The biggest critic
But what happens when someone refuses to engage? Roulston recalls an executive on one project who refused to even talk to the architects. “We often start with a simple survey about current working conditions, but he flatly refused to talk about anything to do with the survey.
“So we just went to him and said, what are your ideas? He talked for an hour! He had excellent ideas, some of which have been implemented. He went from someone standoffish to realising he had someone who was prepared to listen to him.”
“In relocations, we come across a lot of people who are losing their office and potentially a car park, all those things that give you a status as having worked up to a certain level. But in fact, for quite a number of our clients, the downside of that office is that they don’t have visibility of their teams. So we point out the advantages: if we do these changes, you will be with your team, and if they are going to activity-based workplaces, then the key thing is flexible working times.
“So if you have two kids, you are not chained to the office – we are implementing new technology to make you more mobile, with less “face time”. I am not saying it always gets them across the line, but it is about working through those concerns and showing them benefits they don’t currently have that would make their working life better.”
It doesn’t always work though. “Whenever you have a big transformational change, you risk losing people. And sometimes that does needs to happen to move forward and maintain the culture,” says Roulston. “But not on our projects!”
Evaluating success
Roulston says the best way of evaluating the success of her approach to changing the design and use of offices is to return to the site and see it in action. “You have to go back, we want to know it has worked, and to see people who were against it enjoying it now.”
In one design, where people no longer had their own desks to personalise, Roulston had created a feature wall that looked great on its own, but was also designed for people to personalise. “They could move it around, and they had decorated it with family photos, with little nooks that they had done in their teams, so it was nice to see something we had envisioned taken on and embraced.”
Research suggests that an uplift in productivity following an office redesign or relocation does not last more than a year or two. Roulston agrees that it is almost impossible to measure the productivity impact, but she judges the long-term benefits of her work by a simpler measure: return business.
This article first appeared on LeadingCompany.
