{"id":2702,"date":"2014-07-15T13:01:24","date_gmt":"2014-07-15T13:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blogs\/work-follows-people-creating-spaces-that-work-2\/"},"modified":"2017-07-25T09:39:34","modified_gmt":"2017-07-25T13:39:34","slug":"work-follows-people-creating-spaces-that-work-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/work-follows-people-creating-spaces-that-work-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Work follows people: creating spaces that work"},"content":{"rendered":"

At our recent launch event for the latest issue of See Further<\/a> magazine, a lot of the debate focused on people \u2013 for example, \u201chow can we make space that suits both extroverts and introverts?\u201d and \u201chow can space cater for several generations, each with a different set of values?”<\/p>\n

I believe that the reason questions like this are being asked ever more urgently is that we are all starting to really take in the fact that work is following people. <\/strong>We\u2019re all probably familiar with the statistic \u2013 80% of an organisation\u2019s costs are its people \u2013 so it does seem counter-productive when a company designs its spaces according simply to cost saving, rather than people: how they work, how they want to work, and what the business wants from them.<\/p>\n

I wrote in the previous issue<\/a> of See Further about the link between happiness and productivity \u2013 happiness is a big factor in efficiency, trust, and attracting the best people in the first place (not to mention retaining them). But we know better than to focus on this alone, and occupiers are wary of fads that cater too whimsically to staff\u2019s apparent happiness \u2013 more than one client has, when discussing a brief, pleaded \u201cplease, no slides or bean bags\u201d.<\/p>\n

But leaving aside the debate on playful design (which Gavin Hughes recently blogged about<\/a>), there IS more to office design than fun. Lydia Dutton sat on the panel at the event and, talking about Argent\u2019s development at Kings Cross, London<\/a>, said \u201cwe want to create a space where people can live, work and<\/em> play\u201d. Also on the panel was Richard Jackson of UCL<\/a>, who commented \u201cstudents and staff need different things from our spaces; the challenge is creating space to suit both sets of needs\u201d. And that\u2019s before getting started on what the parents<\/em> of the students might want to see!<\/p>\n

So what we\u2019re hearing, in different forms, is \u201chow can one space be many things to many people?\u201d The key to this is asking the right questions, in the right order.\u00a0What do we want to do with our space<\/em> is where occupiers often start, but a more urgent question is, What do we want to get out of our people? <\/em>Starting at this point, more questions become obvious \u2013 what kind of behaviour do we want to encourage? How can we represent our organisation\u2019s values? And suddenly there are a lot of important tributaries of information, all feeding into what to do with your space.<\/p>\n

So \u2013 work is following people, and workspaces will be all the more interesting for it. I look forward to seeing where it can go next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Nicola<\/a>Nicola Gillen (nicola.gillen@archtam.com) is a director of ArchTam’s Strategy Plus<\/a> practice in London.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At our recent launch event for the latest issue of See Further magazine, a lot of the debate focused on people \u2013 for example, \u201chow can we make space that suits both extroverts and introverts?\u201d and \u201chow can space cater for several generations, each with a different set of values?” I believe that the reason […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":2703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[141],"tags":[139,147],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tomorrows-workplace","tag-people-place-performance","tag-workplace-design"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2702"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.archtam.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}