Over the past several years, what we think of as “the workplace” has been changing in almost every aspect. It’s no longer one place, but many. It’s both face-to-face and virtual, and sometimes also 24/7. In many cases, it’s a lot less institutional and more user-oriented, placing a greater focus on experiences and fostering community.
This breadth and speed of change in today’s workplace is unprecedented. The old approaches used for almost 50 years no longer apply. The new models taking their place in response to these shifts in work are much more complex, but also offer substantial benefits: to truly connect work and place; to more aggressively support “the business of the business”; to use space more wisely and efficiently; and to enable effective adaptability to changes in work practice, social needs, and technology as they happen.
So, what’s changed?
The shift from the industrial age of factory workers to the information age of knowledge workers has fundamentally changed the nature of work, its social structures and worker expectations. Now mix in technology and how it’s enabled unprecedented access to information and each other.
“Work” is now more complex and interdependent on others and the outcomes are often not tangible things. In response, the activities the office is designed to support are shifting. Older workplaces are still mostly designed for individual, focused work, even though about half of workers’ time is now devoted to other activities — collaboration, learning and socializing. Having said that, there are plenty of articles decrying the evils of “open plan” and focused work still does need appropriate support.
Workers now think and behave like consumers, as things like Netflix and YouTube have created new expectations like “on-demand” and “everything I need to know is at my fingertips.”
And the real-world geography of work has changed. We can work at the office, at home and almost anywhere else and because we can, we do. In this new landscape, distinctions between working and socializing are blurring and workers expect much greater choice regarding work location and work-life balance.
We also know so much more about human performance — specifically, what correlates to knowledge worker productivity and the work of teams — factors such as social cohesion, trust and willingness to share information.
Why are these correlations significant? Teams that have developed a strong sense of trust and know what each other knows move with greater speed. Building meaningful connections and confidence in the support of their supervisors make teammates more willing to work in ways that are mutually valuable.
Identifying critical workplace goals
Workplace makers’ goals for the workplace have been pretty consistent over the years: to bring workers together to accomplish the organization’s goals by enabling the effectiveness of those workers, and to do so as efficiently as possible. Space is also recognized as a meaningful opportunity to express an organization’s brand or culture in compelling ways to support attraction and retention.
In the midst of this, “workplace strategy” has emerged as a powerful discipline, providing organizations a critical connection between strategic business imperatives and the way workplaces are developed and managed over time. Workplace strategy involves creating an ecosystem of spatial and behavioral norms which are designed specifically to support key business processes and organizational management practices, which in turn helps organizations achieve their business goals.
A comprehensive workplace strategy should address four workplace goals:
1. Alignment. The workplace must be in context, consistently materializing the organization’s intentions. It must respond to business strategies, economic realities, organization culture, demographic and social changes, all while walking the talk.
2. Effectiveness. Workplace designs should be informed by the critical work activities and experiences of individuals and teams. Logically, performance is enhanced when there is a fit among what people do, how they do it and what the workspace supports.
3. Efficiency. When real estate resources and other assets are used as wisely as possible, the workplace strategy is both efficient and in service of larger business goals. Utilization tracking is emerging as a powerful tool to analyze patterns of use and opportunities to “fix-the-mix” — to match what’s needed to what’s been provided in the workplace.
4. Agility. Agility helps us future-proof the workplace to easily adapt to change and is taking on greater urgency these days to enable the workplace to keep pace with the two major catalysts of change: technology and the ongoing evolution of a given organization. Whether it means being prepared for the next big thing, responding to unanticipated economic changes, or making planned growth easier to absorb, organizations need to remain nimble and adaptable over time.
What this means for the way we work today
How individuals experience the workplace is relevant not only to their own performance but to that of the organization as a whole. In order for knowledge workers — or people who "think for a living" — to help accomplish business goals, they need to be able to access the expertise of many throughout and even beyond the organization. Work today is far too varied and much less linear to be accomplished with a repetitive, well-charted process as it may have been in decades past.
In short, organizational goals are more interdependent than ever before, and the need for work to touch more hands and minds across departments and disciplines to get accomplished must be supported by space. Workplace strategy should consider how to break down siloes between departments and open the lines of communication.
Jan Johnson is vice president of design and workplace resources at Allsteel. She is a workplace strategist and frequently writes, speaks and teaches on the subject.