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Call Centres Find Their Voice

Solutions for Improving Employee Satisfaction and Productivity

At Tavistock Development Company, people don’t eat lunch at their desks. Why would they, when they can enjoy a meal in the real estate development firm’s bright, window-lined café. Against a backdrop of palm trees lazing in a blue Florida sky, accountants mingle with project managers, administrative assistants laugh with legal counsel, and marketing specialists catch up with urban planners. People who wouldn’t normally spend a lot of time together during the workday are getting a glimpse of what others are working on, and they are having fun doing it.

It wasn’t always this way. Before Tavistock’s president, Jim Zboril, and his team made the decision to consolidate three disparate offices into one location, it was nearly impossible for people to get together for any sort of occasion, lunch included. Tavistock’s Human Resources Director, Karen Duerr, recalls a failed attempt to gather everyone in a conference room for popsicles on one of the hottest days of the year. “It was so awkward,” she says. “There were 50 people squished into a room designed for about five.”

Tavistock’s dispersed and undersized offices also lacked enough space for people to effectively do their work, both together and alone. Aside from a handful of look-a-like conference rooms, an out-of-the-way breakroom and a lobby that didn’t afford enough privacy for confidential discussions, employees had nowhere to work together on their community development projects.

“My executive team and I hogged all the conference rooms,” says Zboril. “The people that were actually getting all the work done didn’t have access to collaborative spaces.” Employees were scheduling important meetings offsite, a practice that was becoming a drain on both efficiency and the budget.

In Zboril’s opinion, these challenges signalled a problem that went far deeper than inefficiencies and inconveniences. If Tavistock wanted to maintain its reputation as a company that builds inspiring and supportive communities for clients, it would need to do the same for its employees.

Zboril and his leadership team knew they needed to get everyone together in one place, and the soon-to-be bustling Town Centre at their marquee development project, Lake Nona, was the ideal spot. The next step – planning a workplace that would help employees interact with one another more – wasn’t so simple. Tavistock enlisted Herman Miller and Orlando-based Little Diversified Architectural Consulting (Little) to help.

 “When we visited Herman Miller’s headquarters in West Michigan, one of the things that inspired us immediately was the energy,” says Zboril. “Walking into the space on a dreary winter day, it was alive, bright, and there was a vibe that was infectious. That’s something we needed to bring back to our environment. We started looking at the different types of spaces they had, and thinking about how we could create them for our own needs in Florida.”

The spaces Zboril recalls seeing are called settings – just one part of Herman Miller’s Living Office approach to creating workplaces where both people and organisations can prosper. Living Office provides organisations with a framework for creating settings based on people’s needs and daily work activities. Outfitted with a custom mix of furnishings and tools, these settings can unleash people’s potential to be more creative, collaborative and engaged in their work.

Create a Centre of Attraction

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Living Office in Development

Herman Miller invited Tavistock to participate in a research project to study the effectiveness of Tavistock’s workplace before, during and after the implementation of its Living Office. This research-based approach aligned with Tavistock’s own practice of using data to inform community development projects.

As part of the research, Herman Miller guided employees and leaders through the Living Office Discovery Process. This workshop helps organisations identify their purpose, business priorities, character and activities.

Company leaders kicked off the process by pinpointing organisational goals that they hoped the new workplace would help them advance. These included building a stronger sense of community among employees, increasing efficiency, and attracting and retaining top talent.

People gather to look at charts on a wall.

During the Living Office Discovery Process, Tavistock employees identified work activities that were supported and unsupported by their current workplace.

 
 
Three people sit in a lounge area with reclined chairs and couches.

In their new workplace, Tavistock employees have a choice of settings – including this Cove Setting – where they can have conversations, socialise or work together to solve problems.

For Tavistock, the next step was identifying disparities between their daily work activities and their workplace. A group of employees studied a list of 10 common work activities, identified the ones that were most critical to their jobs, and mapped those activities to the settings that would best support them.

To supplement these efforts, Herman Miller researchers conducted workplace effectiveness surveys with company leaders and employees, observed people’s behaviours, and worked with employees to photograph elements of the space that were and were not supportive.

The results of this research proved that the new space would need to enable the highly collaborative activities Tavistock employees do throughout the day. These include lengthy conversations, longer periods of collaborative project development work, and quick, impromptu discussions – activities known as Converse, Co-Create, Divide & Conquer and Chat in Living Office parlance.

“We already knew that we were in three different buildings, so we weren’t colliding and collaborating like we should be,” says Human Resources Director Karen Duerr. “The research reinforced how important these types of interactions are to our work.”

Settings Under Construction

“Herman Miller introduced us to this notion of providing for alternative ways of working,” says Ralph Ireland, Vice President of Development for Tavistock. “For instance, in our old office, I had the option of either working in my enclosed office or in a conference room. Now I’ve got probably 10 or 12 options. This is an environment that allows one to work the way they want to work at a particular point in time.”

 
A chart showing the number of office settings before and after new furnishings.

Each of the eight types of settings in Tavistock’s Living Office is intentionally designed to support different types of individual and group work. One of these settings is a Workshop – what Tavistock employees call “the brainstorming room”. The space is large enough for the entire construction team to gather and discuss a project. And with a mix of furnishings designed to enhance collaborative creative work, people can then break off into smaller teams to complete specific tasks (a Living Office Activity called Divide & Conquer).

In the Workshop, people huddle around a long, standing-height work surface reviewing plans for new development projects. Large monitors flank the perimeter, allowing people to review projects digitally and make changes in real time. And if someone needs to take a phone call, they can relocate to a nearby grouping of lounge chairs.

“The brainstorming room is everything in one place,” says Cristyann Courtney, a Project Administrator at Tavistock. “You have whiteboard space, which is helpful as we are trying to think through the flow of a process. We also have plenty of monitors, and because of the way the space is laid out, everybody has a clear view of everything that’s being presented. This gives us a great opportunity to work through things live and be more efficient.”