In the concluding Open Forum/Town Hall session of Tradeline’s Space Strategies 2013 Conference, moderator Derek Westfall, president of Tradeline, and subject matter commentators Michael Sheeres, executive director of infrastructure for University Health Network; Nathan Corser, design principal at IDC Architects and a senior architect at its parent company, CH2M Hill; and Marte Byrne, senior facilities planner at Boston Scientific, led a knowledge exchange on specific question posed by conference attendees. This is an edited transcript of that exchange, featuring questions to the group, from the group, and responses.
- Who has experience in change management for introducing new space models and work cultures? What’s important for success?
Corser: The more simply you can convey the benefits, the better your success. Distill, demonstrate, and make it cross as many boundaries as possible.
Sheeres: There are three research towers that are happening in Toronto, and each of them is creating what we call ‘innovation spaces.’ That is not an area that is down in the basement or on the ground floor. It is connecting the floors vertically with a three-story-high atrium. The idea is to create an environment where collaboration can happen, because that is where the innovation incubates. Each of the three research facilities has done a different model of that vertical collaboration, and it will be interesting to see how that works. The other thing from healthcare is to look at way-finding, all of the places of interaction. We are using that much more for patient and family libraries; what used to be an intersection is now screens for folks to download, look at, and do their own research on whatever they are interested in as they receive their treatment.
Westfall: But how do you take people from one work environment to another? I have heard people say it is important to get upper-level buy-in, and there may be some folks here that are frustrated that they don’t know how to get the attention of the upper-level management to dictate and lead those charges. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for them?
Sheeres: It helps a lot to show people how competitors are operating in these new cultures. We have done that many times, even before we’ve had any conversations, so they can witness it first hand.
Byrne: You need to have a champion for the project, and a champion doesn’t necessarily need to be the CEO. It can be a director and upper manager, to help create that vision for their workspace. They own their team and they own that space, so they can help drive that message and bring it up higher for that top-down vision.
- Who here has implemented a major workspace change and is maybe six months or a year into it?
Keith Mock, principal, Ballinger: We have implemented a couple. The most important thing for success is to write it down. You need to brand it so that people can see it. It is one thing to communicate it and to get the top-level-down influence, but if you are not writing it down … There are also instances where you have the new workspace police who go around and make sure that people are following the rules of engagement. Frankly, it is the most successful means of change management that I’ve seen to date.
Westfall: You say ‘rules of engagement.’ Examples?
Mock: It is how you manage your workspace, everything from open environment etiquette (keeping your voice down if it is a quiet zone), how you have to go in and assign a space, all those kinds of rules of the new workplace. Clean desks is another one. If it is not written down, people are not going to go by it. If it is not policed, people are going to get away with it. And if it is not continually trained and retrained, then you might begin to lose it.
Kim Coleman, facility planner, Intel Corporation: Over the past four or five years, we’ve implemented more mobility, more unassigned spaces. Change management wasn’t incorporated in the beginning, which is a huge problem, so we are going back and doing some of that now. At the start, we did some signage, communications, and open forums for employees who are going to reside in that space. We have done surveys, but it is changing fast. Change management would be much better done up front.
Phil Tackett, senior associate, Little Diversified Architectural Consulting: One of the first things I learned from one of my mentors, when I jumped from the user side to the consulting side 16 or 18 years ago, was the role of socialization. We talk about change management today, but socialization is a step that happens even before change management, when you are talking about a new policy, new software, a new office, a new workspace idea. You usually have a group of core implementers who help you roll this out. They understand and have passion for why you are doing this. It is key to get those folks to not hide in their office but to meet with the end users. The end users are going to be scared. You are changing their environment. The idea is to engage them where they live instead of in forums and communications and doing events where we talk about this new change. Help them to understand how their lives are going to be better because of this change. That is the beginning of that change management process.
Randy Schmitgen, director of interiors, Flad Architects: We fully embraced the change management process early on. We understand culture, we understand change, but we have hired outside consultants to help us with this on a couple of recent projects. I am just wondering if you have ever hired external consultants to lead your change management process?
Byrne: We have. We are currently going through the process of creating a global space policy and standards, and using a firm that is out of Boston. They are helping us create that behavioral change along with the space strategy and the space types.
Corser: I’ve worked with clients who have brought in their own from outside, as sort of a third party to help them. That is the only model I know, but it worked great and took some of the strain off of the design team to try to be the ones to get it all together.
- A related question as we are talking about changing and communicating: How are people describing and talking about culture for a particular work or learning environment? We hear about interactive and collaborative. Is it like describing wines? Is it going to be different in terms of the adjectives depending on the groups?
Sheeres: It is interesting from a healthcare perspective, because it has all been focused around the patients and patient-centered care. The culture talks about having the researchers, the educators, and the clinicians all coming together in that environment. That creates folks who want to have immediate adjacency to the bedside, but how you do that in a planning environment can be pretty challenging. We are trying a number of different models in different areas in different clinical programs to see what seems to be working, how the clinical researchers work with the clinical educators as well as the clinical teams.
Westfall: Does ‘patient-centered’ mean the same thing to all those groups?
Sheeres: No. We have the physicians who are saying the same thing, and then there are nurses and patient care teams. It comes down to a lot of very successful work that is being done in the Canadian not-for-profit healthcare sector around taking that Lean Six Sigma approach and saying what is really value-added in the patient journey and what isn’t, and then figuring out who needs to be bedside.
Byrne: Some of the spaces we have are traditional: Accounting is over here, legal is here, research is over here. One of the models we are starting to implement is creating more team environments or team synergy, so if an employee works with a specific team three days or more a week, then that employee is occupying space with that team, trying to keep the team collaboration together, instead of having groups sit in their own spaces in their own departments.
Westfall: What other words are you hearing people use as they describe what they want?
Corser: It seems to depend culturally—literally culturally—where people are from. When a Vietnamese-based client talks about collaboration or interaction, they mean a different thing than the Chinese; same with Arizona State University collaborators versus P&G. I find that a lot of it is not so much words as it is the old-fashioned pictorial, diagrammatic, experiential stuff that they can talk about, things they have enjoyed. I had a huge global telecom client, who said, ‘I want you to travel to all the great hotels I’ve stayed in,’ which had these great spaces that he thought encouraged the sorts of collaborative and interactive and engaging types of workspaces that he imagined he would have at his R&D telecom company. That was the best way he could find the words to describe what it would be like. I thought it was helpful, because there were physical things we could witness together, and we could talk about the way people seem to congregate and not congregate.
There is something about the tangible examples that is very helpful. You can point to it as opposed to the dialectic, everybody’s word for ‘breakout space,’ or ‘war rooms.’ You don’t know which one you are going to trip over that is particularly offensive to that corporate culture or that regional culture. You tell me your words first, and then we’ll agree on what they look like, and then we can talk about it further. It is always different, because they shift.
Wes Drodge, project director, Memorial University of Newfoundland: I am going to throw out a couple of words of caution. If we are talking about change management in the context of changing software, the words that we would use would be very different than changing collaborative office systems like we are talking about. We are now changing culture as opposed to a technology. That is a dimension I think we need to recognize when we are doing this. The other thing I think we need to recognize, if we are changing what amounts to a cultural environmental piece, is the time frame. There is empirical evidence that to change a cultural dimension in an organization can take up to 10 years. So if we think that we can go in and, in the course of designing a building, in the course of a year or two, we can implement a whole cultural change in the dynamic of that organization, I would be careful.
Phil Lisotta, senior director of architecture, Qualcomm, Inc.: I did something with my leadership team; I said, ‘Here are a bunch of sodas on the table.’ There was Coke; there was a Mountain Dew; there was ginger ale. I said, ‘Which one of these sodas is Qualcomm, if Qualcomm were a soda?’ They looked at me kind of bizarrely, but in the end they were able to answer. They didn’t agree, first of all, which I thought was interesting. The one guy picked up the ginger ale and said, ‘It’s got a sparkle. It’s universal. Everybody knows ginger ale. It’s fine and it’s great.’ Somebody else picked up the Coke and said, ‘Everybody knows Coke. It’s the most well-known soda around the world. We want to be that.’ Somebody else picked up the Mountain Dew and said, ‘We want to be out there, exciting, tons of energy, and bulked.’ So being able to manifest culture with other things that are easy for people to see and address is a great tool. Trying to find the words for that culture is difficult for most people. That type of an exercise would help. You can do it with cars. You can do it with motorcycles. But if it is something that they can relate to like a soda, it is easier for them to articulate.
- Is anyone doing space mockups as part of the change management process? Can you tell us a little bit about the scale and level of detail?
Lori Ferguson, property project manager, Wells Fargo Bank: We have three major initiatives going on across the country where we are building large buildings right now. Our furniture standards team is trying to come up with the appropriate-sized workstations, panel heights, things like that. They have done mockups at one of the facilities to get not only the project managers out there but also the various customer groups, people who can kick the tires and test it out and see what is working and what is not. Whenever we are doing large initiatives, we usually do mockups.
Westfall: Does it work?
Ferguson: It does, because they see what they are getting; they are part of the selection process and they buy into it. I just wanted to add one more comment. For us, the culture that I have been hearing about a lot lately is that there is a sense of community by coming to work. There was that initial time when people were very excited about working from home and working remotely, and that has shifted back towards the workspace, where people want to come to work and they want to see their friends and their neighbors. We have seen a little bit of a shift back to that.
- For an institution without a space policy, what are the three key things for putting one in place? What are the most important components of that from your perspective?
Sheeres: The one that we would draw the most attention to is recognizing that the space is a corporate asset, just like finance is. Square footage is an asset across the organization, and it is not my space. It may be that I have the accountability for that or I am using it for the time being. The second thing would be the buy-in in terms of recognizing that we are going to have to have some rules of engagement, or some behaviors that we are all going to agree on regarding how we allocate that space. I have seen models work where it has been the CEO making the decisions, and I have seen the model work where folks come to me with recommendations.
- We have heard a number of examples of academic faculty in the U.S. having a different viewpoint on whose space it is.
Sheeres: I heard some great examples where folks are saying you can come to the table and talk about the space only if you can bring the funding with it. Part of the challenge there is that it can create the haves and have-nots. Then you’ve got to recognize, from your organization’s perspective, what are really the underdogs that you want to make sure get promoted and get space supported, regardless of the organization and regardless of who says they’ve got the biggest bucks to play with. Finding a way to make sure that there is a level playing field has been the most successful.
Byrne: Each site had its own space policy, so we are trying to put a global policy in place. United Health Group has a great space policy in place. They were able to design it as they built some new buildings, and designed it based on how they built their buildings. The floors are the same. The amenities are the same. It is very outlined. They have got the rules of engagement—keeping a clean work desk, being quiet in certain areas. It engages the people, and they know exactly what the goals are.
Naomi Meyer, senior facilities planner, Qualcomm: Regardless of whether or not you are looking to create a policy to determine how you issue space, or what types of space people qualify for, the thing that I find makes my job the easiest is that it is consistent. It doesn’t matter if you work in space planning or if you are an engineer. Everyone at Qualcomm can dictate to you verbatim how we go about issuing space. That is what eliminates a lot of the resistance to some of the transformations that we make, because people understand. They knew it was going to happen that way. There was no surprise.
Sheeres: A lot of people are using space standards as an opportunity to say, ‘I’m not entitled to that space type standard, but I am going to make the case for what I believe I am entitled to.’ That sense of entitlement is a real challenge. There needs to be the recognition that there is a series of flexibilities. You talk about patient confidentiality, so everyone who deals with a patient should be able to go to a confidential space, and ‘that is why I need an office,’ right? You want to make sure that you have a way to outline the principles that are really important and the standards that we want to apply, but there are the guidelines to talk about the type of work that happens and where you work and how that is most appropriate, without getting into the issue of entitlement or levels.
Meyer: One of the things that we find—it seems kind of silly to even say it—if you are moving people to a different type of office environment, they don’t know how to use it. Helping people understand that you are providing alternative places for them to work, and these are the types of situations where you want to use that space, is crucial. Just because they have always worked in a perimeter office doesn’t mean they can’t work somewhere else. It is just changing their thought process.
Corser: It depends on the circumstances. If you are working with a startup, as we often are, or a company with a large number of younger employees, you don’t have these kinds of conversations. A lot of the ones that I have heard are well-established, well-ingrained, inequitably distributed benefits that went on for decades that you are trying to back out of. You go into each one and you try to get a sense of what the community is already like and where they are headed. Who are they hiring at what rate over the next 10 or 15 years? Then you can begin to gauge in your change management scenarios how you are going to nurse those along, who will be most afraid, and then how many of those young people you can get around them. ‘It’s going to be okay. Let’s help the old guy out.’ There is a lot of that, a lot of persuasion through crowdsourcing.
Westfall: Peer pressure?
Corser: Not peer pressure, group encouragement. Team building; there’s another one of those words.
Sheeres: We’ve talked a lot about what the millennials are going to demand. I see an opportunity that we can leapfrog if we turn the organization upside down and say, ‘How could you better work, what tools do you need?’ and learn from that millennial. ‘What do you need to be able to work better, work more productively, be more engaged in the organization, more aligned with its mission and vision? And how can we enable that?’ That is probably going to create a different work environment.
- What are the metrics of success for space plans?
Byrne: We do some surveys. They are top-down-driven surveys so you get almost 100 percent return rate on them. It is really difficult to put a tangible on that. We do post-surveys after our meeting with the user groups. Sometimes what top management’s vision is may not be the same as that of their employees.
Westfall: So customer satisfaction is really your success metric.
Byrne: Yes, that’s an important part of it. The quality of the work and the space that we provide them.
Sheeres: In healthcare, we are wrestling with the benchmark data, because it is really tough to find comparators. What work is being done to really find out what is successful and why, and promoting that through the culture?
Corser: Depends on the market. If it is university, R&D, laboratory, or sciences building, what is their capacity to attract new faculty and to get awarded grants? If it is a corporate client with a lot of intellectual activities, straight-out attention, retention, and attraction rates. That is an absolute measure of the success of space plans, because that means they beat out the other people in Silicon Valley. At the other end of the spectrum is straight-out manufacturing, whether it is chips, sneakers, candy, it doesn’t matter. Dollar-per-square foot, what is our productivity rate?
