How might we navigate the future of work(place) with “experience” as our North Star?
Challenge
What is the Future of Work? Is it about technology? New work settings? Diversity & Inclusion @ the office? Hybrid work?
This vague challenge was brought to us early in the pandemic with long-time Gensler clients, LoyaltyOne — with whom we had designed a brand-new progressive workplace just 5 years ago in Downtown Toronto — looking for guidance with a highly ambiguous future that no one had answers for.
Our challenge was to set course for what was ahead; translating a shared and generic problem statement, into a bespoke plan tailor made for them.
Outcome
Working in a 2-week sprint, we paired strategy & design to translate trends and signals into employee experiences, re-focusing what they had control over (the experience) with possible future workspaces. We engaged their team in seeing conventional square-footage and seat calculations as prompts for discussions, plausible scenario exploration, and critical creativity.
Being early in the pandemic, this project was less about the output, but rather the process itself. We helped deepen the client relationship by instilling experience-first thinking within Corporate Real Estate stakeholders.
Partner ImpactIn this short two-week sprint, we worked directly with the Associate Director of Workplace Experience — a team firmly rooted in Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Strategy (from an architectural, tactical, and programmatic lens) — to expand their strategy to re-focus on people, culture, and their connections. The impact of the pandemic created a unique opportunity to shift the industry focus to a human-centered mindset, as a driver for physical design. As a lasting capability on the team, we put their values on paper and married it with how they continued to approach space planning calculations: truly connecting the “why” with the “how” in a way that met them where they were today.
Process
If I were to put a finger on the #1 most common request I received as a “workplace consultant” early in the pandemic, it would be about “identifying the amount of square footage a company can purge in their real estate portfolio with the impact of working from home”. And that’s exactly where this project started and was scoped for.
This calculation was pretty typical in my overall work day for many, many workplace strategy clients: running scenarios (re-entry, near future, far future, etc.) on different seat sharing ratios, based on some anticipated behaviour that no one could accurately predict. And while we ran the numbers, with a momentary understanding of research and data at that point in the pandemic (something that was constantly shifting), I was more interested in how you thought about the output of that calculator: how do you use these numbers as a prompt to think critically about the experience it could create, and why?
How do you use these numbers as a prompt to think critically about the experience it could create, and why?
This started the conversation about authenticity, purpose, and experience drivers. What were the goals of AIR MILES as a business? As an employer? As a connector of teams?
We quickly designed an interactive and virtual 2-3 hour workshop that focused on unpacking the purpose of the workplace, and how those value statements can translate into far-future destinations and experiences. With a focus on being “critically creative” (i.e. thinking broad, with strategic intent), we pushed ideas with our client partners that were responsive to real-world signals, stories of their own employee experience, and the existing thinking around the ‘future of work’. This allowed us to truly navigate the mess that the world was in at that time.
Outcome
Following the workshop, we assembled the ideation, findings, and “critical creativity” over a 2-day turn-around into a document rich in possible futures but rooted in bespoke experience drivers for the AIR MILES community. As a structure, we built a mindset of being curious in the world — looking around at all corners of the work landscape — and asking “what if” and “so that”. The questions that guided the story were: (1) what are we seeing in the world, (2) what does that mean for us, and (3) does that link back to an experience we’d like to create.
The Next Steps
The impact of the pandemic created a unique opportunity to shift the industry focus to a human-centered mindset, as a driver for physical design. As a lasting capability on the team, we put their values on paper and married it with how they continued to approach space planning calculations: truly connecting the “why” with the “how” in a way that met them where they were today.
We mapped out their next steps, with an eye on the signals that were captured, in a near and far-future strategy. While we were not scoped beyond the two week (!!) time frame that this project lasted, our goal was to continue to be their partner, whether we were there or not, with our way of thinking about the future, firmly in their hands to mold.
Company Gensler
Year 2020
Role Design Strategist
Team Annie Bergeron, Julijana Zrelec, Sarah Taylor