TRANSFORMING - Konica...

WORKPLACES & WORKSPACESSYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES

Towards a digital workplace strategy with Konica Minolta

Paul ChaplinBusiness Innovation Centre EU

Konica Minolta Inc.

TRANSFORMING

TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 2

There is a growing divide in working practice between what people want to do with information at work, and what organisations are able to offer. It is a divide often born from good reasons, such as security and cost efficiencies, but also occasionally bad ones, such as ingrained cultures or narrow focus on the short-term. But whatever the cause, it only becomes possible to unlock new opportunities and create greater social value in a business through closing this divide.

To achieve this, we are advocating a change in workplace practice, so that employees are enabled by technology rather than restricted by it. This means setting specific design processes within, and between, organisations that consider both employee needs and broader system requirements at the same time. The emphasis must be on understanding what is happening in a specific workplace, and working with the people who see the problems first hand, rather than basing technological decisions on the description of a utopia which rarely materialises.

Our belief is that companies need a composite design strategy. On the one hand, it must contain user-centred approaches to aid understanding of how advanced technology in workplace design can meet employee needs. On the other, there must be a system oriented design approach, to understand how technology should be created, sourced and deployed within the wider organisation, and the subsequent effects of doing so.

In order to demonstrate this approach, in this paper we will consider the divergence of ‘workplaces’ and ‘workspaces’, why it matters now, what new challenges can be anticipated, and conclude with an approach to framing systemic workplace strategies which focus on meet the needs of people within an organisation.

To begin this exploration, let’s ask a question:

INTRODUCTION

What is the difference between a workplace and a workspace?

TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 3TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 2

At first, the distinction between workplace and workspace appears artificial, a simple matter of semantics. But the more we explored conversations with clients, consultants and within our own organisation, it became apparent that there is an important difference between the two.

THE WORKPLACE IS COMMUNAL. It is the responsibility of the employing organisation; all of the people, devices and spaces in which that company’s work takes place.

THE WORKSPACE IS PERSONAL. All of the personalised workspaces created for individuals; the tools, devices and resources they’re provided with to carry out the work they are responsible for.

The workplace is determined by the organisation’s policy, whilst each workspace is (to a greater extent) down to the preference of the individual. Why do we need to draw this distinction now?

In the distant past, workplaces were the workshops where things were made. They tended to be small and singular where a few people gathered under a master to learn a particular craft. Skills were learnt with physical materials and acquired through hands-on experience and observation of others; the apprentice would copy the journeyman, the journeyman would copy the master. Learning from others broadened capabilities on the path to becoming a craftsman.

The industrial revolution transformed many small workplaces into large-scale factories, where physical objects such as cloth and latterly complex assembly such as cars. Everyone worked around and inside the machines, housed in specifically designed factories.

Then, during the shift to knowledge economies, a typical office held both the workplace, and all of the individual workspaces of which it was comprised. These of course appeared in a variety of styles and systems, such as open-plan format pioneered by Quickborner in Germany in the 1950s, or the Herman Millar ‘Action Office’ which gave us the cubicle in the 1960s.

The uniting factor throughout all of these eras is that work belonged in a single geographical place. There was no need to distinguish between workplace and workspace because they were one and the same thing.

WORKPLACE OR WORKSPACE?


Until comparitively recently, the whole workplace, the entity that the organisation must look after, was bound by the physical location. The workplace was the site where every individual’s workspace was kept. It was easy to manage and maintain.

But now, the workspace an employee might demand to do their job effectively has a near-endless scope. Workspaces are highly diverse in location and time, shape and size, across your devices and theirs. How can you design a workplace that can deliver what every individual employee is starting to expect?

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We no longer have all our tools and knowledge in one physical location. Electronic data represents our work in many differ-ent forms and versions, often scattered over a number of systems, some of which we own, some of which are shared. We assemble, disassemble and rebuild tasks or processes, often repeatedly, both virtually or physically. This flexible practice is made possible by a combination of technology advances and evolving working policies.

What we create for ourselves are increasingly known as ‘workspaces’, and can appear wherever we want to work, within a set of boundaries determined by our role, company culture or industry. More and more employees are becoming nomadic, and are increasingly adept at crafting their own different workspaces. It may be through selective connections and interactions with other people, choosing their own mix of devices (both the software and the hardware), or selecting carefully the spaces in which they feel they are at their most productive.

This is the modern workspace sought by employees of all generations, and when done well it can bring with it the feeling of effective and natural interaction, despite being physically remote.

It has been pocket technology, much more than just portable computing, that has facilitated this mobility. The smartphone has become an engine that generates new ways to find and interact with others when we choose, or even to be found and interacted with when we haven’t.

What’s interesting is that real mass adoption of pocket technology at work started with the end-user demand, rather than the IT function supply. The locked-down, IT-approved mobile device disappeared quickly (and in the case of some brands, famously) as employees started requesting that their more powerful, flexible personal mobile devices be integrated into their work lives.

This has given rise to the most commonly heard phrases at work today; “I can do this at home, why is it so difficult here..?” This is the heart of the matter. As workplaces and workspaces become more separated, how do organisations design technol-ogy systems in support of user needs, not in spite of them?

The obvious answer here is to employ user-centred design processes to build the technological infrastructure your organisation provides to employees. Starting with well focused research at the point of use, talking with users and understanding their problems, iterating solutions to test and using data to focus direction and deployment are all core parts of the method that’s being increasingly used in a variety of different fields.

But only using user-centred design methodologies in isolation runs the risk of creating a bottom-up shopping list of demands. Without a view of the whole system within an organization, an understanding of the workplace and not just the workspaces, then the job is only half done.

– 14% of the UK’s workforce was working from home in 2014 – the highest since records began but still the majority is made up of self-employed people (IPPR)

– Research by Citrix indicated that employers in the US, China and India are provid-ing or expanding teleworking environments for remote working, more than employ-ers in Europe – almost 20% difference between the US and France.

– Six years ago, the proportion of people using teleworking outside working hours was higher than using teleworking within working hours. By 2015, this number balanced out – more people are working remotely than ever before (Gallup)

UNDERSTANDING WORKSPACES Contrast the origins of workplaces with where we are today in most developed economies. As individuals and teams, we are considerably less bound by office geography:


For organisations, the conversation and research around employees within workplaces has never been louder. There are debates about the value of ‘workplace happiness’, the meaning and value of productivity, and concerns about the risk of paying too much attention to well-being of individuals. Combined with this, there’s a new generation of employees coming through who’re not looking for long-term salaried roles, but more short–term contractual work on projects they’re passionate about.

Proportion of part-time self-employment in selected Europe-24 countries, 2007 and 2012

40%

35%

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25%

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15%

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Netherlands UK Sweden Germany France Poland Spain

Source: IPPR calculations using EULFS (Eurostat 2014b)

So at the same time as you need user-centred design approaches to understand current employee needs, you also need to hold a system orientated design view of how your organisation works as a whole, and will work into the longer term.

As an example, taking a cue from the Stewart Brand’s ‘shearing layers’, you might choose to breaking down your system into a series of layers, from the slowest moving (ECONOMY) to the fastest (SKILLS), allowing you to think about the effects on the workplace:

1. ECONOMY: Over time, the nature of work and its contracting process is going to change (e.g. nearly half EU residents have expressed a preference to be self-employed). If you want greater flexibility in terms of resource contracting, then new flexible workspaces will be needed. Planning your building and service infrastructure to reflect this shift needs to start now.

2. COMPANY: The workplace and workspace represent a basis for competition for new skills – if you need a new genera-tion of skills, you need a new workplace strategy which reflects a ‘to be’ state. Your workplace must be more open and adaptable to change than your competitors.

3. DIVISION: New disruptive businesses are taking workplace and workspace strategy seriously as a reflection of their values and operational model; for instance, AirBnB’s Chief Employee Experience Officer replaced a traditional HR role and runs cross-functional teams addressing workplace quality. Divisions must be involved in determining their own environments.

4. TEAM: If you want to assemble powerful cross-functional teams to address specific business challenges, you need depth of knowledge and stability, agility and adaptability. Great teams today are a flexible combination of long-term and transitory, specialists and generalists. To work together well, look beyond traditional remote conferencing and files sharing tools to form new workspaces, with new workspace tools and methods, especially around physical-virtual collaboration.

5. SKILLS: Digital workplaces will become more commonplace – you will need to understand what they are and how to develop a digital workplace practice, selectively testing and deploying new digital workplace services. Start to understand which skills are more prized throughout your organization: who become the de facto experts because they understand how to do useful things others do not.

UNDERSTANDING WORKPLACES


With our Japanese heritage, we believe in transforming workplaces as a learning practice, rather than big bang approaches across whole organisations. There is an opportunity now to build workplaces and workspaces like never before, which begin to take advantage of a new wave of technology, striking a dynamic balance between what people want and what is available through policy and tempered by legislative requirement. But this requires a methodical approach. Our suggested approach is as follows:

1. Engage in a method or process which seeks to identify common understanding of workplace challenges, for example around information flow, and assemble the ideal solution from the components required. This system-view allows a general map of the organization to be understood, from which user-research requirements may be specified.

2. Collect research from specific areas and disciplines, identifying from the people within different parts of the organization the issues and opportunities they see when it comes to their personal workspaces. This user-view of the organisation must have a wide enough sample to build up the map with specific requirements by role and division.

3. Establish a cross-functional working party with a vision such as ‘Workplace 2020’ and involve end users and works councils as appropriate, to test hypotheses which emerge from combining the system and user views. For instance, this may be trials of prioritised practices and technologies to gauge feedback across the cross-functional teams, so as to validate tools before making practical steps towards adoption.

HOW MIGHT THE JOURNEY TOWARDS GENERATING NEW WORKPLACES AND SPACES BEGIN?

As with Brand’s model, we can see that these layers are all related, dependent on one another, and more robust because of the different pacing. A sharp change in the fast skills layer, for instance, will be absorbed by the slower moving, sturdier team and division layers underneath.

To understand workplaces and workspaces requires a new dialogue, between the system-level workplace, and the individual-level workspace. This means an inter-disciplinary approach involving human resources functions, facilities management, information technology, finance and end-users.

In essence, creating a dialogue means establishing a two-way conversation which is educational, informative and transfor-mational, so that workplace practice creates the right environments for effective workspace management by individuals and groups. It is less about designing perfect solutions to be deployed once, but designing systems in which teams and people can safely discover and refine the right solutions as they go. This way, responsibilities become more widely recognised and shared and ideally, that workplace personalisation becomes enabled by policy.


Let’s take this approach, and see how it would work in a specific scenario.

If workspaces can be created anywhere, the workplace has to demonstrate special features to make person-to-person communication especially effective. As one CEO sees it, the workplace is much more important as an environment in which to communicate face to face, than it is as a piece of real estate. To make this happen is less a matter of policy and more a matter of designing different facilitating environments, however temporary. If the ideal facilitating environment is one which adapts to the needs of what or whom it contains, then we can infer that technology will play a significant role in helping organisations create these facilitating environments. Adaptive workplaces that rely on a combination of technology and capabilities should result in environments which change in realtime, or near-realtime, according to the presence or absence of people. They are design to act as an environmental chameleon which changes to blend in with whomever is present.

WHAT MIGHT THIS LOOK LIKE?

How can we use our three step approach to begin to design such a workplace?

Firstly, the system level map. This can be pulled together at a sketch level from a fusion of organisation charts, building maps, meeting rooms calendars, travel data and device/service usage. Every organisation already has the data to use as a basis for workplace and workspace adaptation, but often it’s not brought together to create a global view of what is happening in the current given state.

Rather than use this map to arbitrarily decide on what technologies will suit a business, it should be used to steer the second step, a granular, user-up piece of research that tests some of the hypotheses that the system view throws up. For instance, here are three hypotheses we imagine may come up in a system view around adaptive environments:

– Environmental adaptation – heating, light quality, air-quality, workspace allocation should be attuned to the individual desk level wherever possible, and optimised against the cost of used / unused space

– Context adaptation – individual files should be made available automatically according to personal or group requirement, aligned to calendar, project and process management systems, obviating the need for teams and individuals to search for every data file needed for a scheduled meeting

– Information systems adaption – the platforms needed to access different systems become invisible to the end-user. We will be able to access different systems without the need for different tablets, screens and devices – and the information we need will adapt to where we are and what we’re doing.


These hypotheses must be tested at an individual user level, rather than simply validated from the system level. How does it feel for people working in an office where the environmental aspects are dictated to them automatically, irrespective of whether it’s based on personal data? How unnerving is it to walk into a meeting unprepared, relying on a system to gather the right files and folders for you automatically? Are you happy to lose all personal devices, and work on public surfaces instead?

Matching up the workplace system view with a proper understanding of the workspaces people want creates a dialogue between the two realms, and in doing so, means you can learn what an ideal working environment might look like from both the company and employee perspective.

This leads us to the third step, the trialing of potential solutions within given contexts. This often means using new technolo-gies, or minimum viable prototypes of them, in specific situations that emerge both from a user-up perspective (“we want this to be better”) as well as the system view (“if we solve this, it helps a lot of people in the business”).

Let’s look back to our adaptive technology examples. The environmental elements (heating, lighting and so on) could be explored using an assembly of off-the-shelf consumer technologies blended with larger-scale workplace ones, to see how and if groups of people can create common comfort. Should it prove useful in small environments, this sort of test can be used to set the requirements for a larger more robust system throughout the organisation.

For context adaptation, you might set-up a ‘hand-cranked’ file system that everyone on a particular project relies upon – one person in the background creates a file system as if it were automated, to see how supported the participants feel they are. Before finding out if automation is the solution, it’s easy to use this methodology to test the real effects it might have.

Finally, for information systems adaption, you might create a temporary combination of adaptive services for a team working on a sales pitch, and track progress of the ideas, the feelings of the participants in the room, as well as the end result itself which emerges from a new way of working. Asking people to test a whole new way of working for just one specific project allows them to express ideas and feel confident whilst working ‘inside’ that prototype, rather than feeling anxious that they are permanently losing ways of working they currently rely on.


In our work so far, we have seen how employing both a system oriented design approach (to understand the workplace requirements for technology) and a user-centred approach (to describe workspace requirements) offers a framework that can both meet employee needs and overall organisational requirements.

Having specific design processes to follow, which makes the most of current and emerging information flows, means that different layers in the digital workplace are recognised in an open and collaborative decision-environment. It can be done in relatively small scale ways using prototypes of what will become robust systems operating at scale. This way, workplace strategy shifts from the tendancy to simply patch-in technologies to designing environments that have lasting, positive, measurable effects, that are widely adopted by people, whatever their generation, across the emerging world of work.

CONCLUSION


As a 140 year old manufacturing company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Konica Minolta may not be immediately associated with workplace services. Yet in fact, the company has been quietly present in all manner of workplaces – especially offices – over that time, and today is found in over 1.5 million locations in Europe alone, providing everything from multifunctional printers and copiers to medical equipment.

From this vantage point, we understand a physical environment can be in shaping people’s interaction with technology, together with the implications for cost and creativity. We work closely with leaders and teams from information technology and facilities departments, and more recently with human resources as understanding of workplaces and workspaces develops.

HOW WE CAN HELP

To further explore how machines and people interact, we have devised a digital workplace toolkit which maps out the way information flows between people, devices and spaces. It works by creating dialogue between the system level of the work-place, and the user level of the workspace.

Over the last year, we have been testing this approach with clients in both the public and private sectors; listening and learning in different work environments. Konica Minolta is pleased to facilitate such dialogue on workplaces and workspaces with our clients, and welcomes approaches from organisations with an interest in developing their working environments towards 2020.

You can reach our digital workplace researcher at:

[email protected]

Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbHEuropaallee 17 30855 Langenhagen GermanyTel.: +49 (0) 511 74 04-0Fax: +49 (0) 511 74 10 50www.konicaminolta.eu 03

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Further titles planned

– Balancing Automation with Human Regulation (June 2016) – Establishing Digital Workplace as a Practice (September 2016)

Further Recommended Reading

– The Changing Workforce, Nick Martindale, July 2014, Confederation of British Industry – How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand, 1994, Penguin – Workspaces That Move People, October 2014, Harvard Business Review – The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, 2008, Penguin – Self Employment in Europe, 2015, IPPR – Five trends that are dramatically changing work and the workplace, Knoll, 2011 – Four fundamentals of workplace automation, Chui, Manyika and Miremadi, McKinsey

Quarterly, November 2015 – Gallup Workplace Study, US Sample, August 2015

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