Why Workplace Matters
Market Forces
The confluence of several market forces is causing the rise in importance of the Workplace.
Businesses need to understand employees as consumers of the workplace AND NEED to reflect the experiential trends seen in the wider world.
Competitive Advantage
The most influential and successful companies in the world utilise Workplace as a tool for competitive advantage. They acknowledge that Workplace is high on their business agenda. It is a way of enabling their people to deliver their best contribution to their organisations every day, inspired by their experience, supported in their work endeavours and unencumbered by failures in services or systems.
Progressive organisations recognise this as improving their business performance, employee experience and brand value and invest in their people, technology and workspace. For these organisations’ workplace is core to what they are about.
The idea that Workplace can be a lever for strategic advantage is by no means new, but it’s one that many leadership teams still fail to act upon. Maximising the contribution of people in this endeavour is an increasingly important challenge for senior leaders in public and private organisations.
Forward-thinking organisations need to articulate a strategy for the workplace that aligns objectives with the organisation’s business strategy & brand.
My “Why”
Over the past 20 years, the workplace industry has been fixated on improving asset efficiency. Workplace density has gradually risen, often driven by the need to reduce operating costs and maximise productivity. But somewhere along the line, we have forgotten about the impact this has on the people that use the Workplace.
Globally 1 in 2 people go to work every day in the certain knowledge that their workplace is going to hinder what they are trying to achieve for the organisation that employs them. No wonder we are in the midst of a productivity crisis worldwide, despite all of the advances in technology and the ubiquitous access to information.