Which office environment is the best at managing change?
Which office environment is the best at managing change?
Companies fit into one of four distinct categories monolith, makeshift, modernizer and mouldbreaker depending on how they use their office environment to manage change. These are the findings of new research conducted by De Montfort University and presented by Jeremy Myerson, visiting Professor of Contemporary Design, and one of five speakers at the Desking Systems-sponsored Changing Workplace seminar.
The research, conducted by the university's Contemporary Design Research Centre, outlines the close links which exist between a company's culture, its physical environment, and its ability to manage change. It says that UK organizations fall into one of four groups depending on how they cope with change. Taking these one by one:
Monoliths are resistant to change, class ridden and deeply hierarchical in management style. They are addicted to formal meetings and paperwork, and live in inflexible, cellular office accommodation. Senior managers are often cocooned in wasteful private rooms from more junior staff who are themselves marooned in sterile open-plan environments. According to Jeremy Myerson, several government departments and traditional private sector companies belong to the monolith model.
Makeshifts are caught in a vicious spiral of management drift and make-do-and-mend, with shabby,overcrowded and poorly organized offices, housing poorly directed and demoralized staff. Used to making-do, they seem incapable of believing that a case could be made to completely recast the physical environment, and would probably not know where to start in terms of changing the culture.
Modernizers are companies which have taken advantage of relocation to create well-designed new workplaces with a greater range of social facilities. But the effects on the organizational culture and on developing new working patterns have been mixed. There are, says Jeremy Myerson, several high profile modernizers in the public and private sectors.
The smallest and most significant category is that of Mouldbreaker. Often found in advertising,management consultancy and IT, mouldbreakers align a less structured work environment with a relaxed, imaginative and interactive management style. While the research identifies no genuine UK public sector mouldbreakers, it says the modernizing tendency at the MoD's £273 million procurement executive office campus at Abbey Wood, near Bristol, comes closest.
Praising Abbey Wood as an environment which confounds the stuffy, secretive, stereotype of civil servants behind closed doors in long gloomy corridors, Jeremy Myerson said that companies like this the modernizers and mouldbreakers have a fighting chance of coping with change. Monoliths and makeshifts are more likely to struggle.
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