Innovation Spaces - Where you Work
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ANALYSIS, Melbourne – Where you work is important to how you are inspired to create & then implement innovation.
Do some of these describe your workplace?
Concrete, gray, drab, cubicle, boxed-in, noisy, mobile phone ringtones from hell, low barriers, bombarded with email, ‘no door’ policy, jokes, noise, prison-like gulag?
Or is it more interesting?
Post-modernist refugee camp for cultural relativists?
Weekend-after recovery center?
Creative desert?
Angst-ridden pit of teenage romance?
So what works for innovation?
One of the perks of having worked at so many corporations (more than 350) is you get to see what works and what doesn’t work in the workplace.
7 Common Workplace Complaints
Seven of the most common complaints I have heard over the years:
- Email bombardment (biggest by far)
- Lack of sound-proofing
- Open plan workplaces
- Lack of private space
- Indiscreet colleagues (do you really want to know about ointments?)
- Tendency of staff to walk in to each others spaces
- Teasing, jokes, inappropriate behavior
Blokey Bankers
An investment bank that shall remain nameless has an entirely open plan operation on it’s dealer floor. Which works well as a conduit for information.
However the blokey (macho in a kind of dumb way) culture and corridor sports makes a decidely non-female friendly or non-concentration friendly workplace.
I remember aerial football swirling about me, in amongst half-eaten pizza slices, BMW keyrings, yelled queries across the floor, a collage of discarded neckties, broken chairs (in amongst the sports), multiple video screens, a bowl of soggy cereal from several days ago, clack of high heels on the corridor tiles, breakfast bars, and numerous cigarette boxes. All amongst a loud background din of activity.
The open-plan buzz is so that information can be shared, and relevant deals overheard.
So: great for dealing, but somewhat poor for analysts who were writing at the time.
And there have been numerous complaints about the blokey culture in investment banking. In addition a number of harassment suits have worked through the courts, especially the now infamous lawsuit against Merrill Lynch in the US.
Big name consulting and legal firms can have similar problems at times.
The Cubicle Pedicurist…
Another big name company, with a more female oriented workforce I had to ask for a private tiny internal office on the floor just to concentrate on consulting work.
Why?
Walk-up-to-my-cubicle-and-chat was a common occurrence. Given the open plan nature of the office people would often be chatting on all 3 sides of any cubicle.
Famously one contractor in this company who was my cubicle-neighbor felt so comfortable that she used to file her toenails with her feet up at her desk.
She was the cubicle-pedicurist.
The Kingdom of Fiefdoms
One powerful organization had numerous private old-style mahogany offices, with 1-5 people in each office. Never was there a more political organization, with numerous alliances, power-bases and covert strikes as the invasion and declaration of space became a battle straight out of Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Architecture & workspace design gives behavioural cues
These were all big successful organizations. In all cases they had spent multi-million or billion dollar amounts on staff salaries & retention.
Yet all had various behavioral problems exacerbated by the design and fit-out of their buildings.
This is because office spaces give behavioural cues. Cues to what behaviour is ‘normal’ and ‘aceptable’.
Workspaces give organizational cues to the way we do it around here.
The key distinction is to consider whether the behavioural cues given suit the environment and culture in your organization.
When I have designed systems for large companies in the past, it has always been a part of the work we do to focus on the interface. Time after time we found interface design was the key focus of getting users to accept the system and utilize it fully.
In the end we developed an approach for interface design because it was so important.
Does your workspace design suit the way your organization would like work to be done around here?
Discuss this
We are doing some research and analysis in the future on workplace design and innovation.
We’d like your thoughts.
Any ideas or thoughts you have please register and comment on this site.
When you state please clearly identify what type of work you do: is it ideas-driven (inspiration) or process-driven (implementation)?
Or feel free to discuss on digg, reddit, pownce or any social network.
I am considering creating a group to discuss these sort of issues from an intelligent viewpoint so your ideas on the format & topics of that are most welcome.
Take care,
Christopher
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
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