Agile Working Explained
There's a high chance your office is outdated and ineffective. Perhaps it used to suit the way your staff worked 5 years ago, but it doesn’t today. Maybe there are too many desks and meeting rooms to enable effective collaboration. If this is you, it's time to redefine why you have an office, how it achieves that, and what it looks like in order to achieve that.
No longer is the office the only place where work happens. Your office now exists to bring your people together, build culture, and collaborate. Most offices are still designed as if they're the only place where work happens, and as a consequence they're ineffective.
In this article, we'll help you learn the most important basics about agile working and how they impact your office design. By the end, you'll understand what agile working is (and isn't), the key drivers of agile working, and how agile impacts office design. You'll be ready to create a workspace that enables and encourages agile working.
What is Agile Working?
What actually is agile working? It's a question worth asking. There are many related terms - activity-based working, hybrid working, and hot desking to name a few - all often used interchangeably. Needless to say, it can be difficult to understand exactly what hybrid working actually is.
At its core, agile working is about getting work done with maximum flexibility and minimum constraints. It involves thinking about work as something your people do, not somewhere they go. It removes all the barriers and bureaucracy that make work frustrating and ineffective. Agile allows staff to choose how, when, and where they work, based on their roles and tasks.
However, agile working doesn’t mean granting your employees carte blanche to do whatever they want. You will still need guidelines and processes in place to help them work together and ensure consistency across teams. However, by focussing on outputs rather than inputs, you create an environment that is dynamic and responsive, promoting adaptability and efficiency.
Agile Working Principles
So what does agile working look like? That's a difficult question to answer, because it's different for every company and every worker. However, there are 5 key pillars of agile working, which we'll go through here.
Flexibility
The first and most important driver is flexibility. Agile working involves allowing staff to work in a variety of locations and times to best suit their performance. By giving them this freedom, they can optimise their work schedule to maximise productivity. Their job satisfaction and wellbeing also improve.
Collaboration
Collaboration is another core tenet of agile. In today’s modern world of work, everyone is very reliant on colleagues and co-workers. To make your people effective, you must encourage teamwork and open communication across all levels - between as well as within teams. This will help your company improve creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.
Empowerment
Empowerment is the part of agile working that many managers struggle with the most. However, without effectively empowering your people, agile working will decrease, not increase results. To reduce bureaucracy and improve speed, you need to give all your people the trust and authority to make decisions. As a result, staff will be more engaged with the result, and more motivated overall.
Focus on Results
The key to effective agile working is giving your people more freedom over their process, and shifting the emphasis to output and performance. Giving your people autonomy doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want or they can't be held to account - quite the opposite. By focussing on performance, you'll be driving productivity and efficiency, rather than presenteeism and politicking.
Adaptability
It's often forgotten, but without adaptability, agile working is not sustainable. We work in a constantly changing world, and you and your people need to be able to respond quickly to new opportunities and threats. By effectively enabling adaptability, you will build resilience, preparing your business for whatever may happen in the future.
Agile Working Office Design
So how does agile working affect your office? The design of your office is just one part of successfully implementing agile working but it's nonetheless crucial. There are 4 key pillars of an office design that supports agile working.
Activity-Based Working
Activity-based working involves having several different areas in your office tailored to specific activities, such as collaborative work, quiet focus, and casual meetings. It's often confused with agile working, but they are vastly different things. Agile working is an office design concept, while agile working is a working philosophy. However, activity-based working does play a part in agile working.
To create an activity-based design in your office, engage with a consultant to analyse the tasks your people perform. You can then work with your designer to create a layout and design that matches these activities, providing a mix of private offices, open areas, and social spaces. This will help your people become more effective.
Collaboration Areas
One of the most important components of activity-based working is collaboration space. Collaboration is a crucial pillar of agile working, and it's essential that you enable and encourage collaboration among your staff. It will lead to improved idea-sharing, innovation, and teamwork.
To enable collaboration, you should have plenty of spaces in your office designed to encourage collaboration. This does not involve meeting rooms, which are too formal to suit collaboration. Instead, integrate open-plan areas, breakout spaces, and meeting pods equipped with collaboration tools and technology.
Focused Zones
While it may seem counterintuitive, providing focussed working spaces for your people to work alone is a key part of agile working. Some of their most important work is conducted alone, and your office needs to enable this. Focussed spaces allow staff to work in a distraction-free environment, enhancing concentration and productivity.
Much like collaboration, you need to designate specific zones for focussed working, and design the environment accordingly. It's important to note that desks are rarely effective for focussed work, as they are not private enough. Drop-in offices or pods are often better.
Adaptable Spaces
Regardless of how well your collaborative and focussed areas are designed, your people all work in different ways. Given that agile working is all about removing barriers and allowing staff to work in the way that best suits them, your office design needs to reflect this too. This requires an adaptable space that can be easily reconfigured and/ or repurposed for different tasks or team sizes.
There are 4 ways to design adaptability into you’re agile office. The first is variety - giving your people options where to work. The second is staff input - making sure they have a say in the space to ensure it is relevant. The most important is modular furniture that can be easily repurposed by staff in the space. Movable walls and screens also allow the reconfiguration of entire spaces.
Implementing Agile Working
Of course, office design is only one part of agile working. People, processes, and technology are all just as important as design, if not more so. However, you'll struggle to effectively implement agile without a suitable workspace.
To effectively implement agile working, you need to change the way you think about work - as an activity, not a place. Agile working requires loosening your control of the process of work and focussing more on the outputs.
Now you know what agile is, the drivers behind it, and how it affects your office, you're able to work effectively with an office designer to create a workspace that enables and encourages agile working - setting your company up for success in the years to come.
At the heart of agile is the drive to make your staff more effective and productive. For more help with that, check out Office Design and Productivity - The Ultimate Guide. This downloadable guide will give you the full breakdown of the why, the how, and the what of staff productivity and office design. Download your productivity guide here.
To learn more about agile working, what it involves, and how to implement it in your organisation, read Agile Working Explained.
