The environment in which we often work is frequently designed more for organisational convenience than it is for the people who work in it, and managed by, in my personal opinion, by “furniture police” who are driven more by space efficiency and cost targets that do not reflect the possible conflict of those targets with the need to help people get the most out of their working days.
In the buildings that Egg designed for itself, the style was generally open plan for working together, even the Egg Executive area in Derby was as open plan as compliance with regulations would allow, and the London offices were designed rather like a call centre. The designs however recognised the need to get get away from your desk occasionally and so included break-out areas, both loud – to blow off-steam – and quiet – to do some thinking. The Dudley Egg IT offices were however not really in the same mould being a rather elderly office block.
If you look at other exemplars, you can see both common themes but also diverse solutions:
- Facebook – recently show-cased their offices in the Washington Post – a vast open hangar where even Mark Zuckerberg sits out in the open area with no special desk
- Microsoft – on the Redmond campus maybe reflects its main founder, and described (by Tom Ilube, I think, memory is a bit fuzzy) as
an INTJ sort of place, where each developer has their own small office, at lunchtime everybody streams out to lunch in the common areas, and then back to quiet corridors after as everybody settles back into their own space
- IDEO – have a keen focus on working spaces designed for their creative people, in particular with dedicated project spaces where the individual teams could work together
Indeed the Egg team were very taken with both IDEO itself and also its working environment which provided some significant inspiration to the thinking on the new Agile environment
The case for space
Early in the process, we engaged in a short review of the external wisdom on the topic of working space, and came up with a number of useful insights:
- In “Peopleware”, List and De Marco indicate that there is a 2.6x productivity multiple between bottom and top quartile of development people, and that the key drivers in terms of working space are:
- Dedicated space, at least 78 sq. ft [this about 7 m2, which is nearly twice the minimum total space including furniture dictated by the UK Heath and Safety regulations, however the Peopleware material is not clear whether the dedicated space referenced includes furniture or not, just that it is about twice as much as the lower productivity group]
- Quiet, individual space
- ‘Manage’ the phone
- Avoid interruptions
- In the SAGE software estimating developed by Dr. Randall Jensen, and the only estimating method at that time to include environmental factors, a similar productivity boost is also indicated for the difference between “Modern” and “Traditional” work project types, with the key environmental factors being
- Dedicated project area with dedicated resources
- No communication barriers
- Tools for creative work
- Project control of the workspace
- An Industrial Society (now The Work Foundation) study on “The State of the Office” noted that whilst people value having a variety of shared and individual space, having control of their space was important
- In discussion with Egg Development managers a number of needs/desires were identified:
- Secure environment
- Quiet area where no meetings take place
- Quality respected space for me
- More like a campus like the States
- Leisure facilities, nice gym
- Good quality refreshments
- Free vending machines for Egg employees [This one probably not in the same cultural context of partnership as later developed!]
- Creative environment
- Child care facilities
- Chance to work from home more often
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Designing the building
The Egg facilities people took on the challenge of designing the fit out of the new building next to the existing contact centre and office building in Derby, including the “Toilet Strategy” amongst other topics…
Http iframes are not shown in https pages in many major browsers. Please read this post for details.Designing the Agile Workspace
IDEO were engaged, led by Harriet Hunter, to help design the environment and worked through the issues with the Egg people, in summary:
- Improve the space
- Help them get their work done – their time is valuable, provide the tools they need, reduce interruptions & improve Tech Support
- Empower the team – enable them, and trust them, to fix things that are wrong
- Fight the “one policy fits all” premise – they’ve different needs to those in the call centre
- Improve communications and build a community – get to know each other
- Encourage and support self learning
- Make it clear who they can go if they have a problem
The IDEO team then proceeded to develop a the brief for the new working environment:
- It must be a working environment that encourages creativity, collaboration and
innovation — a space that really supports team working and knowledge sharing - The new environment should be a place where the best Technologists really want
to work and that attracts great collaborative Partners. It should have WOW-factor - The environment should communicate that the team is passionate about what
they do; there should be a creative buzz about the space - It should be an accessible resource for the rest of Egg — by encouraging
others to share ideas and to collaborate on current projects - It needs to make tangible and visible what CTS does—to both internal & external
audiences—by showing the progress of current projects and by showcasing
completed projects - It needs to have a variety of areas: places to concentrate, places to collaborate,
and places in between - It should be clear from the environment how important CTS’s work
is to Egg - The space needs to be flexible. It must be able to support new ways of
working and be able to accommodate ever-changing technology - CTS team members need to have some control of this new space. It’s
important that they “own” their own desk environment - There needs to be storage space, both shared and personal
- There needs to be more places to hold meetings, with an improved booking
system - It would be great if there is an area where CTS can hold focus groups for
external customers and usability testing - It should feel like Egg. The team are proud to work at Egg. They want the
space, and the culture, to be more Egg-like
A variety of different spaces to support new ways of working were set out:
- space for individual working
- personal desk space
- hotel desks for visitors
- an area for CTS interaction — CTS team area
- a place for individual learning — learning centre / library
- an area for team working — project team areas
- access to bookable meeting rooms
A notable point that changed from the early physical designs was the designation of dedicated project spaces (approx. 261 m2 ) which replaced the originally planned meeting planned rooms.
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Launch…
And so it became to be true: the new facility was launched along with the new Agile organisation in July 2003, meticulously stage managed…
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