Data for be er work lives

MEASURING WORKPLACE VALUE

How can data be analysed to make workers feel better?

By Herpreet Kaur Grewal

Comedian Stewart Lee has a joke about arguing with a cab driver, only to be silenced by the driver’s retort: “You can prove anthing with facts.” While the joke is more about the era of post-truth, it’s a valuable reminder that without data, we can’t prove anything.

So when Steelcase consultants Anisha Patel and Cara Sugrue told the audience at Workplace Trends Research Summit that an attractive office matters to employees and, globally, 87% of people want an office to go to, they had analysed data from 12 primary studies, 11 countries and 57,000 responses to prove it.

Equally, creating the type of attractive workplace that people want to visit, requires access to reliable and real-time data. A recent survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) showed that refining how the sector uses data in buildings would improve energy use and inform decision-making.

Yet, more than 75% of respondents – facilities managers, service providers and consultancies – said data was not being used effectively. This has long been a complaint: we know data is important but we need to do more with it.

Even as the industry gears up to acquire more data and use it more effectively, public concern over the capture, storage and use of data, as well as data privacy regulations are ramping up.

The ‘holy grail‘

Data is already a big deal and will only grow in importance – especially if the workplace and facilities management profession wants to deliver an attractive workplace and enhanced employee experience. These desires are why Ian Ellison, co-founder of consultancy, 3edges Workplace Ltd, set out with his colleagues to develop another new framework with the aim of “assessing workplace experience holistically, with respect to people, spaces, technology and business impacts”.

Ellison, also at Workplace Trends Research Summit, presented the model to the audience, and mentioned that a peer-reviewed article is soon to be published in the Corporate Real Estate Journal.

The model, Ellison told Facilitate, is based on gathering data to reveal how a worker feels. “We are trying to demonstrate that the workplace especially is about more than just space.”

He said the workplace experience is “made or broken by how companies are providing it and how it is felt by workers”. Rather than “seeing that as a threat”, Ellison reasoned that the sector should be more willing to see the links between how workers feel and what practical solutions within the facilities management domain could improve that. The result, he argued, would be to “make life better for people”.

Improving lives could be as simple as a providing stable internet connection to make someone's job easier, or it could be more complex by, for example, resolving plumbing problems in the toilets. The question to ask and answer is: How does the need to remedy maintenance tasks such as these affect workers’ feelings and productivity levels?

It is “not just about cost, it is about value and what if you could show that causal link?” asked Ellison. “A framework that spots that is what we need.”

Think of FM data capture, measurement and interepretation as the “holy grail”, Ellison said, “finding a way to evidence at scale the link to business impact

We are trying to demonstrate that the workplace especially is about more than just space

to people’s feelings and how the working is getting done… this framework is a way to prove it because the linkages are in the analysis techniques”.

Framework

Ellison added that whie he believes his model is sorely needed by the industry, “we are not claiming it is a new invention”. It is, instead, a “holistic amalgamation of great work in the past” but with a difference. “We’ve taken lots of different threads and brought them together like no one has done before. Can we finally demonstrate impact to improve things? We are excited [about it] but not hubristic.”

The framework has drawn upon long standing research by renowned experts including Franklin Becker and Francis Duffy. “None of it is new but we bring many ideas together… It refers to many different experiences – all of it has a home in this framework,” said Ellison.

Such a framework is needed, Ellison argued, because “FM is not particularly research-focused” and the industry was often seen within companies “as operational but as not having the data and not knowing how to present it” which “does not show us in a good light”.

Encouragement

In the paper, the authors “actively encourage readers to use [the] novel framework to explore their own organisational workplace and workplace experience contexts”.

By presenting the framework and encouraging its use “as a tool to understand, measure and potentially improve ‘workplace experience’ from the lived user perspective, the authors believe that the paper is a new way to practise “expert workplace management… in the face of global workplace attention and disruption”.

As Ellison said: “I [as an FM] could only focus on one building at a time, I could be committed. But if there was a technique to capture all the data – not as the bottleneck – the data can show you what’s going on with everyone at scale and you’d have a permanent source of information coming in.”

APPLIED DATA

THE 'HOLISTIC WORKPLACE' FRAMEWORK

SOURCE: ELLISON, PINDER & MORIARTY (2022) Performance how organisational work is going

Community who people work with

BUSINESS

Reputation a ractiveness of an organisation to buy from or work with

Appeal a ractiveness of an organisation to work for

Impacts how working at an organisation affects us

CULTURE

Drivers why people work the way they do

Activities what people do to get work done

Behaviours how people go about their work

Locations the localities people work from

Se ings the spaces people work in

SPACES

Features specific elements of work se ings

Services amenities available to people where they work

Hardware tech equipment used by people to work

TECHNOLOGY

So ware tech applications used by people to work

Connectivity ability for people to connect using their tech tools

Tech support elements that enable people to use tech tools