WORKPLACE SPECIAL.... Designing The New-Age Workplace

Designing The New-Age Workplace
 

Agile, flexible, collaborative and informal — these are just some of the ideas shaping the workplace of the future

The first impression as you enter Hindustan Unilever’s (HUL) sprawling corporate office in Mumbai’s Andheri area is of entering a street. There are people milling around a Bru café. There is an inviting Kwality ice-cream counter, a Lakme hair salon and a well-stocked grocery store. An ATM adds a touch of convenience. At the end of the street is a cascading waterfall around which a couple of people are chilling out. “Here, you can shop, play squash, meet friends over a cup of coffee and also work,” says B.P Biddappa, executive director, human resources at HUL, India’s largest FMCG company.

The workspace of the future, says Biddappa, has to be agile, connected, green and sustainable and also bring an element of the outside inside. That explains the central street at HUL. It should also be a place where employees can do their daily chores. When work intrudes on your personal time, companies should be able to offer to perform those personal services in office time — that is the philosophy of a futuristic office.

HUL’s trendy office is housed in a sprawling 14 acres that also has a residential training and development centre with guest rooms, suites and banquet facilities.

So, what happened to the shrinking office of tomorrow? Why does HUL have such a gigantic set-up? Indeed, many of the offices in the suburbs of metros are like HUL’s. You see no cutting down on space. They are spread out like university campuses, and have that look and feel.
 

But visit the Gurgaon office of Philips, another Anglo-Dutch company, in DLF Cyber City, and you see optimum usage of space and resources. There are no fixed desks for employees. At the Wi-Fi enabled office, where every employee has also been given a data card, laptops can be plugged in anywhere in the office. You could work at any desk in those neat rows of workstations that are completely free of any paper or clutter or personal belongings. Or you could work on a beanbag in any of the coffee rooms, or at the cafeteria. When they finish work, employees have to clean out the place, and stow away anything they want to leave behind in lockers.
 

Philips — a believer in the shrinking office — has wholeheartedly embraced the concept of Hot Desking, also known as Hotelling. Yashwant Mahadik, HR head, Indian subcontinent, Philips, says the company builds offices with only 80 per cent capacity as it assumes 20-25 per cent of the workforce is out somewhere at any given point. At the same time, Hot Desking allows companies to contract and expand according to future needs. “We built this office three years ago. Since then, our headcount has grown 10 per cent, but there has been no expansion of space as we have managed through workplace innovation,” says Mahadik. “We are not designing workspaces, but experiences for the employees.” Philips, too, believes in flexibility — whether in work policies or in office design — so the large airy canteen doubles up as the townhall venue. Employees can clock in eight hours of their choice, enjoy the luxury of concierge services to pay their utility bills and so on.
 

Meetings On Track

If there is one obsessive compulsive research that every company is doing today, it is around meetings. At HUL, meetings are tracked. Says HR head B.P. Biddappa, “We track meetings; what’s the frequency, are we having too many, are we closing on time, are we achieving outcomes...” Companies are also experimenting with the format of meetings — standing meetings, informal hangouts, accidental meetings, walking meetings and virtual meetings are all par for the course. Tech has invaded the meeting room and now experiments are on how to virtually share presentations seamlessly. How Sapient runs its meetings is the stuff of a Yale case study. At the firm, new inductees are given orientation on how to conduct meetings, and how to use the whiteboard. Each day starts with a moderated meeting. The moderator is rotated — even juniors get a shot. Debriefing, the day’s agenda, weekly plan, sorting out of issues and a mood check of those attending are part of the menu. Teams end meetings by shouting their slogan like a war cry.  Fitting, because Sapient’s meeting room is called the War Room! Work is nothing short of a battle.

The other noticeable thing at Philips is the way HR is driving social media use at the workplace. It believes that’s the way employees will engage with each other in future, and the learnings are shared on Twitter. Most companies build open spaces, but forget to build an open culture, says Mahadik. At Philips, team leaders get semi-enclosed spaces, while functional heads have cabins, but the moment they go out, the cabin can be used by anyone.

At least the Philips office has a cabin for its leadership team; at the office of Sapient, a global service company, there are no cubicles or cabins for senior management. The managing director is one among the sea of people seated in a huge hall of unending rows of desks and it is impossible to spot who the boss is.

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Open, Yet Room To Be Alone
Is so much openness a virtue or a vice? Open offices came up because organisations wanted to abolish hierarchy, and create a flatter structure. But only a few have been able to design a truly open office. Today, open offices with their noise and distractions draw a lot of flak. And there is a raging debate on whether we should go back to a design that has more privacy for those on tight deadlines.
 

Talk to those ushering in workplace innovations and they say that they want to retain the openness, yet be practical about it. HUL’s Biddappa explains that you need to look at the concept of an open office in philosophical terms. “Does it mean that everyone has an open office here or does everyone in the office have an opportunity to work in an open space?” At HUL, he says, the top management may have cabins, but they also have a chance to come out and sit in a café or in the garden and work.
 

Also, says Biddappa, there is technology available to make an open office free of distractions — be it the material you use for walls that dampen sound or other innovations. Also, as Philips’s Mahadik says, you can create sound-proof rooms where employees can lock themselves in. Several offices now have such cocoons that employees can book.

To cut out distractions, HUL has designed its workplace in three layers. The central street is an open zone — movement is open to staffers, suppliers, vendors and consumers. Here, employees, the brand and consumers interact in a “simulated real-life experience”, explains Biddappa. In the next layer, adjacent to the street on both sides, are the transition areas — balconies and verandahs, which are semi-open and promote inter-department collaboration. At the core are areas where focused work restricted to the departments takes place.

Sharad Goyal, head of people operations at Google, says, “Like in our operating systems, we believe open is better than closed.” But for Google, the overarching reason to invest in an open office is to promote collaborations. Open offices get people together but lack privacy, he admits. The Google approach is to look at needs. “So, depending on your role, we structure your workspace,” he says.

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On the whole, FMCG offices do not have the kind of open offices seen in the case of IT and ITeS firms. “An open office does not suit us as we don’t have consistent high volume work like IT services,” says Sameer Wadhawan, vice-president, HR services, at Coca-Cola India and South-west Asia. That said, he takes us on a tour to show how collaborative the Coke workspace is. It’s not uncommon to find Coke employees bonding over a game of cricket played in the corridors of the vibrant office that wears the same red colour of the brand. That’s the other thing.  It’s a done deal now for firms to weave in core values and branding into the design — so ‘Open Happiness’ is promoted at Coke, and employees get to imbibe Coke history painted on the walls.

Collaboration And Communities
Building collaborative workspaces is a recurring theme at all the offices we visited, where the designs have been tweaked to throw employees in different departments together several times a day. Interactions happen through engineered design. Take Mindtree, where small grouping spaces — beanbag places, as its chief people office Ravi Shankar calls them — have been created all over the campus, where employees tend to gravitate. At Google, such impromptu interactions usually happen over food.  And that’s engineered too. “Great ideas come when people are thrown together. Food builds great communities; so, at Google, food is a focus point,” says Goyal. If you visit the Google offices in India — Delhi, Mumbai or Hyderabad — you will gawk at the sheer variety and quantity of food served. In addition, there are breakout zones where food can be consumed. There are themed food parties once a week.

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“I see the future workplace as a community gathering. There won’t be employees, but multiple communities existing within one large community,” says Wadhawan of Coca-Cola. He says there will be a work community, a social community — people the employees need to work with — and a learning community. “Offices will need to create large embedded spaces for learning,” he says. Indeed, the Coke University does take up a lot of space at its Gurgaon office.

But we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of office design. Architects and designers are engaged in projects pushing the tech frontier, and tech innovations will shape the new workplace. Virtual benching and virtual cubicles are already here. At Steelcase, there are wormholes — staff at the Mumbai office can watch a telecast of what’s going on at the Kuala Lumpur office. A New York-based architecture magazine recently held a competition on what the future workplace would look like and got entries that had vertically arranged spaces with stair gardens. Other visions included entire walls that were touchscreens or made of thermally active materials.

Remote Work Zones
As offices continue to think about their designs, business centres are seeing a big growth. Take Regus, which is aiming at 2,000 business centres globally by 2014. Already, its footprint covers 600 cities. “A large proportion of our growth is going to come from emerging markets,” says Sahil Varma, chief operating officer, Regus. Hotels to coffee shops, all see great opportunities in floating workers and are redoing their meeting places. Take Marriott, which collaborated with Steelcase and design firm IDEO to come up with prototypes of spaces where travellers staying at the hotel could meet or work with efficiency.
 

Get Up, Stand Up

If you thought a desk and a chair were all that were needed to build an office, think again — there’s a whole new body of research going into those desks and chairs now. To discourage sedentary habits of employees, offices are investing in workstations where people can stand and work, and even massage chairs where they can go and rest those aching muscles. There are now treadmill workstations, virtual cubicles, and lots more. Ergonomics is a big thing as employers recognise that chairs and desks impact workplace productivity as much as new software, so they are being more liberal with their pursestrings on this count. Employees are given custom-built chairs suited to their posture. Apparently, there are 1,000 postures that the human body adopts in the course of a work day. And new postures are developing in keeping with the pace at which new devices are coming in. At Steelcase, Jason Heredia says, anthropologists and social researchers are all engaged in studying the changing postures. Based on this, it has just launched a new chair called Gesture, designed to suit nine new work postures that have developed thanks to the proliferation of new devices. The physiology of work has changed and the way people shift from one device to another causes postural shifts.

About 80 per cent of Indian companies allow flexibility, says Varma who feels business centres are going to grow not only because they provide cost-effective workspaces, but because of a cultural change brewing in corporations. If 80 per cent of the corporations promote flexible working, why are offices still investing in big premises?
 

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Bhaskar of Sapient takes that on. He says with a large GenX and Y workforce, the classical model of an exciting physical workplace is still relevant for the next 2-3 years. But Sapient is also gearing up its IT products and expanding the workplace to the virtual environment, preparing for GenZ (which will arrive in 6-7 years) and the demographics skewing towards GenY.

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Wadhawan sums up. Technology will replace the need for offices, but a workforce needs a symbol to associate with. The office is such a symbol, just as the White House is a symbol for the US.

Chitra Narayanan

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 16-12-2013)

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