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Designing an Efficient and Productive Workspace: Understanding the Ask

Author:

Tim Russell

Modern Workspace

•  Jul 15, 2024

In the last few years we have been figuring out what ‘hybrid working’ means to each of us.  

When we look at procurement rates, headlines, and generally what businesses were doing, outside of the rush to understand what ‘generative AI’ meant, there was not a lot going on. You probably will remember at least one ‘4-day-a-week’ post, or ‘everyone’s back in the office…or not’ article.  

In this, the first of 3 short articles, I want to look at how businesses can focus, design and build both a Modern Workspace and a Modern Workplace. 

Workspace vs Workplace 

Let’s set the ground rules: a Workplace is a physical location, usually an office but it could be a factory a store or any place used as a place to work for groups of employees. A Workspace, by comparison, is the ethereal environment surrounding a user. It includes the physical devices, the software, licenses, applications and accessories.  

A Workspace can be found in a Workplace, but a Workplace is not required to make a Workspace.  

Clear? I hope so, as we need to understand these fundamental differences to look at how businesses invest and why these two concepts require different approaches. 

What is ‘hybrid working’? 

Over the last few years, we have seen a lot of discussions and I have witnessed companies trying to decide what ‘hybrid working’ means to them. What does it mean to you and how does this dictate your workspace enablement policies? 

Let’s take the simple approach; a Modern Workspace and Modern Workplace policy will want to achieve a few things: 

  • Engage employees to be more collaborative wherever they work. 
  • Empower employees to easily use and adopt the technology they are provided with. 
  • Maximise property investments by utilising the space effectively and efficiently. 
  • Reducing administrative overhead on Workspace and Workplace components to allow a business to focus on its core capabilities. 
  • Ensure that both physical and virtual security is maintained. 
  • Maintain and improve the quality of experience for end users. 
  • Enable self-help and self-healing in the end user environment as much as possible. 

Promoting better collaborative working  

Collaborative work is critical, be it in the office, on the plane, or in another time zone, and being able to work together is the key to a productive workforce. There is a difference between the types of collaboration we see in and out of an office, and we need to ensure the experience is both inclusive and equitable. An example I have seen regularly, and I’m sure I am not alone, is seeing an office full of people hunched over laptops, with many of them in the same online meeting.  

There are usually two causes for this scenario: a lack of focus or meeting room spaces where those in the office can join together, and secondly, the disparity in experience between those online and those physically present for a meeting. We quite often sink to the lowest common denominator to level-out the experience (i.e. we all go online). Even in an office with enough meeting rooms, we quite often find 2 people in a room for 6 or a weekly 1-hour reservation that always seems to be online. 

Meeting Room Capability and Capacity: 

  • Ensure there are enough flexible meeting spaces in your office. 
  • Track and optimise the use of meeting rooms to prevent wasteful practices.  

The duration of a meeting should be considered. For some time, I have been using the setting in Microsoft Outlook that lets me book meetings as 25 or 50 minutes, allowing meeting room transition time; it's not meant to be overflow time, by the way!  

I recollect having back-to-back hour-long meetings in different rooms and always being late because I had to run from one room or building to another. We also need to think about the time we take to process the information we have hopefully gathered from one meeting before heading to the next one.  

This segues into the agenda and goal for a meeting. Have you ever turned up to a meeting that was just a time and a place, or maybe online with just a join link? Why were you there? Was there a reason explained beforehand? Without providing people guidance on the meeting content, you can quite often have the wrong participants, and a meeting without structure or planned outcome is inefficient and will inevitable go on for the maximum amount of time available. Set an agenda and an outcome, if you reach it, stop the meeting early.  

Meeting Sanity 

  • Allow post-meeting processing time, 5 on a 30-minute and 10 on an hour-long call. 
  • Give clear and concise guidance for meeting room etiquette, especially around duration and information provided to attendees. 

We all have a preference when it comes to operating systems and the tools we use; are you in Safari or Edge, Chrome or Firefox, Opera or any other of the web browsers available, and which do you prefer? Do you read your emails in a web page or an application? Whether you have an organisation with 10s or 1000s of employees, they will all have different preferences and experiences regarding the technology they want to use. As a provider of technology to your users, how do you address this while protecting company information and standards? 

Applications 

Let’s assume your organisation will have some legacy applications that may not be as flexible as you would like. These applications may only run on specific operating systems or with certain connectivity or latency restraints. If you want to move at speed when it comes to technology development and delivery, a cloud-based architecture and cloud-hosted data will help you as they are far more flexible than traditionally installed applications, especially if you have bespoke or legacy scenarios. 

Application Legacy 

  • Be clear on the real application estate you have. 
  • Understand how flexible your software and application architecture are. 
  • How operating system-independent are you? 

CDW can help with application migration, reach out if this is an issue you are facing. 

How do your users consume the applications you provide; are they manually installed at build time, or are they able to change devices at any given time and still expect the same level of access and capabilities? We have worked with several application packaging and delivery partners that can provide a seamless experience to users, regardless of interface: VDI, Windows, Apple, and even Linux. A user can utilise the platform of choice, changing as often as they like, while still having access to the same applications, the same data and the same experience. There is the pre-requisite of cloud-based data storage, however that is just part of the story. 

Application Delivery 

  • How well-managed is your application delivery? 
  • Can your application delivery be automated? 
  • Are you able to reduce application and version sprawl through a simple managed application delivery model? 

The Physical Workspace 

Moving our focus to the physical Workspace, how connected is your office space? Are your lights movement controlled, screens on energy star settings, or are you already utilising power over ethernet controlled low energy LED lighting? If, like many businesses, you see peak utilisation midweek and Mondays and Fridays are generally quieter, how do you plan for this and adapt?  

Utilise sensing technologies through IoT, room and desk booking systems, and even car parking planning, if your business has this. A business can focus on making data-driven decisions from all the possible environmental sensors and tools to drive efficiencies and deliver a world-class physical experience for employees. The latest generation of meeting room equipment already has the potential to interact with air conditioning, power and lighting systems to adjust environmental conditions based on room occupancy. It’s time to take this approach further and look at the entire office space and how, through the application of relevant data, energy efficiency and employee experience decisions can be made. 

Making IT work for you 

  • How aligned is your IT and building management or facilities departments? 
  • Have you considered joining your teams to look at efficiency and synergies through the correct and relevant application of technology to physical office spaces? 

I like to think that IT should be a product you can consume as simply as you do a mobile phone contract. Change when you want, pay for what you use and ultimately have maximum flexibility and choice. This is, for a lot of companies, not practical as it requires too much of an administrative overhead to tool-up and support these choices.  

Is IT your core business? Probably not. Why let something that delivers productivity and capability while driving employee retention and attraction become a stumbling block? Outsourcing has long been discussed; my perspective is that businesses need to focus on enabling the workforce through consuming IT as a service. A pay-per-use policy across devices, accessories, applications, and all that is required to enable your staff. 

Consumption-based IT. 

  • Are your IT teams given room to innovate and discover or is the focus on support and keeping the lights on? 
  • Where do you want your IT departments to focus? 

Security 

Finally, and ultimately, security needs to be front and centre in all these capabilities. Physical and electronic security are critical, and they should be seen as one component of the protection you offer to your staff. Like how a well-built house requires a solid foundation, your security posture must be the foundation of your business. 

Having security as a foundation enables customers to adopt a more flexible device approach, as they can trust that their data is protected regardless of where and how it is accessed. By implementing a zero-trust model, customers can ensure that only authorised users and devices can access sensitive information and that any potential threats are detected and mitigated. This way, customers can empower their IT teams to innovate and discover new ways of working while maintaining a high level of security and compliance. 

How can we help

- CDW can help customers assess their current security posture and identify any gaps or vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. CDW can also recommend the best solutions and strategies to implement a zero-trust model across devices, networks, applications and data. 

- CDW can help customers deliver a secure and flexible device approach by providing end-to-end services, from procurement and configuration to deployment and support. CDW can also help customers manage their device lifecycle, ensuring that devices are always updated, compliant and protected. 

- CDW can help customers manage their security operations and monitor their environment for any threats or incidents. CDW can provide 24/7 security support, incident response, threat intelligence and analysis, and security awareness training. CDW can also help customers optimise their security investments and measure their security performance. 

- CDW can help customers customise and modernise their application estate by conducting an application assessment, rationalisation and migration service. CDW can help customers identify which applications are essential, suitable for cloud migration, or need to be replaced or retired. CDW can also help customers migrate their applications to the cloud or other platforms, ensuring minimal disruption and maximum performance. 

- CDW can help customers simplify and enhance their user experience by providing application delivery solutions that enable secure, fast and seamless access to applications across devices and locations. CDW can help customers implement solutions such as Citrix Workspace, Microsoft 365, VMware Horizon or Workspace ONE, which offer a unified and intuitive interface for users to access their applications, data and desktops. CDW can also help customers manage and maintain their application delivery solutions, ensuring that they are always patched, updated and optimised. 

How can we help you in your journey to the Modern Workspace of the future? 

In the next article in this series I will build on the AI aspect and how this can influence the Modern Workspace. 

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