What does a good space look like?

The challenge for estates teams in both education and the workplace is that one size definitely does not fit all. The HEPI survey identifies clear differences in the needs and perceptions of younger undergraduates and mature students, and also between students who commute and those who do not. There is also a marked difference between the needs of students studying different subjects.

Furthermore, an increasingly hot topic in workplace design is catering to the needs of different personality types. This topic was also picked up in a paper presented by Dr Hannah Wilson at the recent Design & Management of Learning Environments conference. Her 2017 thesis on the impact of personality types on student satisfaction at Liverpool John Moores University, not only identifies a whole spectrum of factors that affect student satisfaction with the learning environment, but also through studies of different faculties sought to highlight where needs differed between types of personalities.

What came through most strongly from Wilson’s study was the importance of getting the basics right, rather than over-focusing on hot or fashionable issues. For example, ‘access to technology’ and ‘access to suitable clean toilets’ were the overall most important factors for students, while ‘motivating environment’ came at the bottom.

Similarly in Savills 2019 What Workers Want Survey ‘quality of WiFi’ and ‘quiet space for focused work’ scored far higher in terms of perceived importance than the building’s environmental performance or the availability of a crèche or free food.

This raises the question of whether it is more productive to focus on delivering what people like, or removing the factors that they don’t like. In the workspace design world, it is perhaps inevitable that the most attention is given to new and quirky ideas such as running tracks on roofs, slides between floors, and town hall space. However, what makes people happy is probably more subject to age and personality than what irritates them. Tim Oldman, the CEO of Leesman, which has the world’s largest database of employee satisfaction surveys, suggests that we should focus more on “productivity toxins” that make people unhappy or represent a barrier to them learning or working effectively.

Asking staff and students what they are most dissatisfied with might be a more useful question than asking them what they want. For example, in our latest What Workers Want report, the four things that workers were most dissatisfied with were: lack of quiet spaces, air quality, temperature and noise level.

What is most depressing about these findings is that any workplace survey of the last 50 years would probably have delivered much the same conclusions. Indeed, the rise of the open-place workspace has arguably increased unhappiness with noise, air quality and smell. However, the fact that we are still not getting the basics of temperature and comfort right should mean that they are at the top of any estates strategy.

Of course, the challenge for estates directors in both universities and the corporate world is that generally, their customers want everything, and their finance teams don’t want to pay for that!

Wilson’s study highlighted this with students saying both that open spaces were very important for interaction, as was a variety of formal and informal workspace for meetings, lectures and quiet study. The corporate workspace design world has developed the term ‘Activity-based working environments’ (ABW) to describe this acceptance that the work or study day is not one of homogeneity, but is broken up into many small moments of different activity, all of which ideally will have an environment that enables the individual to do that activity unhindered by the space. This solution is also seen as a potential fix to differing ages and personality types, by offering them enough variety of space to fit their needs.

While this a not a new concept, with American architect Luchetti first talking about “activity settings based environments” in the 1970s, it really only started to gather pace when Veldhoen (who went on to design Microsoft’s Amsterdam HQ) wrote his book 'The Demise of the Office'.

Dr Peggie Rothe of the Leesman Group recently carried out a study of 70,000 employees (11,000 of whom worked in environments that their employers described as offering ABW). She concluded that “the data consistently supported industry claims that ABW increased staff collaboration, productivity, pride and effectiveness. But also uncovered a series of failings and challenges that should act as important warning signals to any organisation considering an ABW workplace project.”

The claimed benefits of an ABW strategy as outlined by Rothe will be familiar to corporate and university estates directors:

• Healthier/more engaged and motivated employees;
  
  
• Greater employee empowerment and self-determination;
  
  
• Better collaboration, knowledge transfer and learning
  
  
• Faster and more efficient decision making;
  
  
• Flexible physical infrastructure that can better adapt to organisational change.

Interestingly, the Leesman work on ABW suggested that the biggest barrier to adoption of ABW was not space, but the people. Also of particular relevance to the Higher Education sector is the fact that it was the youngest employees in this survey who were the most sedentary and least likely to adopt a more mobile behaviour. This is probably due to the type of work that younger employees are asked to do (i.e. simpler and with less variation in terms of the balance between fixed address and social working).

Returning to our earlier theme of focusing on what is going wrong than trying to make everything perfect, the most interesting findings of Rothe’s survey are around why ABW was not adopted as fully as might be expected.

Reasons for poor adoption could include:

• The work profile of an individual or community just does not suit ABW;
  
  
• Too much reliance on a technology solution (e.g. Wi-Fi availability or a room booking system) that either fails or creates disengagement from the process;
  
  
• Poor communication – people need to be sold on how it will improve their lives, otherwise it can be seen as cost reduction exercise. In universities, the communication needs to be with both the students and the academics, and the messaging needs to be tailored to each group;
  
  
• Management – are managers capable of adapting to a new way of managing teams that may be spread out widely across a building?
  
  
• Isolation – do employees feel unconnected or adrift, and are they missing direct feedback and being part of a team?
  
  
• Suitable space – is the space too big and the environments too far apart for them to be utilised? While you might have a café or quiet working space, if it is a 10-minute walk away, will you use it?

_{Read the articles within Spotlight: UK Higher Education below.}