Office spaces themselves have been shown to have either positive or negative effects on employee productivity. Companies have found that through innovative tech, they can improve both employee productivity and health and safety.
Smart offices, buildings merged with a sensor network hooked up to algorithms and AI, could help optimize office building conditions for productivity.
Microsoft offered a snapshot of the current state of the workplace in its Digital culture: Your competitive advantage report, which surveyed 20,476 workers in big (250+ employees) and small (50-250 employees) businesses spanning 21 countries in Europe. Microsoft gathered information on both the tech in those offices and employee attitudes.
“Impactful digital transformation isn’t really about IT. It’s about people. This is where company culture comes in,” the report said. A central idea is that of ‘digital culture’, which was defined by the report as “Shared, underlying, and deep-rooted basic assumptions, values, beliefs, and norms that characterize how an organization encourages and supports technology use to get work done in the most effective way”.
Categories Microsoft looked into for businesses classified as either weak, average or strong in terms of digital culture. Its categories included:
- Microsoft examined productivity (work per unit output)
- Innovation (a combination of creativity and collaboration)
- Empowerment (feeling valued, making a difference and able to make strategic contributions)
A noticeable trend was that companies with strong digital cultures had lower percentages of employees who felt unproductive, non-innovative and unempowered was much lower.
Microsoft examined another KPI: ‘flow,’ or the ability for workers to focus on a task and deliver end results efficiently. Just 20% of the respondents described themselves as highly engaged at work. There was also a difference of fourfold in levels of engagement for businesses with weak digital cultures versus those with strong ones. Adding more tech increased engagement in strong cases without increasing those in weak ones. More tech did not seem to be effective unless the culture was already receptive to digital ideas.
Steelcase, a US office furniture company, focused on engagement in its report entitled Engagement and the Global Workplace. The report surveyed 12,480 office workers from 17 countries in four continents in an effort to examine “worker and organisational wellbeing” through measures of employee engagement and workplace satisfaction.