by Isla Galloway-Gaul | Jul 11, 2019 | Jobs
ACCORDING to a Gallup poll called the “State of the Global Workplace”, which studied employee engagement in 142 countries, only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work.
Isla Galloway-Gaul, the managing director of Inspiration Office, a space and furniture consultancy, said: “When people are engaged, they adopt the vision, values and purpose of the organisation they work for. They become passionate contributors, innovative problem solvers and are a joy to work with. “The answer to winning back disengaged employees and keeping the engaged employees engaged isn’t only pay, perks or promotions, but it is meaning – that is, giving work a greater sense of significance and making work matter.”
Here are ways to make people more engaged at work:
- Show people their work matters
“Make time for employees to explore the purpose of what they do,” Introduce your team to their customers. Explain how their work helps others, even in small ways, and encourage them to share their own stories. Reframe the work your team is doing so they can understand how and why they fit into it.
- Create a learning environment to encourage personal growth
Make space for people to create and execute their own learning plans, offering help along the way. Understand their different learning styles and attention spans, and provide experiences for growth expanding on what they already know, with immediate opportunities for putting into practice at work.
- Help make people feel valued and valuable
“You care about your personal family and friends, but what about your ‘work family,’ whom you probably see the most? Do you ever ask how your employees are doing and care about what they say?” By showing employees their value, they will feel valued as individuals and in turn are more likely to live up to their value in the workplace.
- Involve people in decisions to create a sense of control
Micromanagement can be a meaning-killer. “Including your employees in decisions and giving them space to get the job done helps them feel less like numbers and more like contributors. Whether it is where to put the new soda fridge or how to solve a million-dollar problem, don’t manage in a vacuum,” Galloway-Gaul advised.
- Allow people to bring their real self to work
By being your authentic self, you give employees permission not to check their identities at the door, even if they are a quirkier than everyone else. Of course, this must be within the bounds of workplace professionalism.
- Make people see where they fit in the mission
“Employees will never think that their work matters if they don’t know they matter. Achieve this by showing them the long-term vision and how they fit in it and contribute to it beyond the organisational chart of course,” said Galloway-Gaul.
by Isla Galloway-Gaul | Jun 13, 2019 | General, Jobs
THE concept of teamwork is not new. For most of the 20th century, teams functioned like an assembly line, focusing on areas of expertise and the division of tasks.
“But this siloed work style ended up slowing things down, causing errors and overlooked opportunities,” said Isla Galloway-Gaul, the managing director of Inspiration Office, an office space and furniture consultancy. “To combat this problem, that paradigm gave way in many organisations to open plan offices.
According to global office architects and furniture designers Steelcase, 69 percent of all offices now have an open floor plan. But work in these settings is mostly an independent pursuit, interspersed with team meetings and water cooler conversations.” She said: “Without question, the need to reboot the corporate workplace is overdue because while the processes and activities of teams today have changed dramatically, some business spaces have not kept up.”
Today, work gets done through networks and lateral relationships. Employees who once operated in different universes must come together in interdependent, fluid teams. The spaces that best support this kind of work are designed specifically for teams, while embracing the needs of all the constituent individuals. “Forget the adage that ‘there is no ‘I’ in team,” she said. “Teams are made up of individuals.
We need to design for multidisciplinary teamwork in a way that also gives the individual what they need to do their best work. “There is, therefore, a growing demand for user control over spaces – people want to be able to adapt spaces at the pace of the project and to give team members agency in defining how the ‘me’ and the ‘we’ need to work together at a given time.” But right now, although many organisations have become nimble, there are still businesses in which employees need to file requests with facilities and end up waiting for weeks for the changes they have asked for. Galloway-Gaul said: “Project work moves through different phases and each phase has its own set of activities. It is important that the space can evolve with the project.” So, what do teams need from their work environments?
Teams need a sense of shared purpose, cohesion and identity to be able to work together and build on one another’s ideas successfully. Galloway-Gaul said companies should consider three things to help their teams excel.
- Build a home for teams
The role of team space is bigger than just supporting the work itself. It is also about the human dimension. The team space should reflect and encourage the type of practices and working style of the team where they can foster a sense of identity, cohesion and trust.
- Flex space to process
Teams need a dynamic space that keeps up with their process and keeps them in flow. The space should let teams reorganise in a natural, spontaneous way in rapid cycles.
- Empower teams
Teams need control over their environments to cope with individual preferences and project needs. Empower teams and individuals to make quick adjustments to their space on demand to keep projects moving.
Isla Galloway-Gaul is the managing director of Inspiration Office, an office space and furniture consultancy.
by Isla Galloway-Gaul | May 23, 2019 | Jobs
DURING the past decade, the workspace has undergone dramatic change, but it pales in comparison to how new organisational structures will influence the work environment as we move towards 2020. Isla Galloway-Gaul, the managing director of Inspiration Office, an office space and furniture consultancy, said: “Our ways of working have changed as many societies become wealthier, as consumers demand new types of products and services, and as we constantly seek to increase productivity.” She said that there are four megatrends, which will have a profound impact on how we work:
- Rise of mobile knowledge workers
A knowledge worker uses research skills to define a problem, identify possible solutions, communicates that information and then works on one or several of those possible solutions. “The rise of knowledge workers sets new requirements for office design. Knowledge work is flexible, and knowledge workers are far more likely than other types of workers to work from home and be more mobile. “The design of the work environment must be adapted to specific work needs, as well as suit personal preferences,” said Galloway-Gaul.
- Burst of new technology
For more than 30 years, IT and mobile advancements have had a profound influence on how we work and it is possible that this exponential advance will continue. A few emerging technologies are already so advanced that it is possible to gauge their future influence. For example the internet of things, a connected network of physical devices, can connect and exchange data, resulting in efficiency improvements, economic benefits and reduced human efforts. Real-time speech recognition and translation will support easier communications between different language speakers and big data will allow companies to recognise patterns and make better decisions.
- From Generation X to Generation Y
Galloway-Gaul said: “Looking ahead to understand how our ways of working will change, it is necessary to understand what Generation Y need from their workplace, what their characteristics are like and how differently they see the world.” For example, millennials tend to be more family-centric, which means that they are willing to trade higher pay for a better work-life balance. Also, they are the most tech-savvy generation, which makes remote work possible, even desirable. They are achievement-oriented and frequently seek new challenges.
- Globalisation and performance
Globalisation affects how we work in at least two ways. “Firstly, there is a now a larger, global talent pool available, which means that talent is more geographically dispersed and culturally diverse. “As we head towards 2020, people will increasingly work with co-workers they have never met before,” she added. Secondly, globalisation increases the pressure to perform. Previously companies could produce goods and have a secure home market with limited competition. “Now many products are sold at similar or more cost-effective prices with the same or better service and innovation is copied by competitors within weeks. This puts the question of whether work or services should be outsourced to other countries on the strategic agenda,” Galloway-Gaul concluded.
Isla Galloway-Gaul is the managing director of Inspiration Office, an office space and furniture consultancy.
