Human Experience & the Modern Workplace

In our experience, it’s the human element that is the key differentiator for how your people and your company intersect. Real estate shapes so much of the experience of an organisation and its people.

The tech boom and the specialised environments our clients are requesting are powering a new kind of trend: technology is influencing the design and configuration of workplaces, there is an evolution well underway to put the human experience at the heart of modern workspaces. Everything from location to existing infrastructure can impact this evolution and places renewed emphasis on the first step of a new workspace, the real estate.

There appears to be three key priorities we should all be focusing on to drive human experience in commercial real estate choices and workplace design:

1. Engagement

Employees want to come to an engaging workspace. The best talent are considering the location of their potential new office before signing on, and landlords are improving end of trip services. And more than ever, innovation within the workspace is what employees are responding to.

For organisations, give your people a purpose, and nurture them to realise it. This kind of cultural environment puts them in the position to properly prioritise their personal and professional development, and they’ll be more likely to seek out learning and sharing opportunities: fuelling company growth from the ground floor.

2. Empowerment

This is a big one. Trust and empowerment of employees is a critical difference of work-life compared with how things were done last century. Obviously, technology has a huge role to play in this.

When we can work from anywhere, management has to approach employee freedom seriously. And that approach should start with empowering employees to structure their work-life, trust that they know what’s best for them, and agility to a tech landscape that feels like it’s forever shifting underneath us. The invention of email on mobile and constant connectivity actually increases the number of hours worked by employees. The researchers claim that users with email on their phones check for new messages 20 times a day, adding as much as two hours to each individual day.*

"An increasing number of office workers can now work from any location for at least part of their working week. According to the Work Foundation, 30% of office workers could work from any location for at least part of their working week in 2016. This figure is expected to rise to 70% in the next few years" – The Conversation*

3. Fulfilment

Just because your people say they’re happy at work doesn’t mean they’re fulfilled. Comfort extends below the surface. Employee health and wellbeing practices are becoming more and more common throughout workplaces across the world, and for good reason: they work.

This doesn’t mean you can ignore a new approach to more traditional ideas of reward and recognition. Build a challenge-centred work organisation, and embed rich ways of public and private recognition for a job well done.

Activity-based working is just a fact of life now, no longer some eccentric idea tried only by the bravest of companies. There’s an important relationship between workspace density and employee effectiveness, and ABW is, in a sense, the valve through which density is regulated, ramped up or down depending on the task at hand.

More than anything, organisations and their employee’s experiences at work are the glue between individuals and companies to align and advance our ambitions.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, catch me at the #CULTURE18 Summit on 15 May in Sydney Click here

Read More:

• Strategy for your workspace
• #Culture18

Sources:

• theconversation.com
• telegraph.co.uk