Two weeks ago, Herman Millerhosted a research event at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. The night was part of a tour of events intended to roll out what Herman Miller’s workplace strategy team identifies as the biggest research effort in company history.
The goal of the research was to evidentiate Herman Miller’s Living Officeapproach to workplace design, which it introduced to the public in 2013.
In developing the research arm of Living Office, Herman Miller has partnered with Leesman, a global business intelligence tools aggregator. Leesman’s global workplace benchmarking tool, called the Leesman Index, is an impressive example of big data actually being gathered and analyzed for use. It is set to become the largest data pool for rating the employee workplace experience. To date, Leesman has interviewed 425,917 employees – in 3,243 workplaces, 463 organizations and 90 countries – about every possible consideration employees come across in the workplace.
“We strongly believe in the Living Office, but with this research, we’re moving beyond belief and into proof,” said Joseph White, Director of Workplace Strategy, Design & Management, at Herman Miller. “This is the largest research effort Herman Miller has ever undertaken. We began our research efforts three or four years ago, and along the way it became really important for us to involve an independent third party. It quickly became clear that Leesman could provide one of the most powerful tools and data sets available.”
At the Merchandise Mart event, Herman Miller invited Eleanor Forster, Managing Director of North America Leesman, to speak to attendees about all of the data Leesman has collected, how they’re organizing and analyzing it for use, and the results.
“Think of us as an X-ray of the current workplace,” said Ms. Forster. “We don’t do consulting, we don’t tell you what to do with the information or how to fix things. We have no vested interest outside providing insight into the workplace.
“We’re constantly mining data for patterns and correlations, isolating characters of high performance, and we’re now doing our deepest investigation yet into the data to identify the real drivers of sentiment. The Leesman Index is an immersive experience for people who previously wouldn’t have access to this caliber of information. Our purpose is to identify how organizations might provide a frictionless day at work.”
If you aren’t already, we encourage you to become familiar with the work Leesman is doing. Much of its data is available at leesmanindex.com.
In its primary research reporting document, Leesman’s executive summary states:
“As our experience of the brands and services we consume changes, so too does the expectations we place on our workplaces. This study has explored what that means for organisations trying to get the best of their real estate and their employees. This study focuses on the physical, service and virtual aspects of employee workplace experience and has mapped the complex web of factors that impact, shape and ultimately determine employee sentiment.
The results, drawn from the largest employee workplace experience dataset of its kind ever amassed, provide a series of key insights:
1. There are multiple factors at play in employee workplace experience (EwX), some of which may be beyond your control; employee needs, requirements and preferences, behavior, process and organisational structure and dynamics.
2. EwX is shaped through the support of three distinct experience clusters; Doing, Seeing and Feeling. An outstanding workplace experience delivers on all three and failure on one will almost certainly limit or undermine overall EwX sentiment.
3. There is a series of core employee work activities that are key drivers across all three areas of the EwX. Supporting these should be seen as mission-critical in delivering high-performance workplace.
4. The workplace ecosystem is complex, and most physical and service components are intricately entwined. However, certain components are greatly more important than others and will have a significantly larger impact on EwX. These components must be positioned at the top of all agendas.
“Leadership teams have to accept employee workplace experience is subjective by definition, but it is the reality as experienced by the people who matter most – the employees. The leadership team might not appreciate it or agree with it, but it is the employee opinion at that point in time relative to their experience. This research now provides those teams two key elements: a checklist of the factors that carry the greatest influence in improving that experience as well as the evidence on which to build the compelling business benefit case.”
In addition to presenting the data, Ms. Forster and Leesman address how and why their data is valuable:
“We often get asked whether, and how, employee engagement impacts what an employee thinks of their workplace. We are sometimes asked whether the responses in the Leesman survey are reliable, because an employee responds subjectively…Indeed, it is subjective – because experience and sentiment are subjective by their very definition. An employee’s experience is his/her perception of reality at that point in time. What matters to the employee, and should therefore matter to the organisation, is the perception of reality, not reality itself. The actual quality of the workplace doesn’t really matter, if it’s not perceived well.”
Leesman notes an important shift happening in the language we use when describing work: productivity vs. contribution, employee vs. participant; designer vs. co-creator, manager vs. enabler, service vs. support, customer vs. follower, them vs. us, and provider vs. partner.
In framing Herman Miller’s research efforts, Mr. White called specific attention to the language shifts from Employee-to-Participantand from Productivity-to-Contribution.
“Living Office shows that when you support people, your organization will succeed,” said Mr. White. “We wanted to shift the experience of work, and the expectations about that experience – to identify more personalized measures of success. We want our clients to understand who they are, and where they want to go.And in all of this, success is critically linked to the conversations with people about their workplace – engaging people in conversation about things get done at their office.”
“It’s not about measuring yourself against your industry; it’s about measuring yourself to your personal best. As an example, we’ve had law firms come to us asking, ‘What are the industry standards for a law office right now? What is the standard ratio for offices and workstations?’ And we respond with, ‘Well, are you like every other law firm?’” And then the conversation starts to shift to more personal metrics. The ultimate measure of success is how well the workspace fits the people it serves, not how well it fits prescribed industry benchmarks.”
Herman Miller embedded the Leesman Index survey into its own research effort – consisting of 16 unique research methods including interviews, journey maps and surveys – and added a few additional questions specific to the Living Office approach.
The research is summarized in a white paper titled, “How to Catalyze the Workplace for Growth.”
The research identifies three business priorities that companies should focus on, and how each company goes about achieving these goals can, and should, look unique.
1. Stimulate innovation
2. Increase efficiency (rooted in enhanced experience)
3. Attract and retain talent
“Before and after each redesign, we asked people how well the workplace was enabling their daily work activities and fulfilling their expectations,” notes the white paper. “Our findings, validated by the largest set of workplace data in the world, show that when research on people and work informs your office design, it becomes a powerful tool for organizational growth.”
Herman Miller identified three key takeaways from their research:
>”People who inhabit research-based workplaces tell us they are more creative and collaborative, and they approach their work with more productivity and efficiency.”
>”Organizations that invest in workplace research and use it to inform their office designs make more efficient use of their real estate and report measurable improvements in everything from employee retention to innovation.”
>”As smart workplace capabilities evolve, real-time data on space utilization and employee well-being will increasingly allow your workplace to immediately respond to people’s needs and efficiently adapt to the changing demands of your business.”
In describing Herman Miller’s intent with its Living Office research, Mr. White points to Robert Propst’s 1968 book, “The Office: A Facility Based on Change”, a book he wrote when Herman Miller launched its Action Office:
Propst’s words are relevant today:
“The renewed rise of individuality as a value and the great diversity in what one may be required to do in an office does not allow a continuation of sterile uniformity with status as the only definition.”
In another chapter, he writes:
“The business of people talking to each other in offices is a very serious consideration. It is by far the most expensive achievement of offices: the grouping of people that allows conversational exchange.”
Living Office continues the best of what Action Office started.
“Propst identified a distinction between change and growth that’s really important to what Living Office does,” said Mr. White. “In creating these unique structures of workplace, you’re asking yourself, ‘How are we going to navigate the changes that are coming our organization?’ We want to help identify which trends organizations should embrace, and which ones serve as distractions, designing for an organization’s personal best.”