What is a Workplace Strategy?
First published on COMUNiTI, September 2024
How People & Culture teams are repositioning this Boardroom conversation
“Can you help me explain what a workplace strategy is, to my leadership team?”
It’s a question that we get asked a lot at COMUNiTI, and it’s easy to understand why: while workplace strategy is a pivotal concept for forward-thinking organisations, it continues to be misunderstood among many executive teams, who consider their workplace as simply a “place to accommodate people to work”, resulting in a desk + chair approach where they see no strategy is needed.
Re-imagining, redesigning, recreating, and rebuilding a workplace often falls in the remit of the Facilities Management, Operations, or Accommodation teams. HOWEVER, what this approach fails to acknowledge is that our workplaces are created for PEOPLE. To ensure that organisations consider all aspects of what people need to thrive at work, the workplace strategy conversation must be three-way between the Facilities, People & Culture, and IT teams.
To help People & Culture teams secure their place at the ‘workplace redesign’ conversation, COMUNiTI is delivering a 3-part blog series:
- what a workplace strategy is π₯οΈπΌπ
- the role of People & Culture and a workplace strategist, and πΆπ©πΌπ£οΈ
- how a workplace strategy delivers a ROI against key business performance metrics ππ
Let’s dive in!
Defining workplace strategy
At its core, a workplace strategy is a comprehensive plan that defines how an organisation’s work environments can best support its business objectives and employee needs.
It considers far more than just the office layout and furniture choices. It’s a holistic and data-driven approach for integrating space and technology with company culture and values, and a business’ purpose and priorities, to optimise performance, engagement, and wellbeing.
Why is workplace strategy important for People & Culture?
For People & Culture leaders, understanding and shaping a workplace strategy is about ensuring that the environments where people work are as effective and human-centred as possible. Here’s why it matters:
π« Enhancing employee engagement
A well-thought-out workplace strategy fosters environments where employees feel supported and valued — it creates places where people can be their best and do their best work. By designing spaces that promote connection, collaboration, innovation, and wellbeing, businesses can boost engagement.
π« Supporting organisational culture
Workplace strategy plays a crucial role in reinforcing or transforming a company’s culture. The design and feel of a workspace communicates important messages about the values, behaviour expectations, and priorities for the organisation. HR leaders play a key role in ensuring the workplace strategy aligns with the company’s aspirational culture and growth objectives and fosters environments that are inclusive, collaborative, and flexible.
Every physical workplace influences the behaviours that underpin company culture. A workplace strategy should consciously support your desired culture by designing spaces that work towards it, not against it.
π« Attracting and retaining talent
It’s no secret that providing a contemporary office that aligns with employees’ evolving expectations is a competitive advantage. Today’s employees value autonomy, flexibility, and purpose. They want workplaces that work for them. A well-designed workplace, which is informed by a robust and employee-centred strategy, helps to attract top talent and retain high performers. HR’s influence in tailoring the work environment to respond to employee feedback is critical to a company’s overall talent strategy.
π« Adapting to change
Flexibility and adaptability have become key tenets in modern, hybrid workplaces. An effective workplace strategy enables an organisation to be agile in the face of disruption, whether it’s shifting market conditions, evolving technologies, or changes in employee expectations. HR can take the lead in ensuring that workplace strategies remain future-proof, adaptable to growth or a change in business direction, and responsive to employee feedback.
What you should expect to see in a workplace strategy
π Data
First and foremost, a solid workplace strategy should unlock the data that already exists within your organisation, such as space utilisation studies, employee engagement and satisfaction surveys, productivity and wellbeing metrics, brand and values guidelines, business strategies and plans, and organisational structures and cross-functional relationships and communication flows. This data provides rich insights that enable informed and educated decision-making to elevate the employee experience and optimise the use of the physical space.
If you partner with COMUNiTI to develop your workplace strategy you’ll also see our 5-pillar Workplace Dynamics Blueprint come to life:
β¨ Reimagine the future
We consider the business strategy and growth projections, as well as the changing modes of work and the impact of technology, to help you reimagine how your workplace could be used in the future. This helps us develop a layout and stacking plan that’s not just responsive to employee and business needs today, but is also adaptable for the future. This is about focusing on your physical space as an asset and being strategic about how we can optimise it.
β¨ Brand and culture
This is so much more than a logo and colour palette! We focus on your company story — it’s rich history and its vision for the future — and consider how we can bring this story to life in the physical space. Purpose-driven organisations understand the power of their workplace in communicating their intentions and this guides the functional planning and aesthetics in your workplace strategy. We want employees, clients, visitors, anyone who steps into your office to ‘feel’ what it’s like to do business with you.
β¨ Values and behaviours
The environment is an underutilised asset in influencing workplace behaviours. The way the space flows, the zones we create, and the furniture typologies we incorporate all provide cues that influence how your team will behave and interact in a space. Through scientific principles we design environments that align with the values of your organisation, influencing aligned behaviours.
β¨ Wellbeing
Our workplaces have a big impact on our physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing. And while the concept of being healthy and safe at work is not new, the context in which we are having these conversations has evolved as we consider the psychosocial risks that the physical environment can create. Noise and acoustics, access to natural light, air quality — we have conscious conversations about the most appropriate way to control risks and accommodate employee needs so that workplaces promote wellbeing, connection, and safety.
β¨ Employee experience
We unpack the employee journey and understand the employee experience that you are trying to create and then look at how the physical environment is helping or hindering this. We overlay the physical environment, the aspirational company culture, and the technology stack and consider how we can alleviate friction points and create a seamless and frustration-free experience at work. We look at patterns of behaviour, work modes, preferred work styles, and the varying activities that your team undertakes on the day-to-day to design the best floorplan for optimal productivity and a great employee experience.
In COMUNiTI’s view, as organisations navigate remote, hybrid, and in-office work models, People & Culture leaders are uniquely positioned to drive the modern-day conversation around workplace strategy. The decisions made about workplace strategy directly influence culture, the employee experience, productivity, and retention.
We believe that the concept of a workplace strategy isn’t just an operational concern, it’s a strategic lever for People & Culture leaders.
Stay tuned for next month’s blog when we unpack the evolving role of People & Culture and the workplace strategist in designing your next workplace.
Mel x
