Introduction
In September Hurricane Harvey inched through southeast Texas at a slow crawl, producing an unimaginable downpour and flood that threatened our homes, our jobs, our infrastructure, and even our lives. Since then, we’ve seen barrage after barrage of catastrophic crises unfold as places like Miami, California, Puerto Rico, and Las Vegas demonstrate that disruption comes in many shapes and forms—some natural and some man-made. As these individual events ripple outward, it is becoming ever clearer that we live in a world of constant volatility that challenges our perception of “normal.” It’s a kind of chronic disruption and though it is still very early, we are only now beginning to understand the full impact of these events. Not only on how we build and protect ourselves, but also on how we work, how we measure, how we live and ultimately, how we exist.
We have an arsenal of Big Data tools to churn out myriad bite-size statistics to quantify physical damage and loss – how many lives, businesses, homes, economic output, jobs, apartment units, vehicles, and office buildings. But what’s the empirical metric on emotional impact? How long will it take to overcome a problem and return to a state of equilibrium? How do we safeguard to ensure this will never happen again?
As I reflect on these crises I keep coming back to the question of whether it is even possible to plan for such safeguards. And if we think it is, are we solving the right problems? Our dinosaur brains see past events as problems begging for answers as we discussed in the first article (Read here). We introduced design thinking in the second article (Read here) to begin to see problem resolution in a new light.
After having spent time discussing individual and organizational resiliency I want to turn our attention to the workplace and what I call ‘workspace resiliency’. Why is this important? Because everything we do as individuals, as teams, and as organizations, happens in some sense of place – we are some ‘where’ when we do what we do, however we do it. The choices we make happen in a location and so to the extent that those places are either fixed, adaptable or of a different character, they influence us and the decisions we make.
Let’s frame the conversation using a different profession: medical. Imagine you are a doctor and you are faced with a choice to help a patient in an emergency. Can you treat the patient, fix or cure their ailment or are you unable to fix or cure the patient’s ailment because it is an adversity of a different sort? If it is a broken bone or a cut it can be taken care of in a straightforward manner – problem solved. But if it is an allergy, a recurring skin disorder or a chronic disease, it may go on indefinitely and cannot be simply treated, fixed or cured. These complex conditions require a different type of treatment. To the doctor, and the patient, this is an important distinction because different expertise and sensibilities are applied in each case. For certain types of acute medical problems once a treatment is selected, it is pretty well assured the patient’s ailment will be fixed or cured. But if it is a medical condition that cannot be solved, fixed or cured readily, it will need to be managed over time and the patient’s life will not go back to the way it was before.
In the case of these chronic or incurable medical conditions, doctors do not try to bring false hope to the situation. It is in the best interests of everyone for the doctor to focus his or her expertise on the specific treatment that offers the best care for the patient’s wellbeing. Doctors are trained to not try to cure certain medical conditions since not only is it futile it is a waste of time and money. They help the patient manage the ailment over time by providing the best care available and making changes along the way if warranted.
Now imagine a situation where there is little time to assess a patient’s health or treat them in an office or hospital due to the severity of the circumstances and the numbers of people involved – think of recent disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes and fires – doctors are trained to quickly triage the injured and focus on those that can be taken care of so as not to waste valuable time with those that cannot treated.
Workplace or Workspace
The story of doctors and their ability to assess ailments that can be fixed or cured and those that are ongoing conditions to be treated over time is a familiar analogy usually applied to managers and the business of management. In organizations, there is a need to determine if you are solving a problem or managing a condition. Business decisions are largely problem-solving exercises no matter how strategic, and “people decisions” are rarely simple or straightforward, requiring ongoing care and attention.
This same distinction can be applied to the workplace. Throughout its history workplace design has largely been a problem solving exercise – gathering program information, developing options and plans, making decisions on constructing the workplace and closing the project. Yet only rarely does the solution meet the ongoing needs of employees to work productively – let alone meet the needs of the organization as a whole. And as the organization changes over time the workplace is most often a static physical representation of the past and either requires expensive changes or is completely reconstructed. Or the company moves because it sees its workplace as outdated or unable to serve the business. Even the idea of mobility has been more often theoretical than successfully put into practice.
Whether open, closed, cubicle or office the assignment of workers to specific places has created a rigidity that has not kept up with changing business models, workers’ demand for choice in their workplace settings or as a tool in times of disruption and chaos.
Most managers have been educated and trained as problem solvers. They see their role as taking care of any problems in the business and that includes assigning employees to work stations to do their work. Yet, we are in an age of worker choice, productivity has been shown to improve when there is flexibility and mobility. These needs change and the fixed workplace of yesterday needs to make way for the agile workspace of today.
The workplace is complex because its function is multi-varied and must support a wide variety of employees to perform their daily work. As with the management of chronic diseases, managing people, place and technology is not a problem to be solved and then closed. It is interdependent and integrated.
A resilient workspace can ‘bounce back’ and adapt over time with the ability to accommodate different work styles and the business of the business. We see this in the evolution of activity-based working. By understanding individual work styles, creating settings that accommodate different types of work and allowing individual choice we feel better in accomplishing our work, our well-being is enhanced and the organization gets higher productivity – hopefully leading to greater profit.
If you do not limit your thinking to floors in buildings or specific locations then resiliency applies to the ability of people to find ways to work wherever they might be. “Work is what you do – not where you do it,” has recently become the mantra of many. In the first article of this series we explored the idea of a person’s ability to bounce back in times of duress and get back to work as best they can even in difficult situations. (Read here). As traditional workplaces continue to evolve into resilient workspaces more people will learn to adapt to changing conditions and be able to work more efficiently and effectively.
We contend that a lot of people work in resilient workplaces and either don’t realize it or have not connected adaptability to how to work in changing circumstances. If organizations better understood this, they could train their workforces to be resilient and getting back to work during and immediately following a disruption would not be as difficult. We have recently been exploring this contention through focused research around quickly creating adaptable, resilient workspaces from fixed workplaces.
Examples
For a recent research grant, we assembled a team to look at how to create a resilient workspace and how quickly we might be able to do it, beginning with a traditional workplace. We took half a floor in a corporate building designed as a traditional mix of workstations and offices with assigned seating.
In order to convince management this was an idea worth testing we had to increase capacity and lower costs while substantially increasing the different kinds of work settings. We used design thinking as our approach and redesigned it to be more adaptable.
What was more remarkable was our partnership with Steelcase to retool the existing furniture – not build new – to breakdown the space in 3 days and rebuild it in 4.
The 7-day workplace became a 7-day resilient workspace no one thought possible. By using design thinking and not approaching the situation with traditional problem solving we accelerated the implementation from what might typically have been a 3- 6-month workplace design project and implementation schedule.
Even though we began this research to find ways to change our approach to adapting the workplace for our clients amid economic downturns and the need to reduce space, the idea shows great promise for workplace adaptation in times of crisis or disruption and exhibits the characteristics of resilience those chaotic times require.
We have been applying those techniques in our own workspace on the 6th floor of the Pennzoil building in Houston. Even though we have 2 floors of traditional workspaces, the 6th floor educates workers on resilience, adaptability, and agility simply through daily use. I suspect these employees will be better prepared to weather changes ahead and have a far easier time than those who continue to work in traditional workspaces.
These two examples are part of our continuing work with clients we call designing spaces to work, not a workplace. (see http://www.resilientworkspace.com). This has now evolved into further research and development on the implications of resilient workspace and its ability to resolve ongoing changes in work environments rather than only using a traditional problem-solving mindset (see chart).
Conclusion
What I hope you take-a-way from this discussion is that there is a crucial distinction between the design of a workplace (problem to be solved) and the design of a workspace (adapting to changing conditions) with far-reaching implications on the organization and impact on the workforce. You will be able to create better spaces for individuals, teams and communities if you can effectively fix the right problems and manage the right conditions without mixing up the two. New work environments cannot be created using the type of problem solving thinking that creates traditional workplaces. Design thinking is an important tool. Resilient workspaces are situational conditions that handle continuous change, it is not a problem to be solved once and then done.
Being aware of changes needed to create resilient work environments is a first step, helping people use them is another topic to be explored. Change management is going through its own evolution as event change of the past is making way for transition change that is continuous and embedded with the organization, not a service you hire and hope the problem is solved or fades away. Work environments are important levers for the development of culture and whether seen as resilient or fixed influence how people feel and the work they do.
Our aim here was to add workspace resiliency to the discussion of individual and organizational resiliency. It will take time to build awareness, educate and teach organizations and individuals why we need to change the way we are changing work environments today. It is a long-term strategy, vital to business continuity and the volatility we face. Most organizations know what they should be doing, why they should do it and often how – yet as we have discovered – resiliency takes looking at what you are doing today in a different light. It may seem to be easier to build fixed workplaces even when you know that agile, resilient workspaces will stand the test of time, are more cost-effective and will educate and train a more adaptable workforce.
This simple insight can have an enormous impact on not only how an organization thinks of its workforce resiliency, it will also support an organization’s ability to help employees be back at work quicker than those who are ill prepared during times of volatility and disruption. We need to encourage more attention to building resilient workspaces and training people in their use, it is time to realign our actions with our need for resiliency and change the conversation. It will be worth it.
Sven Govaars is a strategy consultant who actively works with business leaders facilitating real estate decisions and workplace change to meet future challenges – today. He is known for generating organizational and workforce insights while amplifying the strength of client teams. Sven has a proven ability to solve complex problems utilizing design thinking to energize, teach, and inform successful outcomes. You can email Sven at svengovaars@gmail.com or visit Resilient Workspace.