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Alignment is the fit between an organization's workplace strategy and their unique business strategies, goals, work processes, culture and climate. Alignment ensures that the more formal codes of conduct and the informal (and largely unconscious) social norms are consistent. In short, it’s all about the workplace being tuned and tailored for each organization.

To assist our clients in unpacking alignment for their specific organization, we first must understand the business, economic, cultural and social context in which the workplace ecosystem will exist. Many of our client’s business goals include greater speed-to-market, fostering innovation and creativity, operational excellence, and the attraction and retention of top

This is the second in a series of short papers on Allsteel’s AEEA goal framework, which outlines what can be achieved with a comprehensive workplace strategy. Alignment ensures workplaces are developed in context, and that workplaces support and reflect an organization’s unique business strategies, economic realities and organizational culture, as well as more global demographic, social and technological changes. This paper defines an approach we use to help clients identify workplace attributes that support the goal of Alignment.

The other three goals – Effectiveness, which covers the performance of the workforce; Efficiency to optimize the use of space, capital or any other asset; and Agility, the notion of future-proofing the workplace to easily adapt to change – will be covered in subsequent papers.

By Jan Johnson, VP of Design and Workplace Resources, Allsteel

The four goals every workplace strategy must considerGOAL #1: ALIGNMENT

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talent. Our job is to help identify both the current-state and their desired future-state, identify the gaps between the two and define what needs to happen – the strategy – that will help us get to the desired future. We assist our clients in defining and migrating to the future state, all while knowing it will (and must) continuously evolve.

In order to accomplish this, we first ask the organization to identify their business goals and how they plan to achieve them. The 'how' includes work processes and activities, culture and organizational structures that are needed to achieve those goals. As workplace strategists, we then translate the specifics of their business strategy into spatial and behavioral norms that help them achieve their objectives, including the space types that will support the work activities, and what behavioral norms are required for workers to work effectively.

As we conduct workplace research and begin to understand an organization’s business, the culture is always the hardest of aspect to decode, so we’ll spend some time here defining culture as it relates to the workplace. We all know culture when we see and feel it, but without specific tools to recognize, and most importantly interpret its components and dynamics, we have a difficult time being sure our recommendations are appropriate. Several of the experts in organizational culture and development have given us clues about how to identify organizational cultures, and even better, how they evolve over time in predictable ways. Simply stated, organizations vary in two basic dimensions: how the organization materializes power and how they handle uncertainty.

The chart below is adapted from three similar models1 and shows the ranges of how companies materialize power on the vertical axis and how they handle uncertainty on the horizontal axis; as well as aspects of an organization’s focus at each intersection.

Cameron and Quinn’s book “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture” provides a solid framework for discussing organizational culture. Their version of the above model also suggests that every organization has some aspect of all four of these quadrants in their culture, but that each organization will pass through predictably sequential phases where one of these is most dominant and the highest priority or focus.2

Managing innovationManaging the future

Managing continuous improvementINNOVATION

Managing competitivenessEnergizing employeesManaging customer serviceMARKET

HUMAN CAPITALManaging teams

Managing interpersonal relationshipsManaging the development of others

BUSINESS PROCESSManaging coordinationManaging the control systemManaging acculturation

Egalitarian External focus on differentiation

Hierarchical Internal focus on integration

Results Flexibility/discretion

Processes Control/stability

1 Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind; C. Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, Riding the Waves of Culture; Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture

2 Cameron, Kim S, and Quinn, Robert E, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework, Addison Wesley, 1999. In addition to describing stages of life cycle development, Cameron and Quinn also suggest that their framework is useful for identifying the major approaches to organizational design, organizational quality and effectiveness, leadership roles and management skills, and roles of human resource managers.

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The phases start with Innovation being dominant (picture a start-up focused on what they could bring to market that’s different and compelling), then move to Human Capital (and what kinds of know-how are needed to build a successful enterprise), then to Business Process (the systems and operations needed to manage the complexity or achieve operational excellence in the now larger organization), then to Market (to better understand one’s clients and competition to successfully compete).

A hypothetical example might be a tech company we’ll call Aveeza. As a small start-up, the founders initially focus on the “big idea,” or the breakthrough concept that will revolutionize some aspect of life (Innovation). As they attract venture capital and add staff, it will be important that they do two things: hire people who can bring expertise in needed areas to build internal competencies, and make sure they communicate very effectively as the team grows as no one person could know and direct everything that now needs to happen (Human Capital).

As Aveeza grows to thousands of employees in multiple locations, operating processes will have to be added to manage the growing complexity of an organization that size and to find efficiencies to drive profitability (Business Process). Then comes growth in what they offer the market and expansion into products or services, such as Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods (Market). Now Aveeza’s task is to once again understand what’s next before someone else beats them to it (Innovation, again).

If we apply this model to the workplace goal of Alignment, it’s easy to imagine how Aveeza’s facilities priorities would also progress from stuff they found at Goodwill or thru craigslist (Innovation), to more familiar office furniture (Human Capital), to Corporate Standards (Business Process), and then to being more innovative and hip to attract the best and the brightest (Market). Eventually, the organization will ask “what can we do to spur creative thinking about what we should be doing next?” (Innovation, again).

As this example of Aveeza suggests, an organization’s business strategy and workplace strategy need to evolve in-step and continuously overtime. If the workplace strategy is aligned with the business strategy, spatial and behavioral norms will support critical work activities. If the workplace strategy is out of alignment, the negative impacts can extend across the other three workplace goals – impacting the effectiveness of teams, the efficiency of organizational assets, and ongoing agility.

In fact, the example of Aveeza also helps make the case for our fourth goal: agility. Organizations evolve as they mature and as market and other external forces make it imperative to change. Agility is the notion of enabling the workplace’s spatial and behavioral norms to more easily adapt to those changes, that evolution over time. But more on that to come in the last paper of our AEEA goal framework series.

Workplace Advisory at Allsteel The Workplace Advisory team listens. We apply research and our extensive workplace experience to assist organizations in the development and implementation of situationally appropriate workplace strategies. Strategies that align with organizational culture and business goals, support the ability to work effectively, utilize real estate assets as efficiently as possible, and adapt to changing business and work practice requirements.

Jan Johnson is the Vice President of Design and Workplace Resources at Allsteel, helping businesses drive meaningful change in the way they work, through fit-to-business furniture solutions and consulting services. Email: JohnsonJan@allsteeloffice.com