Live from E&R: Part 8

The second day of HCI’s 2011 Engagement & Retention Conference is in full swing! After a smashing keynote by Doug Conant, Chris Raia from Unilever took over. In a presentation based on organizational design and agile workspaces, it was obvious Chris has a passion for his work, and he made a great business case for it.

“Work begins in the environment you are in,” he said. And, as a response to that fact, Unilever began to gauge the concept of “workplace vitality” and develop strategies to move beyond the typical ones. Chris cited a scary figure as well: 4% of the worldwide GDP –1.8 trillion pounds – is the cost of poor vitality – and that number is 4x Unilever’s annual revenue, so it is clearly a figure that heeds more attention.

Unilever’s new Agile Workplaces is an approach to getting work done with maximum flexibility and minimum constraints, and it was built around the idea that when you work as Unilever, you can do your job any time and any place, as long as your work is getting done and as long as the company’s needs are being met. “Traditionally, there are a lot of boundaries placed around work – when, where, but technology today makes many of these constraints irrelevant,” Chris said. As a result, technology plays a huge role in this approach, and virtual collaboration and advanced mobility are key concepts of the strategy.

In the midst of the current talent landscape, Unilever has focused on the influence that the physical working environment has on employee engagement and supportive leadership. “We have dramatically changed our perspective on the office and are investing a lot of capital on redesigning office space,” Chris said. “In a typical office environment, about 60% of the space is not utilized. It’s gray, it’s windowless, it’s cubicles, and it sucks the life out of you in the morning.” Unilever has responded to this by designing out office spaces that correspond with activities and not simply individuals. Connect Zones, Focus Zones, and Vitality Zones have helped redefine and revitalize the workspaces at Unilever and with the bonus of being more environmentally friendly, more inexpensive, and result in higher productivity and employee engagement.

This latest presentation was a great reminder that organizational development and employee engagement is more than just behavior. There is a place for conversations about the workspace and how it fosters communication and supportive cultures, and it is such an obvious topic that it seems to get pushed to the wayside much too often. (The whole discussion really fired up the HGTV-er in me as well). Next up is a presentation from Hay Group about driving strategies to enable engaged employees, so stick with us for all the details! 

Photo credit: Burning Red