create high quality written material, the process of review by appropriate experts is every bit as important as that of commissioning and creation.

Not least, it is the check that everything that should have been included has been, to the levels of quality expected.

If the knowledge a document contains is highly specialised, this process of review might almost certainly include oversight by an appropriately qualified technical expert to validate its accuracy.

Then, the review for editorial quality should ensure that aims for readability, accuracy and user comprehensibility aren’t corrupted by poor spelling and grammar, or presentational sloppiness.

You cannot assume that someone will produce something you haven’t asked them to write

If you are a specialist in a discipline, even if it seems blindingly obvious that a specific document needs to be created, you can never assume that others see things the same way.

It is also unsafe to assume anyone will magically document what you can see as obvious without you first making a request and finding the experts to make it happen.

Create a process for retiring aged project content

A key lesson in creating a body of useful content is that before you produce more pages, order should be given to monitoring the content that already exists, or decisions made about what must be retired before adding to its sprawl.

The longer this job is left undone, the harder it becomes to unpick what is of value and what isn’t.

The more quickly you can impose order on existing documentation, the more quickly will emerge its proper production processes, taxonomies, indexation, relationship to all other previous and future documentation and usefulness to its consumers.

Thus, as the rules for creating better documentation become clearer, the simpler becomes the process for commissioning new content, and the more effective becomes the review of everything produced against its specification.

It is easy to overlook how documentation ages in a living system, but experience confirms how problems can be compounded by large numbers of new content producers coming onstream at the same time.

Experience also tells us that even when the development of high-quality documentation is a declared project goal, attention to the detail of delivering it can be the last thing on project leaders’ minds as they continue to give shape to their baby.

Then common among new users’ complaints can be that the “platform” material they need to understand what they are expected to do is missing, especially if it has never been commissioned or committed to documentation by the leaders responsible.

Establish the benefits of a platform for shared learning

It sounds obvious, but organisations with a plan to learn are likely to do so much faster than their competitors, getting better at planning what they need to learn next, and knowing how and from whom to get it.

In the same way, by adjusting your briefing process to capture early in your project the insights of those who will actually occupy your new work space, the likelihood of protecting the returns originally aimed for in your investment in it are substantially magnified.

Moreover, as an inclusive tool, the risks of alienation from the disruptive process of relocation are also minimised, providing change-management cover across the project, including post-occupancy.

For the real upsides of this approach to be felt, it is necessary to factor in the longer term workplace benefits of cultivating the knowledge flows of a smarter learning organisation.

Such workplaces can create a more engaging experience for those who come to work wishing to contribute and learn.

As a corollary, those who come to work wishing to learn will find their participation motivating, as it makes them feel they are part of the answer, and part of their company’s future.

As an employer, knowledge of who your most willing contributors are will help you understand better how to find and attract new employees meeting the profile of those you value most highly.

Understanding how to learn across an organisation will create focused, agile, adaptable and truly distinctive business units built exclusively to fit the knowledge they contain.

And the effect on that space in which your organisation can learn to create its future really can be felt directly on its bottom line.

Contact me if you’d like to know more.

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In the meantime, I outline some questions beneath about how you might like to think differently about future workplace-design briefing.

Ten critical questions for those about to undertake next-generation workplace-design briefing

1. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout as a trigger to change the way the organisation operates, and to what degree is workplace change intended to be its outcome?
2. What will you factor in as non-building goals for the exercise, and how will you measure its success?
3. How do you intend to run your briefing, and what alternatives have you considered in the way you construct the brief for this project?
4. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout to change the ways in which your organisation addresses its higher goals, such as in directing its strategy or shaping its culture?
5. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout to introduce changes in way the organisation uses technology?
6. How have you considered ways in which to use your briefing to make your workplace a more attractive place through which to compete in securing the best available new staff?
7. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout as the catalyst for introducing new ways of working, such as in flexible modes of engagement, more working off-site or in attempting to enlist new kinds of worker?
8. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout and its briefing process to inspire increased innovation and collaboration across the business?
9. How have you considered using your relocation/fitout to get better use out of the minds you employ, and in what ways have you considered how using those minds could be introduced into the way you brief for it?
10. How has your briefing process factored in post-occupancy data collection as a means of constructing your organisation’s unique body of competitive “data capital”?

As a final consideration, having given this some thought, how will you plan to pull this information into a professionally produced body for reference and enquiry?

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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.

If you’d like to contribute to this study, please:
Email me at graham [at] shiroarchitects.com
Join the LinkedIn Workplace Strategy Australia group
Follow me at Twitter
Find us at Shiro Architects

See also, posted at The Urban Developer:

Is Workplace Design Briefing Becoming Too Complex For Property Specialists Alone?
Beyond Activity Based Working
What Is Workplace Strategy, And Why Is It So Important?