Trusting Data for Ongoing Workplace Iteration

By Chris Diming, PhD - Applied Anthropolgist

A year since the Covid-19 lockdowns began in earnest, organizations are faced with numerous choices. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote working for “knowledge workers” and others doing certain tasks. With that comes a reaffirmed desire by those who can work remotely for flexibility and the potential benefits of working from home for achieving harmony between “work” and “life.” The emerging consensus surrounding hybrid work, a workplace arrangement combining remote working and office working through technology, opens the door to new possibilities for aligning people, technology, and space with the work being done. 

However, with such possibilities also comes uncertainty. The Covid-19 pandemic’s trajectory remains as winding as ever due to concerns over the potential for an additional surge, the vaccination rate, and global access to vaccines. Will there be an unexpected rise in cases, and would it affect workers’ return to the office? 

Additionally, what will be Covid-19’s long-term impacts on workplaces and workers? Will employees return to the office and use facilities as expected, or will they initially be reluctant to gather in-person? Furthermore, will employees’ experience with remote working’s benefits prompt them to stay home?

Thus, the pandemic’s winding trajectory has meant that, with such possibility also comes great uncertainty. It can seem daunting to design a post-pandemic workplace when so much is unknown. 

However, fog does not necessitate paralysis. Neil Usher, Chief Workplace and Change Strategist with GoSpace AI, emphasizes in his recent book, Elemental Change, that workplace practitioners should focus their efforts on finding opportunities to shape future behaviors, rather than relying solely on data from the past or present. The workplace becomes a testbed for experimentation, with successive iterations capitalizing on lessons learned and exploring possible avenues.

Therefore, although today’s workplace professionals have a lot on their plate, it is possible to move forward. However, to do so, they will need all the tools at their disposal. Harnessing qualitative and quantitative workplace data can be a powerful tool for unearthing opportunities for innovation. Utilization scores, occupancy metrics, and traditional surveys uncover behavioral patterns, while interviews and observations conducted with employees delve into what happens underneath.

Workplace data can provide a critical foundation for iteration. Access to it allows strategists, planners, facility managers, and others tasked with figuring out work to base their conclusions on empirical facts, thereby granting a crucial degree of certainty amid uncertainty. 

In January and February 2021, we conducted primary research with professionals in workplace strategy, design, facilities management, and space planning. A California-based workplace planner we interviewed explained that, because of how his colleagues work from home, it is impossible to know how spaces will be used after they are designed. Therefore, he asked, “How do I design when I don’t know who the actual end-user is going to be?”

Rather than take a “wait and see” approach, the planner instead advocates for conducting pilot projects to iterate new environments. For many participants, doing so involves the use of data to create scenarios and project future space requirements. Clients, internal stakeholders, and other collaborators often expect the practitioner to come to the table with possible outcomes of what may happen if certain design decisions are taken over others. 

However, the data must be trustworthy. It is within this context that a UK-based design strategist explains, “[there] is this need for being able to model and simulate an answer. Future is critical…so…modeling is part of that. The question of course is where the data is coming from. But assuming that we have the data, the ability to model, simulate and do scenarios is valuable.”

Hitting the point home, a planner in the US mainland illustrates how he came up with the figures needed to estimate space requirements and present answers to stakeholders. Lacking a source of reliable utilization data, he makes do with headcount estimates from recruitment and meetings booked in Google Calendar. However, he is ultimately unsure whether he can trust the data. Thus, he says, “I go through the calendars and…essentially plug in how often they use [meeting rooms] to create utilization rates… but I don't know how accurate those numbers are to be fully honest, because those meetings could have been cancelled.”

Harnessing data for planning and scenario generation is a crucial tool for workplace professionals to operate on a day-to-day basis. However, workplace professionals need to trust the data they have. Our research shows that this certainty is not always the case. 

Our research tells us that data accuracy is a crucial issue facing workplace practitioners during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, we are exploring how we can help by leveraging our technology to foster certainty in data. To do so, we are embarking on a series of pilot studies with organizations and professionals who may use our services. Will you join us on our journey to reimagine workplace data and innovate the Future of Work?