The business workplace is not just an office building. Nor can a workplace just be defined within the software that your team carry out their work in.
These things can make up components of the workplace. However, the workplace encompasses much more than these on their own.
Why you need to understand what a worksplace is?
As a business leader you need to be able to design and construct your workplace.
Like a building it might need maintenance from time to time. Or as the world continues to evolve, you might need to carry out large scale renovation, or commission a new building.
To be able to construct, design and maintain your teams’ workplace effectively, you need to understand each component of the workplace.
Once you can understand the components, you can think about how to position each in such a way to get the desired output.
So, what is a workplace?
“A workplace encompasses all aspects and spaces, in which the work of the organization is conducted.”
From “STUDYING MOBILE MULTI-LOCATIONAL WORK, Matti VARTIAINEN, WORKSPACE METHODOLOGIES – STUDYING COMMUNICATION, COLLABORATION AND WORKSCAPES, Helsinki University of Technology Laboratory of Work Psychology and Leadership Report 2006/3, 2006“
It pretty much covers every touch point. A workplace encompasses all the business tasks, how these tasks are carried out, where they are carried out and with whom.
So thinking about the design of your workplace impacts every area of your business and is worth exploring further.
There are 3 key elements to the workplace
A workplace consists of three key elements:
- The physical
- The information
- The psychological
A brief outline of the physical workspace
The concept of the physical space is, fairly, self-explanatory. However, there are some things to think about in more detail which we will come to shortly.
But it mostly consists of the buildings, furniture, fittings, and any physical things that are involved with your team conducting their work.
The information/virtual workspace
If you have studied this topic before you might be wondering why I have not just written virtual here. The reason is because the virtual space is all about information transfer.
Although it mostly is across electronic devices in today’s environment. The fact is that it is centred on electronic and virtual devices and focusses on transferring data and information between members in the organisation.
A virtual workplace can therefore be within a physical office. Because you can be sat in the office using virtual means to carry out your work.
This is idea of the boundaries between these elements crossing will be expanded on later.
The psychological workspace
The psychological space, although not visible (like virtual spaces), is very important. It does not just encompass the individual. The mental space also covers group dynamics and how one affects the other.
How you support your teams with the physical and information spaces can help you shape and mould these mental and social spaces. These factors interact with the concept of culture building.
In this article looking at Virtual Teams vs Face to Face Teams. A study reference on nurses showed even shared car journeys offered a great social space.
How these elements link together
Understanding each of these elements in isolation will help you quickly fix areas in your business that need fixing. Or see points where you could make improvements.
This image, although not perfect, (nothing in this world is), is a good visual aid to start with.
It is useful for starting to build your frame of reference on what things fit together.
The effects of the physical world on the workplace
You and your workers live in the physical world. Even if you are conducting work in a virtual space or your work is impacted in the mental and social space. All of that is grounded in the physical.
When we consider how effective a workplace is the key focus is how much it facilitates task related work of the organisation. This includes reducing task complexity, complexity of space and supporting regulative processes.
Quite simply, helping people deal with the stresses, strains, and pressures of group work.
Every physical environment that you work in should be considered. The above image uses yellow which is a bit gross to read so I will outline them here:
- Home
- Main Workplace
- Office
- Moving transport
- Trains
- Aeroplanes
- Ships
- Automotive
- Other workplaces
- Client sites
- Supplier site
- Shared offices
- Third workplaces
- Hotel
- Café
- Conference hall
Workplace design fundamentals
But if you want to really push yourself and your teams forward you must understand how they link together. If you see where each block fits within the overall structure that is where you will make the most significant gains.
Once you work it out you will not only answer what is a workplace? You will be able to map out and be the architect of your own workplace.
Your workplace needs to be considerate of the following key features.
Regulative processes
The relationship between regulating both task and space complexity
Imagine a container. A glass for example. The glass is not half full or not half empty. But you are going to fill the glass with a mix of two ingredients.
Now the task is this. There is another larger container that you need to fill with your smaller container. Like one of those old-style kid’s gameshows. Any liquid you spill gets removed from the final container. Fill the container, press the buzzer and you win!
The liquids represent the task complexity and the complexity for space. The glass receiver is your regulative processes or capacity to deal with them. It’s probably easier to see this below.
The blue circle represents the regulative processes that envelope the task complexity and complexity of space.
If we increase task complexity, we either need to work on decreasing the complexity of space or increasing the regulative processes. This same is for when the complexity of space is increased.
This was notable during Covid with many organisations offering reduced services and access to service until they improved their setup.
Example of the home as a workplace
Man’s home is his castle. Some people love to work and work well from home. However, others prefer to separate their work and homelife completely. Or struggle to focus or collaborate from home.
Covid briefly brought a lot of this crashing together. But we can go into more detail of home working another time. The rush to purchase laptops, and peoples IT issues during this period was a clear indicator of how the virtual environment was not prepared for this.
Many people longed to return to the office for social interaction and the sometimes just the simple change in environment. As such there are also limitations to some of the regulative processes involved around home working also.
There would also be many situations where regulative spaces have formed and developed over years within the office environment. Many of the psychological and mental spaces of the office were not prepared for this and suffered greatly during this time.
Build a workspace to your requirements
This is by no means enough detail to really understand each of the elements of what makes up your workspace and how to optimise it. However, it gives a quick insight into the points and areas that you need to look at and think of to maximise your potential for success.
Finding the balance between organic growth and architecting your design for the future you want to develop is the challenge that you face. You will not always be able to fully architect and control the output.
However, the better you understand some of these concepts the better your short-term solutions will be and the more informed those decisions are the fewer pitfalls you will encounter and those that you do you will have the tools to figure out how to overcome.
This week
- Think about your workspaces.
- How do you envisage them to look in the future?
- What are the complexities of tasks?
- Could it be appropriate to change the workplace of some tasks to fit it better?
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