BEHAVIOUR AND MISBEHAVIOUR AT WORK
For agile to succeed, we need awareness of how people actually work. That means deeply understanding worker behaviour and organisational culture, and managing change to suit.
There’s been much written about workplace design in recent years, often contradictory and usually too simplistic. Our industry seems to spend too much time thinking about ‘how it looks’ rather than investing time and effort examining ‘how it works’ and figuring out what real-world problems need to be solved.
Delivering a great outcome requires a sophisticated process linking strategy, design and change, where the first step is to develop an ‘aspirational brief’ capturing five key areas:
1. What is the business trying to achieve?
2. What is the desired organisational culture in order for the business to grow?
3. What experience do we need to create for staff and customers? 4. How can we use an analytical evidence-based approach to inform decision making?
5. How can new thinking and trends transform the nature of work in the business?
Importantly, there’s a need to view the project through a changemanagement lens at the earliest possible stage. Once the strategy is agreed, we can move on to the detailed ‘functional brief’, where the requirements of each team can be challenged and defined prior to detailed design work commencing.
Looking a little more deeply into business aspiration, we are all certainly familiar with the ‘battle of the buzzwords’ that is common in workplace commentary. We’ll try and simplify things in this article, starting with two terms that are often conflated: ‘agile work’ is the first, which shouldn't be confused with ‘agile workplace’. One is the act, the other is the place.
‘Agile work’ is a product-development methodology. Formalised around 2001 by software developers frustrated with top-down approaches to projects, agile work promotes interactions, collaboration and speed of response. Agile teams are self organising, cross functional and often collaborate directly with their clients. This ensures that skills and perspectives fluidly enter and exit projects in response to changing project needs. ‘Agile workplace’ is a workplace design methodology. Typically, it has three components:
1. An assumption that designing an ‘open-plan’ office will lead to better collaboration and communication.
2. Self-organising teams who use all the available spaces in the office, allowing staff to sit wherever they need or want to be effective. 3. The adoption of mobile technology – smartphones, lightweight notebooks, cloud computing, Wi-Fi, and messaging apps that enable staff to work from anywhere.
On the face of it, the agile workplace seems like a win-win: it is lower cost as it enables more people to flexibly work in less space; and it ideally improves performance as it enables collaboration and communication. Unfortunately, this can be an illusion when executed incorrectly.
While having people sit together in an open-plan area might seem perfect for collaborative working, poor implementation can actually harm communication, collaboration, concentration, continuous learning and trust – the very things we were trying to achieve in the first place!
Why? Teams can be noisy, which distracts the rest of the office, hindering concentration and cognitive ability. Being overly dependent on digital connectivity and the social pressure to be quiet prevents deep social connectedness and lowers interpersonal trust. And furthermore, open-plan distractions and hyper-fast digital connectivity prevent reflection and learning, and decrease the possibility of continuous improvement.
These contradictions and ambiguities can have significant consequences. Harvard Business Review reports that open-plan increases email usage by 67 per cent and decreases face-to-face interactions by 73 per cent – anathema to good agile work. Forbes suggests that open-plan can incur a ‘15-per-cent productivity tax’.
In reality, most so-called agile workplaces are a shallow ‘work swamp’, with endless emails and messages, pointless meetings, interruptions by colleagues and a hotbed of workplace gossip.