Balancing Individual preferences and team priorities
The core challenge in almost all workplace renovation projects is to strike the right balance among individual preferences, team priorities, and the constraints presented by the building. Individuals are habitual. They resolve uncertainty and complexity in their work by seeking out the harbor of predictability, wherever they can find it. This means the vast majority of American workers prefers workplace settings that are conducive to their own particular shade of certainty. Similarly, employees rely on the steadiness and dependability of their teammates to balance the workload and keep the business moving forward. Employees need to know where their teammates are, what they are working on, and when they are going to deliver. The success and stability of the business depend on this information.
What happens, then, when the direction shifts and the business demands change? Something has to give.
The Dow Chemical Story
That was the challenge Dow faced when renovating 27,000 square feet of existing office space to accommodate 250 people located on its Midland, MI campus. Reflecting on the start of the project, Paul Kline, Information Systems Global Director of Employee Experience Services, stated, “We brought together teams from a dozen different parts of Dow, including IT and business process organizations. Most came from a variety of office or cubicle workspaces with a heavy reliance on meeting rooms and audio conferencing for collaboration.” Rather than refresh the new space by replicating the sorts of environments people were accustomed to, Kline and the team recognized that the future workplace would look nothing like workplaces of the past. “One of the primary objectives of the project was to bring work groups that were spread across multiple sites and buildings together in a single location to allow for greater collaboration across teams to drive more innovative ideas and solutions,” said Paul Barbeau, Real Estate Strategy and Facility Development Director.
Early concepts illustrate the proximity of team spaces to individual work surfaces and the amount of area dedicated to shared program.
BHDP led the Dow team through a series of visioning sessions, interviews, and focus groups. As a result, an overarching organizing concept emerged. Kline says, “Our vision for the project was to create a vibrant, agile workspace at scale that we could use for project-based teams. We wanted a workspace that would increase collaboration and knowledge sharing within and across teams and enable faster delivery of solutions.” In short, the team needed a space that embraced the principles of agile development, scaled to the size of the organization.
Since the publication of the Agile Manifesto in the early-2000’s, much has been written about “agile” development – a contrasting workflow to the preceding “waterfall” development model previously practiced in the IT industry. Typically, the agile development model relies on a series of successive scrums and sprints, the rapid release of working prototypes, continuous testing and refining of these prototypes, the welcoming of changes in requirements no matter how late in the process, and the uninterrupted flow of information among members of the project team.
Many IT teams have embraced this model, and it is not uncommon to find teams of 8-12 employees working together in a dedicated project room that can be at times energetic and frenetic, and at other times quiet and focused. Dow endeavored to scale the behaviors of these project teams to meet the demands of the business. The design team accomplished this by breaking down the program into more manageable neighborhoods, isolated by a series of closed and open support spaces.
Kline states, “Creating an agile workspace at scale was challenging. The floor holds 250 people, so breaking it up into four neighborhoods created a nice balance between open and focused. At this scale, a significant amount of floor space was freed up from the reduction of space dedicated to each individual. This collective free space was used for a large community area for social activities, a ‘garage’ where we can close the overhead door and run loud design thinking workshops, and a ‘library’ quiet zone where there is drop-in seating for focused work.” The end result of this innovative design resolved the conflicting priorities for both individual- and team-based work and delivered free area back to the business to create an inviting sense of place.