Workplace: The Next Frontier

Written by Chris Hood, Advanced Workplace Associates

Since the beginning of the twentieth century we have been able to see how the pace of adoption of new things has accelerated. The telephone took 70 years to reach 80% adoption, the mobile phone 15 years and the latest iPhone, mere days. Such is the focus on short-term business outcomes, that there is a lot less focus on the reinvention that this high-change environment demands. Deliverables resulting from business strategy  development need to reach deeper and more  decisively across the whole organisation.

At any point in the life of an adoption curve, there are leaders and laggards, and it is dangerous to average the results. There will be true pioneers who are reinventing our world, whilst others follow, riding on the coattails of invention without understanding it. There is danger that these apparent adopters are popularising and distorting great ideas, which devalues the work of the true innovators. To illustrate: organisations are designing great looking workplaces, which tick the boxes, but are misaligned with strategic business challenges. Indeed here, we see the organisations themselves are not thinking about the future, but are focused on short-term financials. 

What I see time and time again are: solutions that are out of date well before the lease expires; worse, organisations moving into new environments, but continuing to work in out of date ways, and at worst, organisations that expire in the face of disruptive competition. 

There is no doubt that a genuine attempt is being made by organisations around the world to move from office as ‘warehouses for the people’ and to see them as spaces where productivity, community and creativity come together. Improving health and well-being has supposedly relegated cost saving well down the list. While remote working enables much needed flexibility, it may have taken a toll on company culture. Building a collaborative and creative workforce needs face-to-face time. Teams have always needed this to build trust and share knowledge. Today, however, we are seeing this togetherness in smaller, higher-energy, activity-based environments. This creates conflict and friction when the high-energy collaborative environments fail to deliver the peace and tranquility for individuals to “do their work”, as it’s seen.

As broad organisational roll-outs occur, sooner or later the effort to implement becomes seen as cost rather than value. Instructions emerge to optimise the resources required across construction, and technology platforms. Management and resources needed are compromised, change management programs are shelved, and there is less employee engagement in soliciting input and buy-in. The outcome are solutions that are more corporate, less local and rarely any good. So how do we face the future?

Preparing for the future

The workforce itself is shifting before our very eyes. Every industry, every discipline, every educator ought to be thinking about what this means. Inspiring leadership can right many if not most of the wrongs we see in the workplace. I advocate for a new leadership role to be created  which concerns itself with how we work, covering everything from business process and strategy, to technology, space, and human capital and beyond. This role would integrate and aggregate a group of stove-pipe functions into a set of common measures of success, like the conductor of an orchestra, as it were. 

Increasingly, we are recognising that embracing a broader array of disciplines, sciences and skills in our workplace solutions requires a tapestry of potential contributors. The types of new and creative measures that will underpin the future of workplace success involves the up-skilling of leaders who are otherwise intellectually capable of understanding the great opportunity at hand. Professionals from service design and future thinking, along with innovation ideation and organisation design should be permanent residents in every large forward-thinking organisation – and those are just the essentials.  

Many talented individuals shy away from careers within work and workplace, possibly due to a preconception that they are technical disciplines. This saddens and concerns me because the future of the workplace demands a wide set of inputs with both fresh and expert perspectives. Mathematicians, environmental psychologists and anthropologists bring equal but differentiated value to those of an architect, engineer, HR director or a technologist.

Paving the way for workplace 2.0 and the world of work in 2030 is a fertile ground for great thinkers and great doers – and we need many more of them. The built environment needs a siren call to unleash the possibilities of what working with us can offer. As pessimists crawl into their shell and deny the reality of our shifting world, so opportunity and excitement awaits the optimists who see this ever changing world and bring their vision to it. Here today, gone tomorrow has never felt as apt as the future of work and the workplace move ever closer. It is never been so inspiring a space to be. 

By Chris Hood
Advanced Workplace
Associate 

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