The future workplace is here. Traditional office spaces are transitioning to modern workplaces designed around social interaction, collaboration and relationship building. There’s no longer a one size fits all office environment and with the sharp increase in hybrid working businesses are thinking about how their teams need to work together now, and designing new office spaces with an emphasis on communal and collaborative areas that spark creativity and innovation through conversation, whilst also breaking up open-plan spaces by including pods and booths for privacy and quiet moments.
Hybrid working also brings new challenges to our HR and leadership teams such as managing employees’ well-being when they are working remotely and ensuring everyone receives the same level of care whether they’re at home or in the office.
At the recent South West Business Expo in Exeter Georgina Smith, Director at Broadbase, discussed these points in an informal chat alongside our guest Kevin Miller, Chief Humanity Officer at Apex HR and co-founder of the LinkedIn group Humanising Workplaces.
Welcome both, please introduce yourselves and tell us how you started working together
KEVIN MILLER: I am Chief Humanity Officer at Apex HR, that was a deliberate job title because all organisations are effectively made up of people and their relationships with each other. We believe if you provide world-class, really effective working cultures for people, where people can thrive and do their best work combined with a great physical environment and great workspace design – especially in a remote and hybrid world – it’s not only going to be better for people, it’s going to be better for business too. Apex HR is a company based in Plymouth but we work with clients all over the UK bringing a modern and progressive approach to HR.
GEORGINA SMITH: We started working with Kevin in regard to employee welfare and people working from home. A lot of businesses got in contact with us during and post-pandemic asking how can they cater for their staff working from home in regards to both the nuts and bolts of chairs and desks and monitor arms, but equally advice on what they needed to do to provide for their home workers from a well-being perspective.
That’s where we aligned with Kevin and his team at Apex HR to better understand that well-being, as we know from our experience in the industry, goes far beyond the physical it goes to the mental. We see how the physical space of an office and the physical space for a home office affects both your productivity and your well-being and both should be at the forefront of the decision-maker’s mind.
How are your companies helping to elevate the employee experience?
KM: The first thing we’ll start with is it all depends on our mentality in business of how we actually see people, so even the name Human Resources we think is wrong because if I say to anyone ‘you’re a resource’ how does that make you feel? It’s like you’re a number or an object so we need to really see the whole person and understand that people’s experience at work matters.
We do actually spend most of our lives at work, if we work full-time hours we spend more of our lives at work with our colleagues than we do our own family. The way we feel in our day-to-day workspace really matters, and it doesn’t just matter to the success of the business, it matters when we go home at the end of the day and those positive ripple effects can be felt in families and wider communities.
So the challenge now with the employee experience is how do we make that meaningful in a remote and hybrid environment? In physical workspaces when people come in every day you can pick up on the visual cues if people are not quite themselves, this is much more difficult to do in a remote environment so you’ve got to be more curious as leaders and reach out to make those connections.
GS: The employee experience even pre-COVID was something at the forefront of I would say progressive businesses and aims for their office space. We talk about the Google effect and all these very exciting interesting looking office spaces that served more purpose than just desks and chairs. Post-pandemic that’s even more significant because we now operate in multiple working environments, our home working and remote working environment and then what the office environment now is. No longer do we need the office to represent the desk and chair because we’ve got a desk and chair at home and as we’ve discovered by working remotely, that homeworking set up away from the office can be anywhere and a desk and chair can be represented by anything.
What we need to do for office spaces is provide places for collaboration, for socialising, but also provide private and quiet places for employees that can’t get that in their homes. It’s really taking that experience to the next level by changing your office environment away from just desks and chairs. I think more so employees are looking for that when they come to the office space now, they’re not just looking for somewhere the same as just sitting in a coffee shop or sitting at their home desk, they’re looking for spaces where they can connect with people, problem solve, have meetings.
Employees are looking for more out of the office than ever before because they know that their desk, laptop and chair at home are offering what their office used to. To actually entice people back into the office employers need to be thinking more than ever of what they’re offering in that office space and what purposes it’s providing people, from a retention perspective and from an output perspective. The experience in the office needs to be something quite different to what we’ve previously presented to people.
In regards to hybrid working, in your home environment yes we can all work from the kitchen table, the kitchen chair, the sofa, the coffee table, and a lot of people throughout the early stages of the pandemic when we didn’t have the proper infrastructure in place were doing those things, but actually, the employee experience now with hybrid working means that we do have to look at the home working set up with a much more well-being and holistic stance of how can we make sure places at home are appropriate for people to work in? We need to ensure that people at home are taken care of in their physical self because sitting at the kitchen table and the kitchen chair is going to have a long-term effect physically. It’s also just not getting the best out of people, as Kevin said, you can’t think of people as resources, think of them as people and people need to be appropriately set up wherever they’re working. You wouldn’t – well I hope you wouldn’t – set up your office with folding chairs and some folding tables and hope that everybody is happy and productive. We need to look at the homeworking environment with the same perspective as the office environment we’re providing people to elevate their experience everywhere.
Can you talk about how progressive clients are looking at their internal environments and aligning that with their internal cultures as well?
KM: I think the pandemic was a real game changer, it’s fundamentally changed the experience people are looking for from their workplaces. Employees want to come into work and feel that they’re working for companies with a meaning and a purpose that’s really important, and they want to feel inspired and able to work as part of great teams and genuinely collaborate and have a really productive and meaningful work experience day to day. I think a lot of the traditional ways organisations are set up with a lot of traditional what I would call command and control hierarchies don’t always support that so the world is changing rapidly, people’s expectations are changing and all of the evidence says there’s an overwhelming and compelling business case to treat your people superbly well. It is the single biggest differentiator you’re going to have in the marketplace, so if we genuinely care about people and support their well-being it’s a really positive sustainable strategy for business success.
GS: Progressive businesses understand that there is no such thing as a one size fits all office design and we always try to really interrogate our clients about their business culture to find out what they actually need from their office space. Businesses are realising that their office space can be one of the most impactful ways to communicate their unique identity and culture which can be useful in attracting and retaining employees.
The modern office needs to accommodate both the different ways of working that are required by that business as well as the differing needs of their individual employees. We are not all doing the same task all day every day, so having a flexible design can support this. Offering spaces for communal, social and collaborative work are hugely popular and important, but businesses also need to offer quiet spaces and areas for individuals to work in as not everybody thrives in an open-plan space. We need to be aware that whilst hybrid working seems to be suiting the majority of office workers there are many that do not want to be confined to their home either due to space or for mental health reasons, that still need a private and quiet space to work in in the office. Employers need to be sensitive to this and ensure they’re providing an inclusive work environment alongside an inclusive culture that supports well-being.
Kevin, please give us an example of how HR is changing with your clients
KM: I think the language we use is really important in terms of setting our values and the culture in our organisation, having worked in HR for many many years – it was called personnel when I first started the profession so that will give you an indication of how long it’s been – a lot of the language feels quite restrictive and punitive. I’ll give you a quick example, people come into a new organisation and then they go on something called a probation period, now that word just makes me think of prisons. If we think about it logically, what are we trying to create in our workplaces? We want to welcome employees in warmly to our organisation and a more human-centred way of going about this is simply to referring to it as a settling in period. We want to say, welcome on board, delighted you’re bringing in your skills and your expertise. As your employer we have expectations of you to deliver a good performance but we’re going to support you to do that, we’re going to coach you, we’re going to mentor you, we want to ensure we get the very best out of you.
When we started looking at this we found traditional HR was littered with language that feels too restrictive and punitive for people and actually all of the evidence says that just doesn’t work. People want autonomy and they want as we call it, responsible freedom. There’s freedom to get on and do your best work, but your responsibility is still to your team and ultimately of course the end customer, because as Georgina said without those we don’t have a business so we need to look at these things in a much more interconnected way.
A lot of companies think, act and communicate based on what they do rather than why they do it. Simon Sinek’s work ‘Start with Why’ had a big influence on the way I go about things because the whole argument is people don’t think about the why, you’re much more likely to get people connected with that message. I think it’s also important to remember that communication styles differ from person to person and people absorb information in different ways as well so it’s never about just one single way of communicating it’s having a diverse mix of different ways to get your message across.
Georgina, can you tell us about the zip-tap effect?
GS: This is something we’ve spoken about in our business for a long time and it’s actually an anecdote from our MD, Stephen. About 15 years ago a furniture manufacturer commissioned a study of businesses that had made big office changes within that year to find out what was successful and what wasn’t and general other feedback to help with their product development. One of the responses was that the introduction of the zip-tap – the fast boil tap – in the office had had a direct effect on lines of communication. Effectively by removing the kettle they had removed a natural point in the office where people congregated. Previously it had been someone from accounts talking to someone in procurement while waiting for the kettle to boil. Or two other departments bumping into each other and realising how beneficial it would be to set up a meeting within their teams. People from different teams were having a chat and problem solving and communicating with each other. The introduction of the zip-tap meant you put your tea bag in your cup and walked away, that natural stopping point and line of communication was broken. What we can learn from this is not to just bring back the kettle, the point is thinking about creating spaces that allow people to have lines of communication.
We often talk to clients about including collaborative spaces in their office design, a third space as it’s quite often referred to. It’s not a desk space or a meeting room but an informal social area that people can just come and have a chat in. I think it’s even more significant now with hybrid working and we also now need more than a small tea point to come and have a chat in, we need social areas, we need informal meeting spaces to allow people to have those informal conversations that aren’t so natural on Teams or email or Zoom. More now than ever the fact is that yes we don’t need as many desks in the office and yes businesses potentially don’t need as big a space as they used to, but they need functioning spaces that enable these lines of communication and more.
From experience, in the last year to 18 months a lot of our clients are actually downsizing their spaces and that’s brilliant, potentially that’s saving them money, but a successful business as Kevin said is to do with the people and retaining your skilled workers by adapting to their current needs. That partly comes into the physical and the fact that these offices that we might be downsizing can’t just be downsized with the same furniture reproduced on a smaller scale, we need to be making functioning spaces that actually enable these lines of communication and give employees a reason to want to come into the office. So the ‘zip-tap effect’ as we like to call it colloquially in our office is more important than ever.
Forward-thinking businesses were already making these changes pre-pandemic but I think now all businesses need to think about it post-pandemic because hybrid working is working well and productivity is up and profits are going up, but to maintain that and maintain that flow we can’t just keep people in silos we need to make sure we’re allowing appropriate spaces for collaboration meeting and conversation.
