Building the Right Space for Your Company’s Situation:

• Organizational Culture – This is the first, critical, step to deciding how to create your company’s space. It is also the most difficult as it requires introspection on the part of the C-Suite.  Do you really want to be a creative, do it first kind of company?  Or are you more comfortable competing by doing things quickly and efficiently?  There’s nothing wrong with either approach – they’re both viable business models – but the space plan implications couldn’t be more different.  Oftentimes, we are faced with the “open plan vs private office” question by clients. This is another dilemma that depends on your culture.  Agile, collaboration, free-address, mobile work – all of those “buzzword” concepts will only succeed (or fail) in so far as your company’s culture will support them.  At any given company, organizational culture is truly the stick that stirs the drink.
• Employee engagement – the state of engagement in the US is disastrous – some 70% of employees are disengaged at work. It’s estimated we lose $1.5 trillion per year in productivity from this lack of engagement.  Employee engagement comes from a company clearly and effectively communicating their culture to employees as well as how those employees fit into and contribute to it. Based on the engagement numbers in the US, it seems a lot of companies are skipping the above first step
• Individual Workstyles – We all know, intuitively, that the marketing and accounting departments work differently. So, why, for decades, have we been putting them in the same workstation?  The concept of “standardization” has been blown apart by modern office products.  It Is not necessary for everyone to have the exact same parts and pieces.  Rather, the style of workstation (wall heights, storage options, height adjustable worksurface) should be determined by the type of work being done.

• Shared Workstyles – The dreaded “C” word – collaboration! Everyone says they want it, but not 1 in 10 of them can meaningfully define it.   Yes, it means working together.  But for space planning purposes, we need to know working together on what?  For how long?  With how many people?  With what tools?.  Defining the type of collaboration you’re trying to encourage is the space planning version of “measure twice, cut once”.  By building space that supports the type of work being done, you are giving your employees the tools to collaborate and innovate
• Affordances – What is the behavioral science behind creating a space that increase feelings of belonging? What are the factors that inspire or refresh employees while at work?  There is a growing body of research that asks these questions and, more importantly, gives real life answers
• Change Management – There is no more jarring an experience for an employee than moving to a new building or renovating their existing space. Yet, our industry rarely talks about change management when building a new space.  Mckinsey & Co estimates that 70% of corporate change fails because it is either managed poorly or not managed at all.  Implementing an effective change management process when building or renovating a space helps employees understand the “why” of what you’re doing, not just the what and when. 

No question – that’s a lot.  One can almost understand why most companies simply revert to picking out pretty fabrics or drawer pulls, like their buying furniture for their living room.  It’s much easier than asking the hard questions about culture or workstyles or – gasp! – being transparent about the change with employees.  But there’s an old saying – those that do what’s easy make their lives hard.  Those who do what’s hard make their lives easy.  There is no truer axiom when it comes to creating an effective and appropriate space for your company.

So, lets get into it.  Let’s build a truly effective and engaging space.  We’ll start where you should always start – at the beginning.