FEATURE


provides a critical link between work experience and workspace.


What’s quite interesting is that despite the clear association, FM and workspace often find themselves disassociated, and addressed very differently, despite DEGW et al.’s initial recognition of their united importance. There are a range of reasons for why this has happened, but keeping them apart serves little purpose. Workspace is the stage upon which FM provision plays out, in service of an organisation’s people. It’s time to reunite them.


At 3edges, we use a deceptively simple equation to allow us to explore the different perspectives FM can adopt:


workspace + culture = workplace


If FM focuses on workspace to the exclusion of an organisation’s people and its culture, it is always going to struggle to genuinely add value, because it is never fully committed and in tune to its ra


i n d t so ’êre.


But if FM foregrounds its cultural contribution, there is potential for far more powerful things to happen.


So far, so good, but in some respects this is only the beginning. FM has always been about the provision and subsequent management of organisational space. Yet in a recent piece of academic research undertaken by Ian Ellison from 3edges, where he sought to explore ‘what mattered’ to both providers and users of organisational workspace, one of the key findings was that when invited to talk openly about whatever


issues they felt mattered and important, participants foregrounded a range of both functional and meaningful issues far beyond the built workspace. Perhaps the most significant of these are:


• Not just having a choice of working location, but perceiving the autonomy to choose


• The importance of, and social opportunities that come from food and drink - especially cake, coffee and beer


• The importance of personal health, and seeing and accessing nature for individual and collective well-being


• The challenges of successfully negotiating the work-life boundary


• Being able to engage in socially- responsible activity in work


If these issues really matter - pause and consider how much each resonates with you personally, just as a benchmark - what is your FM function currently doing in to enable them, and where is it lacking?


Some people in the study also talked about how their work actually took place in different ways, in a range of locations outside their work’s spaces. This is more than flexible working, in location terms. It is a recognition that everyone works differently, in and through different spaces and places.


So what is the implication of this? Well, if only a proportion of work gets done ‘at work’, in the office, and


FM’s role is to enable a workplace, not just provide a workspace, is it falling short of its commitment? How can FM contribute beyond those workspace walls it has become (at best) accountable for?


“ATTENTION SEEMS


TO HAVE TURNED TO THE ROLE FM CAN


PLAY IN TERMS OF THE WORK EXPERIENCE.”


The recently published Stoddart Review develops the notion of the chief workplace officer, or CWO, as an organisational lynchpin capable of drawing together the key elements of FM, real estate, HR and technology. This develops two somewhat overused ideas. The first is that FM should have a seat at an organisation’s boardroom table. The second is that successful FM is achieved through the intersection of people, process and place. This is no longer an aggrieved narrative about position or siloed remit. It is a more informed conversation about value taken to the business, with more outcome-focused evidence of contribution, and so with more intrinsic alignment.


So perhaps space is no longer the final frontier? Join Ian Ellison and Jill Fortune for some lively discussions at 2.15pm on 21st March at the Facilities Management 2017 event at the NEC in Birmingham.


www.fm-birmingham.com/fm-seminars


www.tomorrowsfm.com


TOMORROW’S FM | 41


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