9th Jul 2020

How to Develop a Successful Workplace Strategy

Creating a workplace strategy involves studying what your people need to work at their best. The ultimate aim is to create a workspace that benefits your business and your employees.

A well designed workplace helps to empower your team to be happy, healthy and motivated at work. This strategic approach helps to improve productivity, reduce absenteeism, attract the best talent and will also help to impress visitors by providing a visual representation of your success, culture and values.

Just a few of the reasons why offices are more important than ever if your business, and your people, are to thrive!

So how do you go about creating a better workspace for real people that helps your business to achieve its goals?

How to develop a successful workplace strategy

The first step in developing a workplace strategy is defining the things that you and your team want and need.

This is unique to every business and that’s why every workplace strategy is different. It makes sense really – as ultimately it’s all about your business’s specific culture, aims, people and space.

These are some of the tools we use to help our own clients develop their workplace strategies.

Visioning and discovery workshop

Designing spaces fit for real people starts with gaining a full understanding of your business.

We set the project vision by gaining a deeper insight into your workplace priorities and initiatives, then delving into your business activities, how you operate and your aims and ambitions.

This ensures that your strategy supports your organisation’s aims and goals.

Occupancy studies

Occupancy studies help you to identify how your space is used now, so that you can transform it to support individual and group success in the future.

Focus groups

Focus groups help you to understand if your workplace is meeting your team’s fundamental emotional needs. They’re also a chance to uncover what’s really important to your people so that your spaces can cater to this.

Surveys

Workplace evaluation surveys are designed to get your employees on-board and help you understand how your people perceive your office environment. They cover everything from mental health and wellbeing to working patterns and storage requirements.

These elements give you a whole lot of data to work with, which forms the basis of your workplace strategy.

So how does a workplace strategy benefit your business?

So now we’ve established what a workplace strategy is, and how we can create one specifically tailored to your business, let’s talk about the most important part – the ways it benefits your organisation as a whole.

Happier, healthier people

Creating a workplace strategy gives you the tools you need to support your people in lots of ways. The insight and knowledge it provides is what allows you to build workspaces that empower your team to work at their best.

An effective workplace strategy supports health and wellbeing, drives creativity and productivity, improves collaboration and communication, and enables your team to work in agile and flexible ways.

For instance, you might decide to design a space to encourage new agile working practices in your business. Your people will then be able to have more freedom to choose how they go about doing their jobs, which can boost productivity.

Reduce inefficiencies

A successful workplace strategy also helps you to understand how you can make better use of your workplace. This could end up saving your organisation money if you can reduce the amount of space you need.

For example, you could find that your second large meeting room is always in use, but only by two people at a time. You may then decide to build smaller meeting rooms or provide meeting pods to better serve the way that your people are wanting to use the available space.

Looking at your day to day operations can also help to reduce costs. For instance, if nobody’s using that expensive coffee machine, why are you paying to keep it running?

And when it comes to your biggest asset – your people – you can help them work efficiently by integrating technology to make their jobs easier.

Better business resilience

Your physical space should reflect your desired company culture which is key if you want to  attract and retain the best employees.

Your workplace strategy will help you to identify exactly how to do that. It will also give your people the opportunity to have their say on how they feel your current space reflects the overall business culture (or not).

Managing change

We’ve established that implementing a workplace strategy can greatly benefit you and your team, but it can also be a big change.

We’ve got more tips on how to successfully manage change during a workplace transformation here.

Let’s talk about your workspace

If you’d like some more personalised advice on how to implement a successful workplace strategy within your organisation, get in touch for an informal chat with one of our team.