Relocation: New thinking on workplace design briefing
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Office relocation or consolidation or can be a disruptive change event, but a different approach to workplace design briefing can present an opportunity to look at your organisation from the perspective of its propensity to learn and to create new knowledge flows.
When they move to new premises and new ways of working, managers use workplaces in the hope they will create new knowledge flows.
But what would happen if they paid attention first to learning more about the knowledge flows before they started thinking about moving offices?
How would this change the relocation outcome?
This question above is not at all facetious.
Office relocation or consolidation or can be a massively disruptive change event, but it’s an opportunity to look at your organisation from a different perspective.
As architects, we are fascinated by the future workplace and are cultivating a workplace strategy geared to foster more pervasive organisational learning.
To this end, I have been researching a book with the theme “beyond activity based working”.
My interviewees tell me that the businesses of the future look very different, and that they can often do more with less space.
My work looks at a future whose workspaces are more closely geared in operation to getting more use from the intelligence they contain.
Our belief is also that the briefing process itself is due for an overhaul, and whether you decide to use Shiro Architects or not for your actual workplace design, as each week I learn more about it, I’d like to offer to help out in your briefing process.
Our workplace learning is updated through consistent research
We now spend a lot of time talking with qualified practitioners and property professionals about how to create workplaces of the future, and with every interview we learn more.
Our research focuses on how workplace change is initiated, and its effects for occupiers, developers, owners and investors and, to a lesser degree, agents.
To date, we’ve interviewed representatives from organisations across professional services, travel, retail, financial services, education and property about the challenges presented by change to the workplace.
I’ve published some of this work at the property industry web site The Urban Developer.
Whether they articulate it as such, workplace professionals are looking seriously to understand how to use activity based working to cultivate smarter and more responsive organisations in the shift to more flexible forms of working.
Marcus Hanlon, who as general manager for the giant Australian property trust ISPT is responsible for $11 billion worth of commercial property, is one.
Hanlon says, “I ask the question, is the workforce going to be more flexible and more mobile in three years based on today?
“That’s a no-brainer, but then you look ahead to six years or nine years, and then you have to start thinking, what does that mean to my business?”
Through our research, we can provide evidence of a major household-name financial services company that has used the redesign of its premises to cut both its overhead of knowledge blockages and bring its new products and services to market faster.
So, if workplace change works for some, can it be improved for others, and how?
Interviewees increasingly say workplace design briefing gets started in the wrong place
As with many precedents, there is nothing wrong with most of the traditional methods by which workplace design briefing is conducted, until you think of the ways in which the world is changing.
In our research into briefing, our interviewees commonly concur that the discussion too often begins, property-first, with the technical considerations of a relocation, rather than focusing on the more important, higher level vision of the business and its mission.
In an interview I am soon to publish, Hanlon says: “The property people should be on the second line.
“What you are talking about is questions that these guys need to be thinking about and answering from the perspective of where is the business going to be in five to seven years?
“This is from an operational and strategy perspective.
“Secondly, what is the culture, and what are the cultural aspirations of the business?
“And third, what are the aspirations around productivity, engagement and collaboration that the organisation most wants to drive?
“None of that conversation is around square metres or rent or floorplate size or fitout.”
Yet, in briefing, slow, expensive, labour-intensive workshops, surveys and series of structured engagements with senior executives, middle managers and coalface staff persist.
When they move to new premises, planners use the design of workplaces and new ways of working in the hope of stimulating new knowledge flows.
Yet, existing processes won’t typically give you any idea of how the knowledge flows in your organisation are going to work after it moves.
So what if you could use the briefing process itself to begin to trigger those new flows?
How would that look?
Who’s got your most valuable knowledge?
Every business has more intelligence than it ever puts to use.
Under-used knowledge exists in any business, but isn’t just lying on the surface waiting to be found.
Its holders may not step forward, and without a method for capturing it, companies will every day keep on wasting the knowledge they contain.
The costs of lost opportunities to turn hidden knowledge into learning are substantial and almost certainly growing.
Yet, because those who have to endure a workplace are likely to have knowledge and opinions about it, a workplace design briefing is perhaps an optimal opportunity to find out what they know.
It is also an opportunity to organise and to put such knowledge to work in changing the very shape of an organisation around its potential for generating new and potentially profitable knowledge flows.
In March 2016, management consultancy McKinsey wrote that “Only three out of ten American workers feel engaged by their job.”
Where that may be as true in Australia as it is in the US, offering the opportunity to shape their workplace’s future is perhaps a perfect opportunity to engage people productively in the future of a business.
Those across a workplace with diverse backgrounds may be more likely to come up with fresh ideas, but this unlikely ever to happen without making the effort to join the dots between them.
Planning for it is certainly likely to give a better chance for creating serendipitous learning than bringing its holders together in a new workspace and simply hoping for behaviour change.
Social engagement is the most potent untapped resource in workplace design briefing
By engaging your workplace’s brains with the use of dedicated social technologies in the workplace you can effect a large part of your organisation’s transition from old to new ways of thinking and working long before your organisation gets anywhere close to finding or even looking for new premises.
The possibility of a move provides a clear focus for this engagement.
Beginning it upstream can notably lessen the pain of downstream change management at the time a relocation actually happens.
When workers are familiar with its processes, it can also provide an enduring safety valve in addressing post-occupancy stress.
The more opportunities leaders offer for engaging those across its workplace in developing the narrative of the new workplace, the more persuasive and engaging it will become.
The how of social workplace design engagement
In channelling this effort, wikis and similar workplace social technologies are the best tools ever invented for gathering and disseminating knowledge across even the most distributed organisations.
They offer a vital way of creating the improved knowledge flows that are the future for any business getting serious about its competitive learning.
They equip it to define a learning agenda.
They also lend management control, as such tools’ use in briefing should not be an unstructured free for all, but part of an organised editorial process designed to focus attention on what is most important.
Creating “clean content” is after all the way in which knowledge has always been shared and learning built on over centuries.
Conversations properly seeded by appropriate questions and guided by imagery can stimulate the responses necessary to root out what managers most need to know when redesigning a workplace.
The dialogue can be monitored to probe for sense, and edited to generate the detailed reports capable of giving architects and workspace designers new and invaluable material to work with, beyond the superficial and readily visible.
The great opportunity lies in creating documentation everyone can understand, absorb, question and reflect on, guiding more thoughtful, intelligent contribution.
Curated, digestible reports for use by managers and teams become ready tools to assist understanding and decision making, and to precipitate further reflection and learning.
Use technology and method to put together a better workplace design process
Following the learnings of our interviewees, here’s some guidance in creating a better briefing process.
First, interviews should be conducted with those at the top responsible for directing the strategy, shaping the culture and guiding the higher aspirations of the organisation.
These are then edited and summarised to focus attention on the key issues, and the process may then be repeated with key senior executives and business unit leaders before engaging in the most important step of all, which is engaging in the ensuing dialogue with the workforce.
Most of our interviewees agree on the need to be able to use new premises and ways of working to lure the most attractive workers and those who must endure whatever workplace is given to them will also be the ambassadors you most need to listen to and enthuse about your move.
It is they who will tell the world what a great place yours is to work at.
Importantly, those who come to work already engaged in its learning and transformation will find their participation highly motivating as it makes them feel they are part of the answer, and part of their company’s future.
The process will show you who your most willing contributors are, and those you need to target in future knowledge creation.
They will also show you who you need to recruit next.
In this way, engaging those who matter most in the design of your future workspace can help to create a focused, agile, adaptable and truly distinctive workplace geared to fit the future knowledge and flows it contains.
Let me help you put together a more effective workplace design brief
Our research confirms the efficacy of using web-based surveys to elicit information critical to workplace design briefing.
I’d like to help you develop yours.
My research-learning aside, I can apply relevant first-hand experience to this work through almost 20 years of work as a sub-editor on newspapers and magazines, including on the business titles of Fairfax Media’s Australian Financial Review Group.
I spent the latter half of 2013 editing the (Confluence) wiki of a significant software development project engaging a team of hundreds in the activity based working environment of a Big Four Australian bank.
The focus of my MBA (Technology) from the University of New South Wales is also on the management of business strategy, organisational change, learning and innovation as driven by technological change.
The upshot is that I have relevant learning and experience to bring to this, and a passion to demonstrate and learn more about how it can be done better.
And, like I say, whether or not you choose to use Shiro Architects as your actual workplace designers, I’d like to be a part of your briefing process.
As an outsider, I have the skills to set up and help you run the change within your business, and to establish the necessary learning frameworks.
I will use them to bring your people and their ideas together online using the best tools ever made available for the task.
And, because this work is necessarily conducted in real time in the cloud, it can be carried out cost-effectively from almost anywhere, and it doesn’t lock a business into any supplier’s technology.
Indeed, some of its best online technologies to use for the purpose are to all intents free to users.
Summing up
Our research interviewees are as one about the quality of workplace design output being only as good as what goes in.
In the view of Shiro Architects, it’s not just about the building; it’s about getting a better return on every element of your built space, from earliest input to the final output, and beyond.
By adjusting your process to capture early the insights of those who will occupy it, the likelihood of protecting the returns originally aimed for in your investment in new work space are substantially magnified.
And the effect on that space in which your organisation can learn to create its future really can feed straight to the bottom line.
Let us bring real value to your workplace briefing by transforming it into something greater altogether.
Download a pdf of this piece here.
Contact me: graham@shiroarchitects.com/ 0416 171724
Please also read at The Urban Developer:
Beyond Activity Based Working
What Is Workplace Strategy, And Why Is It So Important?
