Workplace Consultancy Explained: 'Getting To Know You'

We’ve been sharing our workplace consultancy expertise with clients for many years and have a 9-strong team of dedicated professionals who understand the value of using evidence to devise future workplace strategy.

It is an incredibly effective way to help businesses understand themselves, for it can reveal how people really work, how space can deliver commercial objectives and where priorities should lie when it comes to workplace investment.  Consequently, it’s a process best started before an organisation embarks on a new office interior project, selects a new home or undertakes significant organisational change.

In this new blog series called ‘Workplace Consultancy Explained’, we’ll explore the four stages of this consultancy process and demonstrate how they add value to people-centric organisations.

The first stage is aptly called ‘getting to know you’.

Who are you?

Workplaces should reflect organisational values and culture and support how people work. In a hybrid age where people are increasingly working from home – workplaces have to try much harder to be relevant, which means offering the experiences they can’t get elsewhere (think collaboration, learning and socialising).   They must become destination offices – a process that begins with asking lots of questions.

To do this, we undertake a range of information-gathering activities across all levels of an organisation via a series of in-person and online interviews, workshops, questionnaires, utilisation surveys and sustainability and DIBE-focused activities.   This stage typically involves a series of spatial observations and audits designed to reveal how current space is performing, square foot by square foot. These look at storage, furniture and meeting room usage as well as the movement and habits of people.

By hosting sessions with senior leadership teams as well as individuals, we can unearth organisational and departmental wants and needs, as well as individuals’ personal preferences.  We identify the current pain-points (poor circulation space, not enough meeting spaces etc), establish cultural values and interrogate the nature of that organisation’s work and the complexity of those tasks.

Workplace Consultancy Benefits

This first stage is all about collecting intelligence and interpreting the data. The result is a very honest, holistic and objective view of an organisation’s needs that will determine future workplace strategy and therefore how office interior design must respond. We know it would be too onerous for most organisations to undertake this level of internal research alone – which is why our in-house team takes on the task and devises the perfect tailored ‘getting to know you’ programme for each organisation.

The benefits of this stage are clear. It ensures that organisations really know themselves before investing in the workplace and offers intelligence that can de-risk future workplace projects. Quite simply, it provides the means to ensure the office is the jewel in a business’s crown, rather than a millstone around its neck.  It’s also the foundation on which the rest of the workplace consultancy process rests and sets the scene ready for stage two. – ‘Shaping your Space’.

Look out for the next blog in our workplace consultancy series where we’ll explain what stage two involves and how it adds value.

In the meantime if you’re embarking on organisational change and would like to define your future workplace strategy, visit: https://landing.claremontgi.com/Workplace-Consultancy/workplaceconsultancy.html