Workplace Is Changing Faster Than The Organisations That Support It

Howard Murray
12 minutes ago
5 min read

Only 24% of business leaders say their organisations are very ready to make the workplace changes they believe are necessary for future success. Source: Deloitte Workplace Intelligence Survey, 2023.

That statistic struck me because it reflects something I've observed repeatedly over the last decade.

The expectations organisations have of workplace have changed significantly. Workplace is now increasingly expected to contribute to culture, collaboration, employee experience, talent attraction and retention, organisational performance and business change. In many ways, this reflects the evolution that many workplace leaders have been advocating for over a long period of time.

What I'm less certain about is whether organisations have changed the way they organise, govern and support workplace quickly enough to enable those outcomes to be achieved.

Increasingly, I find myself wondering whether many of the challenges organisations experience in workplace are actually workplace problems at all, or whether they are organisational problems that happen to manifest through workplace.

The Questions Have Changed

Not that long ago, workplace success was relatively straightforward to understand. Buildings needed to operate effectively. Services needed to be delivered reliably. Costs needed to be controlled and risks managed.

Today, the questions being asked of workplace are often very different.

● How do we improve collaboration?

● How do we strengthen culture and connection?

● How do we support organisational performance?

● How do we attract and retain talent?

● How do we create a consistent employee experience?

These are not really workplace questions. They are business questions.

The challenge is that many organisations continue to support workplace through structures that were designed when workplace was primarily viewed as an operational support function.

For example, organisations increasingly talk about creating seamless employee experiences. Yet responsibility for delivering that experience often remains fragmented. HR may own employee engagement and culture. IT may own digital experience and collaboration tools.

Workplace may own the physical environment. Procurement may own supplier relationships. Finance may control investment decisions. Business leaders may retain operational autonomy.

Everyone contributes to the employee experience, but nobody necessarily owns it end-to-end.

A similar tension exists around performance. Workplace leaders are increasingly expected to contribute to outcomes such as collaboration, employee experience, talent attraction and organisational effectiveness, while continuing to be measured primarily through operational metrics such as service levels, cost management, utilisation, supplier performance and risk management.

In effect, organisations are asking workplace to deliver strategic outcomes while continuing to reward operational performance.

At the same time, many organisations now expect workplace to operate strategically while continuing to position it organisationally as an operational capability, with limited authority over many of the factors that influence success.

The expectations have changed. In many organisations, the conditions required to deliver those expectations have not.

We Often Assume The Problem Is Workplace

One of the patterns I've observed, both on the client side and provider side, is that when organisations fail to achieve the outcomes they expected, the response often focuses on intervention.

We reduce space.
We redesign offices.
We introduce workplace technology.
We launch employee experience programmes.

These interventions can all contribute positively. However, they can also distract us from a more fundamental challenge.

A redesigned workplace may support collaboration, but it is unlikely to create collaboration if leadership behaviours, ways of working, incentives and organisational structures remain unchanged.

Similarly, organisations often invest heavily in workplace technology and employee experience platforms while continuing to struggle to answer relatively simple questions about performance, effectiveness and value. The challenge may not be the quality of the technology itself, but a lack of agreement about what success actually looks like and how it should be measured.

Even employee experience programmes can struggle to achieve sustained impact if the underlying organisational conditions supporting the employee experience remain fragmented.

These challenges often present as workplace problems. I'm not convinced they always are.

The Challenge Isn't Only Organisational

I also think workplace leaders themselves are navigating a transition that isn't always fully acknowledged.

Historically, many workplace leaders have been rewarded for being operationally excellent, responsive and pragmatic. Increasingly, however, organisations are asking them to operate as business leaders.

That requires something different.

It requires workplace leaders not only to deliver services and solve problems, but also to challenge assumptions, question expectations and help organisations understand what conditions need to exist for workplace to achieve the outcomes they say they want.

That is not always comfortable.

It is often easier to focus on solving the problem we have been given than questioning whether the organisation has created the conditions necessary for success in the first place.

Yet if workplace is increasingly expected to operate as a strategic capability, then perhaps workplace leaders need to become more comfortable challenging not only how workplace is delivered, but what organisations are actually expecting workplace to achieve.

Perhaps We're Asking The Wrong Question

Many organisations ask: How do we improve workplace?

I'm increasingly convinced that a more useful question might be:

Have we created the organisational conditions required for workplace to deliver the outcomes we're expecting from it?

That question becomes particularly relevant when organisations find themselves in situations such as these.

Q: We're spending a significant amount on real estate and workplace, but we're struggling to demonstrate the value we're creating.

Many organisations have reduced portfolios, redesigned offices, introduced hybrid working and invested heavily in workplace experience. Yet there is often limited agreement on what value workplace is actually expected to create, how that value should be measured, or who ultimately owns those outcomes.

Q: We've changed where and how people work, but we're not seeing the improvements in collaboration, connection or organisational performance we expected.

The workplace itself may not be the constraint. Leadership behaviours, ways of working, incentives and organisational norms often have a greater influence on outcomes than the physical environment alone.

Q: Employee experience remains inconsistent depending on where people work, who supports them and which part of the organisation they belong to.

When responsibility for experience is distributed across multiple functions, consistency becomes difficult to achieve regardless of how much investment is made.

Q: Different parts of the organisation continue to operate differently despite years of workplace transformation.

Workplace strategies, standards and programmes can only achieve so much if governance, accountability and decision-making remain fragmented.

Q: Workplace, HR, technology, finance and business leaders all believe they understand the challenge, yet progress remains slower and more difficult than expected.

In many organisations, everyone owns part of the solution, but nobody owns the whole problem.

If these situations feel familiar, the question may not be:

What should we do next in workplace?

It may be:

Have we created the organisational conditions required for workplace to succeed?

Howard Murray

Senior Consultant, Global Workplace Operations

Drives strategy, operations, and transformation excellence, aligning people, processes, and governance to deliver sustainable business performance.

Email Howard

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