A ‘Fantastic' Workplace

Workplaces are not mere ‘spaces’ but a physical representation of a company’s mission and values.

- Neil Usher

The physical workplace. As a business leader, how do you see it? Often as a cost that you would reduce if you could, a source of distracting low-level noise you would rather not hear, or perhaps an inconvenient necessity? After many false starts and at least 60 years since the first bürolandschaft experiments in making it more engaging (the essence of which is finally resurfacing), there is an emerging realisation of what the workplace can do for the organisation and its people. For too long, its contribution has been hiding in the light.

In short, place matters.

A distinction is necessary between space and place. Space is empty, unoccupied. We strategise, design, construct, and furnish it, we take some amazing photos that look uber-cool. It is our blank canvas. Place, on the other hand, all too often used interchangeably with space, is occupied, it is where physical space and people create something entirely new. In creating a workplace, we need to understand both. When we add the opportunities for us to connect and share in digital space, using enterprise social networks, we genuinely create what can be called the ‘social workplace’.

The workplace sector often focusses on a single idea to promote its contribution, that of productivity—yet it has been unable, despite the work of many academics and strategists, to separate the contribution of the workplace from all of the other factors that influence the performance of an organisation. It also does not consider those organisations for whom productivity is not an aim—charities, not-for-profit, and public-sector bodies, for instance.

Instead of joining the struggle to see it in this way, we can instead focus on what we absolutely know a fantastic workplace can do for an organisation.