One of the less tangible effects of the current economic downturn has been to accelerate the pace of change in workplace cultures.
Today, modern offices are frequently designed to be less hierarchical.
In practice, this has seen a significant shift towards open-plan working, hot-desking, and the principle that individuals should freely circulate around the office. In doing so, they will develop their own informal networks and thrive in a more collegiate environment.
With the financial appeal of down-sizing property portfolios an added incentive, the traditional office is becoming, for many organisations, a symbol of a bygone era.
Deloitte is one business that has already embraced these more modern methods. “We have a very diverse set of people working in very different sectors of professional services. At one extreme, we have people who are based at their desk all day and who require a monitor and a desk. At the other, we have people out and about travelling or seeing clients, in multiple locations, and they’re sharing three or four people to one desk,” says Simon Booth, director, property and corporate services group, with responsibility for the firm’s internal environment.
Facilities management is increasingly involved earlier in the process, when such set-ups are designed, he says, with the ultimate aim being to provide people with a greater choice around how and where they work.
Andrew Mawson, managing director of Advanced Workplace Associates, believes facilities management has a core role to play in identifying just what staff require and ensuring they have the tools with which to do their job. “We see an evolution where you have a ‘workplace manager’, who needs to take responsibility for all of the systems and facilities that enables them to do their best work and do it anywhere,” he says.
But FM also has to be aware of changing requirements. “In the traditional world, you have a team of 100 people and you allocate 100 spaces — basically pretty straightforward,” he says.
For Mawson, the overall headcount is no longer as visible — you may have 120 people and have decided that 100 seats would deal with their daily demands. “But after three months,” he says, “that particular group may have grown by 20, or your headcount may go down.”
Workplace managers
Mawson feels the role of the workplace manager is to reallocate the zones and space for different groups, on almost a daily basis.
There are a number of practical issues that FMs face, to ensure such systems operate effectively. Derrick Tate, assistant director, real estate advisory, at PricewaterhouseCoopers makes the point that if people spend less time in the office, they need to be more productive when they are there.
“If I’m in the office only one day a week and if the power goes down, or if things aren’t available, then that’s a problem, much more so than in the traditional model.”
The positive impact could be, however, that FM becomes more critical and therefore has a higher profile among building users. Hot-desking is a particular issue, says Tate, with FM needing to devise and supervise a system that will ensure desks are available when people need them. “You also need to implement a clear-desk policy and stipulate that people don’t have fluffy toys on the computer screens or photographs on the desk,” he says.
An even more practical consideration is to number the various desks and make it easy for people to find them, particularly if offices could be used by people who are not normally based in that particular location.
Not everyone is entirely convinced by the current push towards open-plan working and hot-desking. Monica Parker, head of workplace consultancy at Morgan Lovell, says many companies have taken it too far, effectively trying to minimise the amount of space they require with little regard for other aspects of the workplace.
“If you’re going to have an open plan that works well, you need to have a variety of work settings,” she says.
“A good activity-based working environment will have a spaces for private meetings, collaborative meetings, a singular/private environment, open-plan working, heads-down working and then a thinking and social area,” she adds.
“One of the things that people were trying to accomplish with open plan is this idea that people will bump into each other, but to do that you need circulation routes. If you don’t do that you’re basically just putting people in a battery cage.”
Hot-desking is a particularly problematic area, she says, especially if it is forced on people without offering any other aspects — such as reflection spaces or breakout areas — in return.
The industry impact
These new ways of working can also have profound implications on how FM itself is set up, with professionals increasingly allocated to a particular floor or team, and a move towards a flatter managerial structure. “Typically, when an organisation introduces an agile working approach, there will be a shift in the hands-on element of the FM service, towards providing people on th e ground locally,” suggests Mawson.
“It’s almost like a concierge service. But you still need to manage the overall experience that people have in the workplace, while maintaining the link with the business and what it’s trying to achieve.”
Embedded FMs
In the longer-term, Booth suggests there’s likely to be a move towards having dedicated “workplace” teams within FM, to cope with the growing demand for services on the ground. “It needs a lot more management time around the space, because it’s not the same type of furniture in every location or the same material that is being used,” he says. “Frankly, it’s a more onerous task.”
Open season at KPMG
With many of its staff out of the office for much of their time, professional services firm KPMG has actively embraced open-plan working and hot-desking.
“When people come to the office it is for meetings and collaboration, so the type of space you need to provide is different,” says head of facilities Guy Stallard. “You need more project rooms, meeting rooms and soft chairs, and catering becomes more of an issue. People want a Starbucks or Costa Coffee-type experience internally.”
Hot-desking creates more of a demand for FM to take ownership of space, he adds, as individuals are less likely to report problems with particular desks. “If something is wrong with one desk they go and sit at another,” he says. “They’re more likely to report it if it’s not clean, so that becomes more important.”
Such a set-up creates a need for a more on-the-ground presence, says Stallard, and in bigger premises KPMG has dedicated building managers who are required to be highly visible. “I expect them to be doing a lot more tours of the office and spend a lot of the day on the move, not just sitting behind a computer screen,” he says.
With this comes a need for facilities managers who are happy to think on their feet and take responsibility at a local level. “Someone who is worried about authority in terms of power and organisational structures would be the wrong type of person,” says Stallard. “That’s also going to be true when you’re trying to run key FM contracts.”
In turn, this requires a different type of person in FM, he says, with personal skills more in demand and a need to understand the differing requirements of individuals and teams on particular floors.
Often, a conscious move to a more flexible office space is also the catalyst for a change in how the FM services are structured, suggests Tate. “It usually goes hand-in-hand with outsourcing these services,” he says. “It’s rare for someone to make such a big change and do all these things in-house. Providers themselves are becoming more experienced at providing services in these sorts of environments; you could argue that zonal cleaning is a response to more flexible working and open-plan areas.”
One example of this is the relationship between Balfour Beatty Workplace and the BBC, at its MediaCityUK headquarters in Salford, which includes a number of ‘workplace support’ team members acting as an interface between BBC employees and the service provider.
Such relationships, though, are only possible where there is a high degree of trust, suggests Pete Mathieson, contract director at Balfour Beatty Workplace, and this would almost certainly require there to be an existing relationship. “We could have only done that through them having an understanding of us as people and us of them,” he says. “Unless you know what your clients’ needs and wants are, it would be a very brave move.”
The role of trust
But where that trust exists and outsourced providers have the flexibility to deliver on their own initiative, it does make for a flatter structure. “The more you self-deliver, the more opportunity you have to rely on your people,” he says.
“Do you need the standard one-to-eight [manager-to-staff] model if you don’t need to supervise the work?”
Such new ways of working are likely to become more common in the post-recession world. “The economic malaise has pushed to the front new FM models. Workplace transition is now much more in focus,” says Mawson. “Everyone we’ve talked to is trying to get a better experience, while at the same time reduce the cost of real estate. That’s the Holy Grail.”
