Getting the Workspace right

Here we ask what’s really important when considering how your workspace will evolve in a way which continually meets the needs of your business – and most critically – of the people who make up your workforce.

Believe in the workforce

We believe that workforce performance is the most critical success factor in business today. Effective collaboration, a strong communications culture, the ability to act decisively to the limits of responsibility – these are the hallmarks of a stimulated, motivated and high-performance workforce. It is the quality of the workforce which sets one organisation apart from another – not the technology they use.

Having said that - if you want an exceptional workforce, then you must provide them with an exceptional workspace. When you are thinking about that workspace, don’t just consider what makes it fit for purpose for the organisation – you also need to look at how the way in which people use information technology has changed. (Remember that people’s expectation of technology is increasingly set more by personal than professional experience).

Envision the workspace

Ask how the workspace you create will support your workforce in their desire to excel. To envision the workspace, you need to look forwards, to anticipate future need. Your vision will be framed not only by what the ‘organisation’ expects: it must also be driven by an understanding of what the individual needs.

The workspace itself must also be able to deal with the new reality in which private and professional life co-exists. We work longer and more flexible hours, and we work across more locations: we must find ways to dovetail the technology we use in our professional and private lives. This is no longer true just for the high-flying executive: any ambitious employee is equally keen to keep involved from outside the office or branch.

The workspace must give the workforce what it needs wherever and whenever it needs it. It must be secure, and it must also allow people to work in an increasingly media-rich world in which the barriers between personal life and work life are softer than ever.

To balance the need for both individualisation and enterprise rigour, the workspace must be flexible and agile. The demand for individualisation is not an invitation to anarchy. It is the opposite – standards, definition and design principles become even more important.

The IT Challenge

In a world in which the boundary between business and personal life is more fluid, the challenges facing enterprise IT have changed. If the organisation is to attract and retain the people it needs in high-value roles, it must ensure that their personal expectations of IT are met: just as our working lives extend into our private lives, so we expect to keep connected to our private lives during the working day.

The business, however, remains the driver and business does not sit still: when new products or services are ready for launch, or when a major business change is on the horizon, the ‘IT people’ had better be ready.

Being able to provide continuity is as important as being able to manage change. Business does not want any IT surprises and will push for higher and higher levels of service too: as people’s use of technology in their private lives becomes increasingly sophisticated, their expectations at work are constantly raised.

This creates major challenges. The complexity of sustaining and managing day-to-day operations has reached unprecedented levels. Resources are never enough and the squeeze is always on – apart from anything else, how do you keep pace with innovation in this scenario?

The questions we must ask

When Getronics sits down with its clients to consider the big picture for the evolving workspace - at how to build and sustain it – four perspectives feature time and again:

• People - start by looking at roles and behaviour – by understanding what individuals and communities of workers need to perform exceptionally in their jobs. Be prepared to learn from the workforce rather than imposing assumptions.
• Risk - all change involves risk, and you need to ensure that this can be minimised on any major change project. Standards lie at the absolute core of risk management, and for this reason we will strongly recommend that you steer policy away from more traditional ad hoc service approaches.
• Cost - it’s not about added-value versus reduced cost: any workspace project must achieve both. Make sure that there is an effective framework for understanding the real costs of any engagement, with realistic and quantified ROI as an essential element of the equation.
• Technology - When considering technology, it’s more important to help form the overall strategy of choice than to select the individual products. Establish a non-disruptive integration path, which helps you evaluate emerging and innovative technologies for your enterprise environment.

Framing the overall examination of workspace evolution around these themes helps ensure that we don’t lose site of the real business priorities. The actual detail of technology choice and of how you choose to manage it is critical, but it must not obscure the real priority – how to give people the tools they need to work at their best, in a way which is cost-effective and reliable.

Success

We have given you a flavour of how Getronics approaches creating workspace excellence with its clients and we’ve introduced the four areas which we believe to be absolutely critical for success.

Above all, perhaps, it’s important to think seriously now about how your workforce’s personal experience of technology is going to change their expectations of how technology will help them achieve their best at work.