A homicide investigator turned workplace guru on the link between design and organisational culture
Designing a great workplace used to involve loading up the drinks trolley and knocking down some walls. But as our knowledge of employee motivation and engagement increases, savvy organisations are seeing the built environment and wider organisational design as part of the same challenge.
Monica Parker’s unique background gives her a fresh perspective on the debate. As a homicide investigator in Florida, she began making links between physical surroundings and well-being that have been delivered to corporate clients including RBS and Google in a consultancy career. Now workplace director at Morgan Lovell, she settled into a comfy chair to tell People Management what really works.
The starting point for any design project must be an office slide…
Only if you have an office slide sort of culture. I know one office where the slide has literally never been used because it’s just not that sort of place. It’s just a gimmick. There aren’t that many places that have the same sort of culture as Google. If we think a great workplace is all about the design, we’re going to get it wrong. Culture trumps design every time. That’s why you often see start-ups in basements and garages – if they have the right culture, it can work for them.
A lot of organisations want to put the cart before the horse – “if we build it, they will come.” There’s an assumption people’s behaviour will change based on design, but they aren’t using evidence-based design, they’re saying “I saw this at Google – can I have the same?” It ends up just being a sticking plaster.
How do you approach the problem more effectively?
One of the easiest ways is to understand how people are using your existing space. It’s not sufficient to know how many people work for you. You need to know how many bums are on seats, when they’re working, how they’re working and how they’re moving around the building. If you can connect that to someone who knows what good looks like, you really get somewhere.
What are the biggest workplace design mistakes you see organisations making?
They try to short-cut it. They think: “I know people and I know what they need.” But you don’t know them until you’ve asked them the right questions. And a workplace initiative driven by the facilities department is a big mistake – you need HR and IT at the table. The best projects I’ve worked on are where I’ve been hired by the COO or the head of HR. When it’s someone in facilities, it’s not people-focused.
A poorly designed office is a discomfort but if you have a great culture you’ll bear it because of the esprit de corps. But bad culture is toxic: disengaged employees miss more work, and they can become cultural saboteurs looking to undermine the organisation.
What sort of trends are you seeing at the moment?
Most businesses are moving to recapture their nicest space and give it over to the greatest number of staff they can. They’re moving away from cellular offices so sunlight is shared around. And giving executives big offices is an inefficient use of space anyway, because they’re not likely to be in them most of the time.
Can call centres and other high-churn businesses be rethought?
Lots of great work is being done in call centres, first and foremost around giving people the flexibility to work from home. It doesn’t work for everyone – newer staff need a lot of line-of-sight management. You need to be able to raise your hand and have someone come over. But even so, there are things you can do around acoustics, and you can also put breakout zones close to the phones so people can take a quick break or get some immediate feedback. Call centres don’t have to be sweatshops.
How did you end up as a homicide investigator, and what did it teach you about organisations?
I studied design and started working on large scale environmental installations, but I had a crisis of conscience, as many 25-year-olds do, and I went to work for the Florida Department of Justice. My role was to determine the guilt or innocence of people who were on Death Row, and understand any mitigating factors in their case, because the state of Florida didn’t want anyone to be able to say they hadn’t had a fair hearing.
It taught me how vital physical space can be to well-being. I’m not comparing our offices to Death Row, but people need light and need to be able to move around. I worked with the team developing a case against Pelican Bay prison in California, where people who went in mentally healthy were slowly losing their minds.
In the end, I had to leave the profession – when my first client got executed, the light that brought me there just went out entirely. The people who were successful in that role were quite hardened from the beginning, whereas I was idealistic and open, which made me a good investigator but meant I was carrying a lot of things around with me.
How do you persuade business leaders about the ROI of creating better workplaces?
I don’t see it as a return on investment. I call it return on emotion. I’ve met CEOs who think attrition rates and engagement are just soft numbers. People in HR know that’s not the case, but it can be frustrating – this is a metric on which I get a bonus, yet when I come in to talk to you about it, you tell me it’s a soft number.
But there’s a lot of evidence out there around engagement. The important thing is to use it when talking to the CEO – if you only offer opinions, they’ll just get shot down.