By Melissa Campeau
Today’s flexible workspaces might be the ticket to a more collaborative culture, but HR needs to lend a guiding hand
Anyone who has ever picked up a paint brush to change the feel of their living room or de-cluttered a desk in search of a little Zen understands that physical space impacts performance. Study after study supports the idea that the environment in which we work can’t help but shape what we do and how we feel about it.
With this in mind, an increasing number of organizations have taken to knocking down walls, quite literally, in the hopes of shaping a more innovative and collaborative culture. Often fueled by an organizational emphasis on cross-functional teams, they’re hoping a more open and flexible workspace will translate into greater creativity and a corresponding competitive edge in the marketplace.
Employees in Google’s Toronto location, for example, don’t have offices or cubicles. Instead, employees are gathered in four- or six-desk open clusters and take advantage of more than 50 designated spots for private phone calls, team meetings and larger gatherings.
Deloitte Canada’s offices use a similar model, with an extra variable: their employees don’t have assigned seats. This makes smart fiscal sense for an organization like Deloitte, where a large percentage of employees are working remotely or visiting clients at any given time. But much like Google, Deloitte had broader cultural goals in mind when the company made the shift to flexible offices, complete with workstations, phone booths, reading nooks and more.
The reasoning for the office design goes like this: ideally, workers with a range of backgrounds and experiences from different areas of the company sit next to each other, discuss ideas and challenges and gain company-wide knowledge from each other.
“I’d call it learning by osmosis,” said Cissy Pau, principal consultant with Clear HR Consulting in Vancouver. “Let’s say you’re a developer sitting in an open space, and you’re next to a graphic designer, who’s next to a sales person. It’s a way of learning what’s going on with their world and being more engaged in the organization. You hear the challenges and maybe you can start contributing to some of those discussions from your perspective, your knowledge.”
The plan isn’t without its drawbacks, though.
“It sounds like utopia, but without some guidance – and this is where HR can make a real difference – it can be chaos,” said Pau.
Planning stages
It can also be a rocky transition for some employees, but starting the conversation early in the process can smooth the path.
“Before employees walk in and find that all their desk space is gone and they have no walls, you need to talk to them and say, ‘This is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing it,’” said Pau. “You need to ask them what challenges they foresee and how those might be mitigated. It’s all about change management.”
During the development phase at Deloitte, the project team worked with one or two people from each area of the business.
“They told us what their typical days looked like, from a morning client meeting offsite, followed by a few hours at a desk at the office, then a team meeting, then lunch with a colleague, followed by a confidential client meeting in the afternoon,” said Jason Winkler, managing partner, Talent at Deloitte Canada.
Considering the details of how every part of the business functions can help pinpoint what to include in a flexible environment. Those in accounting, for example, may need more filing space for papers and proximity to printers. Tech people may need space for or proximity to particular pieces of equipment.
“People in HR, for example, aren’t going to discuss sensitive topics like someone’s mental health issues in a wide open space, so the planning needs to consider where those things will happen,” said Pau. “You need to find ways to accommodate each person’s different needs.”
Social spaces
Beyond workstations, meeting rooms, readings nooks and other productivity-focused areas, new flexible workspaces place an emphasis on spots for socializing, as well.
“When I walk into the average Starbucks I see a lot of people talking, working and connecting,” said Winkler. “One of the things we realized when planning our new design is that many of the spaces we had before didn’t really enable connections between people the way we would like. The addition of social spaces into the workplace was a really important component of what we wanted to do.”
While the emphasis might be on connections, it’s important to consider how to support the individual, as well.
“If you’re moving to this environment and suddenly you don’t have a regular desk or a high wall where you can tack pictures, I think sometimes people can feel a little bit lost or homeless,” said Pau. “It’s important to work through some of that and consider, ‘How do we still build personalization and community and that ownership without saying everyone’s got their own little silos?’”
Sound issues
When people imagine open-concept spaces, they often imagine noise, and lots of it. That can certainly happen, although it can often be avoided or addressed with some office etiquette ground rules and a good communication plan.
Sometimes, it’s not noise but quiet that’s the challenge.
“When we go into clients’ workspaces, some of those open concept environments are deathly quiet,” said Pau. That’s a problem for collaboration, since workers are less likely to speak up with half-baked brainstorming ideas if they feel the entire office is listening. To counter this, some companies gather desks in smaller groups to create the feeling of intimacy, and others pipe in enough white noise to ensure voices don’t carry beyond a certain distance.
“For HR, finding a balance between competing employee interests becomes critically important,” said Pau.
Manage your managers
Another consideration – employees in open and collaborative work environments often need a different kind of manager. In this setup, workers typically take more control of their time and tend to move around each day, making use of meeting rooms, phone booths and other task-specific areas of the office. The environment also places an emphasis on the employee’s responsibility to sort out the “how” of getting a project done.
“A command-and-control style manager may have a hard time with this transition,” said Pau. “This is where HR can play a role, and help coach those managers on how to manage by objectives and expectations, because you don’t have the luxury of observation.”
A measure of success
If an organization’s goal in making this change is increased collaboration, innovation or some other outcome, consider how you’ll assess whether you’ve met the goal.
“What’s the measure for you to say this is better than what it was?” said Pau. “Will you measure productivity, the number of new ideas that come out, engagement or something else? The question deserves some thought, even if you don’t know the answer.”
Along the way – and Pau points out it can take a few years for organizations to fully adjust to a new working environment – it’s likely that some personalities, professionals and generations may warm to this shift more easily than others.
“For HR, it’s really about finding solutions to make sure everyone is accountable and buying in,” said Pau. “It’s not just for the twenty somethings. This can work for nearly everyone, with the right planning.”