You don't have to have been around human resources for long before you can start to rattle off examples of funky workplaces and their uber-cool facilities.
Workplaces with ping pong tables and bar fridges were the first to impress, workplaces started "hotdesking", and over the past decade we've seen workplace design on steroids, as slides become more common (here's an article on the best 10!), open plan becomes the norm, and organisations are building the world's biggest single room (yeah, of course it's Facebook).
Many say that radical workspace redesign if vital - it's essential for communication, teaming, projectising, and even plays a role in teleworking although that's another topic all together.
There are also many more examples of organisations without central workspaces, particularly new small/entrepreneurial companies. This is has led to a burgeoning growth in co-working spaces around the world, such as Spacecubed in Perth (where I was for #OzHR 25 coincidentally!).
So, is it all a big gimmick, is it essential, or is it somewhere in between?
This Harvard Business Review article titled Workspaces That Move People highlights a growing body of evidence for it's importance in the future of work.
As with most things, the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
So let's throw it open to our #OzHR community. What do you think? And please, let's not focus on the one-in-a-million examples that I've given above, let's talk about REAL workplaces. What you've seen, what you've experienced and how it's worked.
Workplaces with ping pong tables and bar fridges were the first to impress, workplaces started "hotdesking", and over the past decade we've seen workplace design on steroids, as slides become more common (here's an article on the best 10!), open plan becomes the norm, and organisations are building the world's biggest single room (yeah, of course it's Facebook).
Many say that radical workspace redesign if vital - it's essential for communication, teaming, projectising, and even plays a role in teleworking although that's another topic all together.
There are also many more examples of organisations without central workspaces, particularly new small/entrepreneurial companies. This is has led to a burgeoning growth in co-working spaces around the world, such as Spacecubed in Perth (where I was for #OzHR 25 coincidentally!).
So, is it all a big gimmick, is it essential, or is it somewhere in between?
This Harvard Business Review article titled Workspaces That Move People highlights a growing body of evidence for it's importance in the future of work.
As with most things, the answer may lie somewhere in the middle.
So let's throw it open to our #OzHR community. What do you think? And please, let's not focus on the one-in-a-million examples that I've given above, let's talk about REAL workplaces. What you've seen, what you've experienced and how it's worked.
The chat will be Thursday 11 June starting at 7pm AEST. Find your city (or corresponding time zone) below, for the starting time:
7:00pm - Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne (AEST)
6:30pm - Adelaide, Darwin (ACST)
5:00pm - Perth (AWST)
We know it's such an exciting topic that our international people will want to join too. To help, we've done the maths for you (correctly this time I think!) - 9:00pm in Auckland, 4:00pm in Singapore, 8:00am in London, 5:00am in New York and 2:00am in LA (we know you're keen!).
Just make sure to pop a #OzHR in your tweet so we can see it, and be sure to invite others along for the ride!
The questions for this topic are:
1. Contemporary Workspaces - gimmick or essential? Let's start with a black or white answer, nowhere in between just yet.
2. How important is workspace design? Is it high, medium or low priority, and why?
3. How do we manage and/or adapt our workspaces to cater for vastly different personal preferences?
4. What's one radical change you'd love to see in workspaces? Why?
3. How do we manage and/or adapt our workspaces to cater for vastly different personal preferences?
4. What's one radical change you'd love to see in workspaces? Why?
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