Agile Work
Agile Work: Modern workplace design is multifaceted, participative, and scalable
Challenge
Agile Work specializes in planning and managing changes in the workplace from a multidisciplinary perspective: employee experience, culture, and the company’s strategic goals. They were looking for an effective way to digitize and streamline their projects.
Solution
“Workplace management is easily management-centric, and employees’ dreams and wishes about their workplace don’t get enough attention when they are forced into numerical survey data. Howspace came to the fore when we mapped out digital ways to bring the employee perspective to the process in a scalable way. This is especially important for us from the perspective of a consulting company, as the size and number of projects we simultaneously work on have increased, but we still want to reach the same scope and quality of involvement,” says Antti Pitkänen, Director of Research and Strategy and Chairman of the Board.
Results
Agile Work, founded in 2015, specializes in planning and managing changes in the workplace. Agile Work looks at workplaces from a multidisciplinary perspective: employee experience, culture and the company’s strategic goals are the basis for workplace design that takes into account the social, digital, and physical work environment.
Antti Pitkänen, Agile Work’s Director of Research and Strategy and Chairman of the Board, works with customer projects as a part of a multi-expert team. “We have experts in service design, property management, interior design, change management and workplace design who bring together the best skills for the challenges at hand. Changing the workplace is never just about walls or square meters. With the selected team, we lead both the workplace project and the related change.”
On the road to the digitalization of the workplace design
Agile Work has had a focus on digitalizing and streamlining its projects for a long time. They have a variety of participatory tools like workshops, interviews, work environment surveys, and observation of activities in current facilities. These provide good input but consume a lot of resources and are poorly scalable. “Workplace management is easily management-centric, and employees’ dreams and wishes about their workplace don’t get enough attention when they are forced into numerical survey data. Howspace came to the fore when we mapped out digital ways to bring the employee perspective to the process in a scalable way. This is especially important for us from the perspective of a consulting company, as the size and number of projects we simultaneously work on have increased, but we still want to reach the same scope and quality of involvement,” says Pitkänen.
Involvement and transparency build sustainable change
Agile Work’s workplace projects, built with Howspace, bring everything related to the project to a secure environment, a platform that is home to all project-related discussions. “The digital way of working brings transparency to processes. When the discussion involves a wide range of experts from the organization, in addition to management, it breaks down the hierarchy and builds trust. On the platform, change and related decisions are constantly visible to everyone, not just at separate points in time. We do not believe in a change where a workshop or a few are held, followed by a long silence and uncertainty about whether common ideas have progressed,” Pitkänen describes their way of working.
AI-interpreted qualitative data and project management side by side
Traditional workplace management tools are often focused on traditional project management and budget monitoring. In addition to sharing documents and plans, dialogue management plays a major role in Agile Work’s projects.
“We want to produce workplace concepts with a process where experimentation and qualitative research go hand in hand with numerical measurements. With Howspace’s artificial intelligence tools, we can extract and analyze a large number of employee conversations. We have many other tools at our disposal to bring experientiality, virtual reality and visual experiences to our processes. Howspace is the home of the project, where all information and discussions can be found in a shared workspace that’s open to all stakeholders.”
Successful change work is continuous and facilitated
“We want Agile Work to be a developer of discussion and practice in our industry, and that is reflected in the way we work. We are also using the platform, for example, now during the pandemic, to organize an inclusive virtual discussion event for the entire facility management community. Our workplace projects implemented with the help of Howspace are suitable for organizations with a genuine need for change. We are not doing a single-facility project and think that our work is finished. We want to make change a continuous and inclusive journey for organizations. Change in the workplace often culminates in renovation or relocation, but change and development work does not end there.” Pitkänen describes.
Agile Work is an official Howspace partner and has already implemented digitally facilitated change processes for numerous customers, including Vaisala, TEK and Volkswagen.
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