Smart Workplace Design 2016

I posted on a couple of case studies of workplace design in Australia last month whilst attending separate conferences in Sydney and Melbourne:

http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/flexible-working-woolworths-sydney.html 
http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/ahrinc-office-design-for-organisation.html
 

Whilst the link between HR and Property seems much stronger in Australia than it does in the UK, the rest of Europe or just about anywhere else I've been, there's clearly more we can do.

Part of the issue is that HR needs to develop it's understanding of workplace design so that we can work with our Property / Facilities colleagues more easily.

And part of it is to be able to link what's possible in these areas to what we're doing in HR.  I think this is more than the suggestion in Melbourne that HR's job isn't to choose the colour of the chairs but to integrate this into the rest of the culture.  As owners of the culture, we do also need some capability to direct and lead what happens in the workplace as part of our broader organisation design.

I got into some of this agenda in Fleming's Smart Workspace Design conference earlier this year.

I'm also back at the same conference in Amsterdam next year, doing two things:

Firstly to present an input on Connecting HR, Property and Digital to Organisation Design and Development:

Human Resources, Corporate Real Estate and Information Technology functions all have similar remits and attributes - the most important of these being that we all need to focus less on what we do than on what we create.  The input to this session will argue that once we have established what we want to develop (for example innovation, collaboration, fun etc), all three functions need to be harnessed and integrated together if meaningful change is going to take place.  It sounds simple but in last year’s conference we found true integration is very rare indeed.  So how can we connect HR, CRE and IT to the outcomes we need to create?

• Recommendations for inserting the workplace into broader organisation design and development

• Examples of organisations aligning their overall designs behind a required culture or capabilities.

And secondly to lead a panel discussion:

• How can we ensure that a workspace reflects the company’s culture and communicates its strategic requirements for example supporting employer branding?

• How do we integrate workspace, IT and HR policies to create an omni-employment experience? 

• What are some practical examples of strategies for enhancing collaboration across HR, Facilities and IT, engaging members of other disciplines in the broader picture and your own part of the agenda?

• The journey is many organisations is to become more human (leave aside those for a moment which just want to reduce their costs).  How can HR, CRE and IT work individually and together to enable people to be people, for example by responding to different national cultures, generational differences and individual personalities etc?

It should be a really good session, and a great conference, so do have a think about whether you're going to be able to join us.  I'm hoping we'll have more HR people than Property people there this year.

Details here: http://human-resources.flemingeurope.com/workspace-design-summit 

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