Cummins South Pacific | Workplace | P4 Case Study

Case Study: Cummins South Pacific

CUMMINS SOUTH PACIFIC

Australia’s commercial landscape continues to influence the world. At the forefront of this movement is the drive to achieve greater wellbeing, productivity and employee engagement through rethinking the built environment.

Collaborating with Cummins South Pacific and the design team at Venko Design, P4 presents the following case study on how transforming a commercial environment can enrich employee engagement and ultimately lead to greater effectiveness in the workplace.

“This project for Cummins South Pacific was driven by the desire to enhance collaborative engagement amongst end users. We were inspired by the opportunity to remove silos and provide Cummins South Pacific’s teams with a workplace tailored to their unique needs.”

– Tina Berardi, Director, Venko Design.

Across Australia’s commercial landscape, employers on average spend 90 per cent of their annual operating costs on people. As such, even small impacts on productivity, engagement and satisfaction in the contemporary workplace can generate meaningful returns on investment.

To this end, our commercial sector is currently undergoing a revolution – with a staggering number of workplaces across the nation embracing new workplace design strategies in the direction of agile and activity-based working.

As such organisations continue to harness the creativity of their workforces, the power of creative knowledge work

as a critical success factor is only just being recognised.

Seeking to support original ideas for original outcomes, the conditions for proactive creativity necessitates the bringing together of people to collaborate.

Demonstrating very clear wins for organisations to attract and retain key talent, the value of collaboration lies in its potential to enhance employee experience, support wellbeing and promote corporate brand value that increase productivity. This journey of activating workplaces to empower employees and increase engagement leads to greater effectiveness, loyalty, creativity and satisfaction.

Case Study: Cummins South Pacific “Our relationships drive our desire to excel”, says Tina Berardi, Director of Venko Design. “It’s about working together for a shared outcome to be proud of.” This energy of collaboration coloured all aspects of the design intent and process for Venko Design’s recent work with Cummins South Pacific in Victoria.

This collocation project saw the consolidation of Cummins South Pacific’s Box Hill and Scoresby offices into one newly flexible and agile environment at the Scoresby site.

Comprising a new fitout to accommodate approximately 300 individual staff members, the project offers an ideal model to generate greater employee engagement and collaboration through the built environment.

Understanding that collocation held the potential to be highly disruptive to end users, Venko Design worked with an independent change management consultant at the very early stages of the process. According to Berardi,

“this allowed us to foster inclusion and ownership of the project so as to encourage future uptake of the new environment and ease the transition to the cultural changes it heralded.”

To this end, Venko Design and Cummins South Pacific safeguarded the fluid transition of both the consolidated staff and the new workplace behavioural changes anticipated.

Recognising the degree to which this new workplace would represent a dramatic shift in the behavioural patterns of the end user, Venko Design and Cummins South Pacific’s management teams placed 360-degreee communications at the forefront of the design process.

Leaving a more traditional and siloed workplace for a new agile environment, stakeholder management was crucial element to the successful on-boarding of all end user individuals and teams. The new office, according to Berardi, “is aligned with Cummins South Pacific’s company culture, enabling innovation and growth for staff and the business.”

“Our work with Cummins South Pacific allowed us to truly understand the ethos of the company – and we wanted to incorporate this throughout every element of the design process. As a result, Cummins now has a facility that actively speaks to the brand’s core tenets: diversity, innovation, inclusiveness and leadership.”

– Tina Berardi, Director, Venko Design.

In Detail Driven by the need to increase the number of meeting spaces and breakout zones for Cummins South Pacific’s 300 approximate staff members, Venko Design recognised that adaptable and versatile furniture would be a critical success factor for end users. Clusters of loose furniture items – easy chairs, side tables and ottomans – promote easy engagement between individuals and provide the important backdrop against which collaboration can emerge as an organic behavioural response.

Given the potentially disruptive acoustic and visual problems that can arise in an open plan environment fostering collaboration, these breakout zones are accompanied by a suite of acoustically-sensitive products including sound-absorptive privacy screens and lounges with high backs and sides to bring optical discretion.

The degree of mobility to which these furniture items lend themselves looks forward to end users recalibrating their spaces of engagement throughout the day – for multiple arrays of uses and users. Elements including integrated technology and task-specific or natural lighting empower end users with the quality of ‘choice’ to select an area within Cummins South Pacific’s 4,000 square-metre agile, open plan workplace, best suited to their needs at any point during the workday.

Supremely agile to this end, Venko Design has provided Cummins South Pacific with a highly workable agile model that can accommodate growing team numbers.

Augmenting employee engagement throughout the workplace-proper, the site is connected to other service arms of Cummins South Pacific: including, reception/ concierge, utility spaces, support functions and a courtyard that bridges the divide between the workplace and warehouse. Supported by more private conference rooms, height-adjustable workstations and flexible AV solutions, the specification of furniture, fixtures and flooring assist to personalise areas across the floorplate, thus passively demarcating zones for interaction, collaboration, focused individual work, and formal and informal meetings.

Wellbeing remained a key driver of the project’s core brief, allowing Venko Design to incorporate generous natural light and views of the verdant tree lines that surround the site into the interior. Heavily influenced by biophilic design approaches, the workplace takes full advantage of organic tonal schemes and materials – from timber surfaces across tabletops and joinery, all the way through to variegated textures in soft flooring and furniture upholstery.

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