Where technology fits in

• The rapid changes in technology reinforce the fact that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all workplace

• If tech and workplace enable, then tech, workplace and culture empower

• With careful leadership consideration, the tech-enabled workplace can become the most humane workplace

The mod­ern work­place has been trans­formed by tech­no­log­i­cal advances such as dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, automa­tion and the Inter­net of Things (IoT). While tech inno­va­tion is a con­stant and fast-mov­ing process, it is impor­tant to focus on what is avail­able now with­in the range of afford­abil­i­ty and skillsets rather than become dis­tract­ed by future-gaz­ing deep into the dig­i­tal age.

Enlight­ened prac­ti­tion­ers of work­places are now tak­ing a tech-focused strat­e­gy, from retro­fitting offices to pur­pose-built build­ings, to achieve the best results. These results are pos­si­ble as the IoT and avail­able infor­ma­tion enable greater indi­vid­u­al­i­sa­tion and cus­tomi­sa­tion, greater per­for­mance opti­mi­sa­tion through data ana­lyt­ics, and greater agili­ty that pro­motes results-dri­ven inter­ven­tion and man­age­ment. Gart­ner pre­dicts that IoT deploy­ment in com­mer­cial build­ings will con­tin­ue to grow at a rapid pace over the next few years and will include more than a bil­lion con­nect­ed things by 2018.

How­ev­er, UK com­pa­nies are only just start­ing to grap­ple with how to get the most out of their work­spaces and many are still only begin­ning to address the imme­di­ate con­sid­er­a­tions that were laid out in sec­tions 1 to 4 of The Stod­dart Review.

The rapid changes in tech­nol­o­gy rein­force the fact that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all work­place. With­in a work­place each busi­ness func­tion or team has dif­fer­ent needs. Work­place, enabled through tech, can there­fore be viewed as a series of inter­con­nect­ing eco-sys­tems.

Tech has been the great enabler of our workscape – the wider port­fo­lio of for­mal and infor­mal space where we now work – and this rein­forces the idea that employ­ees do not need to have a spe­cif­ic work loca­tion to car­ry out their oper­a­tions and meet their goals. Tech­nol­o­gy and real-estate expert Antony Slum­bers has said that the work­place will only remain rel­e­vant as some­where ‘expo­nen­tial human­i­ty coun­ter­bal­ances expo­nen­tial tech­nol­o­gy’. Slum­bers is talk­ing about great design, some­where that inspires peo­ple, a place for cre­ation, some­where peo­ple use their imag­i­na­tion, a place where empa­thy abounds, where inge­nu­ity and inno­va­tion is what mat­ters, and a space for col­lab­o­ra­tion.

Indus­try lead­ers were keen for our researchers to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between organ­i­sa­tions that use tech to enable their employ­ees, rather than to demand more from them, either explic­it­ly or implic­it­ly. If tech and work­place enable, then tech, work­place and cul­ture empow­er.

Employ­ers who are ahead of the curve when it comes to work­place design are already very aware of these ele­ments and are striv­ing to instil them. This is demon­strat­ed in the Leesman+ respons­es, which con­sis­tent­ly show high­er scores for social infra­struc­ture and oth­er aspects (such as the oppor­tu­ni­ty to have chance meet­ings) that encour­age col­lab­o­ra­tive work­ing.

Smart workplace

OVG’s Ams­ter­dam build­ing, The Edge (of which the main ten­ant is Deloitte), is one of the smartest work­places in the world. It’s a tip­ping point project for real estate devel­op­ers, as it gath­ers infor­ma­tion on the work­ers’ needs and responds to them. Work­spaces with­in the build­ing are allo­cat­ed accord­ing to spe­cif­ic sched­uled needs and once work­ers are there, things such as light and tem­per­a­ture are mod­i­fied accord­ing to per­son­al pref­er­ence. The Edge is also the green­est build­ing in the world, with a BREEAM rat­ing of 98.4% – the high­est score ever award­ed.

Deloitte con­stant­ly col­lects data on how staff inside the build­ing inter­act with each oth­er. A cen­tral dash­board tracks every­thing from ener­gy use to cof­fee machine per­for­mance. This means that when few­er staff are expect­ed on cer­tain days, whole offices can be closed down, min­imis­ing heat­ing and light­ing costs. While data col­la­tion is part of the equa­tion, so too is the need for human behav­iour to be as adap­tive. For Deloitte to realise the ben­e­fit of clos­ing areas down, their peo­ple need to be able and will­ing to work some­where else. Behav­iour and cul­ture have to be pro­grammed into the new work­place genome.

There has also been an increase in the num­ber of prod­ucts that help deliv­er smarter indi­vid­ual per­for­mance. A good exam­ple is well­ness tech that can lead to high­er lev­els of work­er sat­is­fac­tion. A report by ABI Research, Wear­able Wire­less Devices in Enter­prise Well­ness Pro­grams, pre­dicts that by 2018 at least 13 mil­lion work­place wear­able devices will be inte­grat­ed into well­ness pro­grammes. At The Edge, smart­phones are used to find col­leagues, man­age gym book­ings and adjust heat­ing and light­ing tem­porar­i­ly to reflect per­son­al pref­er­ences. To facil­i­tate this, work areas are equipped with built-in wire­less phone charg­ers.

By using tech that gath­ers quan­tifi­able data – such as seat sen­sors to show how much time peo­ple are at their desk – com­pa­nies can then bet­ter devel­op work­place solu­tions focused on the end users

A 2014 study from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty found that cre­ative think­ing improved while a per­son was walk­ing and short­ly there­after. Out­side of a lab envi­ron­ment, organ­i­sa­tions such as Lendlease are using new tech­nol­o­gy to mea­sure how much time employ­ees are spend­ing at their desk or walk­ing around. Mea­sur­ing this allows them to insti­gate schemes to encour­age peo­ple to walk more in the office or engage in active com­mut­ing (and this can be encour­aged in the phys­i­cal work­place by pro­vid­ing end-of-trip facil­i­ties such as show­ers and bike park­ing). Com­pa­nies are now able to mea­sure the peaks for run­ners and walk­ers and rework strat­e­gy accord­ing­ly. ‘When you pro­vide great facil­i­ties it encour­ages peo­ple to use them,’ says head of work­place and well­be­ing, Dun­can Young. Tech plays a key role in get­ting this right.

Lendlease encour­ages its staff to wear heart-rate vari­abil­i­ty mon­i­tors. These mon­i­tors show whether peo­ple are in ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ mode. Once this has been observed the com­pa­ny has a behav­iour­al change sys­tem in place to edu­cate staff on how to breathe prop­er­ly, how to make the most from micro-breaks and to devel­op a healthy sleep and eat­ing rou­tine. This all ties back into the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ben­e­fit. Sem­i­nal stud­ies of elite ath­letes sug­gest that top per­form­ers sleep on aver­age eight hours and 36 min­utes com­pared with the aver­age per­son who sleeps for six hours and 51 min­utes. Research by the Nation­al Insti­tute for Health and Care Excel­lence (NICE) sug­gests that pro­mot­ing a cul­ture that improves the health and wel­fare of employ­ees leads to a healthy and pro­duc­tive work­place as it reduces the occur­rence of work­place ill­ness (which it esti­mates leads to around 27 mil­lion lost work­ing days per year and costs the econ­o­my £13.4 bil­lion annu­al­ly).

Focus on staff

Organ­i­sa­tions that want to be suc­cess­ful in using tech­nol­o­gy to improve the work­place must start with the staff in mind rather than jump­ing on the lat­est tech trends.

By using tech that gath­ers quan­tifi­able data – such as seat sen­sors to show how much time peo­ple are at their desk – com­pa­nies can then bet­ter devel­op work­place solu­tions focused on the end users. Unless those plan­ning the work­place have a clear under­stand­ing of the needs of its users, the tech can­not be imple­ment­ed prop­er­ly. The best solu­tions are cre­at­ed with the employ­ees in mind.

It might be tempt­ing to pic­ture this tech-enabled future work­place as a soul­less place, run for and by robots. But the strong mes­sage from the research is that with care­ful lead­er­ship con­sid­er­a­tion, the tech-enabled work­place can also become the most humane work­place. ADP Research Institute’s 2016 Evo­lu­tion of Work study of more than 2,400 employ­ees and employ­ers across 13 coun­tries found that, while there is a sense of fear that increased tech­nol­o­gy will lead to automa­tion and job loss, 37% of UK staff are tech­nol­o­gy advo­cates. They believed it improved con­nec­tions with co-work­ers and employ­ers, made their work­ing life eas­i­er and helped them oper­ate more effec­tive­ly with glob­al staff, not to men­tion reduc­ing trav­el costs. A recent report on co-work­ing from Corenet Glob­al sug­gests that in the long term, VR, AR and even holo­graph­ic solu­tions will enable remote work­ers to sat­is­fy their own social needs vir­tu­al­ly so the work­place can be tech-enabled to improve the envi­ron­ment of peo­ple who are not even in the build­ing.

The Leesman data sup­ports these inno­va­tions. It sees that offices that are mak­ing good use of the tech avail­able, such as sen­sors to con­trol tem­per­a­ture, light­ing and IoT, have the high­est sat­is­fac­tion with their work­place because it is a com­fort­able place for peo­ple to work in.

Both the qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive research shows that rather than iso­lat­ing and alien­at­ing work­ers as one might assume, work­place tech­nol­o­gy can bring them togeth­er and facil­i­tate greater lev­els of col­lab­o­ra­tion and inno­va­tion.

Of course, a mul­ti­tude of fac­tors will equip the work­place for future busi­ness suc­cess and each organ­i­sa­tion will con­tin­ue to have its own pri­or­i­ties based on its work­force and out­puts. But we are con­fi­dent that what suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es will all have in com­mon is that they have shift­ed work­place fur­ther up the val­ue chain.

The rapid changes in technology reinforce the fact that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all workplace

If tech and workplace enable, then tech, workplace and culture empower

With careful leadership consideration, the tech-enabled workplace can become the most humane workplace