Successful Teams Need Successful Spaces

Motivate workers with conducive workspaces

We cannot down-play the importance of a great team to a business’ success. The quality of the work you do will never exceed the quality of the team behind it. Merely referring to a collection of employees as a team, does not make them one.

Working successfully as a team can be compared to the complicated art of watchmaking – there are so many moving parts, which all must grind together to make it happen. The importance of where it happens is becoming a significant topic of conversation during the Pandemic.

Old fashioned Individual workstations and meeting spaces offered only in a boardroom, areas with audio privacy for video and teleconferencing that are limited in number, and social spaces, if they exist, which often lack power sources or Wi-Fi – were, even preCovid-19, becoming a thing of the past.

With diversified team members, some colocated and others stationed globally, efficient collaboration is becoming a true challenge. Providing the right platform for teamwork and the sharing of information ultimately leads to co-operative employee communications and engagement, which is key to creating dynamic teams. Digital technology and the growing sophistication of online platforms like Zoom and Teams are addressing these virtual experiences and will become the norm with the growing need for virtual reality (VR).

“The need for unprecedented flexibility in the ‘Workplace of the Future’ means different things to different people – but maximising productivity, health, wellness, and sustainability, sees teams looking to push workspace layouts beyond conventional collaborative models to focus on multifaceted and multi-functional arrangements and is taking the flexible working trend to the next level”, says Joanne Bushell, IWG, Country Head for South Africa.

To create an expansive winning team that is encouraged to be collaborative, organisations need to remain flexible and agile in the workplace. Developing synergy through a wide-spread diverse workforce is about creating and supporting varied opportunities. A mindset that is all-embracing of varied methods of working, can cultivate interpersonal relationships, even with a socially distanced perimeter and still provides a supportive environment in which synergy can naturally occur.

Successful teams are placing comfort, aesthetically pleasing spaces, and technology at the forefront and organisations stand to benefit from the shift to flexible spaces that generate happy, co-operative employees. Employee-centric workspaces, ultimately maximise productivity, promoting a win-win situation for team members and leaders alike.

The use of flexible offices such as the Regus and SPACES brand in South Africa provides work areas where employee comfort and collaboration takes precedence, allowing the natural progression of virtual togetherness no matter where they are in the country, providing a holistic office solution that encompasses it all. In other words, creating a -not-in-the-same- room “togetherness”.

A mixture of group spaces that include areas for co-creation and for concentrated work, such as unassigned individual workstations, allows opportunistic social exchange and an environment that always encourages learning. Flexible working has changed forever and is about to see exponential growth. With that in mind, the workspace is becoming an essential element in the creation of winning teams that will take a business to new heights. How you do it greatly depends on where you do it. For more information on IWG and how they are transforming workspaces, visit www.iwgplc.com.