Employee-Centered Workplace Transformation

Summer 2020: Transformation Strategy

Over the summer, employees began to master working from home. The need to multitask because of helping with remote learning eased up and, overall, people became comfortable with collaboration technologies and remote working. At that time, management was able to take a step back, reflect on the future of work at the company, and ultimately, plan how the organization should transform by adopting new approaches regarding where and how people do their work. Leaders wanted to understand how they could make remote working more permanent and consider how physical office spaces factored into that vision. Management sought the expertise of our Customer Experience practice, which I helped lead, to ensure that they made any decisions in an employee-focused way.

Making Working from Home a Permanent Solution

One of the first activities through which our team helped management was defining what problem statements the team wanted to address. Our first goal was to enable a permanent, productive, work-from-home approach for the majority of employees. Up until this point, enabling employees to work from home had been a technology problem: do people have access to the systems and applications they need to be productive at home? While technology policy and ensuring that employees have the tools necessary to do their job at home is critical, a true work-from-home strategy must be broader. For example, over the years, many managers had likely become accustomed to seeing their team come into the office by a certain time, take a lunch break, then leave the office at a certain time. The move to remote work flipped those expectations upside down. Successful employee performance doesn’t require that employees be sitting in a cube for a certain number of hours a day. We needed to shift managers’ expectations: Don’t care where and when people do their work. Instead, care about outcomes and the quality of work. Our cross-functional management team who worked on this transformation initiative took ownership of the next steps, relating to human resources and performance management, IT policy, culture and wellness, and communications.

Understanding Workplace Usage

While we knew that office workspaces weren’t going completely away, we needed to understand what purpose they should serve if the majority of our employees would be working from home long term. Therefore, our next goal was to create an office experience that supports and complements working from home. So management began the exercise of looking at historical office-space usage versus overall capacity—for example, how many employees had actually come into the office regularly.

They also considered the various job functions throughout the company, then evaluated what types of jobs people would most likely be successful in doing from home. They based these decisions on common knowledge about specific types of jobs, initial surveys, and manager feedback on which employees required a work-from-anywhere approach—for example, sales and consultants—and which would require the use of an office space—for example, call-center agents. This exercise was essentially a high-level persona activity, allowing us to be smarter and more employee centered about office usage. It also enabled management to understand how much office space was really necessary.

Designing the Workplace of the Future

For the offices that would remain, we began the process of defining how they should look. We first needed to understand why employees would use an office space versus working from home. We launched a company-wide survey to understand their office usage—for example, how often they would use an office space and for what types of work activities and what challenges working from home would pose that an office space could help address. Some of our findings from this survey include the following:

• People are productive working from home doing individual work tasks, so we did not see the need for office space for these types of work activities.
• Space in which to enable effective collaboration and group activities was essential.
• People would require limited-use office space on an as-necessary basis versus working in the office on a prescribed schedule or in a more permanent workspace.

Therefore, we knew that our strategy for the workplace of the future would need to focus on enabling collaboration and group activities and de-emphasize individual work.

Fall 2020: Implementation

By the fall of 2020, our management team was ready to execute our workplace-transformation strategy, which manifested itself in several ways:

• Human Resources updated their policies to address the flexible working approach, including providing vouchers for employees who require special ergonomic chairs or other home-office needs.
• The Performance Management group added training modules for managers who needed help navigating this new way of working.
• IT updated their guidelines for system access and device and hardware requests to accommodate employees working from home.
• Facilities began the process of strategically closing offices, while Communications emailed this information to employees.

Most exciting was the decision to begin a pilot workplace-redesign project. We selected an existing office that we weren’t planning to close as the target for our redesign, then sent out RFPs (Requests for Proposals) to solicit proposals from several design firms. This process was fascinating for a few reasons.

Working as a consultant, I’m used to being on the partner side of an RFP, but not the client side. So the experience of drafting an RFP, reviewing proposal responses, listening to oral presentations, and deciding on our final partner was slightly surreal for me.

While we wanted to give some direction to our potential partners, relating to our strategy and design considerations, we also wanted to get their point of view, as the experts on the design of workplaces. As a consultant, it can be frustrating when you receive an RFP that lacks details. But, after having been on the other side of this process, I now understand why clients do this. They want to see how a potential partner thinks, based on their experiences in similar client situations, without being affected by the client’s opinions.

The synergies between the design of physical spaces and service design were also fascinating. Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the relationship between the two, and the experience I had working with architecture and interior-design firms validated this connection. The partner we selected had conducted a discovery exercise and asked questions that enabled them to understand who our employees are, their use cases for the office space, and how adaptable the organization is to change. We shared the results of our research, while they shared studies they had done on the employee experience and the workplace transformation. They led some interactive workshops to help us understand their future-state vision for the space and identify barriers to change. Then they used the resulting insights and their best practices from similar workplace engagements to inform their design and draft a blueprint for the space. Thus, their process was not dissimilar to that of experience and service designers.

One interesting point of tension that arose during the design process was deciding how many individual, hotel-like spaces there should be. These are tiny rooms, usually with a small table, chair, phone, and door. I argued these spaces would be important for employees making client calls or requiring some decompression time between group meetings or collaboration sessions. But our Facilities group argued that these were the least-used spaces at our headquarters. I explained that the purpose of these two types of spaces would be completely different. At our headquarters, workspaces were for full-day, full-week use, and most employees had a dedicated cube or office space. In our newly designed office, there would be no dedicated spaces for employees. Therefore, we needed to accommodate employees’ more transient needs.

Short-term Change, Long-term Impacts

I often find myself explaining to colleagues and clients who are not familiar with user experience or customer experience that, as designers, we don’t simply give people what they want. We use our methods and expertise to uncover what they need.

My company’s transformation efforts really put this approach to the test. While this initiative was generally a positive, successful effort, it wasn’t without challenges. Notably, many employees wanted to return to the way things had been, so they struggled with leadership’s decision to close or redesign their office. Many were not happy that they were going to lose a permanent workspace—especially those who had previously had a private office.

The success of our initiative relied on strategic change management and effective communication—involving key leadership stakeholders in discussions early and often. I’m sure some employees still struggle with remote work and wish they could go back to the way they worked before, and I have great empathy for those employees. Change is hard. But I believe that organizations who opportunistically took advantage of this time to define a new way of working will ultimately have a more agile workforce, achieve greater collaboration across disparate groups, and provide an improved employee experience.