Wednesday 27 February 2013

New 'social' ways of working

Embracing breakout zones, hot-desking and office pods

Social Working Spaces Break-out Zones Collabrative Working UK

People are usually an organisation’s biggest cost - but equally they should always be their greatest asset too.

Many employers are currently struggling to balance the need for cost reductions, outsourcing and flexible working with trying to retain or attract talent to maintain services and improve productivity.

Coupled with this is the need to dispose of surplus infrastructure and to condense office space, which is leaving many organisations increasingly looking to reduce their property support people and their work; resulting in compressing occupant densities and dispersing teams with remote or flexible working, which brings new challenges in terms of infrastructure and workspace design.

Many public and private corporations are looking to extend flexible working across their organisations to help retain key staff, create a more productive workforce and support carbon targets but particularly to make their property assets work harder by re-defining work settings and space requirements – ultimately improving the ‘bottom line’.

Successfully implementing flexible working is not something that happens overnight - it requires time, energy and input from many sources across the client organisation and its suppliers. Early engagement with the client to understand the key space requirements, IT investment and technology, management capability, and changing work practices will significantly benefit the outcome of the workspace design.

In essence, new ways of working empowers and supports people to work where, when and how they choose to maximise their productivity, innovation and ultimately to deliver best value to the organisation. Every organisation is different and has different levels of capability however if managed well, introducing new working practices can significantly cut fixed and variable costs, reduce environmental impact, improve productivity, resilience and customer focus as well as creating a more satisfied workforce with a better work life balance.

This is at the core of what space-pod does and we have already helped many SME's and larger organisations to maximise their working spaces into more open, modern and 'social' environment, whilst also achieving some notable productivity and working environment improvements.

To find out how, just fill-in a few details in the panel on the left of the screen and let's talk!