Work in Progress!!

Due to illness we have been delayed in finishing the paper. We will have a finished paper before the conference.

Voice at work - Employee driven Innovation in new Workspace Design

Eva Bjerrum & Anne Bøgh Fangel, The Alexandra Institute, Denmark

Companies increasingly think of office design as a strategic tool for learning and supporting the organizational structure. The argument is that “knowledge” work is becoming more nomadic and more flexible; that it can take place anytime, anywhere, and that this should be reflected in the way office environments are designed with focus on physical meetings, interaction and knowledge sharing.

The early studies of Wynn and Suchman (1984) of procedures and problems in the office pointed out how much work in, what at a first glance seemed to be highly routinized office settings is based on joint problem solving, based on peripheral overseeing and overhearing of the work of co-workers in the office. Based on interviews with clerical workers they conclude:”Discussion is spontaneous and topical, premised on the notion that because we all know this work, and we know what each of us is up against, the issues raised are of mutual relevance”(p.140). And that the interviews provide evidence for the significance of the office environment to everyday problem solving in Customer Service.So it makes good sense to rethink space in order to support both tacit knowledge and collaboration.

In Denmark the implementation of New Office design (Duffy) in the nineties were mainly based on the idea that different working activities required different kinds of space, and this resulted in a lot of companies introducing more open office design to enhance collaboration and the typical method usedwas a top down process.

Duffy (1997) can be said to be founding father of the correlation between work processes and office environments (New Office). He is a significant propagator for the idea that the new design of office environments directly leads to enhanced knowledge sharing and collaboration. This argument can also be found in Myerson and Ross (2006) who also argues that new office design improve the work of knowledge workers: “[The new office]encourages a more collegiate and collaborative approach to work. Academies are places where knowledge is shared more easily, where chance meetings, training and mentoring are built into the physical tapestry of the working day (Myerson & Ross 2006:16)

However, we argue that office design is not a change agent in itself. The physical layout can provide a range of different working solutions or only just one! The physical solutions can aim to encourage teamwork, ad hoc meetings or individual work but there is no guarantee that people will behave according to the strategy for the physical surroundings.

In earlier case studies we found that introducing new office environments can be a challenge for organisations (Bjerrum, 2005). Often the change from traditional office design to new office design results in frustrations and complaints about noise, and unfruitful discussions on traditional office design versus open offices paralyze many organisations. The reason for this is a combination between ill-considered processes and ill-considered solutions.(Bjerrum, 2007).

Danish Case studies have also shown that conception of work plays a vital role in the relation between office design and knowledge sharing. “Conception of work” is not a notion that has been part of an academic discussion, but it is a new recognition we have made through different case studies on office design. Conception of work is distinctively different from the idea of corporate culture (e.g. Schein 2004, Peters & Waterman 2004) that dominates the debate on how employees identify with the company (e.g. DuGay 1996, Kunda 1992, Garsten 1994). The conception of work is what you consider real work. At each workplace employees carry out a lot of different tasks everyday, but they only consider some of them as being work activities, others are disturbances or even directly obstructing the real work. So it is the “work mindset” of the employees we are exploring when talking about conception of work. (Bjerrum, 2005)

In this paper we want to suggest that involving the employees in the development of the new workspaces is an important element in a successful learning and change process. That employee involvement can result in a more nuanced picture of the work in an organisation and thereby also a more nuanced?? demand for space

Recently some companies are introducing a more employee driven bottom up process where employees work continuously and consciously with reflecting their own change in work styles and attitudes in the office design so this user involvement often results in a realization process challenging habitudes and giving new ideas and energy.

We want to argue that involving the employees in the design of their future workplace is key to giving the employee ownership for the change, a learning process that may provide the organisation with invaluable ideas for the new work environment and the process of change. We base our argument on a series of research based consulting processes we have carried out with both private and public organizations in Denmark.

In some of our research based consultancy processes we have used workshops as user involvement, but not in a traditional sense. We have used the workshop results in combination with ethnographic observations as a diagnostic tool to identify the challenges in the organisation. And we have designed user involvement processes where our role only has been to facilitate the process. Where the employees themselves have decided what they would like to focus on, where they have worked with different tasks, e.g. made their own ethnographic observations in their workplace and given their own picture of challenges and advantages. With this paper we want to propose that an employee driven innovation process is a small step to take but a step with a huge impact on the result.

Employee participation in the workplace

In Denmark there is a long tradition for employee participation in the workplace, a tradition that is solidly founded in the way Danish organizations work. In most cases this takes the form of representative participation, where employees elect colleagues to represent them in committees that are an integrated part of the companies, i.e. Health and Safety Committees, Joint Consultative Committees and employee representation in company boards. The purpose of this kind of participation is to ensure an element of democracy in the collaboration between management and employees in Danish organizations, and the form and scope of this kind of participation is governed by Danish law and by agreements made between Danish employee and employer organisations.

This kind of employee participation takes its point of departure in the ingrained conflict of interest between management and employees. And the committees are often seen as a safeguard of employee rights.

However, in recent years it has become more and more common to consult employees more directly in connection with important organizational issues. This kind of participation often takes the form of ad hoc involvement of groups of employees and in some cases the entire body of employees. In recent years it has thus become common in Denmark for organisations to organize strategy workshops or value workshops where the employees give their input to the development of company strategies.

The idea is that this bottom-up approach in the development of company strategies is an important vehicle for ensuring employees’ ownership to important organisational strategies. This development is influenced organizational development theorists like Karl E. Weick, who stresses the importance of creating a structured framework for creating meaning in processes of change – what he calls a sensemaking process (Weick, 2005).An employee participation process can be said to do just that. The argument is that if we don’t provide an opportunity for creating meaning in a structured setting, it will just happen elsewhere.A sensemaking process is crucial for the participant’s experience of co-ownership and an important vehicle for a change of thoughts and behaviour about the change process. Or quoting a famous phrase by E.M. Forster often used by Karl E. Weick: “How can I know what I think until I see what I say”. Engaging employees in a sensemaking process thus becomes a way to structure the unknown where “Situations, organizations and environments are talked into existence.”(Weick, 2005).

Seen from organisational development point of view this kind of employee participation is highly beneficial and serves as an important vehicle for mobilising the organisation in the process of change. However, the focus is often on creating meaning in changes that have already been decided.

We want to argue that some organisational changes cannot be just talkedinto existence. Sometimes it is not just a matter of asking people what they want and what they need, because what we can say is often limited by our discourse – an invisible conceptual framework that frames our perception of reality and determines how we think and act. (Foucault, 1972).

We want to argue that it is important to develop new ways of involving employees where we challenge the discursive practice of the organization by providing them with alternative pictures of the organization or engaging them in a process where they challenge each other`s accepted understandings of the organization and their work

Case 1 - Ethnographic analysis – as a tool for organisational development

The first case that we are going to describe was carried out as a consultancy project for a public organization in connection with the development of new innovative working environments for the organisation’s employees. The public organisationwanted to be leading within the development of new working environments in Denmark, and was therefore focused on working strategically and experimentally with the interaction between their own work forms and workplace design.

We were engaged to help ensure that the future design of the workplace met the needs of the employees and help them in the process of change. In collaboration with top management we designed a processthat consisted of two major parts. An investigative part where we carried out an ethnographic analysis of working styles in all the departments supplemented by a questionnaire about attitudes to the development of new working environments. And aparticipatory part where we facilitated a series of workshops in the organisation; starting with a workshop with the top management, progressing with workshops for the middle management and the Joint Consultative Committee, and finally concluding with two workshops for all the employees in the organisation.

By combining ethnographic analysis with a participatory process where management and employees get a chance to contribute with their inputs to the change, we aimed to open up for new way of involving employees in the design of their new work environments;an approach where we focus on creating a sensemaking process for the organisation, and help them generate hopes and dreams for the new office environment, while simultaneously providing them with new insights about their organization.

The purpose of making observations in the organization was thus to provide the organization with analternative view of the organization. The reason is that we often experience that there is a difference between how people describe their working patterns and what is actually taking place in the office space.We argue that this element is crucial since important decisions about the future design of the work place.

Both parts were subsequently used as a tool for organisational development.

The Workshops

The purpose of the top management workshop was to inspire them to formulate a strong overall vision for the change of their working environment, and discuss how they would work to realize this vision. The framework for the discussion was provided by an inspirational talk where we as consultants talked about experiences, successes and failures in organisations we had previously researched or consulted.

Having established a strong vision for the change project with the top management we went on to facilitate a workshop for the middle management. The workshop consisted of five parts; 1) An inspirational talk, 2) a picture association exercise, where they were asked to give their associations to a number of pictures of their present work environment; 3) a concerns-solutions exercise where they got the opportunity to raise any personal concerns about the change and come up with joint solutions; 4) an exercise where they came up with ideas for how they could contribute to reaching the vision of the change; and finally a dream scenario excise where they were asked to describe the result of the change one year in the future.

We then had a workshop with the Joint Consultative Committee giving them a similar inspirational talk about how to work with the relation between work processes and the design of office environment. The Joint Consultative committee consisted of seven employee representatives and four management representatives. Thisworkshop was set in place, because this would have been the usual forum for employee participation and influence on management decision making. Normally the process of sensemaking would be centred round the Joint Consultative Committee who would then take on the role of sensemakers and act as opinionmakers in the organisation.

The primary purpose of the workshop was to brief them about thework we were going to carry out in the organisation and ensure them that the ethnographic study was not in actual fact efficiency surveillance of the employees.

We then concluded with two workshops for all employees in the organisation. The format of the workshop was an exact repetition of the middle management workshop. The only difference was that it was held on two consecutive days in order to have a manageable workshop size. During the different exercises the employees were split into department groups.

The Ethnographic Analysis

The ethnographic study consisted of two different elements; observations of the work environment and observations of the use of facilities and work processes.

Our approach to ethnographic field study is passive participation (Spradley)We are present at the scene of action, but we do not participate or interact with people to any great extent, because we don´t want to mix up the roles. As Spradley puts it “The more you know about a situation as an ordinary participant the more difficult it is to study it as an ethnographer (Spradley, p.61). Our aim is to be explorative and focus on not to be preconceived, but study the field with wonder: “ One can infer a great deal about the cultural rules people follow from the vantage point of passive participation”(Spradley, p 52).

When we enter an organization the first thing we do is to make broad descriptive observations of everything that the office environment Atmosphere and general activity and sound picture. We make observations of the physical design of the work environment. What facilities they have?

Afterwards we make focused observations where we narrow the scope at what we are looking for: How the different departments have accommodated themselves in the work environment? If they have a lot of personal stuff? Have they arranged the furniture to support individual or collaborative work? How has the manager placed him/herself in the work environment? How they use the office space? What are the characteristics of their working pattern? Are they primarily working individually or collaborating a lot? Do they have a lot of meetings? And do they use the phone a lot?

In our observations we make extensive field notes, but in order to provide ourselves with an overview of the working patterns we over the years we have developed two supplementary methods that also serves as important communicative tools in our feedback to the organization: 1)Snapshots, where we make 5-minute registrations of what happens in the office environment. Repeated registrations provide us with an overview of the dominating working patterns and are also useful for illustrating possible differences between departments. 2) Episodes, where we make 15-minute descriptions of what we see in the office space. Again, these repeated descriptions provide us with an overview of patterns and are also useful for illustrating the work processes in the work environment.

This is an example of a typical 5-minute snapshot from the project department (figure 1).

The difference is striking when you look at a typical snapshot from the legal department (figure 2).

The analysis showed that the departments were characterised by very different work forms, workplace design, atmosphere and culture and made it possible for them to see the organisation with new eyes, challenging their implicit assumptions

The Result of the Process

While the workshops process was indeed designed as a sensemaking process, we also use the results of the workshops as important material for analysis and central to our formulation of recommendations for the organization. We study the input of each workshop in detail and use the as foundation for estimating possible challenges in the change process.

We often find a close correspondence between the results of management workshops and the employee workshops. If management have a strong vision and show leadership in how they are going to implement the ideas in the organisation, we typically see employees showing similar energy and innovation. In this case, the contrast was striking. Both top management and management showed great eagerness in the generation of ideas for the new office environment, whereas both employee workshops where characterized by mistrust and resistance to the new work environment. They had very few ideas and the ideas they had focused on challenging the management’s right to make these changes and dealt with what the management ought to do rather than contributing with their ideas and wishes for the creation of a future work environment.