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
Does This Spark Joy?: People-First Design with Adam Burtt-Jones
Coined by Marie Kondo, the idea of "does this spark joy?" forces us to look at what we have and decide whether we need to make a change.
What if your workspace was more than just a desk and a chair? What if it was actually designed with you and your needs in mind? Join us as we sit down with renowned workplace strategist, Adam Burtt-Jones, to crack open the traditional views of office design and explore a revolutionized concept that puts people first. Adam sheds light on how we can create engaging, comfortable, and productive spaces that seamlessly blend with our lifestyle.
We dive into the intricate balance between strategy and design, discussing how joy, inspiration, and innovation can breathe life into a workspace. Adam asserts the importance of understanding people's routines, feelings, and emotions in the workspace in crafting effective design strategies. We also touch on the potential of creating a free-flowing workplace that challenges traditional office concepts and boosts productivity.
Adam guides us through the complexities of designing a workspace that harmoniously merges functionality and budget while meeting human needs. We then move on to ponder about the future evolution of workplaces, focusing on a shift towards employee empowerment and workplaces' role in recognizing good work. This episode promises to change your perspective on workspace design and leave you contemplating how your own workplace can adapt to these progressive concepts.
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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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So welcome back to the Space. Is that Shape Us? First of all, I have to apologise for my voice. I have lost it. It's very unfortunate, but I'm going to try my best to speak as clearly as I can.
Speaker 1:So today we are going to be talking about a people-first approach to design. So we're obviously living in a very fast-paced world. The lines between work and life are quite blurred, so, more than ever, it's really important for us to really consider people when we're designing all our spaces that we live in, that we work in everything. So this isn't really just about aesthetics. It's about shaping environments that respond to the needs of those who inhabit them and creating a culture of engagement, comfort and productivity. It's about reimagining our workplaces as ecosystems that support creativity, collaboration and wellbeing.
Speaker 1:So today I'm very excited to have our guest, adam Bert Jones. He's a workplace strategist with a 25-year track record in commercial interior design. Adam's approach intertwines innovation and practicality, transforming workplaces for diverse clients like Camelot Group and the BBC. With a degree in interior architecture and design, adam brings an energetic and thoughtful perspective to the conversation on people-first design. Welcome to the spaces at Shapebox. It's great to have you, so let's dive in. First of all, would you mind giving us a bit of a background into yourself, a bit about Bert and Brewer, anything exciting you've been working on recently.
Speaker 2:Sure Well, thank you, holly, for the glowing intro. That's very kind. Yes, adam, bert Jones one-half of Bert Jones and Brewer co-founded with Steve Brewer 15 years ago and I was a result of that. I've worked 10 years previous to that for myself and found a good partner to want to work with and found the market. Even in looking back 25 years ago and thinking about what it was doing in the markets and the way that people worked then and actually coming to this podcast, I was trying to reflect on the type of things we were going to talk about and that once thinking, have things changed and what has changed? Because that's a pretty big and fundamental question and actually the same things are happening.
Speaker 2:Actually, I think it's the irony of what history teaches us as well. So I think a lot of that is to do with looking at when you consider what design means, and not going to take you back to a little story of the experiences I had when I started them and the great people I've sort of met along the way, and a number of those sat down with me when I was trying to do design work and sort of said when you're thinking about design, what do you think about and do you think about the problem? Do you think about great ideas? Do you think about the things you're trying to achieve? Do you think about almost the pride that you have at the end of the project? And the thing I think I actually found first and it's good that you're bringing it up right at the beginning was trying to consider the relationship we have with space and people. No Big words, it sounds like everybody's saying sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So it's not easy to imagine that.
Speaker 2:You know that's not always embedded into a project, but lots of things in life, when you take a lens to the thing you're trying to look at and color that lens differently, you see a different picture.
Speaker 2:And I think when I talk about workplace I talk about two different factors involved in it. So and again sort of bring this up as part of the conversation we're going to have the first part being strategy, which I've been doing for again 25 years as part of design, but then recognizing that design, whilst it is a piece of strategy, it's a piece of design, and I was still talk about them in the same breath. They are distinct and there are clear differences between the methodology and the philosophy of the way you approach those two pieces of engagement. So, again, over the period of the time we've been working with different clients and thinking about the entire, the spaces that you create and the clients you're working with. Having different hats on and actually having the opportunity to see how clients behave and work and through two different lenses. That actually gives us, has given me great power over the years to do to, I think at times, make different and create different spaces and find different conclusions.
Speaker 1:And this was as a difference between workplace and workspace.
Speaker 2:Yes, I mean, it's a semantic thing, and I think it's.
Speaker 2:I agree with you. Actually I do agree with you and I think also even I think it was one of your earlier podcasts Cliff brought up the semantic of what we call the office and I think he's absolutely right when he was saying the office is treated as this object that is, a sterile, an inhuman, a manufacturing, an efficient environment in which people are there to perform like cogs in a wheel. And actually if you again it's sort of cabusier talked about the house or the home as a machine for living in. So there's a sort of concurrent dialogue that we look back on and we sort of say, all right, these things are about creating efficiencies, but actually the fundamental piece of this is we want to create pieces of joy. We want to create pieces of things that we can reflect on and create power and energy and influence the world we're trying to live in for the best.
Speaker 2:And I think that takes lots of different angles. I think there's a certain, there's lots of different ways of achieving that, but I do think if you get that balance and blend and different perspectives, you end up with a better product. So, but you did ask me exclusively why I'm here. So Bertrand Zabra has been going 15 years. We're a workspace only interiors business based in London. We've worked nationally and globally and we tend to work best with small to medium scale corporates and I would say 30, 40, maybe even 50% of the work I do at times is actually the strategy work with clients, when often the question isn't even are we going to do a project? Essentially, what is this project?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So what do we mean by people first? You've kind of answered this, but I want to dig a bit deeper into what we actually mean by people first and why it's important. You said about we need to create joy, why.
Speaker 2:I'm going to strug on that one. That's a particularly good question. It would be easy and I think it's a little bit too, probably too easy to say that when you think about what the decisions we make, I would say I'd split these things into two categories, and I think this is a relatively again, it's a mechanic I use sometimes when I think about the philosophy of, when you think about strategy, what do you do? The first part is subjectivity. So what are the things? So that is joy sits into that subjectivity. So why do we you know, they could even ask the question of why do we enjoy, you know, sort of dig a bit harder into the things that we enjoy.
Speaker 2:And that's a very heartfelt, very often emotional, principally quite instinctive, let's put it actually design lead way of thinking.
Speaker 2:So when we think about something, when we talk about design, we might actually say to ourselves I love it because it's a very powerful emotion, inequally, I hate, it's as powerful.
Speaker 2:So we think about creating spaces that deliver that for us and therefore we build the philosophy and almost the story of what we're trying to do around those elements of philosophy. We say to ourselves right, yeah, we're not going to go this inspiring, you know, use these words or the collaborative, innovative sort of space that really resonates with the people that are there and draws the right people in, and you should talk with these quite fundamental pieces of language. But the moment again where that sits is in the subject of space. But this is the big but I think with these types of the types of thinking is that has to be grounded. We can't just say to ourselves what's the next big idea, let's correct some joy and have actually the office space and be fabulous if it were, but it would be utterly unproductive so that a space of joy, which would be a space that set out like a bar or a pub, where there's drinks on offer.
Speaker 1:There we go.
Speaker 2:It's pretty, you know you diversify the question about what it is you're trying to achieve and all of a sudden you end up with different, different, different axis. So actually what we're trying to do is blend a number of different things. One of those big things I think this is a very big truth of the way that workspace works is you have to use objectivity in that space. There are commercial endeavors, there's a never to play, a significant investment coming into the thing you're going to be achieving, there are balances, and I'll talk about productivity a bit later, about how we think about what productivity means. So if you don't answer the fundamentals, if you don't start to question the objectives, what you're trying to do and put them on a page and say there might be some subjective goals.
Speaker 2:But actually we do need to look at the objective case study. Essentially that says right, what is it where? If there's going to be an office, how many people are going to? Really fundamentals. But I'm going to sort of fash out from these things how many people do we expect to be there? Who are they going to be? When are they going to be there? I mean, they're really simple questions but all of a sudden, if you ask them and again you put them through a slightly different lens. The stuff that you talked about when you talk about joy is the thing you answer once you get those problems right.
Speaker 1:So do you start there?
Speaker 2:I think it's, I think you have to start with the joy.
Speaker 2:I would suggest, I would suggest you can and I was just with some clients and some circumstances that can be the right answer and it certainly creates inspiration. And I would use another philosophy I use towards doing this, as the essentially the cartons. You know you're trying to. You're donkey on a cart with a carriage in front of it and you're trying to create an opportunity in front of you by engaging with the big, the client. You're sort of saying here's fantastic joy, here's an inspirational environment, here's what we're trying to create that's going to get all the people that you thought you were going to get back into the office, back into office. Fantastic. Yeah, I've really buy into that. But where's it rooted, where's the basis for that thinking?
Speaker 1:Has anyone done?
Speaker 2:a study to work out whether those are the things that the right answers? Has anyone canvassed the views of the people coming into the office, if you talk to your client base, and actually worked out whether that's going to be a realistic thing that they find joy with? So you know you're an alcohol company, but actually probably the PR buyers that buy the alcohol probably don't drink much when they come. So there's an oxymoron's attached to the whole thing. And the other thing I think that's important and I do lean into is that you know there's lots of research in other places that talks about these types of this type of thinking. One particular in person Daniel Kainman, a Nobel Prize winner, so I'm not going to take any credit for any of his types of, but nevertheless, what he looked at when he was thinking about this barrier between subjectivity and objectivity and thinking about why we use these two trains of thought, he called the modes, and he was one of the few people that when he was looking at the 2008 financial crash and thinking why did we have it, what were the signals and what human behavior and principles were attached to the fact we had the crash, and he was looking at that and thinking and actually explored this, a really, I think, really powerful idea, and it's really gained.
Speaker 2:Like lots of powerful ideas, they're very simple. There's two ways of thinking. So he called one of which he called system one thinking. So that's intuitive, reactive, often quite emotional. And system two, which, quite naturally, is the opposite, which is rational, calculated, logical and in the way we think about design, very often we think about it in a system one mode. We think to ourselves what's inspirational? What are we going to have? Where are we going to have joy? What's the things going to make me inspired? But the financial crash was actually caused by people that were subjectively thinking, and now officers aren't the stock market.
Speaker 1:Stakes are a bit lower.
Speaker 2:Stakes are lower, but you can pretty much. You're not going to want to get three or four million, five million pounds spent wrong and if you think about those types of you know and, but equally there's an opportunity to get these things right. So when I talk about strategy, I said I was and again, I was thinking about this on the way over. It's actually all the things you do before you start designing.
Speaker 1:Talk us through them. What do you do?
Speaker 2:So each client is different. I think that's an important measure whenever you approach a client, so some clients will care about different facets of whatever you're trying to do. Second thing to say with the world of lived in and strategy for the past 25 years is that there isn't one model fits all and there isn't even a standard, and actually no one's ever taught it to me. So I find it quite interesting that there's no courses out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I asked you, didn't I? I said I want to learn more about this. I'm so, I'm clearly so interested in it. Where can I go? And you like, oh, I don't know, just do it and you learn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a piece of that. I also think it's because it's very difficult to quantify benefit. So I think as a as a capital expenditure for a client walking up to the client going Right, we're going to spend two to three months, which is what he usually takes for a mid scale client to run through a decent strategic process. And a lot of clients will say to you hey, I don't have the energy, I don't know the time, and often more than what most, most clients actually do because they don't have the resource. So those say to themselves right, actually we don't. So there is a I would call this a shopping list, which is the answer you, the question you posed, which is the traditional shopping list. I would say the number one is probably utilization study, a lot less valuable now than it was before COVID, but nevertheless having someone in your office walking around or putting the infrared detectors or motion detectors in the workspace, working out either where people are so a number of people are meeting rooms and also the number of people at desks and hell on the spend there. So there are other ways.
Speaker 2:Again, that data is not needed and there's some very, some quite interesting models are trying to get that through using the computers, you know. So people modeling it through how much time people spend a laptop. Equally through gate access data, and they all basically vanished. Run a couple of models over the years and pretty much they all validate each other. I've had about 5% variants. It's quite interesting how they all end up being in roughly the same place, even though you think the data sources and type very different. So utilization data is powerful. It's a message, but it does set a message about past experience. So I'm going to come to that a bit later, because I was thinking about how to sort of explore what this all means.
Speaker 2:So what are you capturing data of? You capturing data of behavior of people in an office that you want to change. It's not particularly. Is that going to be a positive piece of data? And then, when you get that data, actually what's it going to tell you? So I'm going to tell you about the innovations you're trying to put in to create difference. It's actually going to potentially reinforce the things you're trying to change, and the other danger of design is it tries to fix broken things.
Speaker 2:So the principle of strategy is you start with an open book. You say to yourself right, what are we trying to build when we build our new castle and you say to yourself do we need a gate, do we need a fort, do we need a moat? And lots of people from the design background as I used to be would walk in and go. Well, of course you need all those things. That's what castles are made of. But actually, if you think about it more fundamentally, you say right, wouldn't it actually be clever to have five or six castles? Wouldn't it be clever to have no moat on one side? Because actually you want so. Again, you get the gist. It's about exploring the boundaries.
Speaker 2:And it's about exploring what I would call actually fundamental innovation, when you're building something from the ground up rather than categorizing things as assumptions and building from them to try and create some joy. So, again, being a bit flippant with my words here, but I think that these things are important. So, utilization studies gathering data about the way that people feel, I think is actually very important. So that is the subjective component and that's done a number of different ways. So, online surveys there are some metric data study surveys out there, Leesman Index probably being the most dominant.
Speaker 2:Another number of other strategists and strategy companies out there Gensler, Hannigan I know that Knight Frank, I think, has already got their own. We've even done our own at times where you gather data based on questionnaires, and obviously those questionnaires are relatively freeform, but they try to gather data about how people work and what they enjoy and don't enjoy and where they think they would be more productive, which, again, potentially a dangerous question, but you can often glean certain types of evidence from it Interviews, which are probably the most powerful thing, the way of doing it, and workshops. So if anyone comes and says what are you trying to do and if you're trying to learn something out of and learn something of value out of your organizations. I would always suggest to them to do an independently sourced interview process with managers through the organization and I would always always do, if you can. If there's some businesses don't like this, a degree, a number of people often picked at random from the organization below management levels.
Speaker 1:Different levels.
Speaker 2:Different levels. It's really important you find cleans of information. There's always the power that you can find some nugget from someone.
Speaker 1:What kind of questions would you ask?
Speaker 2:They're actually quite very straightforward. One of them, I think, is the most, sometimes it's the leading one. I mean you just want to get people to chat very often is actually could you describe your day when you work into the office and what happens? So where do you you know you've come from? Do you walk from the tube? You come in if you've got a desk where you go to? Who do you work with? Do you tend to get out? Sounds really simple. Do you tend to get a coffee? Where does your coat go? What types of actions do you have with your colleagues? How many times a week do you probably meet them? When you do meet them, what happens when you meet them? What do you talk about? So very rarely ever say. Could you say you know? Could you tell me how long you spend at your laptop every week? Who the hell knows that? Yeah, precisely. Or how many times do you make a phone call?
Speaker 1:a day.
Speaker 2:It's valueless. There's some people out there I think they do that. I can see the reason for it, but actually you don't really create any genuine knowledge there and do you focus on feelings and emotions or try to incorporate that into it? Ask certain questions through the process of exploring what the day looks like, and actually what they're, and the most powerful part of that is asking them what their day would look like if they choose to change it. So what would happen? If so, then just explore the facets around.
Speaker 2:So when you go and talk to people and have that interaction with others, what happens at the moment? Are we going to meeting rooms at around the table? Okay, Do you find that to be a productive way of trying to type a meeting? Is it for it's generally we get together twice a week to have a huddle or whatever? You know whatever word you want to use to try and describe the type of meetings they want? And then they say, yeah, but actually we talk about stuff that isn't related to it. And actually the best ones we've had are when we, when we huddle around the coffee point because everybody's in and it's really busy, you begin to start to tell a story and that's not everybody's story.
Speaker 1:We must have such a good insight into the waste of meetings.
Speaker 2:What happens and I think it's the game, playing back to the models and assumptions we use about what makes an office work is that we want meeting rooms because they provide this distinction between environments, and it's the boxes of thinking that we have when we think about what the office should contain and the moment you Like the castle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like the castle, and you always talk about the simple way I talk about. It is being a pub. So you walk into a pub and you walk up and you go to a bar and you know you're going to order a drink, you know you're going to transact and you turn around from the bar and you find there's a free seat and you go and sit down. You know it's time immemorial, right.
Speaker 2:That's been the same for 500 years or more. But actually, what happened if you took away the bar? It's a really simple question.
Speaker 3:You walk into the pub Cheers, yeah, so you walk into the pub.
Speaker 2:So where's my drink? It's in the room at the back. Oh God, someone's got to tell me and you've got to put some signage up to tell the pub to go and find the room in the back. And then when you walk in the room in the back, you just can bobble it because the things you thought you were doing have changed. So there's no. Okay, I've sort of exploring these things because I find them fundamentally interesting, but it's also because when you start to unpack problems and you start to needle the issues involved with the reasons why you think in tropes. And again, there's another author of fair amount was Daniel Cayman, who wrote a book called Black Swan, which I thoroughly recommend, and he talks about the fact that most people think with blinkers on. And I think you know, you can imagine it for yourself you sort of go right, I'll think in a certain line, in a certain way, and I also think there's a power of thinking and rationalising which decisions you want to invest your time in and the ones you don't.
Speaker 1:Well, your brain tries to take shortcuts as well, right.
Speaker 2:Because but there's often shortcuts because you see the answers. I think at times it's too easy. I think that's what happens and I think the office and I'll be very sort of blunt here I think workspace design has become incredibly lazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah and I think it resolves itself with making great looking 3D. So yeah, I'm gonna go in my soapbox Great looking 3Ds that people buy into, because all they're doing is following the herd of others and actually what they don't do is investigate what is essentially a problem. There's a good another strategist I would. He's very fortunate to say as a friend, as on, neil Usher talks about the minimum viable product when he talks about workspace, which I think is a nice way of perceiving it, and we do the same.
Speaker 2:When we talk with some of our clients and you say, if you took all of the people out of the office and put them out on the street and you've rebuilt the office around the dynamics and the parameters of those individuals, rather than simply assume it's going to be an office in a 22-bitch escape, you can have 5,000 square foot because there's 50 people coming into the office, maybe 100 at certain times, you just go well, we might as well just design the office we designed last week.
Speaker 2:But actually the power of this is if you think about it differently and say to yourself, if we start to break these paradigms down, it's a risky thing because you've explored problems that you never thought you might have and I was treated the other way, treated as a bit like hiring or leasing a car on your drive Is it's always there, you've got your keys in your hand and you can always say to yourself it's insured, I'm paying for it, it doesn't probably cost me that much. It costs me more than I want, but I know I've always got access to it and that's what an office represents for a lot of people.
Speaker 2:They don't really challenge it. They just say to themselves don't worry about it, it's the least car I can forget about it to a certain extent, and actually possibly to some people and I've worked with a very small number of businesses where I think this is the case and I'm lucky to say that I don't think they care, which is a damning indictment of some organisations and I'm certainly not going to name them, but there's a sort of an.
Speaker 2:I'm sure some of the people listening to this might even sort of recognise that sense of saying well, we were chucked into an office and I'm not sure people really spent any attention or real desire for it to be an interesting, productive, valuable, different space. That actually explores the problem of what does this do for the organisation in a different way.
Speaker 1:And it's different for everybody. I say this on every single episode, but I love going into the office. I think I'm one of the only people ever I don't like working from home.
Speaker 1:For me it's a I need that distinction. I need to get home at the end of the day. It's really psychological for me. I could do work from home occasionally, but I miss I have to go and do something. I could go and work in a cafe or go to a co-working space. I can't. I can't be at home. And it's interesting when we're thinking about designing spaces for all people, when we're talking about people centric design how do we cater to everybody? It's really hard.
Speaker 2:I think there's stuff you can do which is interesting and I think there's stuff that I wouldn't say I've seen work but I've seen have the consequences of the decisions you make change as a result of the interactions you're trying to, rather the tool kits you're trying to use. So one of those is actually there's a rather joyous thing, there's a study done. It was about the thing called the Hawthorne effect. So very simple thing. Again, it was a study, I think from the 1930s, a factory that produced lights and it was in the US and they manufactured the bulbs and the sort of a sort of very yearly manufacturing filament bulb.
Speaker 2:So it's quite, probably quite technical thing at the time. I'd imagine they have people on a bench putting these lights together and it sort of doesn't matter what it is really. But nevertheless you've got this sort of principle of all these people sitting around in this great warehouse and there's sort of 10 tables and there's 20 people around each table and all the bits of the lamps get put into the side of the table and the people start to put all the parts of the lamps together and the person that run it was actually sort of very insightful and went what happens if we ask the people working at the bench, rather than make assumptions about what the right answers are and the employees are psychologists to come in and just run those pieces of study and say what works, what doesn't.
Speaker 2:Is it so? Is the so, what's working, what isn't? Looking back at the problem and thinking, just trying to break the problem apart a bit. And the group said the table's too low, no matter what it is, and there's the right answer. That doesn't really matter. So he said, right, we'll put the table up a bit. And they found a 20% increase in productivity. Wow. So you know it was again.
Speaker 2:I've probably got bits of this wrong, so don't crucify me for this into this no, it's just a story to illustrate a point, but it is a very powerful point. And then, having seen this and found out that you can create this difference and back to your thing about people being different, came back and went right. So what we're going to do next? We're going to find out that, what happens if we change something else? So we went and changed and they sort of they asked they didn't just do it, they asked and said what is it that we're trying to change? I said, well, should we change the lighting? It's quite dark in here. So I already am being a lighting company, but it's quite dark in here. Let's put some more lighting so we can see what this or a 10% increase in productivity you know kind of.
Speaker 2:I was just going to go on here. You can imagine them thinking. So they asked them again after a couple of months and they sort of went on through this process. The amount that they improved, productivity decreased, but nevertheless it still stayed at a sort of degrees of increased productivity. And they got to the end of that process and again this is sort of turning a story, almost like it's not meant to be told. But went to the end of it and they went yeah, what would you like to change now? Well, can you make it a bit darker? It's too bright.
Speaker 2:So the Hawthorne effect is this principle if you ask the group of people what they want, it's not even necessarily the action of the change itself that creates the productivity. It's the fact that you're taking an interest in their well-being that actually creates the difference. So, granted, putting the table up is actually positive benefits, which is putting six-ton tables. You can get the benefit, but conversely, this process of asking people can have a very positive and beneficial part of that experience. So this isn't just a workspace. Got a good colleague of mine who encouraged you to look up and called Dr Craig Knight. He's a psychologist, started in the workplace design, did the exact same study in nursing home and found out that he had exactly the same results, just asking people what they would like. So again.
Speaker 2:Hawthorne effect. The interesting thing he did after that which I find very he was, you know, to tell us a story far better than I did was that he said what happens if we involve some creativity in that process. So what happens if we say to the people that are asking the question so it's saying what is it that you'd like to change? I'd like it, I'd like a more comfortable chair. And then someone comes in and says actually, what do you mean when you say comfortable? If I showed you this, this and this and if I worked with you to develop what comfort looked like, how would it work?
Speaker 2:And if I'm not just a 20% increase, it's a 45% increase in the response of people and the quality of the lives of the people who was asking.
Speaker 2:So there's real evidence out there that this, that we ask ourselves about this principle of what strategy means, or interrogation of the brief of the frame, but actually there's a genuine value behind it and there's a proven value too, and it's all startling when you approach projects and people go you haven't got time for strategy and ask what strategy is sometimes, but no, we haven't got time for strategy or no, we don't think we need it, because we think we know what we need.
Speaker 1:Do you think people want to see concepts immediately? Are they just more fascinated in how pretty it is and the aesthetics? I think a lot of no, that's a fair question.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of it is pinned around the a couple of facets of. Number one is, which is to your point of it earlier, about when, when people don't actually want to invest the resource or time in something and they want a quick answer and actually sometimes they don't care enough. You know, which is fine, I've got, I've come to terms with it Bound you. This round is a big problem. While back, but actually, but like going to buy a car back to this car on your drive, do you spend hours going around all the D ships driving cars to make sure you find the perfect one you want I would use? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess, also, if you were going to go and ask a group of people, like all, what would make work better for you, they might say, all well, I want like the most expensive ergonomic seating, and I want a pool table, and I want this, this. Look, the list could go on forever, couldn't it? How do you then balance the kind of commerciality of the space, cuz? I don't know. I think if I had my own space and a team, I'd think, well, not gonna give them all what they want, cuz, we just need to build a week in a Ford. It needs to be within our budget and look nice. So maybe that's not bother asking them what was you? What would your response to that be?
Speaker 2:To all things, relatively surprising things. Well, this is from my experience anyway, one of which is that people actually, when you ask them a question like that, quite genuinely understand the limits of their influence in organizations. So run a lot of workshops over the years with Client and client groups and you get 20 people in a room and I'll sit, got some quite simple questions at the start just to get the conversation rolling. I'll just double a couple of tricks I use to try and make sure you get the right level of interaction, the right and Many became. Many people do similar things. But the thing that always surprises me is that's a couple of things actually. Number one the people that you talked to already have a Quite, a good insight. Doesn't matter where they are in the business, they will have a good insight. Secondly, that they'll have an understanding of where their influence can sit. So you have the joke about. So I get out of the way of quickly have the joke about the jacuzzi and the.
Speaker 2:Swimming pool and the bar in the corner and you say, yeah, if I knew, I'll put that down in the list, hang on, I'll write it down. But when you get down to the number of it, they really do understand. This is about making the fundamental things that make their lives better, and those can be relatively simple things and it was surprises me and it we're used to surprising present price very much now, but I think that's that. That is a once I could credit to the human condition that we can. You know we don't. We're not these 99% of the people. I don't to want these sort of crazy individuals who think that they're gonna be able to buy the world and get the world on a plate. You know they do recognize their sphere of influence. Second thing, which is quite surprising is the workshop groups I work with very often have bigger ideas than the Senior management teams that I talked to afterwards. So I run.
Speaker 2:I run, I cast get. Often what I do is cascade Workshop. So I would cascade them the envisioning workshop with the senior management team very often, or even the board team at the start, to set the philosophy for the project and find out where the boundaries are and what types of things are gonna happen, and then cascade that down, often with interviews and managers, to try and understand where their perspectives are, what they think is gonna be working, what doesn't. And there's often quite powerful but quite controlling perspectives there and they are often the ones that elite most resistant to change, the sort of mid, mid level senior management teams below the board level, and they get down to the workshops, the, the, the teams of people working across the organization and they genuinely come up with some Sometimes already obvious and rather elegant answers to some sometimes quite complicated problems and they express things in a way that is actually quite Refreshing.
Speaker 2:So it's it's a people thing and I think you're right to express the fact that people are different. But equally, I think there's a way through that that will enable I said the last bit of that that I would say is an enabler for how you think about when you've got a group of people together Is that you will have, and this is this is something that Steve and I found quite a long time ago was that, roughly speaking, 25% of people are probably like you, so they enjoy change, and I'll call myself in that group as well. So you're walking to an environment and you find that people are. There'll be a group of people out there, but you know they're encouraged by the idea that things are gonna change and almost it'll, can almost be whatever change you wanted to be Sometimes, but you know they really want things to happen. It's very interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've changed novelty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and often just because I think it inspires, if you've got an acquiring mind difference changes your perspective and I think for some people I think that really helps and that's another and it's the reason that we evolved.
Speaker 1:Well the reason? Because we seek novelty so much. That's why we've got come so far always looking for the new thing it's a very deep thought, yeah that's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's very true.
Speaker 1:So let's say we've done the strategy Designs done, it's built, they've moved in. How do you gauge the success of the strategy you did at the beginning?
Speaker 2:There's the million-dollar question. Right, I've remember when I was working a long time ago I think it's the one and only job I've ever had, working from their organization, full-time and they started. There's a rule, that genuine investment and intent to find out what can we do, to find out what productivity means in the workspace. Do you know real sort of like? How do we measure this? And I don't think I've ever seen a robust measure. There's some people who try very hard.
Speaker 2:That leads one index has an index, and they do that through a Survey that they run that asks questions that are then weighted by their special matrix. That's a thing or not, I don't know. I'm sure it is sorry, I'm being very flippant and they come out with a score and that will give the quality of the environment a. And there are. They call, I think, what they call it now, they call them the Leesman. I think they get the high achievers or something like that. That's one way looking at it. Another way, very simply, might actually be to look at happiness when we come back to joy.
Speaker 2:But when you ask a question about happiness, how hard is that weighted and what is that weighted towards? So would you be able to exclusively unwrap? It was almost like you at a personal level. Would you be as exclusively unwrap your happiness of whether you were at the office or having a Happy time, or that because you had a happy time of the weekend and no happy coming in?
Speaker 2:You know, there's a lot of entangled perspectives there that I think are and impacted by much more than just the space quite, quite, and then you unwrap this thing that we might call performance and you think, right, there's a great team and actually they're working a lot better because we see the outcomes of that team improve. And then you go was the work place just wants all for this, or is that actually because the team of gel, because they've gone away on a Wayday, or as the team gel, because actually they've had a new member added and they've really changed the dynamic? And I think it's all of those things. I don't think it's necessarily one and I think very genuinely the workplace has a Responsibility and it has a, a benefit. And I've also seen businesses which is a great joy actually that we've done work with and Fundamental level is, if you do a good job, you find the business a, the person in the group you worked with are often promoted.
Speaker 2:So I know that's a very strange thing to say, because you've done a good job, they've been recognized as having done a good job and internal to the organization, they will be promoted.
Speaker 2:I think that's actually recognition. Is a very strange thing to think about it like that, because it sort of feels like self-fulfillment, but actually that's because there's a recognition that what's happened is a good thing. And the second thing is that you will see that organization often change in another way than the workspace is allowed it to. So very often workspace change comes with organizational change and maybe work basis because of organizational changes and acquisition and merger, something in business is changing. But if you approach that and you see that the organization, once you've completed some work for it, undergoes another period of reorganization, that I think can be evidence that you've actually had an impact, and often I think that my belief is that's a positive impact, because what's happened is you've released a management and a methodology and a way in which people can work that wasn't released before. So I'd probably call those as being my productivity measures. It's a very low bar, but I think that's the complicated I.
Speaker 2:Haven't seen a measure out there that I know makes sense. I know that sounds like a sort of a cop out, but no, I think it's just nuance, isn't it?
Speaker 1:There's so many different measures, so yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I'd be interesting to see unless something I want to try and Do some more work into myself as actually where AI could have an influence and stuff like this, I think it could pick up.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Trends. I think it would be its, its rationality would actually allow it to Focus on things that I think would be very difficult to otherwise see on that.
Speaker 1:Have you seen anything interesting in this area?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've seen some stuff that's yeah, sort of the reinforcement of the things that I think are against the policy of what we've been talking about. So I'm sure you've probably seen the same some early AI Sort of renderings of offices where they've just, you know, someone said, design me an office and it's come up with, I mean basically everything. You think an office is exactly what we just talked about. All the tropes that we say it's gone, it's got reception area, it's got a meeting room, it's nice looking benches in the corner, oh, it's got some high back seating areas and the kitchen feels not very innovative, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:There's, it's it's very in its infancy, I suppose. But although chat GPT went down today for about three hours and I felt lost, oh, we're just really embarrassing and I can't leave her much saying this out loud on a podcast, but I really use it a lot. Oh right you know it's not even that I use it for original thought. I just put all my thoughts into it and and ask it to Tell me whether it thinks my thinking is is sound. That's how I use it.
Speaker 1:It's really weird. Yeah, I felt really sort of you know, and you lose your phone for a minute. Well, you run out of battery and you feel a bit like whoa am. I gonna get home. I thought like that, it's embarrassing. I can't afford to submit to this. We're actually coming towards the end.
Speaker 1:Sure We've got about five minutes left, so I know we've just touched on AI, but how do you see the future workplace evolving? I know that's a massive question, but we've seen such a huge amount of change in the past Three years, particularly with people and the way that people work. What do you think the next couple of years holds?
Speaker 2:One thing I think is the let's look, use history as our Anchor here for what represents our future. So if 25 percent of people enjoy change, it also, by default, often means that 25 percent of people don't and that often means, I think, that you leave a gap in the middle. Now that gap is filled in part by. Most people don't mind what happens to certain degrees, as long as it fits within a paradigm. So you know you, we're gonna go out for Chinese tie or are we gonna go and just grab a sandwich? Fine, I'm not gonna get too caught up and I was gonna be too emotional, I was gonna fall out over it. So most people don't mind what changes, as long as it's within a reason, parameters or similar to the things they've had before. And 25 percent of people don't want change. Now I think that's changed since COVID and the impact has had that's accelerated.
Speaker 2:This drive towards empowerment for the employee Rather than empowerment for the employer Is as that shift and patterns happened. There's a scramble happening for who controls what the office does and also what work represents and where work is done most critically. You know it's a massive conversation. I've quite obviously and everyone's having it, quite rightly. So if we look at that and we say so, one thing we found before we did these projects is that we found that About five percent of the people we but two or three percent of the people we worked with Didn't want to engage in any change at all in the workspace because they felt unable to comment on it, and that was often because the things that happened outside the office were too powerful for them to be able to think about stuff that happens inside of it, and that's often to do with mental health issues or something that's happening in their personal life. So that's grown, we said we think, from somewhere with two or three percent Probably, to five, maybe even 10 percent. So it's in this growth of people that are working in workspaces and because they have activities or something that's happened in their life outside of work and something may well be external or internal I either have issues with well-being, they've got issues of anxiety, whatever. It is sort of.
Speaker 2:So you know, I think the list there is important to recognize. So what is it? We? How we were responding to that, and when we were talking earlier, you were saying you're quite rightly trying to find that there's a something to talk about, and I think that's very important.
Speaker 2:But where that gets me to a place of is this idea of the what work represents and also the office as a piece of identity for an organization. So one critical thing that's happened is it's not as costly anymore to do offices. If people are taking that space, it means they need to spend less on it. Even if they spend the money say my donate it'll be a smaller space and it'll cost them less in the long run. Many businesses did far better in covid economically because of these savings.
Speaker 2:So actually, where the office might have been 10, 12, 15% of the overall sort of growth out goings of an organization, maybe it's now seven or 6%. It means probably also that it's less important. But it does have a problem because I think what it does is it makes the office need to represented, to have a different purpose, and again that we were purpose lots of people talking about it. But it means, I think, that the office has to have a has to bend into an understanding that it is there to represent the stuff that you can't represent elsewhere. And it needs destination.
Speaker 2:I think it's, it's it needs to signify and exhibit the standards and the qualities of the thing and the organization you're trying to be and become Aren't able to be represented elsewhere and that, if you think about it, is quite. It might be quite simple, but it does change the emphasis we try to do I think that potentially is quite a powerful lever.
Speaker 2:to think about the workspace is a different With throw it back to this conversation very nicely.
Speaker 2:Hopefully segue back to this is idea of just seeing it through a different lens.
Speaker 2:Stop thinking about it as this engine or powerhouse or the you know you're feeding the fuel into the engine to drive the business.
Speaker 2:I don't think that's needed anymore. It's there to ring fence culture and support, support people that may not be able to be supported at home or successfully in other ways. It's there to be the carrier for the brand of the organization internally as well as externally. It's there to be a standard bearer and as people think about their investment in, I think, the way that people will look at the workspace and that might not manifest itself physically in substantially different environments, I think the expenditure profile will be quite different and certainly with things like office be able to be least now, rather than the impact of regenerating and refurbishing existing spaces Feed into that. Actually we can reoccupy spaces that might not have been appropriate because the demands of space are going to be different. Because if we think about it more clearly, we can actually say to ourselves don't need to build something new. We can actually revisit, refurbish and recycle what we've got in a more successful way. So I think that's the future.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much, adam. So nice to have you here. You can connect with Adam on LinkedIn. He'll have his link in the show notes and also the link to Bert Jones and Brewer, and I apologize again for my voice being terrible. I hope this wasn't too difficult to listen to. But thank you so much and we will see you next time. This podcast is sponsored by Projects, the home for better business, with two beautiful buildings open in the heart of Brighton, one in the lanes and one moment from the beach, plus many more set to open across the UK. Projects is proud to house a community of collaborative businesses. They change and operate inspiring spaces that make everyone feel included. Projects combines co-working areas, dedicated desks and fully serviced offices with meeting and event spaces, cafes, bars and a gym and this podcast suite. Find out more, book a tour and arrange a free trial via their website, wwwprojectsclubcredituk. Plus, you can let them know that you've heard about them via the spaces that shape us to receive 25% off your first podcast suite booking.
