September 13, 2016 - Mike Dilke
I recently spoke with some experts and tried to get to the bottom of how to create a workplace that is both efficient and a fun place to be. It was very illuminating and the transcript of the whole discussion is below. The participants were Kursty Groves, workplace consultant, Tim Hanwell of Office Works and Martin Coyd – all experts in their fields.
Kursty Groves – can be contacted via her website http://www.kurstygroves.com/ . She has just published a book called ‘Spaces for Innovation, Science and Design of Inspiring Environments.’
Martin Coyd – his email address is coyd@blueyonder.co.uk
Tim Hanwell – his email address is tim@officeworks.co.uk and the website is http://officeworks.co.uk/
MIKE DILKE
Hello everybody. Welcome to a discussion on the future of the office, where we hope to explore the ways that the office might evolve, and make it more efficient, and also a fun place to be. I’m Mike Dilke and I have a panel of experts with me, and I think the first thing to do would be to ask you to introduce yourselves and, please, when you do that, don’t hold back, let the listeners know how expert you are any why you’re here. So I’ll start to my right, please, Kursty.
KURSTY GROVES
Hi Mike, I’m Kursty Groves. I have a bit of an interesting background in that I started off life as a designer but now I’m an innovation consultant with a specific interest in space and environment and I am particularly interested in how people interact with physical environment when it comes to work. So I’m all about creating an inspiring work environment so that people can do their best work. I am just about to launch my second book, which is called “The Spaces for Innovation”, and that goes into quite a lot of depth around the science and design of space to help people to do great work.
MIKE DILKE
Excellent, very good. At the end please make sure that I remember to mention the book again. Okay, moving on to Martin please.
MARTIN COYD
Hi, I’m Martin Coyd, I’m Head of Health and Safety for Lend Lease in Europe; Lend Lease are a global property infrastructure company. I am also Chair of Build UK Health Working Group, which is 27 principal contract organisations and 43 trade associations, with untold members. What we are trying to do is to look at our working environment and our working practices to improve, and that of course includes office space. I have a passion for mental health, which I stumbled into through my sport of rugby league. With the parallels between sport and the construction industry with regards to the need to perform and deliver targets, etc. are very, very obvious. I believe we can improve an awful lot of things that start to begin to have conversation around mental health.
MIKE DILKE
Certainly, construction is very fast paced and in my experience quite aggressive, it can sometimes feel like a rugby scrum.
MARTIN COYD
We don’t really do scrums in my sport, we tend to collide a lot so a slight difference. Construction is additional, it is a contractual thing and that cut and thrust makes it exciting but it also can cause damage.
MIKE DILKE
Thank you, we’ll come back and explore that later. On to Tim please.
TIM HANWELL
My name is Tim Hanwell, I’m an osteopath and have been for 20 years. My career has taken me through in to various places, I used to be osteopath at the BBC, back in the 1990s, where I realised that most of my patients spent their days sitting, office based, many, many hours, reaching deadlines involved in editing. And I realised that they were all getting similar symptoms. So I decided one day to get them into a room and see if we could give them some advice on how maybe they could all reduce their symptoms, because they were so similar. From that came another little company that I set up called DSE Partnership, which is going in to companies and helping them with their work station set up. So, how people sit and interact with their desk, their chair and their computer. I’ve since finished at the BBC but now I’m the osteopath at the London School of Economics. And, again, the same thing’s happened – lots of academics, lots of students, sitting for very, very long periods of time, often hunched over laptops. I’m continuing my work helping people to sit in a healthy way. This has also taken me on another journey, I’ve joined forces with a colleague of mine, Craig Philipson, and set up a company called Office Works, which is taking the health side of it a little bit further. So my role is the health of the employee at the desk but Office Works goes a little bit further than that and looks at the environment of the rest of the office as well – the light, the heat, the humidity and the people flow, and that side of things to make sure that the employees are in the best environment they can be.
MIKE DILKE
I can certainly relate to the academic side of that, my wife is an academic scientist and many of her colleagues have the most awful posture I have come across. So that is certainly an aspect of what we can chat about today. But, it’s again, much, much broader than that. I would like to move on, in that a few years ago there was a lot of talk about we’re all going to be working at home, we’re all going to be using technology. But it hasn’t happened and, actually, even the tech companies they don’t do it. A while ago it was Yahoo, I think, Marissa Mayer, she banned it, this was a couple of years ago, making all staff come to work. I think Facebook have just staffed a new office in the States, an enormous office, 2800 people, 22 acres, huge. So this is kind of a big turnaround from what we were lead to believe a little while ago. So, why has that happened?
KURSTY GROVES
I think there’s a number of reasons that’s happening. I think one of the main ones is that the predictions around everyone working from home was, I guess, technology driven and also a relaxation of HR policies around flexible working, people trying to achieve a balance of work and life. But actually what everyone has found is that working from home is not necessarily productive. I know, for myself, when I work from home I get really distracted, for example, by the amount of stuff I need to do around the house, so there’s one reason. But also more flexible working from home, people become quite lonely and so there’s been a huge drive around getting people to come back to work. But the most important one is that, I think, the biggest change is around the way that we work now has moved from being a very linear, systematic task based type of work to one that requires much more problem solving and interaction. And so innovation has become something that’s no longer reserved for, say, creative agencies, it’s something that all organisations, especially when they have what we call ‘knowledge workers’, need to have. And innovation requires interaction, it requires an alignment around culture and so, when you bring people in to the office to interact with each other, that’s what the organisations are trying to do.
MIKE DILKE
Okay, right. So, I’m just thinking about the innovation being ‘new’. We’re sitting in the Institution of Civil Engineers and I’m sure they would agree that innovation is not that new, it’s been going on for a long time.
KURSTY GROVES
Yes, I’m not saying that innovation is new, I’m saying that organisations are realising that actually they need to innovate in order to survive, and the Institution of Civil Engineers would be one of the first to agree with that, I think. It’s not possible to continue to survive if you aren’t able to think about what is coming next and how you’re going to succeed and weather change.
MIKE DILKE
That probably brings in this example of the Facebook office, where Mark Zuckenburg is the boss of Facebook, he described it as the ‘perfect engineering space’. But, to me, it’s one big space, it’s not carved up into individual offices. I guess there’s an individual space for the loos, but that’s it. My thought when I read that, is that sounds like work would be kind of a rather scary situation, which can’t be great for mental health.
KURSTY GROVES
I agree.
MARTIN COYD
It’s interesting, Mike, your vision of my organisation is to create the best place, is that what you say? A lot of people think that’s some sort of structure and build, and I don’t think that is a build, I think it’s the environment and the culture you actually create. More and more clients are coming now very early saying ‘what are you going to do?’ they don’t want to look at a drawing or an artist’s impression. They are going to say ‘how is this going to work for us? What have you learnt? What ideas can you share? How can you work in partnership to create a working environment where people are productive, happy, healthy, well and life’s good?’ That’s very much the differentiator clients are looking for right now. We’re building new headquarters for Transport for London and the Financial Control Authority in Stratford between the shopping centre and the Olympic Park, and it appears right at the top of the agenda from the CEOs of those organisations, ‘what are you going to do to create a wonderful working environment?’ So, I think there is just an evolution going on. We can quote whatever you like, many organisations as you like that have introduced something called Wellbeing Days, you’re encouraged to take one day off a quarter. The construction industry flog ourselves from before dawn until our hands bleed and then we go home. You’re talking about having a Wellbeing Day, but the impact would be fantastic. People feel very respected, trusted and are making a difference with that. So the evolution I see is we’re moving away from rules and the linear you were talking about earlier, and encouraging people to fail. I think you learn more failing than you do just repeating the same thing over and over.
MIKE DILKE
Certainly trying new things that may or may not work.
MARTIN COYD
That’s the plan and some things do work and some things don’t work and I just think they’ll continue to evolve over time.
MIKE DILKE
I suppose if you can create an environment where, actually, if what you’re doing doesn’t quite work, that’s not the end of your career, and it’s seen as a positive. Certainly I’ve worked in places where, if something goes wrong, it’s scary.
TIM HANWELL
I think Martin’s absolutely right. At Office Works we look at who’s in your work force and what do they need to do? Let’s design the office around that, who do they need to communication with? What sort of people are they? We can almost split them into introvert or extrovert, so that maybe the introverts need to have their own space, a sort of cave dwelling if you like, and maybe they’re the accountants that need to concentrate, it’s all very computer based, they don’t want any distractions. Whereas the extroverts, maybe they’re more sales/marketing, more collaborative and need to be in an open plan office, sharing ideas and doing work that way. So, Martin is absolutely right.
KURSTY GROVES
I think this is really critical that this conversation happening right now. For a start, looking at those big external expressions of what a cool, funky, modern workplace should look by looking to Silicon Valley and then saying ‘oh my God, that’s what we’ve all got to do’, is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. As Martin and Tim say, it’s starting with people and what they need. And I think we’re all on spectrum, so yes, some people might think that I’m extrovert but I love my own time and space and there are certain activities that I need to do where I need to get my head down and be quiet and I might go for a day without actually speaking to anyone. So it’s really down to the autonomy and the trust and both the organisation but also the spaces to give permission to people to actually seek out the places where they do their best work. So the assumption that we are all going to be sitting at a station for 12 hours a day, doing the same thing is just no longer true. And I think these are really good pointers to say these are the kind of things that we’ve started to think about but each and every organisation has their own suite of issues and challenges that they are trying to face.
MIKE DILKE
I suppose it’s moving towards, if we’re trying to promote collaboration, which is a big buzz word in all sorts of businesses at the moment, and my experience is if you’re collaborating well with your colleagues you are generally happier. So to promote collaboration, it’s not about the physical office only it’s about the feel of the place. Again, I’ve mentioned my wife is a scientist, but she collaborates a lot and she keeps saying to make collaboration happen you’ve got to have a need, a reason and a desire. She’ll get up in the middle of the night to Skype to New Zealand, and her working place is pretty cramped, to be honest, it’s not that palatial. So perhaps this sort of design, of nice layout of offices, is barking up the wrong tree, maybe?
KURSTY GROVES
It is part of the toolbox and it helps to reinforce. I think you’re right, you have to start with a purpose, a reason, and then there needs to be alignment around large organisations with a CEO directive to say we want to create a place where people want to be and thrive from being there. Then surely we’re going to get the best work out of them and collaboration is part and parcel of doing the work to serve that purpose.
TIM HANWELL
Are we talking about activity based working here, where you work in different areas with different things? So if you need to get your head down to finish a presentation, you want a nice quiet space, maybe your own little office. Then maybe you’ll be sharing ideas with somebody and you need a bit more of an open plan. You’ve got a meeting and therefore you want a boardroom setting with all the interactions of technologies to link you up with people who are not in the office. I just wonder whether that’s why a lot of us now feel a bit like an office/a bit like your house/bit like a coffee shop, there are breakout areas, maybe a ping pong table, there are different areas for different work with different types of people. I think as long as we educate the staff to use that in the right way, then that’s a very useful thing to have is these different spaces for different types of work. From my point of view, as a master plan, it’s brilliant because they get up all the time, they move around and they’re being much more active, their posture is better, circulation is better. Maybe it can filter through o the mental health issues as well?
KURSTY GROVES
It’s a really great example. I think activity based working in a new-ish paradigm that’s been around since the 80s really, but it’s been something that has gained a lot of traction for the reasons that Tim outlines. And, actually, also, Martin’s point, it’s physically and socially, psychologically healthier to give people the trust, and giving it all the time, to choose where they want to work, so it’s great for your psychological wellbeing. There’s a really, really fantastic example of this though in Australia, a group of people called MediBank, they used to be a government organisation, they were all about health insurance. When they moved private they completely realigned around their purpose and it was to become all about ASHE rates, so giving to the world, helping them to prevent broad physical, psychological. But what they wanted to do was to reflect that as well for members, for all the people that worked for them are part of that big directive, it was all real estate consolidation going on as well as this, but they started activity based work and you’d think that, exactly as Tim says, actually by getting up and moving from place to place, depending on the type of work you’re doing, you’re naturally breaking up that whole 8 hours sitting. There’s a great expression, ‘sitting is the new smoking’, it’s the thing that’s one of the biggest health issues we’re facing. However, MediBank took it another step further and made it their own. I’ve seen activity based working flop dismally because it’s almost as if this kind of ‘ping pong table/breakout’ and all these different wacky spaces have been forced upon people, when actually the tasks that those people do need is literally to sit for a long time and just collaborate with the person next to them. And so actually they’ve got a very different set of issues around it, so I think it’s really important to use maybe that as a model, but then to really understand what your people need.
MIKE DILKE
I had a thought about it, actually, which Martin may well have come across. Because I’ve reached a milestone, at the weekend I had my 50th birthday, but my thought was, older people (and actually, maybe even a bit younger than me), do they like to go to the same desk and have a picture of their wife, their kids, and this kind of thing? Is it a little bit unsettling to have to go to different desks? To find a desk? Do younger people take to it? Maybe more traditional professions, like construction and banking? What are your thoughts?
MARTIN COYD
I don’t think it’s age related, we just have preferences. You fill in this psychometric profile and all this type of thing and I like to think I’m quite young in my outlook on life. My PA keeps saying ‘this is your desk, sit down’, so I’m not drawn to a desk and I certainly don’t have pictures of my children on it. So I don’t think it’s age.
MIKE DILKE
So it’s not a problem, but just the way I am possibly?
MARTIN COYD
If you look at us, we’ve all got communication devices at the end of our arms right now. I’ve got two, a blue one and a red one, one’s work and one’s pleasure. My wife asked me which one she’s on, and the answer is both. But you can have anything instantly, right now. For me it’s the biggest plague and burden of our life, I coach kids playing sport, and the pressure teenagers are now in to achieve in everything they do in life is incredible. It’s all about achievement, it’s instant and measureable, it goes on some form of social media, whatever your preference is this month. Some kids do all of the social media and repeat the same message – ‘I am doing this right now’. And I think this is just unbelievable, and then there’s the how you look thing, and there’s whether you belong thing, so this constant communication, incoming and outgoing, all day every day, for me is the biggest issue we have right now. I personally like space, solitude is one thing, but I enjoy being able to think things through.
KURSTY GROVES
Alone with your thoughts?
MARTIN COYD
Yes, and I work close to Regent’s Park and make an effort to get in to Regent’s Park and just get away from this thing at the end of your arm, or a keyboard, or the screen, or whatever it might be, and have that, break up your day so different things happen.
MIKE DILKE
Do you have clients trying to make the same thing happen with their offices?
MARTIN COYD
Part of the structure thing with [recording breaks up slightly] South East Workplace is because of the green of the park and the way that’s been tidied up and we had the opportunity to get out and do either physical activity, or just be in an open space is important. It’s what we are going to do on top of sitting at our workstations and pumping out our pulp fiction?
TIM HANWELL
It’s not an age thing. I think it’s a task, you want some space, it doesn’t matter what age you are, you want some space you get some space. If you’re happy to be in the open plan thing then that’s also fine. I just wonder whether maybe the people who are towards the end of their career have been so used to having their own office that it becomes habit. The youngsters are coming in and it’s different for them. But I think they probably too also need some space, by themselves, to get away from the constant bombardment of social media and email and everything else, just so they can sit down and concentrate. So I remember I was at a conference once, and we were discussing getting away from your own space and hot-desking. At the end of it, any questions, and this guy said ‘wait a minute, where’s the picture of my wife and kids going to go?’ And somebody said, ‘well it’s your screensaver of course’, and that summed it up to me really. It was the fact that he wanted the picture and the pot plant maybe in his desk, it was his own space, but now it’s all on the screen and you just pick it up and take it with you. If you want a picture of your wife and kids it’s there all the time, have it on both phones if you want.
KURSTY GROVES
I think that’s a really important point as well that you make Tim. I’ve not heard that expression, ‘it’s your screensaver’, I mean that’s a brilliant comeback because that’s all it is. But there is another element to that whole feeling attached to, or territorial, around a desk or a space, or even the opposite when that’s taken away from someone, that kind of feeling of loss. It’s like you were saying, it’s not because human beings are unable to adapt to change, it’s just that we’ve become very used to a certain way of doing things. Also, there’s a level of symbolism that’s been placed on top of things like corner offices, and then desks, and so if people see their desks starting to shrink, and ultimately being taken away from them, then often when there’s a problem it’s because there’s this legacy of what that means that hasn’t been dealt with.
MIKE DILKE
The boss has to do it as well? Everyone has to do it.
KURSTY GROVES
Well, yes, absolutely. If there’s a new way or working then there should be a new way of working. As opposed to approaching it from a physical perspective, and that’s usually when you have a real estate cost per square foot issue, and it’s been driven from that perspective and that’s when you have the problems. When it’s driven from a human perspective, i.e. let’s work better together/let’s make sure you’re healthier at work, then actually the motive’s very different, the outcomes can be quite similar in terms of bottom line, and actually save space. But the value that you’re creating through these interactions and the wellbeing is very different.
MIKE DILKE
Certainly, when there was the drive for everyone to be home working, I think a lot of offices thought ‘great, we don’t have to have so much space’. But now everyone’s come back in, I think people sitting around the table here need to get creative about how to make the same space work for all the people.
MARTIN COYD
Offices are interesting, the 9-5 day’s gone. We have challenges with some people working too long hours, but when it comes with flexible working you’re right, I think the phrase used linear working, you come in at 9 o’clock and by 5 o’clock you’re supposed to have achieved so much and you’re measured on how much, that’s gone. In my experience that’s gone. There are more and more people who are choosing to come in later and work later, and that might suit because they’re caring for a parent or something like that. And I’ve never heard anybody say ‘what time do you call this?’ or ‘where have you been?’ You don’t have those conversations, you’re judged on your outcome, your contribution. If you are delivering and you’re making a positive contribution, we don’t really care what hours you keep. We don’t have anybody working through the night yet but we certainly have significant number of people who are working beyond 7.30-8 o’clock but that suits them at this particular time.
MIKE DILKE
That in itself must be a big step forward, just for general wellbeing.
TIM HANWELL
Technology has allowed us to work everywhere, all the time, and I think what Martin’s saying is spot on because it allows you to drop your kids off at school, do your emails on the train, pitch up to work at 10 o’clock, that’s absolutely fine. Nobody’s thinking you’re slacking because they know that you’re trying to blend in family time and a bit of work time, and they know you’ll do it at some point. So, I guess before the mobile technology kicked in you used to read a book on the train instead of sitting at your laptop, so that was time off. Whereas actually now most people on the train, I see anyway, are doing something and it’s often work related.
KURSTY GORVES
That’s the flipside though as well, in terms of not switching off. I met someone the other day who was actually a taxi driver now and he had recently given up his job as an investment banker because two people in his team of six dropped dead through stress. So, it’s because he said they were always on, around the clock, and the intensity of the pressure was just so high. And so that is, I think, is when you see the financial industry’s starting to change that culture as well, that’s really important. I think the points Tim and Martin make about having time off and managing that always on mode is absolutely critical.
MARTIN COYD
There’s some great strives being taken in the City of London, there’s an organisation called the City Mental Health Alliance, which features all of the banks and the clinical institutions and service organisations, and they’re having exactly that conversation right now with some really interesting speakers; Gus O’Donnell came in, Alistair Campbell, another advocate of this ability to really relieve the pressure. There are now, I hear of bans on late working where people are going to collapse and also email blackouts, where the email machine stops at a certain time. I speak to my people and the challenge is that sometimes I get creative at 11 o’clock at night, if it’s got to come out, it’s got to come out. I’m not going to think ‘I’m not going to do this in case I offend anybody’, I’m going to do what I do. My phone is a marvellous thing, because you can delay sending, it’s an option in your Microsoft Outlook, which was a revelation to me, a 50-odd year old bloke from the North of England, having sent loads of emails and when I turn my computer on in the morning they all go out at once. So you can create that literal space for people where they have been free.
MIKE DILKE
One thing which you haven’t touched on, which maybe we can touch on briefly, we have a couple of minutes left. We’ve talked about collaboration, a fair bit about mental wellbeing but not so much about the physical, getting people to not just sit still for 8 hours a day. Obviously it’s bound up with both of those things, but have you got any quick tips?
TIM HANWELL
I’m a big fan of the sit/stand desks, I thought they’d be coming in a bit quicker than they are, they sort of appeared 10-15 years ago and I thought they were going to sweep the country. They haven’t done yet but I’m seeing more and more of them now. What they do is encourage you to sit for a bit and stand for a bit, as the name might suggest. However, you need to educate the employee otherwise they’ll get a sit/stand desk and just sit at it all day. So one of the tips we can do, and this is what I told some of the guys at the LSE actually, is to leave your desk in a standing position when you go home at night. So when you come in in the morning you stand up initially, and that gets you into the cycle of sitting and standing. What this does, it prevents you, from reducing the amount of time that you’re sitting down all day, but it also, on a muscular level, it’s very good for muscle groups. So the hamstrings aren’t shortening because you’re not sitting all the time, the pectoral muscles aren’t shortening because you’re not hunched over your computer. And over time this is really useful, helping to improve their muscular skeletal health and their posture which, I guess, ultimately might put me out of a job as an osteopath. But part of my job is to treat patients but also try and remove the cause of their symptoms as well. So I’m a big fan of these sit/stand desks, as well as getting people to stand up, mover around a lot, it’s very good. Also, get out at lunchtime, Martin was saying about a park, a lot of people eat at their desk, sitting again – get out. It’s not only good for your muscular skeletal system, it’s good for your mental health, also good for your eyes as well. It gives your eyes a bit of a break from staring at something that’s at arm’s length all of the time, go and look out into the distance and star up at the trees for a bit, relax the eyes.
MIKE DILKE
Very good advice. That was a useful chat and I think we should bring it to a close now. Maybe we could finish with just one quick question, going round everyone. It’s probably a bit of an unfair question so apologies for that. In the next six months to a year, what do you think (if anything) might be the next thing coming down the pipeline as far as the office design is concerned? Anything bubbling that is interesting and, with that, is the office slide now well and truly dead?
KURSTY GROVES
The office slide is a great symbol of gimmick, isn’t it? Yet when that happened with Google, they had a very interesting reason for doing it, one of their things was that they wanted everyone to get from A to B as quickly as possible.
MIKE DILKE
I didn’t realise that, I thought it was just fun?
KURSTY GROVES
And fun, but they had some sort of crazy software engineer logic behind it, and it suited their culture. But the danger is when people go ‘what it the next big thing? Let’s look and copy someone else’, I think that really it’s more an encouragement of working in the ways that we’ve described. Which I think we’re seeing more and more organisations adopting things like activity based working and I think introduction of wellness, things like supplying things like Fitbits and those activity trackers to get people to do things like walking meetings and to buzz them when they’ve been sitting down for 20 minutes or so to encourage them to get up and sit/stand, I think we’ll see that a lot more.
MARTIN COYD
The question’s around the design of the office. I think, going back to a previous point, I think what will change regards the design is the working day, the expectations of the working day and the more movement to encourage people to be different in what they do, create space and time, take pressure off themselves, more flexible working. But I don’t see a huge immediate change in the next few years in what they look like but more about what you do when you’re in them.
MIKE DILKE
I like that.
TIM HANWELL
I wonder, it might not be in the next few months, maybe the next few years, I think maybe we will find some sort of software where we have to tap and click and scroll less on our keyboards and mice. So maybe more voice activated commands and things and this will help reduce the muscular skeletal pressures on our forearms, repetitive strain injury and things like that. And I also, what Kursty was saying, software will encourage you to take breaks, so whether it be stand up or sit down, or use your sit/stand desk, or to get up away from your desk for a few minutes. I think that’s the next stage, but how long it will take to come in, I’m not sure.
MIKE DILKE
Interesting. Good, thank you. Lastly, if listeners have found this particularly interesting and are keen to contact any of you, please go round and give your name again and also the best way to get hold of you.
KURSTY GROVES
It’s Kursty Groves and my website is kurstygroves.com and the latest book is called “Spaces for Innovation, Science and Design of Inspiring Environments”.
MARTIN COYD
Martin Coyd, easiest one is by email which is coyd@blueyonder.co.uk.
TIM HANWELL
Finally, Tim Hanwell, Office Works – we design healthy office space and you can contact me by tim@officeworks.co.uk.
MIKE DILKE
Thank you. I’m Mike Dilke of Relaxback UK, and the website relaxbackuk.com. So I would like to thank you all very much indeed for coming on. Thank you for the last half hour.
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