The Spaces That Shape Us
Join us as we explore the profound impact of physical spaces on individuals' lives. Through interviews and expert panels, we unveil the secrets of designing spaces that shape emotions, boost productivity, and enhance overall well-being. Discover the latest trends, innovative designs, and strategies for creating inspiring work environments that foster collaboration, engagement, and work-life balance.
The Spaces That Shape Us
Unleashing Potential: Employee Engagement and Workspace Design
What if the physical space around us could spark our motivation, engagement, and productivity? In this eye-opening episode, we sat down with Cliff Ettridge, partner at London Brand and Communications Agency, The Team, to unravel the fascinating bond between workspace design and employee engagement. From the walls that surround us to the chair we sit on, every aspect of our workspace plays a part in shaping our work ethics, inspiring us to bring our best selves forward.
Ever considered workspace design as a part of HR? Our discussion takes an interesting turn as we explore the potential of creative workspace designs in revitalizing HR. Beyond just monetary gratification, rewarding employees in today's society requires a deeper understanding of their needs and aspirations. Cliff introduces us to his team's innovative approach of using co-working spaces to keep their employees engaged. Enabling purpose, mastery, and autonomy, we learn how simple changes in workspace design can foster trust and construct meaningful work environments.
As we wrap up this enlightening dialogue, we delve into the importance of considering neurodiversity when designing workspaces and policies. We discuss the concept of blended working, its advantages, and its practical implementation. We explore how offices can be designed to initiate discussions about customer needs, and how flexibility in workspace design can adapt to changing team sizes. From co-working spaces to education facilities, we share invaluable insights into designing spaces that engage and inspire. So, join us and unlock the potential of your workspace!
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If you're pondering how to optimize your team's performance and workspace, reach out to one of our workplace strategists at AW Spaces.
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Welcome back to the Spaces that Shape Us, the show where we deep dive into the topics shaping the future of work and our everyday lives. Today we're stepping into the world of physical space and its profound impact on employee engagement. So what do we mean when we talk about employee engagement? It's a very broad topic. I think we can all agree, you know. Are we talking about productivity? Is it about career development, well-being, collaborating, and also, why is it so important to discuss this? For any owners of businesses listening to this podcast, you'll be wanting to know how much should we invest in employee engagement and what's the return. And then, when we're talking about physical space, how can we really create spaces that enhance this? To help me answer these questions and discuss this topic today, we have two wonderful guests joining us.
Speaker 1:Ralph Etterich is a partner at London Brand and Communications Agency, the team. Over the past 25 years, he's worked in and for organisations as varied as the Body Shop, ibm, natwest and eBay. He's worked to engage employees with their work in markets all around the world and believe that it's the duty of employers to create workplaces where people can be their best. For many years, he has advocated for blended working, using co-working spaces, mega hubs on the home, as places where people can do great work. On the other side, we have Lisa, our head of design. If you've listened to previous episodes, you'll know all about Lisa, so welcome back again, and she will shed light on emerging trends in physical workplace design. So, whether you're a manager striving to boost team morale and architects sketching the next big co-working space, or simply someone curious about the spaces we inhabit daily, this episode promises rich insights and discussions, so let's dive in. Welcome, cliff.
Speaker 2:Hello.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for being here today. We've obviously worked together before. I'm really a massive admirer of the work you do for employee engagement. So tell us a bit about yourself and about the team.
Speaker 2:Well, the team is a Brand and Communications Agency in London and my role there is to lead the employee engagement offer, which means that basically, I work with organisations of many different sizes, just helping the leaders of those organisations understand how to get everybody pointed in the same direction and how to get the people in the organisation to want to be pointed in that direction and have a great time at work, because, I mean, ultimately, we spend most of our time at work, don't we? So we might as well enjoy it. So that's really the role of the agency. We're a creative design agency, but I do the employee engagement bit.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So let's go a bit more. Why you think that it's so important. Why is employee engagement important? Why are we even talking about this?
Speaker 2:I think there's a mention in how much time do you spend at work, far more than you actually spend, probably with your friends.
Speaker 1:We actually said this last time in the last episode 90,000 hours 90,000, there you go With those 90,000 hours in mind.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine having to go through 90,000 hours, 90,000 hours feeling bored, feeling demotivated, hating what you do? It's just not right. If anything, I think it should be a fundamental human right that people at work should be able to do a good job and feel like they're doing something worthwhile. So I mean that to me is why it's so important. It strikes at the very heart of us as human beings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So, in terms of any recent work that you're proud of, tell us a bit about what you've been up to recently.
Speaker 2:Recently Do you know what? I've just been working with a Portuguese convenience supermarket. Oh yeah, I know. They're based in Portugal, colombia and Poland. Now work that one out. I mean, how do you end up in those three markets? But they are. They've got a fantastic purpose and when I saw it, I just loved it. It was we want to democratize food and I just thought, wow, what's that mean? And the great thing about organization with purpose is that if you feel like you're working towards something that means something, then immediately it just lifts you a little bit.
Speaker 2:And it's just this idea that we're going to run supermarkets and food groups that mean that in the community, you've got access to food that you can afford. But not only that our own brand stuff that we sell. We're going to make sure it's low in sugar, it's low in salt, it's healthy. We're going to promote the health brands over maybe the what might be the cheaper, unhealthier brands, and we're going to ensure that the community is benefiting that way. And I just thought, wow, that's fantastic. So they asked me to look at their values. What are the values of the organization? So I got to speak to people in Cumbia and Poland about what do you value and what will drive you, and that ended up in coming up with three fantastic values for them which they're now pushing us the way in which we want to work. And what will it look like if you turn up and you're brilliant.
Speaker 2:It'll look like this and it just gives people a really easy guardrail to work towards, so that's been fantastic. It's been great, I don't know about you. I always find it fantastic when I'm working with different cultures and different people and listening to them.
Speaker 1:For sure. That's amazing. So I'm thinking about those values and how important it is to have values as a brand and as a business, and I think potentially some business owners can sort of put that to one side and think it's not the most important thing to have that kind of guiding principle. How do you think that having Core values that you really live by impacts employee engagement?
Speaker 2:We're all different, aren't we? We, we, we'll there's. There's a model called the universal basic needs by a chap called Charles Schwartz, and he basically lays out that we're driven. We're driven by certain things. Some of us love liberation, we love to be free, and some of us actually don't like that. We like a bit of control, we like to be told what to do. That's one axis of his model, and the other axis is some of us love belonging, you know being, having consensus, working with others, and and at the other end of the axis, there's distinction.
Speaker 2:People love individual distinction, and so you think about the this model and you think actually, yeah, I can see, I like to be free and I want to be the best I can, so that's the freedom and distinction at work. But some people love belonging and consensus, and I like taking the group with me, and so we're all different actually. So whenever an organization says these are our values, sometimes it actually forgets that people have their own values and you have to sort of merge the two, and it's never an easy answer. When you're trying to create a workplace for everybody, sometimes you look at what the brief is and you think what we need to do this Create a workplace that's suitable for everybody when you end up creating a workplace that sometimes is suitable for nobody.
Speaker 2:So you need to work out how does, how does a workplace not just a physical workplace, but all of the things you offer in terms of reward and recognition and learning and development and flexible working how is it gonna work for Everybody? But at the same time, how can you show up with one set of principles in mind? And you're going towards that? It's. It's so complex. I know everybody's always looking for an easy answer.
Speaker 2:They're never, easy answers to these questions. I mean, why are we doing this podcast? I mean we're doing it without worrying, we're smiling at each other, we're we're gonna have a good conversation, we're gonna get something out of it, but ultimately we're actually doing it for the customers, because that's why we're here. We're here to produce something that customers think. That was interesting. I enjoyed that. I'll engage with these people again.
Speaker 2:Well, that's why any organization exists. Right, it exists to Deliver something to a customer, and sometimes that's a citizen. If you're working in government, you exist to serve somebody. So when you're looking at values and things like that, the starting point is not what do we want. It's what is it a customer one, or who are we serving and what do we have to deliver? And then the values come from that. Now, absolutely, we want to create great places to work. But we're creating great places to work so that the right people are in those organizations Serving that customer. That that's why we're here. We don't create Businesses just so that people can come to work, have a great time and don't worry about serving the customer. We, we create businesses to serve customers.
Speaker 2:So you start. Your start point is always what's the customer want? Then, what are the behaviors that we need in order to serve that customer? What? How does that ladder up to a set of values? And then, when she's got that as a framework, you can start to think right, all of the fabric of this organization, how does it need to change because it needs to work towards those values and behaviors? That's, that would be my take on, and and you probably get to experience that in In reality, when you're actually designing a physical space, because you're taking on board those sort of those concepts, those principles and things like how does that, how does that come to life in a, in a wall, in a, in a piece of glass, in a table, in a, and when you walk into a space and into the sound of the space and to the color of the space, that's quite interesting in how we actually how I approach designing a space.
Speaker 3:A lot of the time I'll talk to clients and I don't feel like they know what their values are. I don't feel like they have woven that into their organizations. So a lot of people instantly say I don't want to show any of our brand, I don't want to show anything that resonates with us in this space. I just want it to be a nice space where people feel at home and comfortable. I mean, that might be one of their values, but you know a lot of people are really steering away from Representing their brand and their values within the design. You know it's completely separate.
Speaker 2:Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know, but but it's yeah, so people turn up to you with a functional request but not an emotional request and they don't see that the emotional request is actually what is potentially driving customer response. Yeah, yeah, it. It's remarkable how often you know clients forget about why are we doing this? Yeah, and it's really important to customers. It's really important to employees. What? Why we exist.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it becomes arbitrary. In that case, I think you know you're, it's just a nice space, but why? What's behind it, like what? What are people buying into? Why do people want to be here? It is, people aren't just going to nice spaces, it's, it's more than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and when you, and when you unlock that connection with a space or connection with an employer, you unlock productivity, because that's when discretionary effort comes in. If you don't have that, then people are thinking that's why the whole quiet quitting thing happens. You know, it's a lot of that is just I'm just have no connection whatsoever with my employer. Yes, there are people thinking that they were underpaid and they weren't being recognized for the word that they did. But a lot of it was like so what, I don't care about you, so You've not sold me on why we're doing what we're doing, so I'll quite quit, and that's. I think that's where that comes from.
Speaker 1:Tell us more about quiet quitting. Are the leaders sitting in the organizations talking about it?
Speaker 2:Oh, they're very aware of it. Yeah, I mean there. I mean everybody is talking about how do you Motivate people to perform that little bit more, how do you get the best out of people. Not just and you know what, when I work with some big brands and it's easy to Think of big brands in a cynical way You're thinking how do I squeeze the most out of people? I can be totally honest with you. I do all the senior HR directors I talked to. They don't think like that. They genuinely think in terms of how do we get the best out of people? How do they get the best out themselves?
Speaker 2:That's the conversation I have, and I mean it's hard because, equally, you've you've got, you know, cost pressures and things like that, which mean, certainly, in today's cost of living crisis. You know everybody wants to have a pay rise, but at the same time, the revenues aren't coming in to be able to deliver the pay rise. So you've got this vicious circle, but so you can't just give people what they want in terms of money. So what? What do you give them? You give them a great place to work. You, you ensure that they've got benefits. You say we're going to invest in your training. We ensure that you know, we put in place flexible working Processes so that you can live your life and you can care for people, and so forth. There are many ways in which you can acknowledge and reward people and that's how Organisations now thinking how do we deliver value to an employer and to an employee? Sorry, how do you deliver that value to an employee?
Speaker 2:So they want to be here and they don't want to go anywhere else, because, I mean, the Attracting talent and recruiting talent cost a huge amount of money and it's everyone's fighting for that space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. So, in terms of your team At the team, how do they what? How do they work? What's the kind of the setup there? Do you have flexible working people? At my home You're, I know you're a real advocate for a blended approach and what? What do you, what does your team do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've. We've got a Flexible working arrangement. So at the team we tend to be in our space two days a week. The rest of the time we're at home or in a co-working space. So we said to everybody in the agency if you want to work in a co-working space, we'll put some budget aside so you can go and work in a co-working space. So you know, one day a month anybody can just go any co-work, any co-working space. Do a day pass, go and work there Just to sort of get out of the house and have some variety. The rest of the time you can work at home or you can work in our team space and we call it team space, we don't call it the office anymore.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that.
Speaker 2:We think the word office is just wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very formal, isn't it it?
Speaker 2:is, isn't it? It's just feels like a old word. Yeah, I Hate the language. Back to the office. Yeah, because when? Who wants to go back to anything? Yeah, you want to go forward. Yeah, I know that, do you? What do you refer to when you're designing space? Is it just?
Speaker 3:workplace is often brought up, but again, that's quite a dull term really.
Speaker 2:I don't think we've actually got a word yet that can excite people.
Speaker 3:Oh what I mean.
Speaker 2:team space, Did you say team space because yeah, yeah, space but yeah, whenever you try and do it like innovation hub, but it's like, oh my blue sky thinking and when you're in your team space with your team at the team love this so many things.
Speaker 1:What do you use it for? Is there a function?
Speaker 2:Well, I think we are, like everyone, coming to terms with what the team space is going to be useful. So, ms teams, there's another team and Zoom, and we're brilliant in lockdown, weren't they? Because they connected us. And now they can be a real pain, because you can go into whatever space you want to call it office, team space, whatever and you can find yourself sat down at a desk and on a Zoom call or a team's call and be thinking, well, I've got to be at home. So we're now trying to learn that when we go into a space, we're actually there just to chat to each other in the kitchen area. Talk, there's serendipitous moments. Get into meeting spaces, make sure we're doing some face-to-face work. Just try and ensure that we plan our days in a way that we can do it face-to-face. It'd be great to see how technology can help us do that and some of those things that teams offer us now.
Speaker 3:We've had this discussion internally recently and we also have a client who's a gaming company. Recently We've done some engagement with them and their team days. So they're required in two days a week. We're also in two days a week. They actually don't think that their staff are going to do project work on those days. They're purely in to collaborate. They might have team discussions on the project, but they're very much there just to talk to each other, to have lunch with each other, to build that morale, to do some sketching, to play some games together, and we've had the same discussions internally.
Speaker 3:Actually, I'm constantly back-to-back meetings on Mondays and Thursdays when I'm in and I don't see my team. That's not conducive. Why am I there? I could do those, as you say, from teams or Zoom or wherever you get your video, whatever it is. I need to fundamentally think about how I am in the office, start saying no to these meetings and questioning internally because if you don't question these things, how are they ever going to change? Is it really relevant that I'm on teams call day? No, I need to be with my team and I need to be having collaboration, especially for younger members of staff learning. They're just isolated in the office.
Speaker 2:They don't want to come in and see you immediately put your headset on and think, oh excellent, lisa's here.
Speaker 3:but she's not really.
Speaker 2:She's in another world. I wish there was a way that the Zoom and team said I'm sorry, you've used up all of your time for this week. You can't do another Zoom and Teams call until Monday and you think well, there you go. I'm going to have to talk to people now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely I agree. So tell us about the three levers of an organisation. This is something that we've talked about before. I think it's fascinating, so tell everyone what it means and why it's important to you.
Speaker 2:I think we sort of touched on one, didn't we with values?
Speaker 2:in a way. There's an author called Daniel Pink and he posited this idea that we want three things purpose, mastery and autonomy. And together, if you get those three things, you feel engaged to, work and purposes, that sort of meaning. Well, why am I here? Am I doing something that I believe in? I'm not talking about some altruistic cause, because some people do think that making money is a meaningful exercise, so never judge people on what their meaning is.
Speaker 2:But there should be meaning in what you do. And then there's if you're working with that organisation. Then there's mastery, which is in my role. Am I good at what I do and are you helping me be good at what I do? Are you training me to be good at what I do, giving me the skills to do what I do well right now? Because people just want to feel proud. They want to feel that they are that. People hate feeling helpless. So make sure that I'm good at what I do. And then the last one is autonomy, just freedom. Trust me, let me go on with it, let me make decisions. Nobody wants somebody looking over their shoulder saying oh no, you can't do that, you can't do that. People love it when they're trusted and free to do what they want. So you get these three things like meaning skills, freedom and sunlight just unlocks things and people. They think I'm in control here. This is good and they get on with it. But if you think about lots of jobs, people complain about oh, micro management, I can't do anything.
Speaker 2:Or people are saying I just feel I'm making it up as I go along. Or they think I don't even know why we do what we do. And if you hear those three things, you need to go back and look at those three levers and think let's answer those.
Speaker 1:And what are some of the tools that people can use to really boost all of those three things?
Speaker 2:Well, firstly, I believe that constant conversations with employees around you the meaning and how we're going to bring it to life is really important. So you should always get people together and say how are we doing this, rather than sort of impose it on people. That's one thing. The other thing is reward and recognition. So making sure that you acknowledge people for great behavior when it happens and you're public about it and it doesn't have to be big monetary reward. It can be small things like little, gifting things, stuff like that, celebrating moments, just publicly acknowledging people. One of the fundamental things that people love is to be acknowledged, even just hello. So many leaders forget that they walk into their office and they might walk past people because they're busy. The difference, if you just as you walk in to say hello, hi, how are you Just say you are there and I see you and I recognize you, so stuff like that. So leadership behavior can start to unlock this, and then you've got your communications drumbeat, just talking about what you do, talking about what you sell, talking about how you sell it, talking about things that inspire you.
Speaker 2:There's so many things in the employee life cycle. It's everything. It's in everything. I started at the Body Shop. You mentioned it in your intro. You know, when I was there, anita Roddick, who ran the Body Shop, she was just always talking about why we did what we do. We were dedicated to the pursuit of social and environmental change, never forgotten it. 25 years ago I left the Body Shop and it's still ingrained in my head. That's why we're here.
Speaker 1:My.
Speaker 2:God. What a purpose, what a thing to work towards.
Speaker 1:And it worked.
Speaker 2:You had to sell a lot of banana shampoo, but it did work, yeah.
Speaker 1:Amazing. So I guess a lot of leaders or maybe not leaders, but business owners might say what's the return on Investing in employee engagement? What's the opportunity cost of not doing it? What would you say to that?
Speaker 2:You lose people faster, which means your recruitment costs go up. You don't get as much out of your people, which means your productivity levels go down. You don't get as much innovation, which means that you don't sell as much product, or certainly your product's probably not going to be beating the competition, even if you're first to market. Then you'll start to lose your presence because you haven't got that innovation. Your customers pick up on it. People want to know how do you treat your people, I would. I mean, I'm sure lots of people do their research when they're about to join someone and then they probably look at I mean, the last story is you know that you're going to get a certain type of person on last days. Certain social media platforms are open to people who just say I want to rant here, so, but it's pretty easy to do a Google search on a company and see how they treat people.
Speaker 2:I saw I was on the tube yesterday and I saw Octopus Energy and they were promoting on the tube how they treat their employees as an advert and I thought, well, that's novel. So it's not only is that trying to attract people to Octopus, but I thought you're saying to your customers we're nice because we treat our people nice.
Speaker 1:And people are much more likely to buy from people that they feel have similar values to them. Right, it goes back to the value thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So next topic I want to kind of go over is this idea of kind of inclusivity in the workplace, because you said earlier that everybody is different and actually it's really difficult to build a set of values because everybody is different. And when we're thinking about creating workspaces and building spaces for people, how do we ensure that, for example, different generations, different age groups, neurodiversity, how do we make sure that all of those different types of people are catered for and that they're feeling engaged with their employer?
Speaker 2:I mean it's so important We've mentioned blended working and a big proponent to that.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 2:I've got a work friend, Susanna Chapman, who was at Bulb.
Speaker 2:Love her oh wonderful and we've done a podcast with her on neurodiversity and she was a neurodiversity champion at Bulb and we were at a conference together and I was talking about blended working and she pulled me to one side and said yeah, but Cliff, you have to understand that people with neurodiverse needs some certainty in their lives. She brilliantly said to me you don't understand. I have superpowers beyond your imagination. She does as well, she's extraordinary, she does, she's like yeah. And she said I need that certainty.
Speaker 2:So you're talking about blended working from your perspective, of being able to adapt. I need to know where I stand. Give me those parameters and within the parameters, I will be absolutely brilliant. So you're right as an employer, you need to think of all needs. And you touched on learning and younger generations learning from the experience that other people have as they're coming into the workplace. And I think we're creating a real problem for ourselves if we don't get some of the experienced people into some of these spaces for a period of time, just so that they can share what they learn, sometimes in really informal ways. I was in the agency a few weeks back and one of our junior designers said does anybody know, how to do this in Adobe, because I can't get this to work.
Speaker 2:And one of the senior designers came over and just said oh, you just do this, this, this. And she went oh that's brilliant, thanks very much. And I observed this and I thought you know what, if you'd been at home, you'd have struggled to try and make that work for yourself for an hour maybe. Then eventually you'd have said can somebody help me? And you'd have waited for a response via Teams. Then you'd have had a half hour call with them, while they couldn't see your screen necessarily, and it might have taken them longer to say oh, you do this, this and this, and then you probably chat for another 20 minutes or something like that. So something that took five minutes for a skill to be imparted could have taken an hour and a half. What a waste of time. So you ask employers why is blended working important and why is it important to young people? Why is it important for them to learn? But it's also important because you can get through stuff a lot faster.
Speaker 1:I just don't know how leaders create policies or put things in place for people to ensure that everyone is catered to.
Speaker 3:Design I mean how we approach that in a design sense in one of those in that topic is so important for us to go into the workplace and really immerse ourselves. Talk to all the members of staff leaders, the juniors, everybody in the organisation to find out what's important to them. What do they need? What types of people are on your team? How do your team work? Can you work from home? Can you work at your desk? What do you need to do in the day? You need to be on Teams calls half the day Great. You need a space to go away and not disrupt your team.
Speaker 3:And from there we do hear about the neurodiverse people in the organisation as well. What do they need? They might want to be at their desk five days a week and they might want their dedicated desk. So what people often see as hybrid working in an environment, hot desks, things like that they definitely don't work for everybody. So you do need that balance of fixed stations where people can be, or small quiet rooms for people in finance or HR, so they can work in a confidential environment that they need and really getting involved with the team and seeing what functions they need, because it's all good and well having a lovely, designed, well-designed space, with spaces that people can collaborate and come together, but if you don't give people those practical things they need, which might be determined as boring or old fashioned, you know, having your own fixed desk, yes, you do still need it because it asserts the suit and certain types of person and how certain people work.
Speaker 2:Do you find that when you go back to clients that sometimes they're surprised by what your observations are that they go? I didn't think that about myself.
Speaker 3:Oh, definitely, definitely, yeah, they have no idea. And even how. I think to some extent. You know, I find it really hard sometimes to put myself in how another person's approach and work. I spoke to you earlier about my husband. You know he works from home five days a week, absolutely loves it. He absolutely loves not having to go in the office. He works so well in that way, whereas I cannot imagine anything worse.
Speaker 3:You know I like variety. I like I like to be able to go to different spaces, I like to collaborate, I like to have quiet time. I like that variety. And it doesn't work for everybody and I think I think leaders and Bosses are often really surprised about about what people want. You know, one of the fundamental things that comes up time after time is I want to eat lunch with my team. You know I want to be able to sit on this big table and come together and not talk about work. I want a space in the office that isn't used for teams calls, as well as lunch, you know, a dedicated space to get away. It's not work, work, work, work constantly, and I think leaders are surprised by those small things.
Speaker 2:You're making me think that perhaps the Workplaces a canvas to actually have a conversation about. You know why we do what we do and how we need to do what we do. Because it forces people to think about, well, how should things be designed differently in order to service that customer? And actually it's a great. It's a great sort of you know mechanic for getting people to think about things differently. I think it's fantastic.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's even really what some people would think is tiny things, like small dull things. You know, having something close to something else.
Speaker 3:Yeah you wouldn't think about that. You think, okay, I need three quiet rooms, three meeting rooms, great. But sometimes the proximity of where they are located certain teams is so important In not wasting time or even providing a hot tap, you know. So you're not having to boil a kettle that's 15 minutes boiling a kettle, making a tea and doing all that, whereas a hot tap, instant, great, done. You know, it's these small little things that you integrate that can really make a difference.
Speaker 2:I was at a company called smart kits a couple of years ago who believe in the principle of self-management Comes from it's called a teal organization Google it. But self-management means that they trust 100% in their teams to organize themselves in order to deliver projects, and so the way in which that affected the physical space was there were a number of rooms with movable glass walls and not just panels You're talking about. They created walls, but then within the space, all of the desks were on wheels so they could move them around at any time, so teams could reconvene and and Reorganize according to projects that started to emerge. So actually it was. It's very buzzy. If you went in there a few weeks later, the setup would be entirely different, because they, because the world had changed and so they'd reorganize themselves and they just worked out that that was the physical design, that they needed this ability to just constantly move stuff around.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we find that a lot. Actually Some the gaming company. Again, I come back to that same company. They might be working on a game for, say, two years and that team will change from just one person or two people starting at the very start. It will ramp up halfway through that to a team of 30 and then it will come right the way back down again to a team of five, depending on the process of this project, and they have a few games going on at the same time. So it's always this shift Tetris within the organization is. So, yes, this team needs to be 30 now, but in two months time it's gonna be two.
Speaker 3:Yeah, how do you make that work? Because you think, yeah, yeah, great, I'll move my desk, but actually you need to think about the cabling underneath the floor so you don't have trailing cables along the floor. You need to think about where the floor boxes are. Can I move my floor? What floor finish am I putting down? Wooden floor? You can't do that. A concrete floor? You can't do that easily. So, yeah, it's so many layers To which you can make these spaces functional for people and not be a hassle needs to be easy.
Speaker 2:You've suddenly just blown my mind on things I hadn't even thought really boring. I know so boring, but so is there's me just thinking what it's just a floor.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely not.
Speaker 1:I Love that idea of movable space. We've just written a. I actually wrote a piece on Generation Alpha Because I'm bored of hearing about gen Z now. So wrote a piece on Generation Alpha because we also design education spaces as well as workspaces, and One of the things I read was that they are going to want movable Furniture and like movable schools. So everything is just in a different place because this attention spans are so small.
Speaker 2:There's an I read something in Sweden where they have open Schools where the walls are gone and they say to the kids, if you want, go to put, sometimes go to which lesson you want to go to, so and so you. Then you're also learning with kids From different ages sometimes we do.
Speaker 1:We actually recently designed a school. It was an academy actually, and Lisa's gonna explain this better than me. It was essentially we. We blended the sixth form with the senior schools. There was like a moving wall, is that? Is that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the sixth form would set the example that they could be observed by the rest of the school what the rest of the school is more of an LRC, a learning resource center kind of set up. So that was Blended in with the sixth form so they can witness, you know, what are their peers doing, really being example. You know how are these people using space? Are they sitting quietly or are they? I mean, one of the things you need to be aware of in schools designing is that you don't design tucked away, hidden spaces, because people are people's. Kids are kids. You know they'll go do their little cheeky things in the corner of a space, so you don't provide those spaces. But yeah, so space that they can witness everybody working and collaborating and working on their own.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting, isn't that? That's fantastic. I mean, that's all that's asking sort of six formers to take on the responsibility of role models, yeah, and to impart learning, probably through osmosis, to the next generation who look at them and think, okay, that's how to play if you want to succeed, yeah, and okay, yeah, well, as you say, we're all gonna make mistakes and things like that. But much rather, why don't we start from a position of trusting people?
Speaker 3:Yeah, because I mean in a traditional school environment, the only the only time you would be seeing your peers would be at lunchtime in the big hall, which is a huge Buzzy not fit for you right over. It's just a wild environment. Really. Isn't it unable to focus the big or in a corridor.
Speaker 3:That's the only time you would ever see your peers, whereas in this sort of environment, if you do blend, you can have a whole lesson, where you might be in the LRC or the six woman. Just see how it all, how it works in a more calm Environment where you can actually focus and watch other people rather than rushing through, trying to get through your lunch or whatever. Yeah, schools are definitely behind on the curve. I suppose from workplaces you know, schools are Definitely realizing now that they need to provide certain things for their students in order for them to thrive and flourish.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and well, I mean, it's really interesting for us designing both, because we're essentially, you know, designing spaces that these people are going to be in the workforce quite soon. So it's really interesting. And we are noticing, aren't we, that more and more schools want to be Designed like workplaces. They do, they do think about it. They sort of look at our work spaces and think, oh well, maybe it should be a bit more like. That seems weird to me that they're such different environments. Really we should kind of be preparing them for work and and that it's.
Speaker 3:It's definitely more prevalent in the universities and the secondary schools, where you have got the older age group, that people are definitely thinking about that, but that does feel to all the way down to the younger students and yeah, your work spaces, though, are still I mean, they're ahead of the curve.
Speaker 2:When it comes to lots of work spaces. This, they're far too many. Where you walk in and you've just got those regimented desks and you, you know, you sit there next to John and Shirley, and and you will sit there for the next 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good luck.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I hope you like John and Shirley, but so they. I mean, those spaces that you're designing are ahead of the curve, and I think I don't know you probably know better than I how many spaces probably need to be upgraded to a different design in order to engage people.
Speaker 3:I'd love to know the statistic, but I've almost. Almost every space we walk into needs tweaking or adjusting to some degree, especially post. I know everyone's going on about post COVID, but Just that the work patterns have changed so much and most people haven't done that since.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I mean, what do you both think about people? I was just thinking about this poor person stuck next to John and Shirley for the rest of their life, from nine to five. What do you think about hot, like hot desking and the importance of people sitting next to different people each day, or what's your experience of that?
Speaker 2:Speaking of my own team and we talked about neurodiversity earlier I know that there are some people that do need to have that fixed space, even if even if they're using a blended working model, that they like to go and sit next to that person or in that space and it works for them. Some people have physical health needs whereby they need lights, so they have to be next to a window, so there are certain individuals that will need that fixed space. You have to cater for everyone and cater for every need. That means catering for people that want to be in a workspace, people that don't want to be in a workspace or don't need to be in a workspace. I did a horrible stat on the amount of time I had spent on a train pre-COVID and I worked out it was three and a half years of my life, had been on a train since school, and I thought three and a half years.
Speaker 1:It's mad, the amount of time you spend commuting and I work on the train. Oh, I do, I can't help it. I just start and then I don't stop. It's not good though.
Speaker 2:You probably have to work using your phone now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is a tiny screen, or you're bouncing your laptop on your knees and it's everyone's crammed in there and you think this is not how I want to work.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about the future, what we think is going to happen. We obviously had the great resignation in 2022. Is that right? We obviously had COVID and we don't want to go too much on about COVID because we all know it happened. What's going to happen now?
Speaker 2:Everyone's waiting for the next bit of chaos, aren't they? Yeah, we live in a world where we just go from one bit of chaos to another bit of chaos.
Speaker 3:I think authenticity is the new thing. I think people want authenticity in and that's so many walks of life and I'll just talk about it from what I know in design. But authenticity and materials used they want to know where has that come from? You know people are way more engaged and understand sustainability now more and they want to know where their materials are coming from. How much has been recycled? Can this be recycled after life? And there's all sorts of interesting things like flooring traditionally glued down on the floor and that means you can't recycle it after life. You cannot detach the glue from the back, so it goes into landfill. But there's these new things called magtiles or just techifiers, so that you can recycle the product. There's no glue attached to the backing so it can be fully put it back into the system, into a circular economy, or recycle back into the system. And clients and designers are way more aware of that now, so that they're in tune with authentic materials. So that will be an authentic way of using material.
Speaker 3:How furniture is made, can it be broken down again and fully recycled? Is it off-gassing? Is it remanufactured furniture? That's another thing. So second hand furniture that's been fully brought back to life and can be used again. It looks almost as good as new, has a guarantee on it still. But it's a circular model Things being brought back into the workplace and the authenticity, whether that be in those sorts of aspects or in terms of how functional a space is. Is this space authentic to how I want it to be? It's not just oh, here's a lovely office, here you go. It comes back to the values how people feel they trust what they're coming into and they believe in it.
Speaker 2:I think that that authenticity observation is a really interesting one. I think people are focused more on the here and now. It's interesting you use the word future. Holly and I did a piece of work on a learning narrative for a client recently which is all about how do you get people focused on developing their future skills.
Speaker 2:One thing that we discovered was the word future is scary and in fact, you got did some research and they discovered that 54% of Brits would rather live in the past and the future. So, and I think this comes down to the idea that people are concerned about the big thing the big elephant in the room is climate change. And you it's. It's fight or fright or freeze. Fight, flight or freeze, I should say.
Speaker 2:And fright, yeah, and fright, and people don't know what, what to do, and so people are concerned about how we can address this massive, massive challenge, which is why I think authenticity, I think you are spot on. People want to know that we're creating something that's sustainable and real and Natural and good, because most people feel pretty helpless in the face of something that big, don't they? So what can I do? What can we do?
Speaker 1:OK. Well, we're coming towards the end now, so I know I'm so sorry, but before we close, one for you, cliff, one piece of advice, your biggest piece of advice for leaders who want to engage their teams. I know that's quite a big question.
Speaker 2:Listen to them. Yeah, get talking to them. Be honest with them. Try and ensure you've answered a question of why you do what you do. So be authentic about why you do what you do. Don't be afraid to talk about all the time and what you value and reward people and acknowledge people for great stuff and and trust in them. Trust and let people make people. Always say that people make mistakes and then learn from those mistakes. All comes back to those three things purpose, mastery, autonomy. Do that.
Speaker 1:Wonderful Great Well, thank you so much for being here. It was an absolute pleasure to chat to you and, of course, you as well, lisa, join us next time. We will be speaking about brand, both verbal brand and visual brand, and how you can implement that into your space in the best possible way. We have a wonderful brand strategist coming along. So, thank you so much, and there will be a link in the description so you can add Cliff on LinkedIn and access the team. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks very much.
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