DESIGN & INTERIORS AN ELEMENTAL APPROACH By adopting a series of universal design principles, everyone can create a fantastic
workplace, a positive environment in which to live, learn, grow, share and contribute suggests Neil Usher, Workplace Director of London’s Sky Central Offices.
Headlines are sensational by nature – but when faced with another day at work, we could be forgiven for wanting to hide under the duvet and hope it all goes away. Debilitating stress, invasive technology, crumbling urban transport infrastructure, and for all the seemingly relentless effort, declining productivity.
There is a general feeling that we are striving to do more and more, while creating progressively less impact. Then, when we finally arrive at our workplace, nothing works, feels or supports us the way it should do. It’s chaotic, disturbing, dysfunctional and drab. You’ve made the effort, your organisation hasn’t.
Everyone deserves a fantastic workplace. Yet articulating why, when all around is as far from fantastic as could be imagined, is often as difficult as getting a WiFi signal and a coffee that doesn’t taste like gravy. There has been something of a revival of the productivity argument in recent years, considered to be a route to the Board for investment. Yet in an age where values are becoming increasingly recognised as something – in the words of Alan Williams – to be lived not laminated, there is a far broader argument for the organisation that seeks purpose with performance.
For this we can add to Frank Duffy’s original three pillars of workplace strategy – efficiency, effectiveness and expression – with three more that have emerged since the original idea, environment, ether and energy. By focussing on the ‘Six E’s’ – or as Ian Ellison terms the model ‘Neil’s Diamond’ – we can also reflect the relative importance of each to an organisation and create a pattern reflecting the present and desired future state, and understand where the workplace needs to head.
“The ultimate goal is that the
standard is no longer needed, that it has served its purpose and happily worked itself into obsolescence.”
The Six E’s give us: efficiency in the form of responsible cost and spatial metrics, respecting the commercial considerations; the effectiveness to ensure that everything needed is provided and works, and people can be at their best every day; the expression of the organisation’s DNA through its workplace creating advocacy and commitment; a focus on the environment such that we leave as light a footprint on the planet as possible; the digital representation of the organisation and its workplace in the ether, where in an age of instant
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accountability demonstrably living its values becomes essential; and an energy for our people, a deeper and more comprehensive idea of wellbeing. The Six E’s create the compelling vision, the ‘why’, encompassing both data and conviction.
It is quite possible to create a fantastic workplace based on 12 key elements – a simple, attainable and universal approach that applies in any location and sector, whatever style of work is desired and with whatever budget is available. It is not an elite standard such as BREEAM and WELL, but a standard that everyone should aspire to – and can reach.
The ultimate goal is that the standard is no longer needed, that it has served its purpose and happily worked itself into obsolescence. In a time where we obfuscate, procrastinate and complicate, it is refreshingly easy to understand. The periodic table in which the 12 elements are framed also recognises that all organisations will need to focus on different areas, and so it is free of hierarchy or order – just as long as each is considered and responded to.
How do we do this? We create the fantastic workplace through the adoption of a series of universally applicable design principles, and a change programme that focusses on adaptation rather than adoption, giving people the space they need to understand where they need to get to and why, to create their own compelling case. We also service our environment with a focus on colleagues, rather than customers – those with whom we are equal partners – and add the necessary intensity to a drive for quality. A new workplace raises expectations, and the old models will not be sufficient.
It is possible for everyone to have a fantastic workplace. There are no longer any excuses. It is time to get on with it.
workessence.com twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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