White PaperCommunication and Collaboration OverloadThe Fight Back for Productivity

Prepared by Carr Design Group

Table of Contents

Communications & Collaboration Overload — The Fight Back For Productivity

1.0 Workplace Design — Can a Business Have it All?

2.0 Collaboration and Concentration — Finding the Balance

3.0 Continuous Partial Attention — Workplaces at The Brink

4.0 Solutions for The New Workplace — Can a Business Have it All?

5.0 Global Management Consulting Firm

6.0 Conclusion

Carr Design GroupLevel 4 31 Flinders LaneMelbourne Victoria 300061 3 9665 2300

Dan Coxdcox@carr.net.auwww.carr.net.au

1.0 Workplace Design - Can a Business Have it All?

When people are interrupted while in the ‘flow’ of work, it takes 20 minutes to return to full efficiency. The beginnings of what may be a brilliant idea may be lost. At the very least it is time and output that can never be retrieved.

As designers, we must be clear in our understanding of the way clients are working now and whether that is effective for their business strategy, and of the way they would like to work. We look at where a business wants to head, and how it wants to bring its people together, to end up with a workplace strategy.

The feedback we are receiving from some workplace clients is that collaborative open plan spaces and technology have both gone too far and are disrupting their thinking and leaving no time for output. The endless activity and interaction means that open plan offices can be hectic places.

In a collaborative, knowledge sharing workplace much of the day is spent in meetings, ad hoc interactions at the desk, and dealing with emails and voice mails. Frequently this leaves only personal time for producing deliverables – giving workers the sense of only starting the day at the end of the day in the office.

However, before we are disrupted, we must first have found time to think, develop and to create ideas, services and products. The overwhelming calls on our time made by communications technology and interactions have created an imbalance skewed towards receiving communications and content, and away from reflection and calm toil towards an output.

This white paper examines how our workspaces can be configured and tasked to balance communication and collaboration with focused working, thinking and producing. With talent being recruited and working on projects within responsive networks, we explore the functions of collaborating and creating and consider how we assign spaces in present and future environments.

2.0 Collaboration and Concentration - Finding the Balance

Frank Lloyd Wright designed New York’s first modern office in 1906, in an atrium inspired by a cathedral and based on an open-plan factory. Motivational slogans carved on the walls kept workers to their purpose in the Larkin Administration Building for the Larkin Soap Company. Their managers forbade conversation,controlling their workforces across the open space. It did not appear to help as some years later the business folded.

From spaces of silence, in the 1980s and 1990s open space workplaces came to be seen as the ultimate venue for brainstorming and knowledge sharing, the workplace galleries of creation, the halls of collaboration.

However, not everyone has been happy in open plan offices. In the 1960s, Herman Miller, the US-headquartered furniture manufacturers commissioned a survey of posture and office behaviour. In quizzing thousands of office workers, Robert Propst, a fine arts professor, found many complained of feeling forced to conduct private conversations in the stairwell or coffee shop. With people passing by their desks so many times each day, they felt distracted. Each time someone passed the workers had to decide whether to invest in a ‘recognition act’. “We are trapped in a game of continuous idiot salutations,” said a respondent to Propst’s survey.

Open plan offices were initially spaces where workers could be supervised and time-monitored.

Collaboration is now often taking place in enclosed or separate spaces. Project spaces, meetings, brainstorming, and phone and Skyping booths are either elsewhere or on the fringe of the work area.

Open plan areas may be seen as quiet work zones, a calm ‘library’ space where individual thinking takes place, often with restrictions on phone calls and Skyping, loud conversations and teleconferencing at desks.

3.0 Continuous Partial Attention — Workplaces at The Brink

Technology monitors activity and shares information in ‘real time’ now removing the need to watch, hear or overhear everything. It is useful and practical to know precisely when to attend to a task and how your workforce is tracking according to given targets. Technology provides that and brings people together saving time, money, energy and reducing emissions from travel. Never before has it been so easy to work with clients and colleagues around the world. Without technology, people feel powerless to influence.

With computers and smart devices, workers draw content from anywhere and anything they do. However, human brains are still required to determine the actions and outcomes that follow.

Content is an ever-growing torrent — apps, programs and hardware are launched constantly, filling working lives with disruptive technology. Emails are checked on awakening and the journey to work is spent clearing email. Notifications — emails, SMS, pings, — pop onto screens all day, compromising output and thinking.

Computers and desks appear as sleek covers for digital clutter — emails, voicemail messages and links and feeds and all the rest that surround everyone. The amount of data being generated and stored globally is increasing at an exponential rate. It is worse than the clutter of paper because the volume is far greater than what anyone could physically have in files around them.

In many cases activities are a response to technology. While communications technology facilitates flexibility and remote working, it has also in some cases moved from being an effective tool and enabler, to become a disruptor and mechanism to avoid accountability. Managers and workers find themselves in an endless communication trail, messaging and cc’ing, without arriving at an outcome. Ironically technology is being developed to block disruptive technology.

Communications overload comes from multiple technologies in the work and home environments, and via devices taken everywhere because of the ‘need to stay connected’. The impact of constant messages and notifications is the equivalent of a 10-point drop in IQ, or of being under the influence. It is overwhelming, making it difficult to complete existing tasks let alone start new work. We struggle, trying to do it all, keeping up with all of our devices and the apps, working in a scattered mind-space. It now has a name: Continuous Partial Attention.

4.0 Solutions for The New Workplace - Can a Business Have it All?

As designers, we determine workplace configurations that are central to our clients’ day-to-day needs. Does everyone need an assigned desk or can they be unassigned and shared? Where does collaboration occur? Where does individual work get done? It is a matter of articulating what the business needs, what challenges it faces, and for us then to work from our knowledge of space and technology. How can those challenges be addressed before we start planning the workspace?

We consider what space is needed and what planning approach will best suit the client’s business. The culture and personality of each business is studied, taking into account whether the work is team or project-based, degrees of focus and confidentiality required and how much of the work is remote.

As well as design, management consultancy and brand strategy play significant roles in workspace planning. Our job is to understand an organisation from macro strategy right down to fundamental principles and technical needs before we start designing.

The message we are receiving is that we need to strike a new balance. People are disrupted and frustrated, but the open plan workplace is here to stay. Businesses will not or can’t spend the amount on real estate that would give everyone exactly what they need or think they want.

The office model gives people space to think but is ineffective for collaboration and expensive in terms of individual space allocation. Businesses are striving to achieve greater variability in real estate costs rather than a return to inflexible overheads.

The old mode of offices on the perimeter does not work. Workplaces have shifted from traditional ‘command control’ hierarchical structures to responsive networks about connections at all levels of an organisation. Hierarchical and linear workflows are being left behind in favour of agile working to bring the right minds together in response to an increasingly complex world. Open plan is more efficient than offices that take up too much space per individual. But increasingly, it is clear that open plan in its traditional form is also outdated and potentially unproductive. People feel that to get things done they need to work at home.

4.0 Solutions for The New Workplace - Can a Business Have it All?

The new structures of responsive networks require bringing together the right minds and expertise for each problem or project. No longer is it productive to draw together everyone for brainstorming. Networks within workplaces are less defined by geography or departments than the skills required for the work at hand. Collaboration is still essential to innovation, but there is a realisation that not all collaboration is productive. At times the adage of ‘head down, bum up’ may be equally productive.

Brainstorming rooms and spaces were a central theme of collaborative and open plan working. There is recognition however, that assembling a mixture of people in a room won’t always deliver innovation. Instead, it may play to inherent personality types and team dynamics, delivering predictable outcomes. With the advent of dynamic and transient teams, workplaces need to bring people together and to create a unifying sense of place and identity. Technology can only go so far. Virtual teams can work but do not expunge the traditional value of being all under one roof.

So the question to us as designers of workspace is ‘can a business have it all?’

5.0 Global Management Consulting Firm

Our client is a leading global management consultant, with staff who spend much of their time working in their clients’ offices. Their use of their office space on any given day averages 40 percent occupancy, so it was clear a traditional model of designated workspaces made no sense. Working remotely, often in sub-optimal conditions, heightened their desire for a space to call home when back in the office. In working closely with the client to build our understanding of the way they need to work, several core modes of working were revealed for when consultants returned to the workplace:

• Socialising and interacting; catching up with colleagues and reconnecting with the business

• Regrouping with the team to problem solve and develop strategies for their clients

• Mentoring and learning; connecting with leadership• Working individually and ‘getting the job done.’

It was clear the current model of assigned workstations and offices with a limited provision of other spaces would not address all these needs. With such low utilisation rates, it was not viable for the business to provide additional spaces beyond assigned work points. Working with the client, we quantified the trade-off between maintaining assigned work points and the impact on effectiveness and productivity of the lack of alternative spaces. It was decided to move away from assigned work points to a ‘free address’ model.

The significance of the change was regarded as transformative to the business, leading our clients to assign a partner from the group to lead the project. The impacts across all levels of the organisation had to be considered. There was a robust debate at a partner level, along with the implementation of a change management and communications program that involved everyone.

“The most challenging part of our change journey was that we were asking our people to change behaviours: Our team members would no longer ‘own’ their workstation, and we wanted Partner rooms to be more accessible to our team members when Partners are out of the office. We co-created our design, communications and training with representatives from various cohorts and teams.

We also recognised early on that there would be a number of individuals who would resist the change, but we did not want to design for the ‘average view’. We ensured clarity of vision, and then worked hard with the skeptics to engage them on the benefits of our new workplace. In most cases any skepticism was simply a case of not being able to visualise a new way of working. Many of the original group of skeptics are now some of the strongest advocates for our new workplace”

5.0 Global Management Consulting Firm

The ‘village’ mode chosen responds well to the inherent zones created by the central lift core defining four clear zones. Each village contains open and enclosed workspaces, access to lockers and a clearly defined visual identity. Teams have been assigned to a particular village to ease the transition and avoid a sense of ‘homelessness’. However, since the relocation many individuals have chosen not to anchor to a particular village, instead working freely within the environment aided by laptop working and technology that enables complete mobility.

The positioning of a generous breakout area, that doubles as ‘town hall’ space, on arrival from the lift lobby strengthens social connections. Diversity is maintained in this area as well, with large communal tables, niche booths and stool seating for individuals, catering to both introverted and extroverted personality styles. Areas for collaboration are enclosed and on the fringes of the open work areas. With screens and technology that support these areas, they are considered to be genuine workspaces. Teams can get together without disrupting those who are working individually.

Smaller retreat rooms enable noisy individual work such as teleconferencing and Skype, as well as a respite for those who find open areas visually distracting. There is also a no-phone workroom akin to a library that removes the distraction of technology.

“When we started the design process, we quickly discovered that people like to work in different ways, at different times, depending on their working style and how much they need to focus individually on a specific task versus collaborate with others. We designed a workplace which provides a variety of different spaces to enable people to work how they want to at different times of the day. This includes team rooms with technology and whiteboards to enable idea generation and collaboration, more traditional team meeting rooms, individual rooms for video or phone calls, and non-bookable meeting rooms people can use when they need to concentrate. We were adamant that we wouldn’t end up with a compromised outcome by pushing for all spaces to be everything for everyone, but instead provided a choice of spaces in each village that as a collective addressed the different styles of working.”

6.0 Conclusion

Our role as designers is not to facilitate compromise but to strive to understand the tensions and intersections between financial, technology and people drivers. Our goal is to arrive at solutions that live and thrive in the intersections.

Can a business have it all? We believe the answer should be yes. With a willingness to leave behind the known and the norm and dig deeper into the real needs of a business, comes the path to greater engagement and effectiveness of the workforce. We do not prescribe to a particular model; we subscribe to design that engages with diversity and is adaptable to change. The workplace is not the creator but the enabler and should facilitate effectiveness, communicate brand and support culture. The purpose of the workplace will continue to evolve and must be responsive to changing work practices.

Successful workplace design finds the balance between bringing minds together to collaborate and innovate and allowing great minds the clarity to think, create and produce.