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How the design and function of your office can affect the success of your business

3D-printed office
[Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, stands in front of the world’s first functional 3D printed offices during the official opening in Dubai May 23, 2016./REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah]

Earlier in 2016, the first fully 3D printed office building opened in Dubai.

Built on the premises of the Emirates Towers, the building will temporarily house The Future Foundation. Billed as, “an incubator for ideas, a driver for innovation, and a destination for inventors and entrepreneurs from around the world,” the building also has many speculating about what 3D printing will mean for office culture and its impact on productivity.

“We’re at that point in time where people are able to customize things really easily and that will certainly impact how people do things for themselves in the workplace. If you wanted to create a work tool that can help you in how you stack your papers or place your iPad as a digital display, you can now do that,” says Yoel Berznoger, eastern Canada’s senior architecture and design workplace advisor for Haworth, a designer and manufacturer of adaptable workspaces. “People have an expectation that their workplace should function as well as their home does, if not better, and that has an impact on employee expectations.”

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This mentality goes way beyond just 3D printing. Berznoger and his team have conducted research showing that a workspace’s general design can have a major impact on a company’s culture and, if done right, can translate into increased productivity and more money for the organization.

Aligning space and culture

Getting your office’s design to work for you starts with getting the design to match up with your organizational culture.

“What we understand about space and organizational culture is if you can align them, so that your space supports your culture or changes what you’re trying to affect in your culture, it’s going to impact how people feel about where they work, how effective they work, how in touch they are and how they’re able to do their mind’s best work more effectively,” says Berznoger.

Thanks to a school of thought know as, “The Competing Values Framework,” organizational culture can be broken down into four different categories:

Control Culture – The traditional hierarchical organization
Create Culture – A more forward-thinking, progressive culture that’s usually first to market with new ideas.
Collaborate Culture – This one’s about nurturing and fostering engagement from within.
Compete Culture – This is about being the fastest and quickest to get things done. This is often the mindset of a sales organization. It usually features a limited amount of time and a limited amount of resources, but is motivated by a deadline.

Once designers know the dominant characteristics of an organization, they can design the space according to the advantages of the culture the company fits into best.

“For example, in a collaborate culture we know that they really thrive on group engagement, so giving them spaces that are going to facilitate quick, informal conversations, like lounge areas or places to grab a cup of coffee because that’s how they think at their best,” says Berznoger.

On the other hand, a compete culture likes to do everything faster, so they may thrive in a space where access to information is at their finger tips at all times.

So how does a design firm like Howarth figure out which of the four cultures a company fits into?

Berznoger says it’s a combination of a specific survey taken by the employees and executives as well as proprietary technologies along with the perception of the brand by the general public that determines what an company’s culture really is. Once the culture is determined, the design team can create a space that fits that culture and better reflects the company’s overall goals.

“We’re trying to align a company’s culture to their goals and vice versa, making sure they have the right kind of spaces, the right kind of people and the right kind of technology to support it. There are so many different layers that go into how a company functions that can then be supported by space,” he says.

Climbing the mountain to success

But does all of this effort to align a company’s workspace with their culture actually benefit the company? Apparently, we need to look no further than Mountain Equipment Co-op [MEC].

When the Vancouver-based outdoor recreation equipment company outgrew its former office it was looking for a place that would “drive the vibrance of an outdoor culture, support MEC’s values, promote collaboration, and enable adaptability for expansion in the future.” The company hired Haworth to design a space that reflected those goals.

The challenge for Haworth was creating a space to accommodate a company that had tripled in size to nearly 400 people since their last office move, while simultaneously providing a collaborative work environment that reflected MEC’s mission to get people outside. To top it off, it had to all be environmentally sustainable and have spaces for both work and play.

What resulted was a space with tons of natural light, an atrium, and features like a bouldering cave, storage for 128 bikes, a multi-purpose room for meetings, fitness and yoga classes and a cafeteria with an adjacent roof-top garden on the fourth floor.

The design draws people up through the building to encourage socializing and collaboration between departments. There is plenty of free space for people to hold meetings and a lot of collaboration rooms with multiple functions that can accommodate both large and small group meetings. Finally, adjustable work stations allow people to sit or stand while they work, which keeps the focus on staying active and healthy.

“From members and employees to the communities we serve, MEC exists to support people, to help them be active and enjoy the benefits of outdoor recreation. Not only does our new headquarters embody this passion, it is a space that supports the culture, collaboration and innovation required to meet the demands of MEC’s progressive business,” said CEO David Labistour following the project.

“They’ve been in that new office for a couple years now and from everything we’ve heard MEC’s employee engagement is at an all-time high and everyone is loving the impact of engaging with the employees the way they did,” says Berznoger.

Change breeds more change

Traditionally, an office usually hires a designer and the executives think, give us a plan, give us our budget, make it so and it’s going to be great for the next five years.

But what companies like Mountain Equipment Co-op are realizing you can’t think, how is this space going to survive the next ten years as is because things are going to change constantly, as the world around us changes constantly and design needs to keep up with that constant state of change.

“As people change, organizations change and as people become more and more comfortable with change, change begets more change,” says Berznoger.

This is why Haworth as a design firm advocates for designing flexibility into a space because when you build-in flexibility new things happen.

“We know that as people’s behaviours change as a result of their environment, they start to say, ‘Well, I didn’t know that I could do this and now that I tried doing it that way, what if we do it slightly different and go this direction.’ These behaviours mean there’s going to be more and more change as a result,” says Bergnozer.

“Good design helps plan for things that cannot be planned for. It sets you on a path to move and flow and do what you need to as unimaginable things happen around you and if design is really good, it’s so intuitive, you won’t even notice it.”