PLEASE NOTE:
This post and others in our series in our research into workplace strategy and design for the modern workplace can now be found at their new home, on Medium.com: Workplace Strategy.
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A strategic resource may generally be conceived as one that can be drawn on to enable or enrich the future of a business, so how might your property be put to better strategic use?
Clearly, if you are a property developer, agent or other kind of dedicated property professional, your centrepiece strategic asset is likely to be the property you build or sell, as it is the enabler of everything else you do.
As such, your strategy will be built on considerations such as the markets and customer groups you serve, where in the industry’s value chain your organisation sits, what in its portfolio your business decides to sell or hold, and the criteria and thresholds it applies to such decisions.
As likely as not, your strategy is something around which you improvise, perhaps opportunistically, adapting to market circumstances.
If you are a business in its early days, still figuring out its market fit and intent on learning where its best long-term prospects lie, that its strategy is still in formation can be be lucky. The ability to “pivot” from apparent to proven opportunity is viewed by many as a great asset in the web age.
The risk for established businesses in mature industries is that their premises are in fact strategic hindrances rather than enablers.
Worse, they may not be recognised as such.
The negative messages inhabiting the wrong premises can send of “the ways things are done round here” might be counter-productive to the development of effective workplace culture and inimical to any possibilities for beneficial change.
Even as the collaborative potentials of the technologies in use in the workplace improve, buildings are invariably highly symbolic, and when workers have a choice, the prospect of serving time in the wrong offices or an unwelcoming workspace might deter those a business seeks to employ from wanting to work there at all.
My interest in this is a complement to Hiromi’s, and it goes both to the effectiveness with which space is designed and used in the work performed, but also to how it is planned to deliver the greatest effect across a business’s strategic arc.
In combination with the yields from building information management (BIM), my guess is that the rapid emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the workplace will see accompanying advances in the measurement of workplace effectiveness and culture.
New kinds of thinking based on better information will take into account how space can be used to optimum effect in enabling workplace thinking and learning, rather than just in squeezing the maximum number of bodies into the minimum feasible space.
Apart from grouping accountants with accountants and sales people with sales people, how pronounced is the strategic rationale for how its people are allocated to spaces in your own office?
Does it use its space to perpetuate the maximum potentials for team learning a place of work can represent?
My guess, based on the organisations I have worked for in recent years, suggests that the enabling qualities of the typical commercial office space, beyond providing appropriate CBD shelter and task support, are as yet, except in rare circumstances, given little further thought.
But the better emerging question will be, how can our property be put to better strategic use, and how can we use it to build organisational culture, learning and, ultimately, sustainable competitive advantage?
What needs to happen before our premises are no longer a handbrake impeding our progress?
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About this post
As architects, we aim to get commercial property occupiers, developers, owners and investors a better return on their built space, which means we have to be active observers of technological advances that have impacts for effective workplace design. Many of these parties are of course already acting in line with the inexorable trend towards Activity Based Working-style work environments, but I am conducting unique, proprietary research, to be published here and elsewhere, trying to identify what lies beyond this trend. My interest is driven in significant measure by the ways in which social workplace technologies can be engaged in transforming business thinking and practices, as well as in the design of work environments capable of enhancing workplace culture and advancing organisational learning and innovation.
Please also read:
The learning organisation: An interview with Robert Hillard of Deloitte Consulting
Losing fiefdom in the transition to Activity Based Working
Can you compete against the minimum viable office?
Designing for creativity attracts better workers
The challenge of instituting collaborative workplace designs that work across the shop
How will the Learning Economy transform your workplace?
Google wants you to use its minimum viable office. How will you cope?
How might your property be put to better strategic use?
