By Jan Johnson  First Published in Work&Place Issue 11 – Spring 2019 pages 13 – 16
Tags: engagement • design • workplace

Note:
The Work&Place Editorial Advisory Board applauds this article as one of the eight best articles we published in 2019. We recommend it highly for its candor, its thoughtful critique of workplace design practices, its highlighting of science and data, and its call for engaging end users early in the design process.

Usually considered a curse, the phrase “May you live in interesting times” is meant to be ironic. Interesting times – like the ones we’re in now – are full of change and disruption. Trying to keep up with the pace of technology and its impacts, like way faster business cycles; “passing the baton” from Boomers to Millennials to Gen Z; responding appropriately to the huge interest in wellness and engagement – those are only a few of the challenges organizations are trying to navigate.
It’s not surprising that we long for simpler times when things weren’t so interesting, and, in our world, “workplace” success was defined using straightforward metrics like square-foot-per-person or cost-per-seat.
But here we are, and there’s no going back.
The way we think about the workplace has changed. No longer a factory for white collar processing tasks, it is now an “ecosystem”: a dynamic series of places where work – and socializing, learning, and playing – happens. Where workers’ experiences matter. Quite a lot, actually.
So, too, have our measures of workplace success changed – to borrow a phrase from CoreNet’s 2020 predictions – “from cost control to value creation.”[i] From focusing on effectively and efficiently “managing supply” (space) to “satisfying demand” (what workers need to be effective) in all its new forms: whether that is for amenities in a vibrant neighborhood, for flexible hours, or for support for wellness.
Science has clued us in on what helps people perform at their best[ii], and we’re starting to build this knowledge into our workplaces in three major categories that correlate to knowledge worker productivity: organizational and management factors, like encouraging teams to develop social cohesion; environmental factors, i.e., promoting group identity or providing great indoor air quality; and cognitive factors, including healthy hydration and nutrition to optimize brain function (See Figure One).

Figure One: The Science Behind Knowledge Worker Productivity[iii]
We know, for example, that providing autonomy and control is related to both individual and team performance. Daniel Pink, in his book Drive,[iv] takes it even one step further, as he describes a compelling study from Cornell:
…the benefits that autonomy confers on individuals extend to their organizations. [emphasis added]. For example, researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.[v]
Science also tells us that granting teams the ability to “own” their neighborhood and create a spatial identity is “good.” The act of doing so builds that all-important social cohesion, and – especially if the team displays their work-in-progress or celebrates their successes – also supports information sharing to others in related teams and reinforces their focus and priorities.
Over the last decade or more, our workplace-making industry has made a sizeable shift towards “activity-based” planning – workspace planning using activities or work processes (vs. status) as the basis for design. This approach results in a range of settings to support the broad range of activities – individual and group – that is now understood as making up a day-in-the-life for most knowledge workers. This and other emerging workplace models emphasize quality user experiences that help them do their best work.
Yet at the same time, our industry appears to have less and less patience for thorough needs analysis or design studies: We sometimes jump straight from cursory test fits to construction documents, rather than investing the time and effort to involve a healthy cross-section of users and delve into how work is happening and what activities make up their most business-critical work processes, and then exploring how best to design the space, allocate resources and encourage supportive behaviors.
Said another way, and perhaps stating the obvious, if we do help organizations make this shift to “activity-based” workplace planning, doesn’t it – by definition – mean we/they need to know much more about the activities that make up work (and socializing, learning, and playing)?…