Workplace strategy: Words with Tony Walsh, Transition Manager Property and Facilities, Toyota Australia

Through talking with many of Australia’s leading workplace strategy practitioners, Shiro Architects aims to understand how to create workplace-design briefings that satisfy the needs of occupants, owners, investors and developers of commercial office space.

Here, we speak with Tony Walsh, who may have one of the more challenging current briefs in Australian property, in consolidating the facilities of Toyota as the organisation scales back, including closing its Altona, Victoria, factory amid the loss of thousands of jobs.

About Toyota
Established over 50 years in Australia, Toyota Australia was in calendar year 2014 the country’s top-selling motoring brand for the twelfth year in a row. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, whose vehicles are sold in more than 170 countries and regions under the Toyota, Lexus, Daihatsu and Hino brands.

Workplace strategy is about understanding the behavioural psychology of people, it’s not about the office fitout or technical tools, it’s about business process and change management. Everything else is toys that facilitate the appropriate way of working for people.

What is your role at Toyota?
I wasn’t brought in to do workplace strategy but property transition, which is a suite of approximately 25 real estate projects, [but] workplace strategy was always something I was very passionate about because of what I’d learned a couple of years prior, and the benefit Toyota could derive from that just seemed enormous, and no one was picking up on it.

What is the current property challenge at Toyota?
The business has taken a decision to consolidate all national business operations into Melbourne, with the net result that we have to relocate Sydney-based people and operations interstate along with restructuring our distribution and regional operations functions.

In Sydney, there are currently 550 people, and the overall organisation is about 4500. In 2018, the image is that it will be a total of 1300.

I’ve been here for eight years, and securing a clear client brief is a challenge, because the way I think isn’t necessarily 100 per cent aligned to that of a typical Toyota executive, and the culture and its thinking ways can be a challenge.

We have a very tight and aggressive timeline with regards to the transition activity, so balancing priorities and negotiating them is a little daunting.

What is your experience of the challenges of contemporary workplace design briefing?
I am navigating this specific issue right now, and they are enormous.

I’ve found throughout my career, that clients typically race to the real estate solution that is required to fufil a particular business need.

You almost have to unravel the knot to get to the true goal they are aiming for, and then try to educate them on the multiple options open and about the one they have selected. Were they even aware there were others?

At an organisational level, when a CEO is trying to achieve large-scale real-estate change, without them being coached and engaged in actually clarifying the brief, the leap can go from the company’s vision through to a technical solution, but not necessarily through understanding what the multiple ways of achieving that ultimate vision might be.

You need to go into much greater detail with the client in understanding what their goals and their aims are.

What are the dangers of applying a traditional mindset to a relocation?
You could apply that traditional mindset of, we have x number of people, we have a rate per sq m, we have a box this big, will they fit?

That approach isn’t necessarily about exploring multiple other avenues such as third space, co-working, and whether that could drive greater cultural unity in the organisation.

In this current context, maybe some of the strategic thinking around what we were actually determining needed to be a bit wider.

For example, are there other workplace strategy options we could explore that might give us better outputs. There is even the question of whether we need to be in the same physical location?

What is different for Toyota?
Many organisations are tenants; we are an owner operator.

We are predominantly a manufacturing business with a sales, marketing and distribution functions team ancillary to it. The business is supported by a proportionally small property team and a very small appreciation of the built form.

Workplace strategy is a bit of a foreign language.

When an owner-occupier organisation such as mine has to come and make real estate and property decisions, not only have you got to put the business case forward, you’ve actually got to educate and explain to people the analysis you’ve done.

You have to explain the reasons why you’ve said we should go and acquire this block of land or build this kind of building, or hire this builder or architect for this project.

But to me, the question now becomes, rather than which of the three architects are you going to hire, why are we hiring architects in the first place?

So, that is a challenge that I’ve come across in this organisation, and to a lesser extent in other organisations in the past where I’ve been in similar roles.

I’ve certainly seen businesses such as AMP becoming very concerned about what is going to happen to their real estate portfolio, with mobile technology, and that this technology may lead businesses to demand less real estate.

I think they are making the realisation that most corporate organisations won’t any longer be taking eight floors in a 50-storey tower, and that they could actually move to agile working, so they actually seem to be trying to restructure their business models to appeal to smaller businesses that couldn’t afford before to be in the CBD because of rents.

But, corporate organisations [such as ours] are not necessarily on the same wavelength as people at ISPT and AMP who really understand property.

What are the challenges for your workplace design briefing?
We are considering how to tackle it right now, so we are asking the same questions of ourselves, in terms of all of the inputs that will formulate a brief.

We now have an overarching workplace strategy and we know how we want to work, and we have a skeleton to our brief, which is basically to describe people as fixed, balanced and mobile in terms of what they do.

We need to map how many of our people are fixed, balanced or mobile to understand their needs to articulate the brief correctly.

One area might have a highly collaborative group of people based on what they do.

They might be very creative types, whereas others might be very process-driven [and] we now have to take it to the next level to engage with various different groups within the company to get their input and our senior or middle management tier about what those departments need.

You profess to be an activity based working advocate, so what is your big belief about flexible working and workplace strategy?
Workplace strategy is about the behavioural psychology of people, it’s not about the fitout or technical tools, it’s about business process and change management

Everything else is toys that facilitate that way of working.

It is about understanding how people work, all the rest of it is facilitating that, so we didn’t want architects whose primary focus was on the building leading our workplace strategy because workplace strategy is about [the combination of] people, building and technology.

There are a few other things as well that move around, depending on the organisation.

But, organisations typically have already specified the end solution rather just specifying to us what they want to achieve.

Instead of specifying a performance requirement, they specify the tool.

What we need to do respectfully is peel back the layers of the onion and say, I need accommodation for three executives who are going to work in this kind of way from this period to this period.

Instead it’s gone racing through to, I need three offices.

But, don’t you want us to look at behaviour, what you want to occur, and then we will look at the best tool to satisfy that?

[In regard of Toyota’s workplace,] because I’d been doing some research for two to three years and managed to finally get some traction within the business, I was able to say, hang on, before we design this solution the same way we’d always designed it, can we look at our workplace strategy and understand what is important to our people?

What is important to our leaders, what is our global vision, what is our cultural vision in terms of the workplace we want to create?

What does that really do to the necessary real-estate outcomes?

To what degree do you concur that social technologies can be deployed in the workplace to generate a better brief?
The importance is massive, I more than concur!

You have different personalities in the workplace and we all need quiet time, we all need social stimulation, some people need lots of quiet and little social time, and others are the other way round.

So, providing these spaces that are flexible to the people’s diversity, their way of working, what helps them to be as productive as they can be is very important.

We all know about things like telephone rooms, quiet workpoints, library-type environments.

But equally, we may need, spine-type working arrangements where people can get on with stuff, where they can also chat across the desk occasionally to someone or ask a question where they don’t mind being interrupted, based on what they are doing.

Using [such] technologies is one of our streams at the moment, quite apart from talking with middle managers about their functions and their departments.

Our approach will be very much one of listening without guaranteeing we can act on everything.

But certainly not to listen is a critical flaw, as you have to pay homage to people’s feedback, give them the opportunity for their voice to be heard … that can take you a long way with people’s engagement in the new work environment.

If you’ve at least listened, you might get some absolutely solid gold insights … and you can use it as a quality check to your design processes, of course.

In what other ways might thinking differently about the workplace-design briefing process pay new dividends?
I just think getting the briefing right from the outset is critical.

[It comes from] having the right seniority of people engaged in the subject matter, understanding what real estate is and how long it takes to complete, what resources are required, what are the priorities and what are not, and usually that only happens by having some good contact to the true decision makers in the business.

Definitely, next time around I’d try to get the leadership study tours to other businesses out earlier, or I’d consider some other ways of building executive sponsor knowledge or understanding as early as possibly.

The sooner you can have that occur, all the other layers of management will fall into line quickly because they don’t want to be out of step.

Building strong staff engagement is critical. To-date, maybe we haven’t told the story well enough and presented how the workplace will change in a positive way.

We need to encourage get people to give us feedback even for those who are leaving the business.

Number one, get hold of a leader, then manage change communication throughout and beyond.

I look at those organisations with an international workplace strategy with envy, as it’s half of what we have to do.

But we have the opportunity to create the first one for Toyota, and maybe we can lead the way.

Marcus Hanlon of ISPT describes accommodating true workplace diversity as “a root challenge for an organisation.” To what degree do you agree?
Marcus may indeed be correct. I also believe a workplace strategy that provides for flexibility can be a significant tool to support as it enables you to create work practices and spaces to appeal to a more diverse workplace in the first place.

It provides people with the opportunity to work they want to work and it might be via different work settings and/or by providing diversity by freeing up some real estate that was typically for allocated desks.

You might be able to provide breastfeeding rooms, prayer rooms, and you can provide social and green space environments such as a roof terrace or a sports court outside, quiet areas for people who are maybe more introvert or have a higher degree of need for concentrated type work, so instead of being in an open plan office, they can pop themselves away.

In any case, a workplace strategy requires strong sponsorship from the leader of the business, supported by a well-informed management team that are enabled to manage people in that way of working and the physical space and technologies that supports it.

But, a flexible workplace environment presents a massive challenge in terms of change management overall and especially when it comes to that middle tier of management.

In flexible working, the most typical examples mean there is a lot of shared spaces rather than owned spaces.

In more traditional workplaces, middle managers are used to seeing their teams laid out before them, and that arrangement typically seems to engender a management approach of, “they are present, so they must be working.”

Typically, many offices follow the 1960s model in which office space has been based on presenteeism management rather than managing on outcomes, so it’s really the organisation chart or the factory floor laid out in a different manner.

The net result of introducing a more agile work environment for that middle tier of management can be a fear of loss of control as well as status — “my people aren’t present, how do I know they are working?” And, “I’ve worked for years to have the corner office, and now it’s being taken away from me.”

They got the bigger monitor, they got the flashiest laptop, they got the bigger office, or an office at least, and allocated parking spaces.

They are not going give them away lightly, all these little perks they have worked for years to work up the corporate ladder to gain.

I think they have fear of losing control but if they are taken on the right change management journey and those fears are tested and considered respectfully, and attempts are made to work out whether they are solvable fears or not … whether it’s technology, whether its management style or how you encourage, support, mentor and motivate your people, a combination of those can lead to a more productive workplace.

How did you manage to get your message across within Toyota?
My approach became one of identifying two or three people I could get good face time with who are influencers, and to invest a lot of time in educating them and exposing them to other knowledgeable and respected people in this subject matter externally.

I managed to persuade one key individual to go on a workshop for two days where they could network with other people and other organisations that were taking this approach, so that they could get that neutral view and then talk to their peers about it.

This then became a very different subject matter to explain to people, so it didn’t become just about my story, and their influencing capabilities then gave me access to the leadership.

When they told the story about workplace strategy, they explained why it is important to a business, what lessons are being learnt from organisations which have adopted a robust approach, what steps they undertook in that process.

One of the key steps was then to run study tours for senior executives.

[In the Toyota way, it was suggested] don’t just read the article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Twitter’s new office to find out about modern workplace strategy.

Instead, go and have a conversation with the person who sits and works there and lives there every day about what is good, bad and indifferent about it.

I was able to provide a lot of material to the person who told that story, so when the study tours were proposed they were accepted on the basis that it was benchmarked as good practice.

It was actually prior to that that one of our most senior leaders also communicated the desire to go out and see some other workplaces as well, so it was a win-win, as both parties were looking for something.

Our president and our chairman attended the two tours held in Melbourne, and then our president went to two others in Sydney as well.

Typically, these involved getting access to senior leaders in those businesses to provide not just the physical tour but to talk about why they designed those spaces the way they did.

They went right the way back to them establishing or re-establishing their vision for their business.

They recognised that their workplace was not just a great enabler for change, but also a manifestation of the culture they were trying to transform into, or to reassert it, if was already there.

So, it was great for them not just to see but hear for the first time, and effectively touch in terms of the layout, the fitout, to walk through the spaces, try and imagine a little bit how that could translate for Toyota into a beneficial workplace.

I think it was the human interaction they saw, the immersion more generally into different ways of working, and I think they came away and they did a little bit of their own follow-up research because they were thinking about what they did that day.

In essence, I’d suggest the best way to build engagement in what’s possible in a workplace is to show business leadership some of the best examples where how people work matches up with the company’s values, its culture and vision. This took us much further than any business papers, videos and discussions we held.

Fortunately, there are plenty of great examples to see in Australia as it appears it is one of the most progressive nations in this space globally right now.

…

See also:
How To Use Social Technologies To Enhance Your Workplace Design Briefing
Relocation: New thinking on workplace design briefing

In The Urban Developer:
Beyond Activity Based Working
What Is Workplace Strategy, And Why Is It So Important?

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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