This corporate headquarters includes workspaces that are no longer easily identifiable as workspaces and now resemble a more residential feel. Image courtesy of BHDP.
Businesses are designed to create and capture value. High-value businesses identify distinct market positions, develop sustainable strategies, maximize the productivity of their assets, marshal their resources (including their people), minimize their expenditures, and generate returns that can either be distributed or reinvested. To accomplish these goals, businesses need to optimize and monetize the productive potential of people. While simple in concept, designing for people is never so straightforward.
As the market continues to shift from concrete, discrete, and predictable modes of business management to emerging ones that embrace complexity and disruption, the demand for different breeds of workers and new modes of management is on the rise. The generation of future business value is dependent on the development of an entirely new set of organizational behaviors. Rather than designing businesses using outdated concepts, intelligent business leaders are constantly evolving the nature of their value streams and tweaking the organizational ecosystems that service their customers. As a result, the office is in a continual state of flux. In this context, it is important for CRE professionals to identify and deliver spaces that anticipate change and evolve to meet an entirely new set of behaviors.
This is the third in a continuing series of articles exploring the link between the built environment and the human behaviors that unfold therein. In the first, the case was made for looking beyond the form and function of the environment. Instead, it was posited that the attitudes and actions of the workforce, set within the context of the building, present a compelling source of design value to the designer and tenant alike.
The second article (April 2018) identified the shift away from individual cubicles towards agile, activity-based workplace environments. This shift was attributed to three factors: 1) the realization (via observation) and confirmation (via data) that the modern office is largely underutilized; 2) the rampant employee engagement epidemic; and 3) the evolution of work, itself—from highly specialized and independent to largely collective and collaborative. The case was made that tenants should acknowledge how the changes, from a dedicated, predictable workplace to one built in response to the factors outlined above, have elicited emotional responses from the people for whom the design was created. They are uncertain, skeptical, doubtful, and afraid. The focus then turned to managing how people experience change.