21 Sep The Four Interconnected Principles of Workplace Strategy

The workplace of today

The workplace in recent years has become more than just a place where work happens. It has evolved to associate the process of how work is done and the work output itself. It now embraces how passionate the workers are, how engaged and how everyone gels as a team to even how people communicate. It is not just about the technical abilities of staff but also how they ‘fit’ in an organisation’s way of doing things.

Therefore workplace is a complex ecosystem with many interweaving elements and relationships. Some dependencies are easy to spot like if the air conditioning or lighting is off workers get uncomfortable and affects their productivity. Yet other fundamentals that impact critical processes may be much harder to pinpoint.

Making sense of the whole workplace environment to understand what needs to be done in order to advance the benefits or the impacts of these interactions can be confusing for some and utterly frustrating for most. This is why we choose Workplace Strategy as focus for HubbTalk this September.

The principles of workplace strategy

So, let’s put the key principles of workplace strategy into handy concepts.

Alignment.

Practice what you preach. The office needs to be consistent and able to respond to business strategies. It has to reflect in the physical sense the organisational culture and the economic realities. When organisations fail to ‘walk the talk’ staffs gets lost in translating what they hear from what they experience and it causes a tremendous amount of stress.

Effectiveness.

Performance is multiplied when there are harmonies between what people do and how they do it. Effectiveness is delivered when work practices of individuals and teams are deeply understood so the workplace is able to offer the most suitable accommodation for a particular task at a certain time. The workplace then becomes effective and aids in the alignment of business goals.

Efficiency.

Optimised productivity. Wise use of real estate and every strength and assets of the organisation as possible. Efficiency is intertwined with Effectiveness. For instance, individual spaces are reduced with some space repurposed to become a breakout area where people can do quick huddles and meetings easily promote encounters, interactions, and collaboration between individuals and teams.

Agility.

Nimble and resilient. The ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances; and being ready for anything. Agility marries the concepts of flexibility or physical adaptability and the idea of user choice and control.

In the context of workplace strategy, when workers recognize the relationship of the work they do and the place and tools they have, they are able to use those resources more effectively. Workers develop adaptability (quickly and intelligently) morphing the work process and work environment as they deem appropriate.

So whilst there is no ‘one size fits all‘ formula in workplace strategy, these key principles can become tools for an organisation in framing their considerations towards a workplace strategy that propels them into the future.

See you all at HubbTalk.

Adapted from the article “How People and Culture Matter in Workplace Design” which first appeared on the CoreNet NYC Chapter website in 2008.