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Is Design adding Value to Your Organisation?
The time will come when you'll sit down with interior designers and other consultants to turn space and a vaguely defined set of needs into an effective physical and virtual work environment. Are you ready to begin?
Moving into a new office building? Remodeling your office to catch up with the times? Looking to use your facility to attract and retain employees? Demonstrating your brand and reinforcing your corporate culture?
One way or another, the time will come when you'll sit down with interior designers and other consultants and begin the process of turning space and a vaguely defined set of needs into a physical and virtual, provisioned and effective work environment. Just how successful will this process and your consultants be? A good indicator is the manner in which your consultants start the process.
Do they huddle with your facilities manager, get a head count and ask questions about which honchos get the big corner offices, what size desks and how much floor space everyone else is entitled to?
Do they head home after the first meeting with your blueprints under their arms and start drawing floor plans the next day?
Do they pitch you, right off the bat, the latest trends in "alternative officing" and the farout furniture designs they think are essential to your company being a cool place to work?
Or do they start by asking about your business and its goals? Do they ask for access to people throughout your organization for gathering information? Do they talk about spatial design, technology, and organizational behavior and all that goes with it not as a cost, but as an investment in achieving your business goals for productivity, creativity and employee satisfaction?
If they're from that last group, congratulations. Your consultants are much more likely to design and deliver a work environment that will meet your needs now and in the highly unpredictable future.
Four principles for workplace design that work
If the process of designing your physical and virtual workplace incorporates the four principles of good workplace design—namely alignment, effectiveness, efficiency and agility—chances are your people will be happier, things will work better, and you'll be more profitable.
Alignment: Can design get in line with your business goals?
Alignment is a matter of getting design in line with corporate business goals and the activities that are necessary to reach those goals. To achieve it, your design firm starts by asking what your goals are, which you must be forthright and clear in revealing. Next, your designers should know what workers need to achieve those goals: what their job functions are, whether their jobs are directed inward or outward, whether their jobs are heads up or heads down, how they interact with other people.
Giving designers access to department heads and staff so they can dig for answers to these questions reaps big rewards, both in more functional design and in getting your employees to buy into the design once it's implemented—which they're likely to do if they helped create it.
Effectiveness: Can workplace environments enhance employee performance in alignment with your corporate goals?
Effectiveness is what you get when your design team and your workers are clear about what key practices and work processes are needed to achieve your goals, so workers get the space and the hardware that help them do their jobs. Traditionally, workspaces have been designed to efficiently manage "supply." That has meant packing more people into less space, standardizing space size, furnishings and equipment for different ranks and so on, rather than "characterizing" demand to optimize occupants' performance.
That's not to fault real estate and facilities managers. Efficiently managing tangible assets is their job, including quick response to moves, adds, and changes. Though the mantra has been "faster, better and cheaper," we need to ask, "better for whom?" You need workplace environments that enhance employee performance in alignment with your corporate goals.
Efficiency: What strategies can we use to make better use of assets?
Of course, that doesn't mean good designers forget about efficiency. Armed with knowledge about your company's goals and how people need to work toward them, designers can come up with strategies for conserving space, multiple uses of space and making better use of other assets. In some cases space strategies will relate to accommodating multiple users. In others, multiple uses will be the goal.
The most familiar example of multiple users is "hotelling," where workers can share a smaller number of offices or open work stations because they are only in the office for brief periods in between assignments. Another form, used by many call centers, is split shifts. An example of multiple uses might be a room devoted to a new project that starts out as a formal conference room and is converted into work space for half-a-dozen people in the project's development phase. Or, a lab might expand into an adjacent project room during the testing phase of a project, then convert back to a project room.
Agility: How can we plan for change?
Finally, agility is critical to the value of your workplace design. Things are going to change. You'll grow. Or maybe shrink in places. Old projects will end and new ones begin. Workplace needs will change as new projects mature. There are ways designers can plan for change. One traditional way is to create a universal environment, one that will support almost any use.
The theory is that it's cheaper to move people than furniture and architecture. The problem with this approach is that one-size-fits-all design rarely fits anybody well, and people adapt to it instead of the other way around. Better yet, then, can we design physical environments that are both universal and "morphable"? The answer is yes.
Designers can find successful working compromises that provide the right mix of standardization and flexibility if they have thoroughly analyzed the needs of each business unit, department, team and individual. In short, designers should achieve a micro view of what changes from day to day and month to month and capitalize on that change to make more efficient use of space. You want a system that is designed to flex as its uses fluctuate. The big idea is to not only make sure the space is adaptable, but that the people who use the space understand that capability and leverage it as their needs change.
What you learn in the process
Often, a real benefit of working with a design firm that conducts thorough research on your organization is that you gain new knowledge about how your organization operates as well as new ways of using space, architecture, equipment and furnishings to make your organization function better. And by involving you and your people in the design process, they'll help you achieve better buy-in for the result.
So when you're interviewing prospective consultants, you might ask how they go about developing a workplace strategy. How do they gather information? What questions do they ask? How do they use that information?
The answers you get will determine whether your prospective service providers are glorified furniture arrangers or consultants that can help your business function both effectively and efficiently.
—reprinted from The Business of Design, June/July 2001
