Our client, a high profile government department occupies a large office in London providing accommodation for the Minister, Board and a number of other major operational groups. Although they had relocated to the building some 3 years ago, for a variety of reasons, the transition to Flexible Working never took place.
The interior of the building was planned and designed by a leading architectural practice with many of the types of space needed to support Flexible Working, however their locations and the IT infrastructure had not been properly geared to support mobility of working within the office.
Three years on, our client wished to accommodate a further 800 staff and AWA were appointed to retrofit Flexible Working/Advanced Working across a population of c.3000 staff, a challenge made greater because there were few perceived benefits as seen by staff.
Following engagement with the senior leaders within the department AWA's team initially undertook a study to evaluate the overall opportunity to increase the capacity of the building through the application of Flexible /Advanced Working. The study included:
- Workplace Utilisation studies 4 observations a day over a 2 week period covering traditional desks, meeting rooms, social spaces, restaurants and cafeteria.
- Business Needs Interviews with senior Home Office leaders to establish future business and workplace needs including business appreciation, headcount forecasts, specific needs etc.
- On-line Workplace Effectiveness Questionnaires in which all staff were invited to provide quantified information covering: perceptions of existing workplaces, workstyles information, perceived IT mobility constraints, attitudes to work flexibility.
- Job Needs Analysis to assess the detailed workplace needs of specific communities of jobs.
- Infrastructure Reviews (building, telephony and IT)
Following the presentation of results, development and acceptance of an overall proposition and opportunity, AWA supported an initial Pilot involving three groups totaling 150 staff before further piloting Advanced Working with a group of 200 and subsequently a unit of 600.
AWA's role in this phase was to work as a full member of the Project Delivery Team, advising the project team on IT and space solutions. AWA designed and delivered a behavioural change programme involving a series of workshops and leader engagement/coaching sessions and developed a library of videos and presentation materials to be used within the change programme.
Following each Pilot an evaluation was undertaken by AWA with results being fed back to the Steering Group and Project Delivery team with solutions and change processes being refined at each stage.
