RULE #2
2
USE SPACE TO PROMOTE CULTURE
Continuing to understand where, how and in what type of space your current and prospective employees want to work, and should be working in, will be a lasting form of competitive advantage.
Workplace is where culture happens. Workplaces manifest culture by design or default. Forward-looking businesses recognize that their workspaces have a huge impact on company culture, employee productivity, and financial performance. “Workplace is now a term of art” says Daniel Anderson, a partner with AndersonPorterDesign. “We talk about workplace now rather than office. HR needs to stay abreast of the different ways in which space affects interactions between employees.” Traditionally, workspace-related decisions have rested with real estate personnel who strive for economic efficiency by minimizing costs and maximizing the number of employees per square foot or square meter. Business and HR leaders need to work in partnership with real estate, facilities, IT and Legal to steer the conversation . . . coordinating all the infrastructure decisions to reinforce company culture.
Top organizations recognize that their workspace is an expanding part of what sets them apart. A well-designed workspace has the capacity to help recruit and retain top talent and foster culture-affirming work behaviors. Increasingly, organizations are strategically redesigning their workplaces to better align with their core values, attract the right talent, and achieve superior results.
Five Drivers for Workspace
The workspaces where people work are changing because the nature of work is evolving to be distributed, mobile, and collaborative. We see five drivers influencing how companies align their workspace and culture (see Figure 2.1). Taken together these drivers provide business and HR leaders with a framework to rethink how space can drive culture, choice, wellness, engagement, and community
Figure 2.1 Five drivers for workspace
1. Drive culture. Workspace is a physical manifestation of an organization’s values and mission. How could we use workspace to drive our values and mission?
2. Enable choice. Employees want to choose how, when, and where to work. How could we enable more employee preferences for where to work?
3. Promote wellness. Workspace influences the health and well-being of employees. How could we ensure our workspace enables and facilitates wellness, instead of proliferating health issues?
4. Enhance engagement. Employee engagement is influenced by workspace. How could we design our workspace to improve employee engagement?
5. Nurture community. Coworking spaces and community managers’ roles are being inspired by the gig economy and adopted by established organizations. How could we apply coworking practices to nurture an authentic sense of community?
The connection between space and corporate culture is not new. Tom Peters, in his 1992 book Liberation Management, states, “Space management may be the most ignored—and most powerful—tool for inducing cultural change, speeding up innovative projects, and enhancing the learning process in far-flung organizations.”1
Having a better appreciation of how workspace drives culture, choice, wellness, engagement, and community will inspire us to create a workspace that becomes a competitive advantage for our organization.
Drive Culture Through Workspace Design
Workplaces are physical manifestations of a company’s culture. Kurt L. Darrow, chairman, president, and CEO of La-Z-Boy Incorporated, a furniture manufacturer based in Monroe, Michigan, says, “Space matters. Facilities matter when people are choosing where to work, where to go to school, how they can work, how they feel good.” A company promoting a culture of high-paced innovation, creativity, and a sense of fun at work will find it hard to promote these values in a bland, gray, cubicle-filled workspace that likely saps employees’ energy rather than inspires employees to achieve creative breakthroughs. Similarly, an organization that has critical deadlines, highly technical work, and ultrafocused workers may not benefit from a workspace filled with video game consoles, ball pits, and office table tennis tournaments. These are perhaps extreme examples, and yet they illustrate very clearly the importance of recognizing the physical role that workspaces play in curating a company’s culture.
Leading organizations recognize this fact. Business and HR leaders increasingly want to use workspace to foster their culture and attract the right type of employees. These business and HR leaders are thinking critically and acting intentionally on the work environment they want to cultivate.
La-Z-Boy recognizes the power of workspace and completed a new corporate headquarters in 2015, designed to use space to attract the next generation employees. Darrow sees workspace as a way to articulate and signal a new way of working to the 8,300 employees of the company. During his 13-year tenure as chairman, president, and CEO, he transformed all facets of the company, increasing its competitiveness in the dynamic home furnishing marketplace, while repositioning the well-known La-Z-Boy brand among consumers.
Darrow summarizes his responsibilities into three categories: “Strategy, Capital, and Talent.” He explains, “If I get those three things right, the rest of my job is pretty easy. If I find myself doing something that is not related to those three principles, I am probably getting in the way of my team.”2
Building an employee-centric workspace is a long-term planning project. The space needs to be organic and flexible enough to facilitate future generational changes and shifts in working-style preferences. The workspace design should promote engagement and collaboration among employees. Darrow recognizes the critical role culture plays in the overall design. With its investment in a new corporate headquarters, La-Z-Boy sought to revolutionize its corporate culture. According to Lea Ann Knapp, the lead internal designer at the La-Z-Boy HQ project, the aim was to “bring a little bit of the past with us, but direct people to the present and the future.”3
Darrow continues, “We design our headquarters for current and future employees who we hope will want to work here for the next 15 or more years. We talked to them all, they felt included and we listened.” He jokes, “After all, we only build a new corporate headquarters once every 90 years!”
The company’s new Michigan-based headquarters houses up to 500 staff, the majority of La-Z-Boy’s corporate employees. It features an open-space design, large windows, and immense glass frontage, along with landscaped grounds with walking trails and backlit fountains. The campus environment is reminiscent of many high-tech companies in Silicon Valley; however, the headquarters is located in Monroe, the town in Michigan where the company was founded 90 years ago.
The design of the company’s new headquarters recognizes that employees expect different ways of working. In response, the space incorporates “niche places” where employees can do their work. There’s an explicit lack of seating or office assignment to combat territorial thinking and silo departments. The open-seating philosophy encourages employees to get out, be seen, and collaborate with coworkers. La-Z-Boy also provides employees with the choice to work at a desk that can convert to a standing desk at the push of a button.4 In some rooms there are even desks with walking treadmills underneath, for those who wish to talk on a conference call or type while they walk.
La-Z-Boy created conference rooms and workrooms that employees can book to do the work they need. There are multiple room formats, ranging from one-person rooms—where people can focus on their individual work—to larger meeting rooms designed for group collaboration about new furniture designs and innovative business models. This innovative approach allows the company to break away from the unwritten rule of conference rooms only being used for meetings. The company complex also features coffee bars, a genius bar–style IT support area called Tech Deck, and outdoor seating patios, complete with Wi-Fi and piped music for ambience.
La-Z-Boy’s executives recognized that reframing the culture of a 90-year-old home furniture business was a change management process beyond their experience and competencies. La-Z-Boy partnered with Steelcase, a fellow Michigan-based firm, to help transition to its new headquarters.
Deep-rooted behaviors and everyday barriers are hard to revamp, but for La-Z-Boy, the challenges were worth overcoming. “I am positive . . . that if we did not have the new facility [the people we recently hired] would have passed on us,” says Darrow. “Do not ever underestimate the influence physical structures have on culture.”
Similarly, Rackspace, a $1.8 billion managed cloud computing company based in San Antonio, Texas, saw its new site in Blacksburg, Virginia, as the company’s opportunity to strategically design space to drive company culture.
Robert McAden, director of Business Operations and Blacksburg site leader at Rackspace, believes workspace design can be an important driver to reinforce a company’s core values. As he says, “Our space is really a package for our culture. You can have the brown box or you can have a package that adds value to the product.”
The challenge for McAden was to design a space to be compelling enough to attract and retain critical talent to a town with a population of 43,000. The starting point was determining “how to translate our core values of giving fanatical support to employees and customers, delivering results, treating employees like friends and family, being passionate about our work, exhibiting full disclosure and transparency, and being committed to greatness into the design for a space.”
For example, “one of the Rackspace core values is transparency,” says McAden. “How do you manifest this into a space? Well we do this by creating a workspace where what people do is transparent to others.” He continues, “To me, culture is not things like foosball tables, haircuts in the office, or free snacks and sodas—these are all perks that have very little to do with culture. Culture comes back to the core values of our company and how we create tribalism around these core values and really instill those values in each and every person that is an employee here.”
As a result, Rackspace established three core design principles for its new workspace: the new design had to be connective, collaborative, and fun.
When it came to connectivity, Rackspace determined that it wanted employees to have a visual line of sight to others but not be disrupted by others. A unique interior atrium housing two stories of conference rooms was designed to create visual connectivity; multiple break areas were deemed important to enable chance encounters; and a larger, flexible-use space was needed for meetings and events. Large, flat-screen monitors were distributed around the office to foster both intrateam and interteam communication. Employees walk with laptops in hand, further reinforcing the paradigm of moving to collaborate and coordinate work in different spaces during the workday.
In terms of collaboration, Rackspace decided that an open office design would provide the foundational work areas. These spaces are supported by flexible work areas ranging from open seating to enclosed conference rooms. The office space is a very open flow environment, with bright colors on the walls, open staircases between floors, and transparent doors to enhance visibility and openness. Gone are the six-foot-tall walled-in box cubicles of the past. Instead, employees now work side by side at desks with small, two-foot-tall partitions separating them from coworkers opposite to them and often with no partition separating the employee sitting beside them.
To make the workspace fun, Rackspace looked to its cocreative culture and determined it was important to design explicit areas where employees could come together to play, recharge, and interact together. Anyone who walks through Rackspace’s Blacksburg office can see the large number of employees wearing immersive headphones, listening to their favorite music. The office is a pet-friendly environment, replete with several dogs.5 It’s also hard to miss the large-scale climbing wall. Coders dressed in jeans, Rackspace-branded T-shirts, and sweatshirts fill the space, the more relaxed dress code encouraging employees to express their best, most productive selves.
By explicitly aligning workspace design principles to cultural values, Rackspace created a physical embodiment of its culture, not only in the core work areas, but in every section of the office space, including often overlooked areas like walls and passageways. Rackspace’s core values are emblazoned in two-foot-tall white print on a red wall in a central location. Other inspiring slogans in foot-tall fonts adorn transition passages, transforming these dead spaces into canvases showcasing Rackspace values.
La-Z-Boy and Rackspace share a common belief that workspace drives enhanced employee engagement. It’s the combination of key workspace attributes—connectivity, collaboration, and fun—that together drive greater engagement and satisfaction.
Enable Choice on Where to Work
Susan Cain’s 2012 TED Talk, “The Power of Introverts,” raised attention to introverts as a distinct class of employee.6 In her talk, she asserted, “one third to one half of the population are introverts,” and passionately advocated how introverts need more privacy, freedom, and autonomy at work. Cain made the case that workplaces were “designed mostly for extroverts and their need for lots of stimulation.” She highlighted how introverts are highly talented individuals with a very different set of characteristics, which need to be encouraged by moving away from the prevailing norms of workplace design. Introverted employees need to find a place to concentrate on their work and also collaborate in the workplace.
So companies need to ask, “How can we accommodate both our introverts and our extroverts in our workspaces?” We propose leaders ask four simple questions to reveal where employees choose to work and why:7
• Where do you go to do your best work? (Engagement spaces)
• Where do you go to get the job done? (Production spaces)
• Where do you avoid meeting or working? (Toleration spaces)
• Where do you go to recharge? (Restoration spaces)
Engagement Spaces: Where Employees Go to Do Their Best Work
Leaders can empower employees to do their best work by providing them with broader choices in workspaces: open space, collaboration space, huddle rooms, quiet rooms,8 and smaller phone booths for private chats. The space where employees choose to do their best work often depends on what the employees are working on at the moment. Thus, employees need to think about what sort of space works best for them at different stages of a project. Additionally, employees can be encouraged to leverage a number of quantified self apps, such as RescueTime, a tool to track how you spend your time during the workday.9
In a similar vein, choice can also be provided by encouraging workplace flexibility, understanding that some employees may be more productive on their own time (early birds or night owls), rather than working a traditional nine-to-five day.10 Similarly some employees may be more productive in private areas wearing noise-canceling headphones, while others may thrive in large, shared spaces with constant stimulation.
Production Spaces: Where Employees Go to Get the Job Done
Too often open-plan offices are designed with more attention paid to facilitating collaboration than completion. The noise level, distractions, and constant interruptions can cause high amounts of stress in the workplace—in fact 61 percent say they go home to get work done.11 Planning a workspace that provides areas for focused work and privacy as well as collaboration is crucial to support innovation. People need time and space to recharge and digest the new ideas generated through collaboration.12
This also means people gravitate to different spaces for different activities they are engaged in. This is known as activity-based working and acknowledges that some spaces are distinctly suited to spending private, concentrated “think time,” some to collaborating with others, and still others to engaging with staff, visitors, and other stakeholders. A workspace built around activity-based working is designed to facilitate the different types of work and increasing productivity across a broader spectrum of the organization.
Toleration Spaces: Where Employees Avoid Meeting or Working
It is also important to pay attention to spaces that are not used. Unused spaces are early warning signs for other issues. Simply “tolerating” a space is the enemy of positive engagement, a drain on finances, and will deplete the energy of employees in any department or building. Tolerating wasted space is an indication of a leadership vacuum in the workplace. We can look around and see examples of dead hallways, unused “noisy” rooms, badly situated rooms where direct sunlight makes it difficult to see computer screens, bean bags or high-end recliner chairs that are never used, TV screens that are never turned on, windowless rooms that people avoid . . . the list goes on. Laura DelaFuente, former VP, Workplace Strategy lead at JLL, calls such spaces “crimes against productivity.”
“Toleration spaces” represent a number of opportunities for companies to revitalize unused spaces by bringing in a local coffee vendor or offering a department the chance to showcase new initiatives. “Toleration spaces” should be identified and eliminated on a regular basis.
Restoration Spaces: Where Employees Go to Recharge
Finally, it is important to recognize the value of space to recharge one’s mind and soul. The Quality of Life @ Work study reports that employees who take at least a brief break every 90 minutes report a 28 percent higher level of focus than those who take just one break, or no breaks at all.13 Employees need and want time to refresh their energy and employers need to provide for this.
Promote Wellness in the Workplace
The evidence that sedentary behavior at work is associated with poorer health has been building for some time. A 2015 University of Toronto led study shows the connection between being sedentary and adverse health outcomes. Put another way: sitting is the new smoking!14 Many organizations now seek to create office environments and work practices to promote standing and movement at work.
Bridget Sullivan, director of Wellness at Glassdoor.com, says “We see a trend among employers to modify how and when people move, from supporting wearable technologies, offering standing desks, to encouraging walking meetings.
Sullivan oversees a range of work programs designed to get employees to “involve themselves in a yoga, meditation, or fitness class, where they are releasing endorphins, releasing stress, helping their body to either strengthen or relax.” A growing number of workspaces encourage movement, including providing employees with wearable fitness trackers that track the number of steps employees take each day and engage in walking meetings and companywide Fitbit challenges.
Different movements have emerged internationally to promote the benefits of wellness. Public Health England and a U.K. community interest company, Active Working CIC, collaborated to create guidelines, published in an insight-packed “Consensus Statement” document (and available on www.GetBritainStanding.org), for employers to discourage prolonged periods of sedentary work.15 The guide provides information for employers and staff who want to create more active work environments. The report concludes that along with other health-promotion goals (such as improving nutrition and reducing alcohol consumption, smoking, and stress), employers should promote the benefits of movement and the potential ills of being sedentary.
While some companies are providing the choice of standing desks to employees, other companies, like Boston Interactive, are introducing office layouts to encourage people to move. Boston Interactive CEO Chuck Murphy eliminated personal desk printers to encourage regular movement and serendipitous interactions at a centralized printing area. He also introduced whiteboards on wheels, standing desks, an open office floor plan with an array of designated informal meeting areas, and long communal dining tables to promote interactions during the day. Many organizations share similar deliberate approaches to encourage movement at work.
Why are companies interested in promoting wellness? Workplace wellness initiatives have the potential to keep insurance, healthcare, and sick-day costs down, contribute to lower absenteeism and employee turnover rates, and drive employee health, engagement, and productivity.
With the majority of our waking hours now spent working and often in an office, the demand for healthy workplaces is on the rise. This has led to the creation of the WELL Building Standard (WELL). The WELL Building Standard measures, certifies, and monitors the performance of building features that impact the health and well-being of employees. WELL provides companies with a framework to create a healthy workplace by focusing on seven concepts, including:
1. Air. Creating optimal indoor air quality
2. Water. Promoting safe and clean water
3. Nourishment. Promoting healthier foods, eating habits, and food culture
5. Light. Incorporating lighting that enhances productivity and minimizes disruption to the body’s circadian system
5. Fitness. Fostering an active lifestyle
6. Comfort. Enabling a distraction-free, productive, and comfortable indoor environment
7. Mind. Supporting cognitive and emotional health
WELL is administered by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), established in 2013 to improve the way people live by developing spaces that enhance occupant health and quality of life.16 According to IWBI founder Paul Scialla, “WELL Certification aims to do for human health what LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), certification does for the environment. WELL marries science, technology, and architecture to improve the health and well-being of employees, students, and apartment dwellers.”
Scialla sees the science of light in the workplace as a growing area that can address future workplace productivity. He stated, “The idea of circadian appropriate lighting is going to change many things for all of us.” To illustrate the rate of change, he explained, “If you went to Light Fair (the largest international annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference) three years ago and discussed circadian lighting, few would have known what you were talking about. This year at Light Fair, it was the one topic everyone wanted to talk about.” Regulated light levels through innovations in LED lighting and controls will improve the employee experience in the future workplace. Regulated lighting has the potential to keep employees more energized, more mentally acute, and more productive.
Commercial real estate services firm CBRE’s headquarters in Los Angeles, Macquarie Bank in Sydney, and TD Ameritrade Bank in Toronto were three early adopters of the WELL Building Standard. As of May 2016, there were over 150 registered and certified WELL projects across 16 countries and 5 continents.17
Scialla’s key insight was to recognize that the work environment could be used as a vehicle to optimize health and wellness: “If real estate can be used to improve the health of employees, then this can have a positive impact on society.”
We expect organizations such as Active Working CIC of the United Kingdom and WELL in the United States to be just the start of a renewed movement to leverage real estate to proactively impact the health and well-being of employees globally. They are leading the way in public-private partnerships to establish higher standards for air, water, nourishment, light, and comfort, including physical, emotional, and cognitive health.
Enhance Engagement
Company workspaces are moving beyond densification strategies (less space per person) to rethinking how to better plan and use communal workspaces. After all, there is only so much space to be cut! In 2010, the average employee had 225 square feet of space; this has now been whittled down to approximately 100 square feet entering 2017, according to Corenet, an association for corporate real estate and workplace professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. employees now work in open floor plans according to the International Facility Management Association, a professional network for the facility management industry.18
The new thinking about workspace focuses on creating space where employees want to be and giving them choice over the type of space and the tools they use so they can best collaborate, concentrate, and network with colleagues.
Ann Bamesberger,19 head of Workplace Effectiveness at Genentech, says, “It’s not about space, it’s not about open space vs. the office or the cube; that’s an old argument. It’s about the way we work.” When Bamesberger joined Genentech in 2013, she was told that the company was out of space and needed to build a new office building at Genentech’s South San Francisco headquarters to house 900 people. Bamesberger used this opportunity to shift the focus of the new building to a shared-office approach. The new approach is based on the work practices of the intended occupants of the building rather than the traditional cubicle office formula.20 Company studies confirmed that offices and cubicle utilization rate was 35 percent.21 Bamesberger and her Workplace Effectiveness Team clearly needed to reinvent how to engage employees with the space. Over several months, through focus group discussions as well as prototyping different aspects of the work environment, the Workplace Effectiveness Team came up with the specifics for their new Neighborhood Work Environment model.
The Workplace Effectiveness Team identified different types of places where people can work, a series of social practices, and a common technology infrastructure to provide employees with choice on where and how to work.
This new building is Genentech’s first entire building of “neighborhoods,” informed by the learnings of their workplace research. Maron Demissie, of the Neighborhood Work Environments research and engagement team, describes the new approach as getting rid of the old model of an “assigned office or cube” and replacing this with teams assigned to a “neighborhood.” She says, “Within that neighborhood, you’ve got access to a mix of spaces to use . . . and it really gives employees that sense of choice and ability, in order to make the decision of where to work based on what suits them.”
Genentech’s facility offers studio and enclosed spaces (including both one- and two-person rooms, team rooms, and conference rooms). Along with a little more than a thousand actual work desks, there are over 500 “collaborative seats” in the building. “This feels more like home, with sofas where people gather and take a break or work as if they are at home,” says Demissie.
This new 225,000-square-foot building opened in May 2015. If it were built to the original office configuration, it would have housed about 900 people. Instead it’s a shared-neighborhood work environment that currently accommodates 1,500 employees.
This reinvention of workspace is also happening at the U.S. headquarters of Credit Suisse in New York, where their activity-based work program, which is internally branded Smart Working, has delivered a greater sense of community and pride in the workplace. Michelle Lindgren, Americas lead, Workplace Strategy, Planning, and Innovation for Credit Suisse, summarizes the objectives of the Smart Working initiative this way: “We want to encourage collaboration among our employees and provide them with an environment to help increase productivity and create an atmosphere for staff to become more engaged with each other. We see this as a competitive advantage as it can impact employee retention, improve our standing as an employer of choice, and create more efficient and effective workspaces which will ultimately reduce our occupancy costs.” Beginning with one location in Switzerland, Smart Working is now a rapidly growing global program with locations in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Poland, Luxembourg, Singapore, Pune (India), and New York. The program emphasizes how and where people work best and is focused on the three primary types of work conducted by the employees of Credit Suisse, also known as the three Cs: collaborative, concentrated, and confidential. Their insight was that often a traditional work environment was not conducive, or equipped, to fully support the three Cs. So Credit Suisse used this information, in combination with its core Smart Working principles, to guide the design and renovation of its New York space.
Like Genentech, Credit Suisse learned that employees value a work neighborhood. Lindgren says, “We created neighborhoods as an alternative to fixed desks. By assigning departments to different neighborhoods, we created a ‘Home Zone’ concept where staff knew where to go if they wanted to sit with or find someone from their team. Since all of the workstations are free-address, or a first come, first served basis for seating, Credit Suisse is able to oversubscribe the space based on research showing approximately 20 percent of staff are not in on any given day. So they allocate 8 desks to 10 people in their NYC Smart Working floor.” Lindgren concludes, “Overall, the most important thing to us is that someone is able to work productively during their day, wherever it may be.”
Nurture Community Values Through Space
For those who have never entered a coworking space, it’s a worthwhile experience. A coworking space is more than just renting out desk space; it is a chance to engage with workers who hail from many different industries and kinds of expertise. It is a chance to share an identity, work within a community, and participate in networking events with other members.
In the past decade, the phenomenon of coworking has grown to such an extent that it is now recognized as a discrete “fourth place”22 for working (after offices, homes, and coffee shops).
“This is a movement that we’re building to change the way people work forever,” declared Tony Bacigalupo to the audience of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) in May 2015.23 Bacigalupo is a cofounder of New Work City and was one of the coauthors of the book I’m Outta Here! How Coworking Is Making the Office Obsolete, one of the earliest books on work culture to describe the then-nascent phenomenon of the global coworking space expansion.24
Coworking community leaders such as Bacigalupo see the emergence of these communities as supporting a new type of workforce that will create a sustainable ecosystem for connection, collaboration, and networked value creation. Bacigalupo’s book proudly highlights over 70 unique identifiable coworking spaces in existence at the end of 2008. By the end of 2010, the number had grown to 600.25 By the end of 2013, the figure was over 2,500 coworking spaces, supporting over 110,000 members across 81 countries.26 By mid-2015, more than 3,000 coworking spaces were available worldwide, and the phenomenon continues to grow.27
Coworking has come far in the decade since Bernard DeKoven and Brad Neuberg opened the first physical coworking space in San Francisco in mid-2005.28 The original posting by Neuberg advertising the space back in 2005 touted the “office of a traditional corporate job, but in a very unique way.”29 The Atlantic magazine described early coworking organizations as finding themselves “at the vanguard of a movement of people who are finding meaningful work, building community, and challenging conventional business practices.”30 The human need for community, according to Jacob Sayles of Office Nomads, is what lures people to coworking spaces. “They find communities and see the possibility of having their emotional needs met via social connections and opportunities to learn. These communities provide a place where a sense of belonging can happen.”31
The 2015 GCUC conducted a survey among members of coworking space to highlight the special ingredients that community members see in their coworking environment.32 When asked for the words that best describe coworking, the top responses were community, collaboration, fun, social, and productivity. Isn’t that what all companies want to create in order to drive engagement and innovation in the workplace?
In the coming years we expect to see more companies becoming community members at one of the global coworking spaces. McKinsey is a case in point. When the company created McKinsey Academy, an online learning portal for both McKinsey employees and customers, rather than house the academy team in McKinsey headquarters in New York City, the company rented space at WeWork in New York City to provide the right mix of community, collaboration, and fun.
Next, we see a growing impact of space on worker satisfaction. Both Steelcase and the GCUC confirm that community influences worker satisfaction. In the GCUC survey, 79 percent of the community members reported being highly satisfied with their coworking space. This data is collected from many workers who pay to work in their own space. Imagine a level of satisfaction this high from employees who are paid to work in their space.
Finally, the GCUC survey documented the importance of a community manager to curate and engage community members. A total of 83 percent of respondents said the community manager was very important or important. We recommend it is time to consider the role of a community manager in all workspaces. Think of coworking spaces as being the early adopters in having a dedicated resource to focus on building community. These community managers curate content but also drive and engage members to attend various community-oriented programming, such as lunch meetings, networking meetings, and a variety of after-hours parties sponsored by companies selling snacks, eyeglasses, fitness classes, and other services.
Natalie Grasso, author of What to Look for in Your Next Community Manager, defines a community manager in the workplace as someone who:
1. Helps to shape the culture and norms of the space through member orientations, ongoing communication, and daily interactions
2. Facilitates connections whenever possible, growing and strengthening the community
3. Embodies the values and core culture
4. Sets the tone of the day for others
5. Draws energy from spending most of the day interacting with others
6. Empowers workers to connect directly to one another and use available resources to self-organize wherever possible
7. Is less of a provider and more of a facilitator, and approaches every interaction with a member as an opportunity to give power and permission33
Look for more community managers in the coming decade, and consider adding one to your workforce if you don’t already have one.
Workspace Within the Future Workplace
The challenge for human resource and real estate leaders is how to realize the best opportunities to leverage space in order to reinforce culture, choice, wellness, engagement, and community. Forward-looking companies like Credit Suisse, Genentech, Glassdoor, La-Z-Boy, McKinsey, and Rackspace illustrate the range of new thinking regarding the power of workspace to increase collaboration, engagement, and satisfaction at work and lead to better business outcomes.
Increasingly, space is becoming part of the discussion in how and where we want to work. Workspace can support and embody company values and culture, cater to diverse worker preferences, enable improvements in well-being, and drive greater productivity, engagement, and community in the workplace.
We are all looking to be part of something bigger than our jobs. But how companies do this is critical. Don’t be fooled into creating an array of workplace perks and think your job is done! Instead focus on how your workspace is an extension of your company culture. As Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”34 We all need to recognize that our workspace is where our culture happens. And we must ask ourselves how we can create a workspace where employees are engaged, motivated, learning, and benefiting from a positive community that cares about their well-being. How would you view your workspace differently if you saw it as less to do with a piece of brick than with “a piece of soul?”35
MY ACTION PLAN
Myself
• Take an observation walk for 30 minutes. What do I notice about how people are using our space? What does my choice of where I work say about me?
• Who do I partner with in my organization to redefine our workspace so it empowers employees?
• How do I use space personally?
• Where are my engagement spaces, where I go to do my best work?
• Where are my production spaces, where I go to get the job done?
• Where are my toleration spaces, where I avoid going to meet or work?
• Where are my restoration spaces to recharge?
My Team
• Do we explicitly discuss the role of space enough as a team? Why or why not? “It’s not our job” is no longer the right answer.
• What could we learn from asking our employees for the three words that best describe their current work space and their desired workspace?
• What are the implications of their answers? How are they different from coworkers’ answers of community, collaboration, fun, social, and productivity?
• What does our workspace say about our culture?
• What are the key elements of our company culture that could be better translated into design elements within our workspace? How are we connecting our culture to our space?
• What are the coworking spaces in our community? What coworking spaces are near the communities where our employees live? Should we consider experimenting with using coworking space to cluster employees differently in a professional space while offering them greater work and travel flexibility?
• What metrics are we using as a company to measure space? Are these the most appropriate metrics for our cultural and performance goals?