Transcript

NICK BARRATT

We’ve decided to build a few show homes across The Open University. We’ve got some in Milton Keynes and also another in Wales with more planned. Now this is to bring to life some of the testing and work that we’ve been doing. The pandemic, as everyone knows, was a bit chaotic, getting people off-site very quickly. But over a longer period of time, just trying to think about how we’re going to work differently. Holding some of the bits of online working that obviously work well, but trying to think about what certain teams need, and thus the idea of show homes were born.

So it’s a bit of an experiment. A few areas have gone first just to see how different environments will support different ways of working. So we’ve got some of the traditional desk-based activity. But we have more bookable desks. So if you want to just pop in for a day or two to be around colleagues, you can do that. But there’s also far more open plan meeting space, there’s some soft seating, so you can have a more relaxed-style conversation, some soundproof booths if you need meetings.

So we’re just looking at a range of different environments to see how this can ideally influence other teams to think about their ways of working. So they’re fluid spaces. We will learn by watching how people interact with some of the objects and the spaces, how they move things around to better suit their working environments.

One of the things we’ve noticed over the last, well, two years or so is that people miss coming together as people. Not necessarily to do meetings, we’ve got Teams and Zooms and other things for transactional meetings. Not even necessarily to do the thing that we do to create content in our computers, but to work sociably. And that’s where we often have great ideas, conversations, social chats, that should be part of what brings us in together and we’ve missed that.

So knowing when colleagues are going to be together will actually give more of an incentive to come in, but we need to design spaces that will make that a really welcoming experience. So it’s great that people are beginning to start to think about workshops or training sessions or strategy sessions where we come together, we do a bit of brainstorming, all that management speak. What we’re doing is just talking to each other in a very different way.

So by creating different spaces, we can see what works best. And if it works well, great, we’ll continue that, if it doesn’t work, we’ll stop. And that’s all part of a different way of working, experimentation. But I think one of the great concerns is that we have spent two years working mainly in a remote environment, and that’s really impacted people’s mental health and wellbeing.

And so part of building new spaces is just to encourage people that it’s safe to come back, and that actually, you can enjoy yourself, have fun at work. I mean, goodness, perish the thought, but if we’re enjoying ourselves, we’re often far more creative as a result. So that’s partly why we’re trying to do this.

Something we need to look at both as an Open University, and in many ways, all organisations, is what is the basic level of equipment, an office in a box, if you like, that should be provided, or should be at an employee’s disposal, shall we say, to make it a suitable working environment? Now in the old days pre-pandemic, you’d come into work, you’d be given your desk, your laptop, your screens.

You’d have a safety assessment to make sure you were working safely. Everyone would know where the fire exits were, there’d be fire marshals, and, of course, we need to keep some of that going as we start to move to a more hybrid balance between on-site and off-site. But, of course, what about people who are forced to go home and work and possibly didn’t have the right equipment? Or they had cramped living conditions?

There’s an inequality, an inequity, if you like, that we might have built in. So we need to be fair, we need to be equal, and we need to put safety at the heart of what we do. So it’s going to require a new set of skills for people who are signing up to an organisation, for line managers, and people in charge of health and safety just to check that someone isn’t struggling at home, or whether it might be better for them to be given the support that they need in an on-site environment because otherwise, we’re going to be building further problems.

So checking in with staff is really important. Have you got the right equipment for your job? Is your home environment, if that’s their preferred or required space of work, suitable for that work? And if not, what alternatives can we provide? And that way, we can begin to describe what that basic package looks like that everyone is entitled to so they can do the job to the best of their abilities.

We’ve tried to think of as many different environments in our show homes as possible, because we don’t really know how people are going to use them. We’ve taken as much feedback as we can from our units, and just got a sense of what needs to stay the same, what we can introduce? So you will still see banks of desks with docking stations, and screens.

So you can book a desk, or if you’re pretty much on-site the whole time have your own allocated desk. So that will look familiar and very much the same. But you will start to see more open plan meeting spaces. So tables, where you can just grab some time with colleagues and have a chat. There’ll be quiet zones so that you’re not disrupted, or the noise levels get too much. So you’ll find some soft seating, often enclosed in screens.

You might find something that’s a bit of a hybrid between a standard desk and just somewhere where you can sit, think, do a little bit of typing on your laptop, whatever you might want to do. And then there are almost meditation booths, where you can have some really quiet time just to gather your thoughts, take that quiet moment. There are rooms where you can go where there’s beanbags and comfy seating if you just need to chill out for a little bit, meditate, think.

If you’ve got a particular issue that you’re working through and you don’t need to be around other people, there were all sorts of different spaces that we will build, and hopefully, will improve people’s experiences of being on-site. But the only way we’ll know what works, is if people come and use them, and tell us, and change the spaces and make it work for them.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about coming back and spending time with people, is it gets the creative juices flowing in ways you can’t do with just a screen. We tried various techniques. We had an experiment with Miro, for example. Kanban boards, which work pretty well online. But actually, the good old-fashioned whiteboard, or durable walls or things where you can just put your thoughts down and play around with them, and people can add to it, that just shows what we’ve missed.

And even with some of those online tools and having run various strategy or planning sessions online, you’ve got good outputs, but we’ve got more done in one afternoon with a whiteboard and a group of people and lots of caffeine, that helped a lot, just simply to connect in ways that we didn’t previously. The iteration of ideas, the development of ideas, and just setting things out in a logical sequence. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but everyone seemed to get a real buzz out of it. So that’s something we’re looking to explore again, building those creative spaces, not just to work, but to really be creative again.