How To Build A World-Class Workplace Strategy

Executive summary:

While flexible working arrangements have been around for

decades, Covid-19 made them mainstream – with four in ten
US adults still working from home a year after its peak. Hybrid
models are here to stay.

So with both C-Suite and middle management looking critically

at leasing costs, empty desks, and employee engagement in a
changed world, the conversation about workplace management
is fast moving onto the subject of workplace strategy. Where
facilities aren’t merely costs to be reduced, but assets to be
leveraged.

And – of course – finding the right plan for doing so.

In this paper, market leader Planon explores the opportunities

for companies adapting to hybrid working. With a five-level
Engaging Workplace Model that helps you – step-by-step –
to make the most of the greatest assets of all: your people.

1
Pew Research Center, ‘https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/12/09/
how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-has-and-hasnt-changed-the-way-americans-work/’
INTRO
Disconnection and reconnection

Remote working. Digital nomads. Joining-from-home. As recently as 2019, hybrid working was more exception
than norm, with Yahoo!’s CEO stating firmly she expected everyone in the office by 9. In the wake of Covid-19,
the opposite is true. Everybody thinks differently about the workplace now.

The Past Way of Working has been disrupted by Covid-19 …

And it’s been a while coming. When management theorist Peter Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge worker’
in 1959, the changes had already started – was the manual skills of the Industrial Era gave way to the white
collars of the Information Age, with workers connected more by communications and technology than
buildings and walls. Yet years before Drucker, other management thinkers had sounded the alarm.

‘Many employees miss going to physical office spaces; consequently,

many companies will be embracing flexible spaces and schedules as
we move forward into 2021.’

A building, after all, is more than an address. It’s where relationships form and thrive, where employees
acquire the tacit knowledge and habitual practices that make up a company’s culture. In fact, as per Ronald
Coase’s seminal paper , ‘the firm’ consists of little else. From the savings on bulk-buying office supplies to
the innovative ideas that come out of the annual management retreat, business advantage stems from how
people relate to each other.

2
‘The Nature of the Firm’, Ronald Coase, 1937

–2–
… while the Present Way is a threat to employee engagement

So the acceleration of flexible working arrangements carries a risk: disconnection. Of employees feeling adrift,
without the learned behaviours that keep them comfortable and productive.

Already, millions of people are a year into a new role without ever having met their colleagues face-to-face. And
that has an impact on productivity, recruitment and retention, even health and wellbeing. Every manager knows
that any team has to establish a shared understanding before it can perform.

‘Obviously – remote and virtual working won’t disappear. However,

there are clear signs that the office won’t die either.’

The constant need to reaffirm ‘what’s right’, the anxieties of not being sure how to obtain and use resources,
are all antithetical to a happy and engaged workforce. That’s why Planon believes that while hybrid working is
here to stay, the office isn’t going anywhere.

This means the successful solution for these challenges has to blend the hard numbers of square footage and
resource utilisation … with the softer factors of employee satisfaction and interpersonal connections across
the organisation. And do it not as a one-off project, but as ongoing Business As Usual.

Let’s explore that solution, starting with the ‘Why’ in the room: not a rear-view-mirror look at a past pandemic,
but about being ready for the next one.

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1 5
Preparing for the next business disruption

CHAPTER 2 7
The Engaging Workplace Model

CHAPTER 3 11
Technological Building Blocks

CONCLUSION 13
A Social, Sustainable and Smart Office Workplace

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CHAPTER 1:
Preparing for the next business disruption

Covid-19 wasn’t the world’s first business disruption. Nor will it be the last. Arguably, it was business that
enabled the pandemic, since close-packed cities, busy trade routes, and international travel are the vectors of
a contagion. And this story isn’t new: from the ancient Silk Roads to the Black Death in more recent centuries,
economic advantage has gone hand-in-hand with societal disruption.

Disruptions are the side effect. Engagement is the solution.

But countless examples show that when people organise into high-performing teams – having gone
through the ‘forming, storming, norming’ processes that build understanding of each other’s strengths and
weaknesses3 – almost any disruption can be overcome.

When everyone knows each other’s abilities and the most productive ways of working together, with a shared
vision of what’s expected of them, the team is resilient. Able to answer its challenges successfully, even when
plans become obsolete and individuals make errors.

It’s why the US Marines never make detailed plans in advance, instead trusting capable people to make
decisions on-the-ground. It’s why Microsoft, with 163,000 people and relatively few products, keeps its actual
development teams small. At the macroscale, it’s also what differentiates constantly warring nations from
those with a sense of shared destiny.

Digital to physical working: you still can’t email a handshake

But that implicit knowledge can be hard to embed when 70% of communication is nonverbal. Technologies like
videoconferencing can even make it harder, because everybody’s putting on a ‘business face’ and treating each
interaction as a checkbox on a list, rather than a chance to build interpersonal trust.

These soft factors matter. High-functioning organisations are full of friendships, not power struggles. Global
corporations with people in different countries and speaking no common language can still share a unifying
vision: look at Nike or Apple. Yet completely virtual organisations never seem to gel; completely office-bound
ones never seem able to adapt.

Cultural consultancy firm Gapingvoid4, which achieves corporate change with ‘semiotics and memetics’
(visual and textual cues that embed desired beliefs and behaviours in the organisations they work with) is
highly tech-savvy, with one of the first famous internet cartoonists on its team. But its approach to rolling out
its messages is often low-tech, focusing on places people pass by every day. And it keeps it physical: giant
posters that entertain while subtly driving behavioural change. Why? Because people see them as a shared
experience, comment on them, and chat about them at the watercooler to their friends.

3
‘Developmental Sequence in Small Groups’, Bruce Tuckman, 1965
4
Gapingvoid.com

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Resilience isn’t just shared understanding – it’s shared experience

And that’s why an effective workplace strategy needs to concentrate on that sense of togetherness – and not
stop at costs and resources. Because doing so fosters that ability to adapt and evolve to unexpected events –
not simply weather each storm as it arrives.

That’s the ‘why’ of workplace strategy: don’t try to anticipate what the next disaster will be, because they’re by
nature rare and unpredictable. Focus instead on fostering positive consequences: equipping your people to
deal with disruption, and empowering them to take corrective action. To be resilient.

Doing so, of course, needs a model. So next in Chapter 2: the ‘what’, or Planon’s 5-level Engaging Workplace
Model.

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CHAPTER 2
The Engaging Workplace Model

That’s the workplace today: not a set of walls and doors, but a set of resources that govern and guide different
relationships between people. Yes, those resources include desks, computers, and ficus trees. But they also
span software applications, communications methods, scheduling policies, resource allocation, and more.

And getting the mix right isn’t a single decision; it’s a constant ongoing process, with the goal of providing
the right mix of office space, with the right environmental quality, with the right services for your people. And
keeping the mix in sync with daily demand as it rises, falls, and changes in character.

The employee is your customer

If that sounds more like a sales pitch than a business objective, you’re right. A modern workplace strategy
treats your workforce as customers, with desires to be satisfied if you’re to retain their affection.

But every organisation is at a different stage of development; often, within a multi-building or multi-region
portfolio there are big differences in the ‘service offering’ to each employee. Treat people in the same job role
differently just because one works in a distant branch and the other at the corporate headquarters, and expect
it to be noticed - leading to dissatisfaction.

Workplace strategy is not a one-off event

To combat this, you need data. A platform that informs your decision-making by showing you where you are
now, so you can plan for the ideal situation that keeps your workforce motivated and your business resilient.

That’s the basis of Planon’s five-level Engaging Workplace Model. Let’s look at each level in turn.

Level 1: the analogue workplace

This is where most established corporations were 10 years ago, and a minority remain today. This workplace
tends to have a traditional working model: people arrive and leave at set times each day, and the building is
empty overnight. Data about the building is minimal: decisions are made after the bills come in. Inertia is often
a big factor: these companies have operated the same way for years, with no good reason to change.

In the absence of crises, this is perfectly acceptable to most workers. Everyone has a desk, they can usually
find a conference room free, and HVAC keeps it cool in summer and warm in winter. But ultimately all
policies are based on square footage – treating buildings and other resources as cost centres, not profit
centres. There’s no IWMS (Integrated Workplace Management System) or CAFM (Computer Aided Facility
Management) in place: operations are driven by a spreadsheet.

‘When workers were surveyed about their ideal situation,

over 72% said they wanted a hybrid remote-office model.’

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Note that such companies are not clueless. Facilities managers may well be experts in budgeting and cost
control; Human Resources may have an intimate understanding of how people fit into each space. What
they’re missing is the opportunity cost: the ability to gather useful data and use its insights to make forward-
looking decisions that look for advantages.

In the inelegant terminology of the Innovation Adoption Lifecycle5, these are laggards. But if you’re among
them, don’t worry. It just means you’ve got the biggest and most profitable opportunity of all open to you.

Level 2: towards proof-of-concept

Organisations at Level 2 are ‘consciously incompetent’6: on the Learning Matrix model used by many HR
professionals. These companies understand the value of data, with a sense of its benefits – but are still getting
to grips with what data to gather.

For example, they may pay attention to how often a meeting room sits empty. They may even successfully use
sensors to provide decision support, such as when light switches are on or off to indicate a room in use. It’s
also the stage where basic Activity-based Working (ABW) has been introduced as a proof-of-concept ready for
a potential rollout. The idea has started to sink in that to serve employees better, look first at what they do.

‘Sodexo has split its workforce into ‘Team A’ and ‘Team B’, where
they switch between office and remote work, thus making the office
safer and being flexible.’

But deeper datasets that add context – like how many conferences take place on Zoom instead – may elude
them. Real levels of daily demand aren’t obvious. They may use IWMS and CAFM applications to measure
what they’ve got, but without enough data they can’t fully realise their potential.

Level 2 is therefore the proof-of-concept stage, where initial explorations suggest big rewards later. But post-
pandemic, Level 2 is a good place to be, because you’re starting to let your people’s needs decide your policies,
and not allowing your buildings to corral and control what people can do.

Level 3: connected but not yet integrated

Organisations at Level 3 have kicked it up a notch, but they’re still behind many competitors. They may use
an array of sensors to aid decision-making – light, heat, remote logins, occupancy levels – and even use
this information in real time, dialling resources up and down to provide services to their people at the most
economical cost.

5
‘The Diffusion of Innovations’ (book) Everett Rogers (1962)
6
One of four boxes on the ‘learning matrix’ people development model

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 Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom says that
the optimal situation is remote working for two days a week.

The critical factor preventing them going further is connectedness of data. The dataset of weekday cube
farm occupancy isn’t compared and contrasted with the dataset for those working from home; the Big Picture
remains elusive. So when a disruptive event happens, they’re unsure of its effects and how their people can
adapt, which affects their response time – and the effectiveness of that response.

Level 4: out of the box, out of the building

To companies at Level 4, the potential of IWMS and CAFM is obvious – and they’re taking concrete action to
take advantage of it, by actively redesigning and reconfiguring their workspaces to meet employee needs and
foster innovation, collaboration and productivity.

Two industries often found at Level 4 are tech and finance. The late Steve Jobs was obsessive about Apple’s
workspaces, seeing ‘serendipitous meetings’ as vital for ideation, while MIT’s ‘Infinite Corridor’ is legendary
for the way it forced people from different departments into daily contact. In New York, Google’s east coast
HQ devotes whole floors for employees to play, with a candy store of hobbyist computer parts for the taking
(many engineers have part-time Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects) and even a LEGO room where developers
can recharge their creativity. And Google did this in a 1930s Art Deco building originally designed for the public
sector.

Among financial institutions, in the UK, asset manager Fidelity houses thousands in a tiny village far from
Canary Wharf and the City of London’s financial district, styled after a university campus to encourage working
together. In America, the hedge funds have long clustered in Connecticut, where people can make coolheaded
decisions away from the hubbub of Manhattan. (Ray Dalio of Bridgewater credits his office’s open barn design
for much of his firm’s success.)

‘Microsoft’s “hybrid workplace” environment will allow most roles

to remain remote less than half of the time with manager approval,
while 62% of Google employees want to return to their offices but not
every day.’

Of course, not every company can afford a Silicon Valley donut or a starchitect-designed skyscraper. But many
can invest in larger numbers of sensors that gather information about human traffic and work patterns, and
connect their datasets in a way that gives rise to insights.

Level 4 companies are early adopters, thinking out of the box about resilient workplace strategy and putting the
technology in to realise it. And they’re ready to go even further.

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 ‘People are more productive working at home than people would
have expected. Some people thought that everything was just going
to fall apart, and it hasn’t. And a lot of people are actually saying that
they’re more productive now.’

– Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

Level 5: unified integration of building technologies

On the bleeding edge of the adoption curve are the Innovators. This is where you see employee strategy woven
into the fabric of building management, where the spaces serve the people and are readily adaptable to their
needs.

With omni-channel sensors in every wall, door, and system, vast quantities of data are produced each minute –
and Level 5 organisations have the tools to make use of it. Increasingly, you’ll see machine learning algorithms
teasing out patterns in the data and turning it into recommendations for action.

Perhaps commuters arrive at 8am but don’t enter the lobby for thirty minutes: does this signify a bottleneck in
the parking lot? Is one meeting room packed every morning but empty in the afternoons: could the sun’s angle
be making it uncomfortable?

By learning what matters and what doesn’t, you’ll achieve more than resilience in times of business
interruption. You’ll be baking resilience into your corporate culture, ready not just for the next disruption … but
all the ones after that.

And it doesn’t stop at the office building. Timestamps of remote logins, bandwidth consumed when working
from home, boosted productivity levels of employees avoiding a commute just one day a week? Ultimately, a
Level 5 workplace strategy is an employee strategy,
with physical office space just part of the mix of Early Majority

services on offer to them. And an integrated dataset, Late Majority

Early Adopters
made sense of by AI, is the bar to aim for.
Laggards
If Chapter 1 was the ‘Why’, Chapter 2 was your ‘What’: Innovators

the Engaged Workplace Model defines where you are

now and the potential available to you. Let’s move on
now to Chapter 3, which answers your next question:
2.5% 13.5% 34% 34% 16%
‘How?’
INNOVATION ADOPTION LIFECYCLE

– 10 –
CHAPTER 3
Technological Building Blocks

Like the ‘what’, our ‘how’ comes in five distinct parts – but they’re not a one-on-one match with the five levels
of the Engaging Workplace Model. Think of them as a high-level design schematic that can put any new
workplace strategy into place, regardless of where you’re starting from.

The Foundation

Every building needs one – and so does every workplace strategy. The foundation for climbing from Laggard
to Innovator is a platform for gathering data and acting on it. You’ve met the acronyms before: either IWMS
(Integrated Workplace Management System) or CAFM (Computer Aided Facility Management). Such as those
from Planon.

Used by IT personnel, building managers, and HR professionals alike, these tools make sense of the data you
already have and provide a range of measures and metrics for continuous improvement, supporting smarter
decision-making. However thin your dataset today, a platform for making use of it is your foundation.

The Bricks

The next step: adding data sources to your foundation, as the bricks and mortar. Some will be simple and
familiar: perhaps calendar data that shows rooms-in-use, or who’s in the office today and who’s working from
home. But less obvious data, such as which printers are in heaviest use and where people prefer to spend their
breaks, can be surprisingly insightful.

The key takeout: since all these new data sources are being drawn into a single platform (the foundation
you built above) they’re already ‘in the system’ and ready for instant use. Meaning all your data is connected,
allowing decisions to be made in confidence … and in context.

The Customers

With foundation built and walls in place, you’re ready to leverage what really sets your company apart from
its competitors: the people. The questions you ask can start simple. What annoys you about your working
arrangements? What takes you the most time? What can we do to make things better? It’s common HR best
practice—but you now have the data to make a genuine difference.

It’s a common misconception that employees love to complain. In fact, many are highly adaptive, and may
have been tolerating subpar conditions for years. And after all, your incentives are aligned: they’d appreciate
better working arrangements, and you want a strategy that makes them happier and more productive.

For example, if your data shows that flexible hours result in a 10% productivity leap, or that opening the office
an hour earlier helps with childcare arrangements, you can now make it happen. And measure the results.

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The Open Platform

Vast quantities of data mean a vast ocean of opportunities for using it. Just as web services and cloud
APIs have led thousands of software developers to roll out innovative applications based on someone else’s
infrastructure, your IWMS/CAFM platform should provide the soil in which further ideas can take root.

A new metric may produce an idea for new functionality – or even additional application – on your existing
IWMS/CAFM platform. By building it, or letting technology and data partners build apps that help you perform
new tasks, you can drive innovation and improvement across the whole business.

At this point, you’ve gone beyond thinking of your workplace as a building, or a resource list, or a set of costs –
or even a single technology solution to answer your multi-dimensional challenges. You’ve reached the level of a
world-class workplace strategy – the right technology approach with room to improve over time, allowing each
innovation to build on the success of everything that went before.

The Control Room

There’s one more technology building block to be added. With your workplace strategy functioning, it’s time to
become ‘the man behind the curtain,’ actively pushing levers and pressing buttons to dazzling effect.

After all, you can’t improve if you don’t manage, you can’t manage if you don’t monitor, and you can’t monitor if
you don’t measure. So determine which KPIs7 and CSFs8 make the most sense to you and schedule plenty of
‘me time’ to make them shine. Increasingly, management of these business metrics can be outsourced to AI
and machine learning algorithms.

So to push the boundaries further, recruit smart algorithms into your Control Room team. Able to watch
greater quantities of data, and do it, 24/7, they’ll provide the answers to your future questions, and ensure
you’re notified of opportunities. Recent history tells us that we can’t take the status quo for granted – every
business needs to focus on the future and make regular course adjustments. HR, IT, FM, and a whole host of
former cost centres are starting to make use of AI and ML technology.

You can turn your workplace strategy into a driver of business growth by applying these technology building
blocks.

7
‘Key Performance Indicators
8
Critical Success Factors

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CONCLUSION
A Social, Sustainable and Smart Office Workplace

For too long, managers have had to rely on their intuition about working arrangements, rather than informative
data. A world-class workplace strategy changes that, bringing data and decisions into view and providing
context and perspective. And it has a positive effect on more than your people.

Of course, greater opportunities for interaction and stronger personal relationships help employees feel more
confident and appreciated at work, but there are environmental advantages as well. Not needing to heat or cool
certain spaces at certain times saves money, energy, and the planet.

Following the Engaging Workplace Model and the technology building blocks, you’ll be ready for the ultimate
interaction: let the platform itself suggest strategies for improvement. Letting software predict when a meeting
room is available solves much more than scheduling hassles: it means people can be directed to a more
spacious room because more people tend to drop in, or anticipate that your presentation needs the biggest
screen available, and change those decisions on the fly if your needs change as well.

With the rise in remote working, nomadic employees, and flexible scheduling, the workplace now extends far
beyond the office. But that’s not a bad thing. Seeing the office for what it is – a place for collaboration and
innovation that enables employees to execute their job responsibilities effectively, rather than four walls and a
ceiling – lets you use physical infrastructure in the best possible way.

And Planon is ready to help you do it. Wherever you’re working today, contact us on
https://planonsoftware.com/uk/planon-workplace-edition/

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About Planon
Planon is the leading global provider of Smart Sustainable Building Management software that connects
buildings, people and processes, providing all building stakeholders with actionable and meaningful insights.
Independent market research and consulting firms have consistently rated Planon as a global leader in the
market. Planon has implemented its comprehensive solutions for more than 2,500 clients, supported by
offices and partners around the world.

For more information please visit us at www.planonsoftware.com

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