How to Catalyze Your Workplace for Growth

When research on your people and their work informs your office design, it becomes a powerful tool for organizational growth.

As part of our ongoing investigation into the connections between people, work, and the workplace, we conducted an experiment with 13 organizations around the world. To do this, we partnered with Leesman, a leading independent global benchmarking service. Our partnership allowed us to measure and validate our Living Office research by comparing it to Leesman’s data from over 340,000 people working in 2,649 offices in 69 countries—the largest collection of workplace effectiveness data in the world.

The aggregated data presented in this report reflects work we’ve completed with eight of the 13 organizations in our study. We are currently finalizing post-occupancy research for the remaining five organizations. Each of the organizations we studied ranged in size and location— from a small, Boston-based non-profit architectural office to a multi-billion-dollar professional services firm in the United Kingdom. Through Living Office, we helped the organizations’ design teams prioritize key work activities, map them to an intentional mix of settings, and fine-tune those settings to reflect their character and purpose.

Then we studied the office environments before and after the redesigns to understand how workplace changes fulfilled people’s needs, enabled their activities, and influenced everything from their ability to work productively to their perception of the organization. We surveyed employees and leaders, meticulously documented their spaces, and captured both quantitative and qualitative data on the performance of their workplace designs. This vast pool of research shows that when it comes to creating workplaces that are primed for organizational growth, only unique, personalized, research-based environments will do.