In my last blog post here and an article I wrote shortly after for iCroner, “Journey of Leadership in the Workplace”, I articulated my thoughts and theories on how leadership has changed in the workplace. Lately I have been reading and reflecting on this, and also on the wider picture of influences on leadership styles, and started to wonder – how much does an organisation allow us to be individual leaders? How does an organisation encourage certain types of leadership style?

A contact (who used to be a professional dancer, like myself) posted on Facebook recently that a dance performance by GroupoCorpo was really innovative and very different. I was intrigued and watched a clip of the performance, and was underwhelmed to say the least. The dancers were mostly all synchronised, as in most group ballets or modern dance routines; the only “dynamic”, in my opinion, was the costumes. They were black and white unitards and the colours were divided down the middle of each person – one side of their body white and the other black. Now, I would say this gives an interesting look, but innovative?

This started to get me thinking – relating the dance to an organisation, and considering the level of freedom we have as managers and leaders to express our own leadership styles, what does this mean? Do we look for synchronicity and uniformity in leaders?

Many organisations use performance management tools for staff that aim to define behaviours that are desirable and encouraged, including “leadership”. Many organisations feel this is necessary in order to foster “right” behaviours and discourage “wrong” behaviours. In principle, this all seems fine, but what defines right? And can we define, for example, the behaviour “to be innovative”? Surely, in many ways, this is subjective, and if this is the case, how do we then measure it? These are questions that HR practitioners have been asking for a number of years, and the only real answer is to define it within the context of the organisation and its vision, and define innovation based on that context. But this is likely to impact on leadership styles and the freedom to express ourselves – if we are all to be defined by the context of the organisation and be uniformed in our approach, then we are perhaps stifling the innovation and talent we, as organisations, are desperate to retain and hire.

But what happens if someone is “different”, as this can be seen as wrong and needing correcting – in order to be seen as “good leaders” within an organisation, do we need to become like actors and only “show” the expressions and leadership of what is required for that particular organisation? I would argue that this is not the solution, and heard a similar position discussed at a lunchtime debate I attended recently, sponsored by HR Magazine. The panellists raised the point that staff want their leaders to be “human”, also referred to as “authentic” and, in the States, “holistic” leadership. Whichever term you use, it seems to me that people want leaders who they feel are “real” – someone they feel comfortable talking to rather than someone who makes them feel like they need to watch their “p’s and q’s” constantly.

One of the most common recruitment questions currently being asked is, “How do you add value?”, which implies an acceptance and even desire of individuality from future (and hence one would assume also current) employees. But is this what organisations genuinely look for and reward – difference and individuality in their leaders – or do they really want uniformity? It seems that there is a trend for people within the organisations wanting individuality but organisations as a whole lacking support for it, so it may be that they need to make some dramatic changes to their processes and systems to accommodate and attract real, innovative talent.

Jennifer Bryan is an independent consultant who collaborates with ArchTam’s Consultancy practice.

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This means new rules, a different game. Internet citizens now understand the enormous power of collective influence to get what they want, when they want and how they want it. Millennials – those born between the late 90s and early 2000s – were the first to embrace the change, and seize the ability to share media content in powerful new ways. Both a cause and product of this new online environment, a typical Millennial is more tolerant, educated and well-connected, and they like to do things their own way. They are less inclined to take orders and more into problem solving through collaborative interaction – live and online.

Alongside this in the workplace, many companies are gradually leaving behind their old-fashioned corporate structures, embracing the effects of these changes. Harnessing the power of networks is falling to management at every level, with a growing impetus to foster an ongoing, open, collaborative culture that facilitates freedom of expression and “entrepreneurial” spirit. Increasingly, companies are tearing down the walls (both physical and metaphorical) between employees, opening up space for dialogue, and allowing them to work together in a way that suits them rather than in a prescribed manner or quantity.

Since I joined ArchTam’s Strategy Plus team in Spain nearly a year ago, I have enjoyed experiencing this “participatory culture”. For example, our i-breaks (innovation breaks) – a weekly 30-minute session where random team members share new trends, e.g. in technology, sustainability, business initiatives. Every member is free to contribute when ready, and what they contribute is always valued. This community of ideas provides a strong incentive for creative expression and active participation, positively affecting the output of our work.

Here’s another example; accompanied by our client, Spanish developer GMP, some ArchTam colleagues from around the world (including me) got together in Madrid for a learning event hosted by the Strategy Plus team. Within a 24-hour timeframe, three teams were challenged to produce three proposals for the future of an iconic building – to turn it into a landmark site. One of these focused on aspirational office space, another on a high-spec technological site, and the third on a top-quality mixed-use space.

Every idea was considered, from each and every team member, for the final delivery of each proposal, enhancing artistic expression and team engagement. The result of sharing knowledge and ideas between the diverse team members was incredibly beneficial in delivering creative solutions, giving a holistic view of the information for faster and better decision making. The event also enabled us to build and strengthen powerful and durable relationships with colleagues around the globe.

It’s time to create a brighter future. I strongly believe that shifting corporate culture towards advanced collaboration plays to the strengths of the incoming workforce, and fosters a more interactive, creative workforce that is engaged and motivated, meaning a project delivery of any size can be handled more efficiently and effectively. A great example of this from amongst our clients would be Sony Music’s Headquarters in Madrid, now an integrated, flexible space for artists and staff to enjoy (pictured above). This new approach has increased the volume of Sony Music’s visitors while fostering closer relationships with their clients and label support teams.

Is your company ready to embrace the change?

Alvaro Ager is part of the Communications team at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Madrid.

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When I graduated in 2010, I didn’t have a clue about my future except for one thing:

Don’t spend the next four years drawing bathroom details.

I landed a job with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice (then DEGW) shortly after graduating, and a whole new world of workplace research, change management and executive summaries lay before me. I was on my way to becoming a “strategic consultant,” whatever that meant…

Four years later, I’m a little bit older, I’ve got a better idea of what a Strategic Consultant is, and I still haven’t drawn a single bathroom detail. It’s been a formative four years, with a lot of accomplishments and just as many mistakes. I learned many invaluable lessons that will undoubtedly stay with me, and it makes it that much harder to say that these are my last few weeks at Strategy Plus before embarking on my next challenge. It’s true; all good things come to an end.

Looking back on my time with Strategy Plus, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with really great people on all sorts of projects, each challenging me to think differently, explore further, and no matter how difficult, produce results. The following are the top four things I’ve learned as a strategic consultant (and how I’ve applied them to my life).

Don’t expect everyone to listen

It’s easy to get invested and attached to a project. I could spend months doing research and developing recommendations that will help my client be successful, but unforeseen factors could prevent the recommendations from being implemented. It can be a huge blow to the ego, because it feels as if all that time was invested and the client spent their money for nothing. It took me some time to realize that this wasn’t the case – the client paid for expertise and advice, and what I have done is to provide the best recommendations for their success. It may eventually get implemented, but that’s all that the client asked for. Like opinions, people may ask you for them but they don’t necessarily have to listen to you.

Change is scary, but worthwhile

No matter how beneficial a recommendation may be, if it disrupts daily life in just the smallest way, prepare for resistance. Understandably – you work long enough doing something, you’ll start to understand how things work, you can predict outcomes, and eventually you develop a sense of control. Change is scary because it’s risky. Change asks you to abandon that control and do something different and foreign, something that may not have been done before so there is no precedent, no example to compare to. But what is life without risk? The thing with risks is this: there’s a chance that things may go poorly, or really, really well. And even if it isn’t what you’d hoped, you will have learned one way not to do things and you can bet the next attempt will be better.

Money doesn’t change ideas

Don’t get me wrong, money is a very real factor in consulting. It can either limit how much time you invest or offer you opportunities to try something different, or on a larger scale. However, I think that’s about all that money should affect: the scale of the work, not the quality. Whether the budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars, or just a few thousand, if I’m not giving it my all, I’m doing it wrong. Develop ideas and recommendations at the highest quality possible because at the end of the day, money doesn’t create ideas, you do.

Creativity is a choice

Let’s lay it out on the table. It’s clear that in this career (and in life), people may not listen to my valued opinion, people may resist and oppose me, and circumstances might prevent me from executing my ideas exactly how I envisioned, but none of this should stop me from creating great things and ideas. Why? Because, put simply, I don’t have control over those external factors. All I can control is how I adapt to situations, and what I choose to do from that point on. Not every project will be glamorous but there are always opportunities for creativity, even if you’re tackling the same issue on three different projects. I know it’s easier said than done, but I’ve learned, and truly believe, that creativity is only limited by how much you’re willing to do and how far you’re willing to explore.

–

Being a strategic consultant has shown me many new things and taught me a great deal about people as well as, even more so, about myself. As I prepare for an indefinite adventure exploring the country by myself, I can’t stop thinking about how foreign it will be and how this trip will completely force me out of my comfort zone. It’s exciting and intimidating, but after writing this, I realize I may be more prepared for it than I think.

Danny Tran is a consultant at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in San Francisco.

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With devices becoming increasingly portable and fast, we can now access our work almost everywhere, seemingly only dependant on wifi connection. Technology’s greatest impacts in the way in which we work are often cited as the ability for greater precision, consistency and for easy communication – with one click we can connect with people across the globe at any time of day, making it far easier to do business with companies worldwide – but what about the impact on office culture?

The ease of sending emails is overriding the office worker’s impulse to pick up the phone or walk over to someone’s desk – many of our clients complain of “email culture”, with clogged inboxes and endless “reply-all”. This begs the question of whether new technology has influenced our business culture or business culture is influencing how we use new technology.

It seems to me that, because we have access to information instantaneously anytime, we also seek this from people as well as technology. There have probably been times when we can all admit to wondering why someone hasn’t responded to our email immediately!

Whilst it’s useful to stay connected, being able to access five different communication methods – from messaging to face time on our smart phones – also means we have to think harder about our work/life balance. To resist checking emails away from the office, when it’s so quick and easy to do so, is more difficult than it may seem. Has it become the norm for our working hours and own time to become blurred?

This blurring of boundaries can also work the other way, with many of the most popular workplaces bringing elements of home-life into their culture and design. In a recent list published on Glassdoor, based on both a survey of workers’ opinions on the pros and cons of holding a job at their company, as well as ratings on how satisfied they are there, the top three companies (Google, Bain & Co. and Nestle Purina) were all supported by employee comments citing things like “beautiful campus” and “excellent culture”, with employees at Nestle Purina even able to bring pets into the workplace. Employees clearly place high value on being able to bring elements of their home and social life into the workplace, and employers are increasingly finding ways to offer this.

So what does this mean for our clients and our workplace designs? How can we maximise the benefits to the merging of work and home life and what does this mean for the future of offices? For example, an approach of 50:50 workspace and social space could enable us to interact and work in a less formal manner, and as long as deadlines are met and the work is done, why should we not embrace a flexible workday?

Although it has both benefits and limitations, technology can only be what we make of it, and so it is imperative that we understand the best ways to make it work for us and for our clients

Amy Bourne (amy.bourne@archtam.com) is a designer at ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in London. 

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Isn’t this wonderful? They had fun in doing this just for its own sake. Not for a purpose, not for money, not for anything or anyone. I’d like to ask you to consider two questions, and be honest!

1) When did you last feel something like this?

2) Was it at work?

There’s a theoretical concept for the state I just described: flow. In my last blog entry, “The upward spiral”, I figured out that flow is a positive state that can make us more creative.

More precisely, flow is characterized by the following components:

• An optimal balance between your abilities and the requirements of the task. This match occurs at a high level of both, so that you perceive the task as challenging, but achievable.
• Whilst performing the task, you get immediate feedback, so you always know what to do next and keep momentum.
• Concentration occurs automatically, you do not have to force yourself.
• You forget about time – performing the task, you do not know how long you’ve been involved with it, hours can seem like minutes.
• You may even perceive yourself as “one” with the activity.

Because of these positive experiences, flow is not only good for you, but also for your performance and learning successes.

Flow is often reported for passionate leisure activities, just like the ice skating I saw. But the interesting thing for us is that in office work flow is also possible. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, intellectual father of the flow concept, studied flow at work in many professions, for example surgeons, engineers, architects, musicians, chemists, and authors. He found that people in all of these professions experience flow because they modify their jobs. They modify the meaning and the content so that they have the most opportunities to experience flow and thus, the most fun doing their jobs. You can always change little things in your job, like changing the order of tasks or deciding to ally with selected colleagues or clients for a specific purpose. Thus, flow should not only be possible if you are a surgeon etc., but in all professions.

I had the opportunity to interview a few colleagues about what they need to experience flow at work and what is detrimental to flow, and got the following feedback.

“Flow boosts creativity, provided you have expertise” A consultant told me that he experiences flow when he faces a new, challenging task and at the same time recognizes that he can use his experience from earlier jobs or projects to approach this task. The creativity and the knowledge transfer produce an extremely positive and motivated mood.

“Flow can easily be interrupted” An app programmer told me that flow requires a state of total concentration. In app programming, every interruption can lead to a break of thought that increases the risk for application failure, like in a “swiss cheese model”. To enable flow in highly concentrated individual work, the programmer uses the following strategies:

• Listening to music via headphones to set a positive mood and to prevent distraction (louder music if the background noise is high).
• Turning off email and instant messenger.
• Being available for requests in a much-frequented place before an important task.

“Flow can also emerge in teamwork” This occurs when colleagues perceive that they share the same “mental model”. This means they have the same understanding and the same knowledge background of a problem or task. Provided this is the case, collaboration can “flow”, but usually requires the following conditions:

• A clear goal, clear tasks, and clear roles and responsibilities.
• “Out of the box thinking” allowed.
• The opportunity for regular serendipitous encounters and thus exchange of ideas.

I’d like to thank my colleagues for these brilliant insights and ideas, which made this exploration of the subject a lot more vivid!

Finally, I’d like to repeat my questions from the beginning and add a third one – please let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

1) When did you last experience flow?

2) Was it at work?

3) How should space augment the possibility for flow?

 Jennifer Gunkel is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

The post Flow: doing what you love, loving what you do appeared first on Blog.

When psychologist Martin Seligman introduced the term “learned helplessness”, he proved the principle: if you experience that you cannot change what happens to yourself, you are paralyzed, leading to a downward spiral, no success stories, no motivation, no success. This was a substantial insight into the psychotherapy of depression. However, during his further studies as a psychologist and researcher, Seligman realised that not all individuals react to adverse circumstances in the same way – some tend to give up sooner, whereas others seem to have resources that prevent them from getting frustrated. In the meantime, a movement called “Positive Psychology” evolved, focusing on exactly these resources. Instead of looking for ways to cure mental illness, Positive Psychologists began to focus on ways to improve the quality of life.

We can transfer the core idea of Positive Psychology to the workplace. There is a simple recipe. Barbara Fredrickson, a distinguished expert in the field of positive emotions, suggests that optimistic thinking can lead to “flourishment”. This might sound a little esoteric, but it is a valuable concept in everyday life, describing a state of entire life satisfaction, comprising “feeling good” and “doing good”. Fredrickson posits that this state is enabled by the Positivity Ratio of 3:1 – that, on average, people who experience three times more positive than negative emotions are healthier, more optimistic, have happier marriages, better relationships and are more creative (try testing your own positivity ratio here!).

Bringing this theory into the workplace, a study found out that in successful meetings, the number of positive interactions clearly exceeds the number of negative interactions. Negative emotions are often experienced as more intense than positive emotions but luckily, for most individuals, the number of positive emotions experienced throughout their usual day exceeds the number of negative ones. And if the ratio is 3:1 or higher, we “flourish” (depressive individuals usually have a ratio of 1:1 or lower). This lead to an “upward spiral”, with motivation for new activities growing with positive experiences, and better motivation creating more positive experiences.

In summary, the recipe for fostering positivity and thus productivity in the workplace is: make sure we all have three times as many positive emotions as negative emotions.

How can we do this? Consider trying out the following ideas:

• Start a meeting by reporting reasons to celebrate and success stories. This allows participants to start off in a positive state of mind. It could help more difficult and tricky issues to be solved throughout the meeting. Research has also shown that individuals can enhance their awareness for positive events by keeping note of at least one good thing that has happened every day – this could be translated into a meeting by making sure to recap any positive outcomes as the meeting finishes.
• Allow “flow” by activity-based working. Doing something you’re really good at and confident in, but with a sense of challenge, can be an extremely positive experience. When these conditions are met, researchers discovered a state of timelessness and sense of total mastery, known as “flow”. Leaders can help enable this in the workplace by assigning the right tasks to the right people, but another important factor is the environment: a space can be ideal for one task (concentrated working in a quiet library), but detrimental to another (the same library to conduct a creative and exciting meeting). If it is possible to choose a suitable space for an activity, it is easier to experience “flow”, which has been shown to be a great enabler for creativity in the workplace.
• Surprise your colleagues. The tiniest positive experiences have been proven to significantly enhance our mood and change the way we approach things. Think about how you might cheer up others at work. A joke on the noticeboard? An unplanned break to have cake? Some flowers?

There are thousands of ways to bring more positivity into the workplace. What else can you think of?

Jennifer Gunkel is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

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I recently wrote a soon-to-be-published article for iCroner that outlined the “Journey of Leadership in the Workplace”, defining the skills a leader would need in 10 years to lead and manage in a more consumer-type workplace, as defined by the ArchTam workplace research. I argued that leaders would need to be able to redefine boundaries and rules, and ensure that they are established throughout the social context. They will need to have a high level of emotional intelligence, demonstrate benevolence towards others, have the intellectual capability to get the job done, and the ability to communicate messages consistently and frequently, so that staff are fully aware of what is expected of them, including the requirement to interact with, and be an active member of the organisation in a consumer-like manner.

With these ideas fresh in my head, I then went to the ballet to see “Cubania” with Carlos Acosta. You may think what does this have to do with leadership and the workplace?,  but I saw pushing, challenging and working within boundaries. Metal bars signified a box on stage and, one by one, each dancer would enter the box, dance, then step out of the box and watch the others do the same, until eventually they all danced in the box: sometimes in sync with one another, sometimes complementing one another, and sometimes dancing their own dance whilst still in the box with the others.

Inspiration struck, and I started to think that, just like in this dance, in the workplace leaders and teams watch each other, are sometimes in sync, sometimes complementary and sometimes doing their own task. For the future workplace, I started to think that leaders and managers may not only need to look to define boundaries from a task perspective, but also in a behavioural and personality arena.

Most leaders, managers and staff members have a “work face” that they put on. When they go home, they put on their “home face”. Cynically, this is thought of as people being two-faced; in a business arena, as being professional, or rather showing professionalism at work. In the future, if (as I argue in my article) we will need a more holistic leadership style, then we will need to interact with the whole person – more than just the “work face”.

So what does that mean? Expectations will change and we will need to accept that we are interacting not just with part of a person, but the whole person – and that means that leaders will need to lead and manage the whole person. A person cannot always be professional, so this will mean we need to be able to manage emotion. I don’t mean our own emotion, in the sense that we hide it – exactly the opposite. We will need to learn how to cope when someone is emotional. What will we do when someone cries? Will we pretend it is not happening, which tends to happen now? What happens when someone shouts? Will we run away and hide? Bury our head? Or face it head on?

How we deal with emotion in our personal lives now will transpire into the workplace as both places meld into one. The expectation of “professional” will actually disappear, as no one person will always be professional.

And so back to that dance – sometimes we will be in sync with one another, sometimes we will complement each other and sometimes we will be doing our own dance. Whatever the case may be, we will need to accept, adapt and cope with these new emotional boundaries.

Jennifer Bryan (jennifer.bryan@archtam.com) is head of organisational development within ArchTam’s Consultancy practice.

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How much do most of us move at work? In some offices, you can get the impression of being surrounded by zombies! The average adult can sit for up to 11.5 hours a day, with most of this time in the office – back bent, perhaps chair not set properly – and the only reason to move to go to the printer – if we do not have one beside our desk. Not to mention our uncomfortable office clothes, in which we must be careful not to be too active.

The consequences? Lower back pain, disc prolapse, gastro-intestinal problems, obesity and, ultimately, sick and absent employees. According to the Integrated Benefits Institute, US workforce illness costs $576bn annually, due to sickness absence and workers’ compensation. It seems reasonable to assume that a not inconsiderable percentage of these absences and illnesses could be linked to the consequences of sitting too much. Another study in the American Journal of Epidemiology even proved that the death rate among people who sit more than six hours a day is about 30% higher than those who sit for about three hours a day.

If we were not sitting so much, we would live longer and be healthier, and employers would benefit from reduced sickness and absence. So how can we get out of the habit of being stationery?

In one attempt to do just this, American journalist Dan Kois thought it would be better to stand all day instead of sitting, and tried completing all his office work standing for one month. His conclusion: “We are not used to standing anymore” – he did not feel better, but suffered new, different complaints – so standing all day seems to be no better than sitting.

What else can we do? Furniture suppliers have introduced plenty of products to the market, meant to prevent office workers from sitting in the same position all day, for example, the famous “Pezzi Ball” or the “Swopper”. One of the latest developments is the “Limbic Chair”, designed to encourage more movement. What remains to be seen is whether these products may enhance the possibility of accidents at work.

What we think, is that all this only fights the symptoms, not the causes, of us being Office Zombies. We need to change our entire attitude and behaviours. We need to reconsider physical movement at the workplace: away with printers at desks, away with lunch delivery services! We should change positions and spaces and stand up more often, ask ourselves if it’s really necessary to do all of our tasks sitting on a chair. What about a standing meeting, or a meeting while taking a walk? What about using the stairs instead of the elevator? After all, many offices have introduced Non-Territorial Working, where the nature of the task determines where you do it. If you have to focus on a difficult task, move and go to a quiet zone. If you have a creative meeting, move and go to an informal meeting area. Non-territorial working helps to hold us back from spending all day in the same position. This is a good start – but we can do more. How can we motivate people to use staircases – what does a staircase have to offer to make us go there? What new technologies might help us use the full potential of non-territorial working?

There is definitely a lot more we can do, and a long way to go. While I’m working right now (non-territorially) I am – what do you think? – sitting! What else? I am on a train, returning from meeting a client. It can seem as if the whole world is forcing us to sit all the time, whether we like it or not.

Did this make you jump up from your chair? Please tell us your story!

Anna Felkel (anna.felkel@archtam.com) and Jennifer Gunkel (jennifer.gunkel@archtam.com) are consultants with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Munich.

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What is the one thing you’d like to do before you die? Candy Chang – artist, designer and urban planner – lost an important person in her life, and her grief led her to ask this question of the public as part of an installation on an abandoned house in her hometown of New Orleans. The public response ranged from answers hand-written on the house, and feedback on photos shared by Chang online, to replica installations in cities all around the world. Chang recently shared her experience at the Sydney Vivid Festival of Ideas, one of a number of events attended by the Strategy Plus team.

Chang also spoke about how she had been guided into her field through what she called ‘creating your own discipline’, the bringing together of a person’s unique skills and interests to provide a distinctive offering. Chang’s work uniquely connects public spaces with her identity and sense of self, and unashamedly expresses personal aspects of her character and life experience. Chang frequently referred to Jung’s process of ‘individuation’, or discovering one’s true self, as a guiding factor in her work.

Personal identity is often suppressed in the workplace in favour of corporate brand, with work-specific clothing, focus on ‘objective’ interactions, and bland – and often sterile – office environments. Recent years, however, have seen our professional and personal lives increasingly blend together. In our Strategy Plus practice, we increasingly see people seeking opportunities to create their own disciplines through bringing personal interests into their work.

A common example of this blending is the rise in social media use – people are willing to publish personal and professional information on the same blog, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram account. Another is the prevalence of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), where people can use their chosen device for both business and personal use.

Organisations are increasingly recognising the benefits of having a workforce empowered to bring their authentic selves to work, illustrated by the rise of community managers in the workplace. A deliberate approach to community management in the workplace is becoming even more important with distributed and agile workforces.

The personal experience of work was a common theme in some of the other Vivid talks in Sydney. In Scoring in the Workplace: Curating the ultimate workspace experience, Gauri Bhalla from the UTS Business School spoke about how important it is for workplaces to promote personal authenticity and expression of identity through  providing increased flexibility.

GPT’s Sam Nickless, in The Big (SHIFT) to Smarter Working, articulated the value of internal social media as a key tool for building community in the workplace and breaking down hierarchies by democratising the flow of information. Workplace connections are now created through both business and social imperatives.

The divide between the personal and the professional elements of identity has been further disintegrated in a residential and mixed-use building recently designed for Antwerp by architects C.F. Møller & Brut. The concept is for a built environment which reinforces the blend between residential and office environments, and a key feature of the building is a rooftop terrace where both residents and workers can mingle.

Image: C.F. Møller & Brut

Rather than work crossing the boundary into personal life, there are more opportunities for people to bring their authentic selves into the workplace. Increased flexibility allows for customisation of the workplace to suit individual needs or desires, and environments where ad-hoc encounters and increased interactions are encouraged provides further opportunities for meaningful personal contributions.

Do you feel as though you are empowered to bring your authentic self to work, and if so, how do you do this?

Are you going to share this blog on your personal or professional social media accounts?

Monica McClure (monica.mclure@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney, and makes friends at work by sharing her fancy tea collection. If you’re not close enough for a cup of tea, you can still connect with Monica on LinkedIn or by email.

This blog was co-written with Monica’s tea buddies Aurora Braddon and Charlotte Fliegner, also consultants with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney.

The post Keeping it real at work appeared first on Blog.

As work leaves the confines of the office, organisations are looking to the workplace to be an anchor of collaboration that connects people and ideas. In a workplace landscape replete with huddle spaces, whiteboards and meeting rooms, collaboration is king. Whilst this is particularly relevant to the knowledge worker in the head office, what about the rest of the organisation? The back office is often relegated to outer suburban locations, considered ‘second class citizens’, and the work environment reflects this.

In recent research led by Strategy Plus, we looked to understand where the workplace is heading for this sector. We took a deep dive into the offices of a major financial services provider to give insight into how call centre, operational and IT project teams function. What we found was a culture aimed at bringing a highly motivated, recharged and inspired outlook to process-based workflow. Recognising that these values, attitudes and behaviours are fundamentally different to the brainstorming, meeting-centric, flexi-workers over in the head office, how might a future workplace experience look for these groups? We can look to a number of global trends to give some clue as to the direction we are moving toward.

Self-appropriation

In a workplace where decoration is an integral part of office expression, the maker movement provides an example of how technology is transforming the traditional DIY movement to cross the physical and virtual realms.  Environments, objects and services are being ‘hacked’ or improved to create new or highly customised uses and functions from a bottom-up approach.

Empowered employees

Traditional motivational tools such as leaderboards, performance statistic displays and team boards are getting social. Social networking platforms such as Mozilla Open Badges show how people are using online tools to freely curate one’s own professional identity in order to be publicly recognised for achievements and skills. In turn, organisations are using gamification concepts as a performance management tool to motivate and recognise employee achievements. Think LinkedIn meets FourSquare.

Mozilla Open Badges (Image: www.blog.mozilla.org)

Connected organisation

In the same way that museums are connecting with visitors through creating immersive and interactive experiences centered around visitor engagement, the office environment can be a mechanism for developing two-way communications between the organisation and the employee. Jake Barton from Local Projects calls this act of listening and participating ‘collaborative storytelling,’ and I think that organisations can adopt this concept to rethink how they converse and share with their workforce. In this way, traditional signage and messaging can be re-imagined to be a conduit through which staff can actively share and layer their own personal stories and ideas to the broader organisation.

(Image: www.jasonbruges.com)

One example is The Bloomberg Connects project at Tate Modern, which invites visitors to learn and contribute their own interpretations of the art to the gallery space.

Health

In a homogenous job centered around sedentary behaviour and shift work, opportunities to recharge both mentally and physically is a priority in keeping staff productivity high and turnover low. The value of natural environments has been shown to aid patient recovery times in hospitals, or to rejuvenate passengers on long-haul flights. Amsterdam-Schiphol’s Airport is one example which combines physical movement – indoor and outdoor gardens, stationery bikes double up as mobile phone chargers – with mental stimulation – an interactive virtual butterfly enclosure, public library, access to natural light and air.

Amsterdam-Schiphol Airport Park (Image: www.inhabitat.com)

While these examples provide brief glimpses into the future, they paint a much greater picture in which the workplace is a platform for people to curate their own authentic and customised experiences. In this way, I envision a workplace which responds to the unique needs of different employees, allowing people to create personal fulfillment and meaning through work, regardless of organisational level or department.

Charlotte Fliegner (charlotte.fliegner@archtam.com) is a consultant with ArchTam’s Strategy Plus practice in Sydney who worked at a call centre during her years at Architecture school. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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