schneiderism

I spent the better part of the weekend digging into research reports and knowledge papers from the Applied Research & Consulting (ARC) group at Steelcase. I was doing this to deepen my understanding of how ARC works to connect workplace design to organizational culture and business model. The big idea here is that a workplace is a social interface, and this interface can work for or against the goals of an organization depending on how successfully it manifests organizational culture and business model. The physical environments in which we work affect, both positively and negatively, the behaviors of those individuals who make up the organization and the culture that results from this bringing together of people for the purpose of business. The markets that we all operate in are increasingly competitive, whether driven by change in technology, the war for talent, or any number of other forces exerting pressure, and to be effective it is required of organizations to think deeply about all of their assets, and how they apply those assets in support of their business model. Success demands that organizations align the often separate business strategies for people, business process, technology, work environment, and real estate.

Workplaces that reflect the desired innovative behaviors and attitudes for an organization are rare, so it is difficult to point to readily available examples. They are rare because to create this type of environment requires an entirely different approach to designing them. It requires a change in the paradigm of workplace design, and as we all know… change is hard. This is partly because legacy thinking pervades how we conceive of the work environments that we create, legacy thinking that begins and ends with cost models that are more about reducing costs using a well-worn methodology based on control, minimization, and reduction, and not on the strategic application of resources. The net result is that enormous opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and effectiveness are missed. This reduces the workplace to something of an “isolated asset” that is effectively constrained by the legacy thinking of real estate cost models and arcane concepts of point and control as a management methodology. Our people demand better, our clients demand better, and those companies that figure out how to empower their human and social capital with effective workplace design have a distinct competitive advantage.

This begins with understanding how an organization’s business model and culture is not only impacted by the physical workplace, but can be aligned with it… and how that alignment can scale over time to the great benefit of the organization. All of this allows us to work toward an understanding of how a workplace is intrinsically related to value creation, and how it is a strategic conduit in delivering this value to the marketplace. The days of point and control are ending as we find ourselves deep into a business environment that is fluid, reactive, and taxing of our best efforts. Workplace must support this reality, it must be able to respond to it, it must adapt. The results will be evident.

Part of the historical problem, and hence the challenge, is that workplace research and analysis has historically been the limited to investigating adjacency and proximity, executive interviews, employee expectation management, and the creation of workstation mock-ups. No doubt, this has helped organizations understand a process and evolve smoothly from one place to another. But it is not enough, at least not anymore. The workplace of the future will emanate from a thorough analysis and the understanding created from a substantial investigation into company and organizational culture, the networks that comprise that culture, the relationship of all of this to business model, and how the inter-relationships of all of these factors will scale together over time. Within this depth of analysis and understanding are revealed the critical business factors.

When we begin to embrace our work environments as a tool, of a manifestation of the valuable processes that not only make organizations unique, but comprise the competitive factors that create success in the marketplace, we realize that this is a first step in transitioning the social and human capital of an organization into innovation and learning. The arcane model of the workplace that seeks to warehouse us in the most efficient and cost-effective way is not only losing relevancy in today’s marketplace, it is becoming an operational liability. What is needed is a workplace that unleashes the potential of the organization, it’s amalgalm of groups and networks, its connection to the marketplace, and each individual. This is an approach that turns the workplace into a launchpad for the organization, not a landing pad.

Telepresence is something I have been following for some time, and I am curious to see discussions of this technology begin to surface with more frequency, like this piece at the Economist. I have been especially interested in the developing intersection between telepresence, virtuality, and robotics and have written about this here and here. Additionally, it was exciting to see the CEO of Steelcase, Jim Hackett, experimenting with telepresence technology in his own office with a direct connection to IDEO’s David Kelley in Palo Alto, they call it “the wormhole”, which I touched on in my post 10 Things: Innovation at Steelcase.

The big deal here is that technology is beginning to catch up with science fiction, and this is being driven by the pressures of speed, efficiency and cost management. Business travel is becoming more and more costly for companies, and as the business we need to do becomes increasingly global this cost will only grow. Limited access to private jets and the potential for supersonic travel aside, one of the biggest contributors to the increasing cost of business travel is the time, and downtime, required to get from one place to another, and the implications this has on productivity and effectiveness. Telepresence is a golden opportunity to eliminate this cost, shrink distance, increase productivity, and virtually create the value of meeting in person. Things are definitely going in this direction, and this would be another significant influence on the workplace of the future. We have already seen great change in that many business practices that required meeting in person a decade ago are now completed without individuals ever having to actually meet at all. This is the reality now for a diversity of industries.

The system depicted in the image above is from Cisco, and is very similar to how Jim Hackett is utilizing this technology at Steelcase. There are systems also offered by Hewlett-Packard (who estimates that their telepresence systems save HP employees up to 20,000 flights per year), most notably their Halo telepresence conferencing technology. To be sure, these are significant investments and not yet viable for smaller enterprise, but even that is changing with forays into telepresence by companies like iRobot and Apple’s offering and refining for some time now of video chat as part of iChat on their computers. Also, telepresence is not a technology to replace the importance of meeting in person entirely, but this is hugely empowering for business, and telepresence technology used well and integrated into a company culture will have an incredibly positive influence on communication, collaboration, and innovation. It will also free tremendous resources for companies that have previously been dedicated to the inefficiency of business travel, resources they can invest into priority areas like R&D or talent acquisition, areas that are so important to success in the competitive marketplace.

Before I get into Steelcase, allow me to announce this piece as the inaugural “10 Things” post on schneiderism. My plan is to use 10 Things as a way to recap some of the more interesting experiences and information I come across. I have added 10 Things as a category in the category menu and am planning on writing several posts of this nature in the coming week or so to get the category going.

Last week I had the opportunity to spend an intense day meeting and interacting with some of the more fascinating aspects of Steelcase at their HQ in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Most will hear the name of this company and think first, and perhaps only, of office furniture and cubicles. They do design and manufacture a lot of both, but that is not why I made this visit. Steelcase has developed tremendous assets with regards to workplace and human factors research, as well as what would appear to be an organization-wide relentless focus on innovation and understanding the complexities and preferences of human interaction. The building in the image above is their WorkSpace Futures Research headquarters, and is essentially the nexus of design and innovation for this nearly $4 billion global enterprise. Yes, that building is a pyramid and yes, it does appear to have fallen out of the sky.

The following are 10 Things from my visit:

1.  User experience, user-centered design, user-focused process was everywhere. It has become the company. Everybody speaks in these terms and they are passionate about understanding people, their needs, and designing solutions and systems from this perspective back to technology and materials. This was an incredibly consistent theme.

2.  Design thinking is the practice and methodology. A few years ago Steelcase very smartly acquired a controlling interest in IDEO, which remains a stand-alone business. Most people hear this and are very, very surprised. That is because IDEO is much more than a portfolio piece for Steelcase, the value being the relationship between the two companies, a relationship between a David and a Goliath. It has become an invaluable strategic partnership.

3.  IDEO/Steelcase has done an expert job positively influencing, infecting really, how Steelcase approaches its business, and that is a truly amazing outcome.

4.  Telepresence is an intense area of focus, and they actively experiment with technology on themselves in an effort to shrink distance and remove the obstacles presented by working remotely. Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett is all over this, so much so that he and IDEO’s David Kelley have a direct telepresence connection between their offices. Jim is in Grand Rapids and David is in Palo Alto. This link is referred to as “the wormhole” and is a connection that is much more than symbolic. They benefit greatly from the opportunity to virtually sit across the table from each other to ideate and challenge ideas. I was fortunate to visit Jim Hackett’s office and actually see how this works. Very cool.

5. Innovation at Steelcase begins at the top. Literally. In many ways it appeared to me that as well as CEO, Jim Hackett also functions as a Chief Innovation Officer. Many initiatives and innovations began with Jim asking some questions or believing that something could be better. In fact, he changed the management paradigm at Steelcase physically and functionally by moving executives out of their arcane and isolated top floor 1950’s executive suite and into a functioning, experimental workspace laboratory that allows even Steelcase executive leadership to be their own lab subjects.

6. “Furniture is a given, and is not what we really need to be talking about.” Furniture is a commodity, Steelcase is not in the commodity business. I heard this a couple of times during my visit, and I believe it was attributed to CEO Hackett. This is somewhat revolutionary in terms of how this organization is thinking about itself. The opportunity is in innovating at a level that their products as physical elements almost fall away with the focus instead being on the thinking behind the products.

7. It’s not about technology, it’s about human factors and the seamless integration of technology into the communication and collaboration needs of teams and the individual. There is much effort being put to understanding the tensions between presentation and collaboration, or presentation vs. collaboration. More collaboration, less presentation.

8. The goal is the strategic application of space. Steelcase is moving way beyond a product mindset and into areas of research that positions them to help organizations map their physical and virtual workplaces to their unique business model. This was a favorite quote, “Stop talking about space, though, and instead look at the table of contents of the latest Harvard Business Review. That is what Steelcase is concerned with, with understanding, and with integrating into our needs response.” Architects and interior designers should take note of this, immediately.

9. “The change in the mindset is that our work is not about saving our client’s money, it is about helping them make money.” It is also about business model alignment and business model innovation. It is about identifying the critical success factors for an organization, at a complexity of levels, and integrating this into the needs response.

10. More than a few people that I met spoke to me about ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), and about “the cloud.” Steelcase knows that these ideas will change the way we work and interact. They choose to be the vanguard by investing serious resources in researching and investigating exactly how this might happen. The Workplace Futures team is constantly projecting out years into the future and hypothesizing about what our interactions might be like, about what new technologies may be of use. Let me remind you that this is happening at a $4 billion global office furniture company. Tom Brown, CEO of IDEO, and Steelcase CEO Jim Hackett conceived of an idea 18 months ago that would provide comprehensive media and communications seamlessly integrated with telepresence, information capture, and idea sharing. They rapid prototyped and iteratively and incrementally improved the concept. Media:Scape launches in the spring of 2009.

There was so much more that I experienced and that is worthy of writing entire posts on. I’ll get to all of it, especially my time in the Learn Lab and with Details president Bud Klipa, but for now these are my 10 Things from my time with Steelcase. I came away very impressed and inspired.

For some, that is an incredibly inflammatory statement. As inflammatory as saying that the workplace of the future is not about real estate, which it’s not. That is because the workplace that many of us already operate in is boundless, and is defined by where we are at any given moment. The workplace of now is our home, hotel room, car, airport lounge, coffee shop… wherever we are. The workplace of now is not a desk, chair and filing cabinet. It is our laptop, mobile phone, and other tools that support us in our tasks wherever we are. This is not a new development, but one that has been in motion, and gaining momentum, for over a decade. There are individuals in the workforce now who have never worked another way. This change has been driven by innovations in the ways in which we communicate, in connectivity, and in how we do business. The “virtuality” of business is not something that can be overstated, really, as so many tasks that required meeting in person twenty years ago are now completed without the involved parties ever needing to occupy the same geographical location, or ever actually talk to each other. That certainly devalues the importance of an office with regards to the effectiveness of business process. Or does it?

There is pressure on the office to change in ways that support this boundless workplace. The reality is that the office is not going away, and it shouldn’t as there are many circumstances where we need to work together in the same place, but how we use the physical space of an office environment is changing and evolving rapidly. As such, the ways that our organizations think about the office needs to change and begin leveraging notions of flexibility, adaptability, and customization to task. The physical office is an important node in our network for bringing us together for interactions that cannot be bested virtually, but this is very different than the typical archetype on which most offices have been built, which is the idea of warehousing workers to make operational control more efficient. Our work is increasingly defying the effectiveness of this archetype, and as a result we are experiencing productivity levels in the United States that are staggering. Organizations are learning that we can share a “mission and vision” without actually having to be in the same place at the same time. Some companies are way ahead in their thinking with regards to the boundless workplace, others are stubborn in the face of this change. The reality, though, is that there are many, many factors driving everyone to begin working in this manner and at some point the entire traditional 1950’s corporate office metaphor is going to collapse and be called out as an obstacle to effectiveness, productivity, and employee health and wellness.

That’s the point of the headline for this post. The office today is in so many ways defined by the furniture that fills it. This doesn’t really work anymore, and the office we increasingly require is one that supports business process, and that meets the requirements of being an effective node, one of many, for the ways in which we do business. There will be furniture in this office, it just won’t be defined by it.

Despite whatever you believe to be our immediate economic reality, it is a good time to be young, smart, and focused. Companies struggle to navigate what is really a seller’s market for “human capital,” and attract the next wave of talent into their fold. The problem? There are several other companies fighting to recruit the same individual. A very successful public company in the consumer lawn care space that I know well admits actively raiding the talent pools of the medical technology companies in the area. Med tech to lawn care? Why not! The thing is, these talent pools are also targeted by financial services firms, retail giants, and others. They’re all competing openly for the same talent. This is a really good case study in supply and demand. You don’t have to look far to realize this is playing out everywhere. Often times, takeover bids between companies are as much about expanding talent as they are about increasing market share. Talent is perhaps the most important weapon in the battle for market success.

And this is nothing new. Look back ten years and business magazines were full of articles about the looming, and now pressing, “War for Talent.” McKinsey released a study back in 1998 that surveyed 6,000 executives in 77 companies which consistently identified that the single most important corporate resource over the next 20 years as talent, define in the study as “smart, sophisticated businesspeople who are technologically literate, globally astute, and operationally agile.” Sounds familiar. Not much has changed in ten years. What’s more, the study goes on to tell us that even as the demand for talent goes up, the supply of it will be going down. Supply and demand in action.

What’s a company to do? Get aggressive, really aggressive. Focus resources on talent acquisition that are commensurate with those focused on market expansion. The reality is that the former will ultimately beget the latter. As a best practice, companies need to be obsessed with ensuring that they are staffed by the best possible people, from the top on down. This is entirely a quality proposition, and it means always having your finger on the pulse of available talent, regardless of the real need for people. It means having an organized HR team that has an effective talent profile, and relentlessly tests for this profile. It means ensuring that your organization is a recruiting machine, that your people, your environment, and your package are not only competitive… they’re compelling. And relevant. And tailored to the people you seek to attract. Stop and think about your company for a moment, and think about your company in two years if a focused plan to attract talent was deployed. I suspect we are talking about two very different companies.

The McKinsey study also revealed ten years ago that only 60% of the corporate officers interviewed said that they were able to pursue most of their growth opportunities. These corporate leaders said that they had good ideas, and that they had the budgets to pursue these ideas, but they lacked the right people to execute. They reported that they did not have enough talented people to pursue their good ideas, regardless of budgetary abundance. They were “talent-constrained.” Ten years ago the implications of this were huge, and was a part of the feeding frenzy that became the .com debacle. Today these implications are staggering and I have yet to find a similar analysis regarding the relationship between growth and talent, but I would surmise that we are facing similar if not more critical deficiencies in growth as it relates to the talent needed to create that growth, and the lack thereof.

Set aside your disdain for sticky web monikers for a moment. I have been following the “The Workplace of The Future” for a while now, and have been writing about it since last July. The Innovation Tours that I organize for my team are focused on surveying where boundaries are being pushed and how businesses are responding to changes in the ways people want to work and the resulting impact on meaningful workplace design. No doubt, the demands on the physical workplace environment are changing right before our eyes, being driven by rapid changes in technology, notions of work, telepresence, and shifts in workforce demographics. Intersecting these drivers is the concept of Office 2.0, which encompasses the increasing number of web-based collaborative work applications, such as the smart suite of web applications from 37 Signals. They are a fast, efficient way for users and teams to organize, manage, disseminate and develop information using a simple, intuitive interface. The value of these applications are that they let you work remotely with people in ways that make us less dependent on desktop workstations and organized offices. At their heart, they functionally support collaborative idea and project development and the efficient sharing of documents and files, but the potential for how they will potentially change the ways in which we work go far beyond the functional benefits and they will ultimately influence what work actually constitutes.

Google is in this space with the web-based offerings Google Apps, and Microsoft is throwing its weight behind a rekindled web-based initiative. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller start-up applications also struggling for attention. Start using these tools now. Familiarize yourself. Encourage your teams to do the same. In the imminent future more and more of our work will take place on the web, leveraging web-based applications, and less and less of it will happen within the confines of an office. Smart companies are already there, and are redefining their models based on their own understanding of how Office 2.0 benefits them. In the short term, the biggest benefit for companies is the liberation from legacy notions of space and real estate, in the long term a benefit will be a workforce distributed globally, not locally. Physical offices will become less about the housing of workers during working hours and more about space that supports in-person meetings and collaboration. Think about how you were working ten years ago, think about how you accomplished your tasks and contrast that to how you work now. Now recall ten years before that, and if you’re old enough, ten years before that. I think it is safe to say that we would be hard pressed to not acknowledge the dramatic change that continues to occur, only with increased speed.

There is an annual conference, aptly named the Office 2.0 Conference, focused on exploring developments around Office 2.0 which I am planning on attending this year.

Robert Scoble recently talked about web-based work apps in an article for Fast Company.

That headline is a riff on a sentence in a report written by Steve Orfield and cognitive psychologist Jay Brand for the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). The report, titled “Better Sound Solutions” is a comprehensive analysis of the state of open plan office design, especially as it relates to the human factors around acoustics and sound attenuation. The line from the report is:

“We have long been facing a collision course between privacy and space utilization and the economics of space have won the battle so far.”

I don’t think that this statement should surprise anybody. Those of us who have any exposure to the realities of workplace design and the economics of space leasing and acquisition understand that companies are constantly trying to do more with less. The result is an open plan office that is at best dysfunctional and awkward, and at worst so disruptive as to damage overall workplace productivity and very negatively impact employee health and well-being. Much of this revolves around the concept of privacy within the workplace and as it is yet very difficult to present the economic argument for privacy, the situation continues to deteriorate. It is simply much too compelling and easy to make an economic argument based on space/lease costs, one that can be glaring on a cost analysis of a move/remodel.

The report goes on to describe a series of strategies for approaching this problem, and perhaps constructing an effective argument for the economics of designing effective environments, and those that support employee productivity, health and well-being. If you work in this space I suggest you download a PDF of the report and give it a review. I will be posting some of the key points from it over the next few days/weeks. You can download a PDF of the report from Haworth’s website.

I had the opportunity to participate in a design charette yesterday put on by Steve Orfield and Wes Chapman at Orfield Laboratories. The charette is part of their Open Plan Working Group, which seeks to address issues of building performance, user experience, and innovation in workplace design. Steve Orfield has been working, through effective and substantive research, for over 30 years to support investigations into workplace quality, worker health, and challenging accepted norms of office design, organization, and function. Human factors is a huge driver of Orfield’s work, and the belief that the concept of “Architectural Dynamics (AD)” can change the world.

Organizations like Herman Miller and Lutron support his efforts, and sponsor the OPWG. Both were present at the charette yesterday. Specifically, this event was to explore opportunities to improve a building environment by the creative application of Architectural Dynamics. AD refers to environments that are controlled and influenced over time based on knowledge and inputs from occupant preferences and actual occupant behavior. AD seeks to effect change in these environments through such things as bio-mimicry, cuing, stimulation, calming, and other forms of occupant reinforcement. The goal is to change the workplace from a non-preferred and involuntary environment into a preferred and voluntary environment. Specific areas of influence are lighting/daylighting and view, thermal comfort, and sound addition and attenuation. Lofty goals, to be sure, but Steve and his group are far down the path of effecting real change.

The charette began with occupant research presented that challenges suppositions and assertions we all have about the places in which we work. A great example of this research was measurements of occupant valuations in regards to daylighting and view. Having an outside view is shown to greatly outweigh valuations of natural daylight. That was surprising.

The design charette involved looking closely at an existing structure with significant design liabilities, and how the individual design teams might mitigate the building limitations by creatively applying AD concepts. The results were very, very cool. While there was quite a bit of similarity between the teams, there was also great difference… especially with regards to how far each team was able or willing to push the concepts. Ultimately, there was tremendous alignment on enhancing audience experience, both from a macro (building-wide) and micro (individual) perspective. There was much discussion on how much control should be given to individuals, and how to manage this control to maintain energy efficiency and minimize negatively affecting other individuals in close proximity. I came away with a much enhanced understanding both of the impact of design decisions in the workplace, and how to design to more effectively enhance the occupant experience. We want the environments we create to enhance health and well being, and to align appropriately to an individuals work style preferences. Yes, this has dramatic affects on productivity, but first and foremost it supports more healthy work environments. Increased productivity is a nice result from this goal.

All of this seeks to challenge and change the reliance on the 1950’s metaphor of workplace design. This is a metaphor that needs to be cracked open as the places in which we spend upwards of 8 hours a day, five+ days a week are not designed to support us in our work or in our interactions. They are created out of economic decisions based on minimizing expense and gaining as much space efficiency as possible. They are created out of building practices that have stood largely unchallenged by research and health assessments. We have a responsibility as designers to hold ourselves to research based standards of performance in the environments that we create, to ensure that our designs are adding health and NOT detracting. To paraphrase Steve Orfield, we should look to the Hippocratic oath for inspiration and commit our work to “doing no harm.”

Think about this for a moment, why do most workplaces today look much like they did 10, 20, or even 30 years ago? How is it, with all of the changes in our society, in technology, and in the ways in which we work, the workplace still looks like a 1950’s cliche? It does not make any sense. The stasis that office and workplace design finds itself in cannot have a very positive effect on worker performance, happiness, or quality of life. Really, this is huge.

A big realization that I’ve had recently is beginning to understand the disconnection between the cycle of workplace renovation/investigation and how frequently work itself is changing. I know that facilities renovations are rare and infrequent largely because they are expensive, and most companies resist rethinking their workplace because of a combination of perceived expense, complexity, and fear. The sad result is that so many people are working today in office environments that reflect assumptions about the nature of work (and technology) that are even older, in many cases, than the actual employees.

My team recently toured a number of organizations recognized for having innovative and creative leadership and cultures, organizations that promote distributed work and enable employees to create their own optimal work patterns and methodologies. They provide their people with a diversity of ways in which they can work, with options. These organizations have had tremendous success in their respective industries, have hugely productive staffs, and generally exhibit a great culture and quality of life. Clearly, there are benefits to investigating the ways we organize around our work. And yet, most office remodels that occur are really just updates on the 1950’s model… some new carpet, new cubes, and maybe a kitchenette over there. The people that work in these “new” offices still have to deal with issues around thermal comfort, lighting, isolation, work interruption, and general discomfort. There is no psychology, no research backing the decisions made in most office rethinks. But what if there was?

Things are beginning to change, as there is some quality research out there that supports very smart changes to the ways we work, the strategies behind the way offices are designed. The good news is that we are seeing more and more examples of workplace layouts that are inherently flexible and open (in a good way) with mobile, modular furniture, terrific lighting, and reconfigurable working space. We are seeing more office design that takes advantage of new technologies and anticipates how technology in the workplace will be changing over time. We can remain optimistic, and the merits of reconfigurable, technology supported working space are becoming more and more accepted. This is partly because of the strength of the research that is out there, and also because almost none of us does precisely the same thing day after day, week after week, and most of us are sick of working in crappy environments.