LEARNING TO SHARE

The Australian workplace is forever buzzing with new catchwords to label the latest shifts in workplace design. True, Australia is widely regarded as among the most innovative countries in the world when it comes to workplace design. But this disguises the fact that it often entails little more than a fresh set of fitttings, furnishings and fitnishes, turning the office into a kind of business class airport lounge.

This is not sleight of hand on the part of designers, but a failure to own the problem – namely, to understand the business in question, its culture and aspirations and only then to devise an appropriate physical environment. It is, says Gijs Nooteboom from Veldhoen + Company, a failure to discern the difference between a workplace strategy and a project methodology.

Veldhoen are workplace strategists, not designers, and insist on putting the horse fitrmly in front of the cart. In other words, get the workplace culture right before you install the furniture. While they introduced activity-based working (ABW) back in the 1990s, their Australasian operation does not even work from an ABW dedicated office, but from Spaces, an inner Sydney co-working facility – surely sending a signal about where they think the workplace is heading.

So, what is co-working, what are its benefitts and are there any potential pitfalls? The Veldhoen base in the Netherlands was the fitrst “office without desks” which, says Nooteboom, had to accommodate their three dynamics of socialising, knowledge-sharing and project management. But, he points out that they had to apply change management to themselves if they were to advise clients.

“We felt we needed to change, to re-discover our own ways of working,” he says. “We thought that if there was one co-work location we should test it was Spaces. We can bump into like-minded people believing, as we do, that sharing is the new norm. We are an ‘outgoing’ company because most of the day we are with clients, but we need a place where we can work in a very focused way, but also work in a very collaborative way. We are also too small – just 10 people – to have our own space in an economical way, as are many companies. So, why not share the costs of a bigger space with the right facilities?”

So, there it is in a nutshell. But co-working is really part of a bigger picture because, on the supply side, developers are now starting to respond to a changing marketplace. As specialist workplace consultant James Calder points out, “There is a whole range of new shared services that are starting to emerge… it is not exactly revolutionary, but I think it could be quite powerful in the market and in how people use space.”