Office Space

Imagine! has been planning a significant overhaul of both of our workspaces for some time now. As we get closer to the time that the actual work of remodeling and reassigning of workspaces will take place, it is probably time to discuss a little bit of the “why” of this project.

In a stroke of fortunate timing, I was pondering how to share with our stakeholders, especially our employees, the reasons for the redesign of our offices when I came across a fantastic podcast. This Harvard Business Review (HBR) podcast features an interview with Jennifer Magnolfi, Founder & Principal Investigator at Programmable Habitats LLC, on how digital work and the Internet of Things will fundamentally change the how we use the buildings and neighborhoods we work in. Magnolfi is one of the authors of an HBR article entitled “Workspaces That Move People,” which encourages companies to measure whether a workspace’s design helps or hurts performance.

That important question, whether Imagine!’s workspace currently helps or hurts our performance, underlies our decision to reconsider how Imagine!’s workspaces are configured. I would argue that our current workspace hurts our performance.

Let me provide a couple of examples of how I think our current workspace inhibits top functioning.

First of all, we are missing many opportunities for what Magnolfi and her co-authors describe as collisions - chance encounters and unplanned interactions between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization. Studies indicate that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in a workspace. This is especially true at Imagine!. We have many employees with very specific knowledge about different aspects of Imagine!, the services we provide, the individuals we serve, and the funding mechanisms for providing those services. No one person has all the pieces to the puzzle, including me. Unfortunately, we tend to literally “silo” knowledge experts with our current workspace set up. People working in the same workspace on the same things for multiple years are less likely to have opportunities to share what they know with those outside of their limited area of expertise. The chance that a comment such as “I’m working on this” will lead to a response of “That fits in perfectly with what I’m doing, let’s see what we can do together” is significantly lessened by the silos that we have, albeit unintentionally, created at Imagine!’s workspaces. Tearing down those silos will lead to accelerated learning and increasing interaction among our workforce.

Here’s a second reason. The redesign is being directed to make our space more user friendly for visitors. For example, currently, many of the meeting rooms at our main administrative building are located on the second floor. Those rooms host meetings every day with the individuals and families we serve. What kind of message does it send when we make the people we are supposed to be assisting, many of whom have physical disabilities in addition to intellectual and developmental disabilities, climb stairs or wait for elevators when we have a ground floor dedicated to other purposes? Not a very friendly or person-centered message, to be sure. So if we have a new workspace design with meeting spaces on the first floor designated for use for meetings with visitors and the people we serve, we are sending a subtle but very powerful message – your needs matter. For an organization like Imagine!, that seems like exactly the message we want to send every day and in every way to our community and the people we serve.

Those are just two examples of why I believe this redesign is so important. There are others as well, but the main point is that we are trying to look at office space in a similar way as we might look at software. No one is surprised when a company updates software annually, or even every six months. It is expected, and assumed, that the upgrades will provide new opportunities for improved performance. But we don’t look at physical buildings in the same way. Workspaces remain static for long periods of time. I agree with Magnolfi that we need to rethink that attitude. Changes should always be considered when the opportunity to do better through that change arises. We can’t cling to our outdated notions of what our workspaces should look like just because we are comfortable, or we like our cube mates, or because change can be intimidating. We have to do our homework. We have to understand how new tools have changed how we work. If we want to be the best we can be, we have to examine everything, including the spaces where we work.

Then again, what do I know?