Creating spaces for the future of work

Richard Godsmark, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, McMaster University

Richard Godsmark, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, McMaster University

“Why do I have to come into work when I can be so much more productive from home?” It is likely that every manager or people leader has heard this from their teams in the last year as we have started to return to the workplace from the pandemic shutdown. It is a good question and one that can be difficult to answer.

Before the pandemic shutdown , our department had a work-from-home (WFH) arrangement that team members could take advantage of. Anyone wanting a WFH arrangement could request up to two days per week, to work from a remote location.They had to agree that the place that they were working in would be suitable and safe for work; and it was well understood that the arrangement was a privilege and not an inalienable right, given our institution’s on-campus nature.

Fast forward to today and things have changed significantly.Recentnumbers from Stats Canada indicate that almost 40% of jobs in Canada can now be performed remotely. In our department, which provides IT services to the broader university community, 90% of our roles can, and have been, performed remotely in the last two years. Add onto this the fact that many new IT job postings in the open market now promote remote work as a benefit, it really does create a challenging situation for attracting and retaining people that are looking for flexibility and work-life balance. The flexibility offered by WFH is no longer just considered a privilege, but a requirement.

So what can we do? We are not becoming an online university, and there is an institutional expectation that support services like IT are present and able to support the students, staff and faculty that are on campus every day. We needed to change our approach and rather than focusing on asking people to come to campus, we needed to start focusing on how we can create spaces that people want to be in.

When we were first safely able to do so, we invited people to start coming back to work on campus one to two days per week.In addition to hearing the question about “why do they need to come into the workplace,”we also heard that when they are here,“no one else is here” and that this contradictsthe whole idea of coming in to foster relationships and build teams.They also said it was “too noisy when in a meeting” and when there were other people in the same room,they would get the echo effect on the Teams or Zoom call. These are just a couple examples of the new considerations we must carry forward as we start to re-imagine the workplace.

Additionally, we have also been reaching out to some of our partners and to other universities to see what they havebeen doing to support return to in-person.At one vendor, they talked about how they brought in several types of monitors and different sizes, and had their people vote on what was the most desired configuration for their new hoteling space.They found that by including people in thedecision-making process,it created better buy-in and acceptance of the new spaces they were providing.They also established a barista service; however, we can’t all do that!

While still gathering information, at a recent conference in Canada for higher education IT (CANHEIT), another university presented their approach and spoke about how they formulated committees for various characteristics or aspects of the workplace/space and that they encouragedteam members to join those committees. They found that providing an avenue for people to become involved also had positive outcomes. People took ownership of spaces because they were a part of creating them.

So what are we doing? We are definitely taking the lessons learned from our partners and friends.We are going to establish additional committees (we have one already for return to work) to discuss and make decisions on things like technology, furniture, space design, and space values/norms (rules for how we use ourspaces). We are looking at defining different spaces, through engagement with our teams, that include hoteling, secure lockers, huddle spaces, meeting rooms, team spaces, and collaborative social spaces.And we have started to make space changes so we can learn and adjust, as we know that there will be no perfect solution out of the box.

What are the changes we have made? We have recently refitted our meeting rooms with video conferencing equipment that can connect to Teams and Zoom.This was the first step towards trying to bridge the gap between working remotely and working in person on campus. .Currently, we are creatingseveral small meeting rooms, or huddle spaces, for where small groups of people can come together and join a meeting together. This and the other meeting room spaces is our first attempt at addressing the meeting noise concern in shared spaces.

To address the concern regarding when someone is in and “no one else is here”, we are looking to create shared hoteling spaces, where anyonefrom any team can use when on campus. We will need to make decisions around types of desks (sit/stand), what technology we want to use, and what secure storage options will be needed, however we are hoping the new committees will help us with that.

So then,what is the big lesson that we have learned so far? The best way to create spaces for the future of work is to create spaces that people want to be in and that requires handing some of the decision making over to those very same people. Like all things for workplace culture, this will be an ongoing endeavor where we will continue to learn, grow and improve, as we work our way towards the future.