A recent report by Deloitte researched how the construction of the workplace can affect innovation, creativity and employee engagement. Researching over 75 companies varying in size, maturity and industry, they concluded that redesigning the work environment will be key to achieving sustainable business performance improvement in the future. They maintain that the work environment needs to be redesigned with three goals in mind to foster talent development, improve innovation in the workplace and achieve performance improvement:
Goal 1—Define high-impact challenges: Help workers and teams to focus on areas of highest business impact, learning, and sustainable improvement. Organisational ability improves when workers and teams strive to achieve more and higher-quality work. Work environments should help workers identify new challenges and focus their attention on the challenges most likely to significantly impact the performance of the firm and its ecosystem.
Goal 2—Strengthen high-impact connections: Enable workers to connect with people who matter, both inside and outside the organisation. Most work environments have rigid organisational structures that silo workers and impede collaboration. Work environments instead should identify similarities, interests, and capabilities to aid team formation, and enable relationships beyond team structures.
Goal 3—Amplify impact: Augment worker impact with the right infrastructure. Many individuals think of work environments as simply the traditional physical space where employees show up Monday through Friday. The problem with this perspective is that it focuses on the environment where work happens rather than how the environment affects work. A broader view of the work environment includes the physical, virtual, and management infrastructure that amplifies the efforts of workers. Using this innovation in the workplace can be enhanced and improved to make for more productive all round workers.
Each goal can be achieved by following a set of design principles, summarised by the following picture:
Read the entire report here. Many very valuable specific company examples. Excellent reading.
