You can’t create a great place to work by simply guessing how Gladys in accounts gets invoices paid, or how Ramon in marketing collaborates, or how Carla in HR onboards new recruits. This kind of thinking has led employers to believe that a mandated, or a ‘one size fits all’ design and attendance solution, is ‘easiest’ for everyone.
Of course, time has proven that this mistaken approach leads to lower morale and productivity, and higher levels of costly attrition, not to mention the loss of knowledge and essential connections across the org. when people leave.
Every business wants to be a ‘great place to work’ but often lack the awareness of how to go about it, post pandemic.
We can define ‘great place to work’ in many ways, for now let’s focus on the workplace, the remote place, the working arrangements, technology and management approach. (Did you know that workplace consultants work across all of these areas to provide a holistic solution?)
So, how do you create a great workplace?
The single, most successful way to create a great place to work is through engaging with employees.
Why? Because in this way you can determine and understand the activities of each role, and how the office space needs to be configured to enable those activities effectively.
This engagement needs to be structured approach across the organisation - why? because each area, department and team in the business will be different, and tailored solutions will need to be created.
Deep dive workforce assessments using the right tools provides the valuable data essential to creating the ideal working environment; it allows for understanding the full range of working activities and durations across all roles in all teams. It captures who is working with who, as well as preferences around location, and timing of work.
There are several ways this can be done; our team uses our powerful Workplace Engagement Platform which sits at the core of the process, and provides detailed analytics that not only enable accurate, detailed modelling of workplace requirements, but also the management interface identifies the dynamics between teams, giving valuable insights to workforce connections and collaboration needs, operational characteristics, culture alignment, working arrangement preferences and informs areas for improvement.
You’ll quickly discover that teams have different working processes and needs and if optimizing occupancy, right sizing real estate, enabling productivity and reducing levels of attrition are important to you, this is the way to go.
So the next time you’re shown a CGI or photo of some other company’s new workplace design, along with the phrase “would something like this be good for your company?” pause for a moment, and remember that you need your own workforce data to develop solutions that work for your business. You can’t successfully use other people’s data (or designs for that matter) to create a great place to work for your people and business.
We guide our clients along a three step process to formalizing ways of working, implementing changes to the office design, right sizing real estate, facilitating team agreements, and adopting enabling technology – creating great places to work.
We have a range of bespoke, innovative tools to simplify the process and maximise the output proven over many years of helping companies work in a more flexible way.
Reach out if you’d like to know more, or check out our free resources:
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