What is the workplace consultancy process?

Developing new working strategies and intelligent office design must be well informed and tailored to suit your individual business, and staff, needs. This process relies on accurate, reliable data gathered from assessing your current workplace and workers. This is often referred to as workplace consultancy and is made up of several different elements which provide a window into your workplace and where the best opportunities to improve exist. In partnership with our strategic partner, Hannah Nardini, we have highlighted some of the key steps of workplace consultancy which will help to unlock the full potential of your new, or existing, office space.

Learning about your company DNA

The first place to start is through a leadership workshop or briefing session. This is where the key project champions and senior stakeholders can get together to begin outlining what is most important to their organisation. The workshop is broken into two clear stages: The first is to understand the aspirations and organisational challenges and the second stage is built around activities to test ideas and gain an understanding of likes and dislikes.

We begin gathering data a space occupancy study (SOS) which is a good way of collecting physical raw data based upon your current workplace performance. Typically held over a 10 -day period, this study enables us to see what your levels of utilisation are as well as how your meeting rooms, cellular offices, break out and general support areas as well as the room booking systems are performing. During this time, we will start to observe human behavioural patterns such as making phone calls in stairwells or how teams currently collaborate.

Workplace consultancy survey

The subjective data gathering takes the form of an anonymous online survey, interviews and focus workshops. The online survey is tailored to suit your specific organisation but would generally cover the following:

Demographics profiling
Personality profiling
20-30 different scoring matrix for the current workplace
How often do you attend meetings each week?
Culture and definition of current workplace / organisation
How staff travel to work
How do you feel about change?
How do you feel about your current workplace?
Any ideas you would like to share?
Staff interviews and workshops

The interviews and focus workshops enable us to take a cross section of all the data obtained to date and validate it. We will sit with teams to understand key differences in the survey data and SOS as well as gain a more thorough understanding of how their team functions within the larger organisation. The workshops are conducted in groups of 2-10 at a time and we would seek to work with around 10-20% of the organisation. These workshops are ideally conducted with a cross section of all teams from senior managers through to administration staff to ensure an even distribution of knowledge sharing. Department heads would be interviewed separately from their teams as we find this most conducive to obtaining open and honest feedback.

Collecting data from our workplace consultancy

Once the workplace consultancy process has been completed, all the data is collated into a simple to understand yet detailed report which analyses the findings and produces a clear model which would work within your workplace. This report will outline in detail:

How we set out to achieve your project objectives
Specific desk sharing ratios per team
Departmental requirement
Worker profiles
All essential support areas required to enable staff to perform their role better
Flexible working model suggestions
Strategies for implementation of agile working / alternative working models
Space budget analysis outlining space impact for decisions

With the output from this report, it is possible to start clearly defining potential smart working concepts to enable informed decision making. This report helps to form the detailed design brief that enables the project to move forward to the design stages.