One of the most common experiential learning processes that the Design team and Change Manager will embark upon is the staff engagement surveys or workshops where discovery, culture/brand, mind mapping and co-creation will be discovered. This may include all employee engagement or vertical sampling throughout your organisation.
The Staff Engagement workshops can uncover design imperatives such as what shared facilities and learning spaces may be required, how people use established zones and mixed use spaces, and what higher proportion of shared and bookable facilities may be required.
The gold to be found in the Staff Engagement workshops can be used for both Design and Change, as the findings of the workshops are distilled into the concept design for the new workplace model and enables the Change Manager to formulate many ideas that will be pivotal in designing a connected and flexible change programme.
The other experiential learning process that could be undertaken may normally occur when the organisation has a custom facility which requires significant design and expenditure – the Lessons Learnt Workshop. This Lesson Learnt Workshop is undertaken to receive feedback from the existing users of the space on the ways in which all parts of the business or a specialist space operates or could be improved.
The Lessons Learnt workshops’ purpose is to receive feedback and to ensure this feedback is considered in the new design. The workshop should avoid solutions and designing the new space (but predictably such discussions will evolve as often these users have probably been thinking and devising improvements throughout the past years of occupying their space).
The Lessons Learnt process can be the beginning of the ‘requirements gathering’ for the design of the new workplace. It will be followed or will occur concurrently with any number of staff engagements including workshops that gather and define precise and detailed design and change requirements, such as the Staff Engagement workshops I spoke of earlier.
The Lessons Learnt workshop normally involves the Fit out, Design and Change teams as well as the key users of the facility who will share knowledge with us. The Findings Report, Schedule and any relationship diagram provided at the end of the Workshop is for information and reference only and is not a design brief for the facility (although can be used as baseline if required).
The workings captured in this workshop could result in a ordering of conclusions such as:
In saying that this exercise is not to capture a design brief, it can serve to do this to a degree. It can support future design considerations for a replacement facility. This is the opportunity to flush out general user considerations that a general employee engagement workshop could not possibly capture for the custom facility, such as:
The extra benefits of the Lessons Learnt Workshop are that the findings can be designed into a document that can evolve as a lasting artefact to record more data as it is collected, and as a design verification artefact to check the delivery of each item if it makes it into the schematic design, the detailed design development, engineering and technology designs, and fit out construction documents.
You may start with the obvious, what is absolutely critical for the design if we do it again? Other questions could be:
There are people who want walls to scribble. It is a tactile way to work in a workshop. Walls are the new paper and workshops are the time to encourage chatter, so start with drawings and then encourage chatter, but remember ‘capture everything!’. At some stage the information gathered may be adjudicated to go into the brief for the design team or will be used in your change programme.
Considerations:
The Change Manager is trying to ‘get the relationships’. They are capturing the relationships they need to solve and identifying the priorities.
The Design and the Change team will review the engagement results, sum up the findings, and distil the findings into the concept for the new workplace model if appropriate, which in turn provides segway into further employee engagement, particularly those business units identified with affinities and adjacencies.
Are you surprised how much can be gained with having the Change and Design teams working together from the get-go?
The Change and Design teams are great partners with many opportunities to share experiential learnings that will benefit both parties in their workplace project.
A workplace project is the enabler for this partnership and designers and change managers know that to develop innovative design solutions for their clients, and ensure these changes are embraced, they need to work together in achieving the same goals.
This partnership enables high-quality design, smooth transitions, unifying disparate teams and creating inspirational workplaces that will retain and attract quality employees to stay on and grow with their employer into the future. Who can ask for more?
If you are interested in what else is going on in the Design phase of any accommodation project, check out the Design Roadmap, which is another of my free journals available for you and your project team on my website.
I look forward to next time taking you through Phase 5 in the Accommodation Life cycle ‘the fit-out phase’.
