Last year in “Is open plan the collaboration magic bullet?” we blogged about the spatial effects on collaboration of an organisation that moved into a single floor open plan workspace from a highly partitioned office accommodated on two floors. Over the last few months we have delved a bit deeper into the evidence and have…
In our fourth and final blog in our series, we discuss the organisational reality of workplace data collection. The truth is organisations and businesses of all kinds routinely collect data. The most obvious being financial results. How many products have been sold this week? What is our total revenue for the year? How much have costs…
When you are, like us, fully convinced that data collection is worth the bother, and have decided what problem you need to solve, another question might be arising. Is traditional small scale data still good enough, or do you need to get your head around the emerging discipline of data science and collect Big Data?…
Hopefully you are convinced that there is virtue in collecting data as a means to aid decision making, especially if you have read the first part of our blog series ‘What data should we collect?’. Now it’s time to think about the core question: what data is it that you should collect and how can…
It’s time for a confession: we are data scientists but very frustrated ones. Data can shine a light on so much, yet there seems to be much confusion and even anxiety about it. In the face of mounting options of easy and automated methods of workplace data collection, we often get asked what data a business…
What happens when 21 people volunteer to take part in a live workplace experiment? An experiment that tests what factors govern the choices people will make when asked to find a work setting for a collaborative team task? A couple of weeks ago we embarked on what was in itself an experimental formula: a kind…
We are always on the look out for research that can demonstrate the link between workplace design and business performance, so it was with huge excitement that we discovered Jacob Morgan’s “The Employee Experience Advantage”, with the slightly lengthy subtitle of “How to win the war for talent by giving employees the workspaces they want,…
We spend a lot of time observing and thinking about office design and the effect it has on people’s behaviour, so what better working environment to study than the ever growing and fashionable phenomenon that is co-working space? Our interest was particularly piqued by a visit we made during last September’s Open House London weekend.…
When was the last time you completed a piece of work where you needed no input at all from anyone else? That probably depends on the exact nature of your work and role, but for most of us in knowledge-intensive work, the answer is likely to be ‘a while ago’. Increasing demands on people to not just do…
A recent post on workplaceinsight, an online publication on the design and management of workplaces, which featured the new workplace design of management consultants BCG, got us thinking about the role of science in the workplace. The article was subtitled “Pushing the art and science of workplace design”. It featured attractive pictures of the new office,…
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