ViOFFICE: Hybrid Work in an Utilities Company

Discovery

We were asked to consider the real estate footprint of a utilities company and help them work toward a contracted workspace distribution ratio per a work-from-anywhere hybrid strategy. The goal was to contract the allocations from 0.8 to 0.6 (6 desks for every 10 employees).

1. ViVA health at work developed the discovery questions used for procurement, change management strategy, employee experience, and health and well-being teams in their preparation for a change in workforce design strategy.
2. We held site visit meetings and consulted with the staff, as subject matter experts, on several occasions. We consulted also with the health and wellbeing teams, facilities management, procurement, change management, and employee experience coordinators.
3. We reviewed results from wellness and engagement surveys, and developed our own for their administration, identifying the gaps and opportunities for work improvement.
4. We learned about the interests among staff to
   become involved in the procurement specifications and set-up of office workstations at remote, central, and home offices.

1. We customised ‘flipped classroom’ training material (where workers build knowledge with online material before face to face workshop delivery)
2. We enhanced the performance and copy of an existing interactive, animated office workstation case study, ViOffice Jessie.

Realisation

1.  ViVA health at work synthesised survey findings and provided the core copy of the content for C-Suite briefing material for the adoption of new statements of intention about their commitment to human-centred design.
2. We provided the glossary of terms for their teams to develop tacit (shared) knowledge about distributed workforce management, such as “open plan”, “hot desking”, “agile”, “activity-based”, “flexible”, “free-addressing”, and “authenticity-centred”, which aided their planning meetings and design strategy.
3. We trained 17 staff with flipped classroom modules (online and face-to-face combined) as in-house ViOffice Workstation Practitioners (Foundation Level 1). This helped them to better inform the procurement teams about their workstation requirements and help set-up workstations for new workers. Also, they could better address the early discomfort reporting of their team members.
4. An in-perpetuity license agreement was developed for the organisation to use an interactive, animated workstation case study, ViOffice Jessie, within their learning management system.
5. We provided advice about scheduling systems for desk allocation.
6. We provided a series of webinar education topics about health to help the organisation demonstrate their commitment to employee well-being. Topics like: positive thinking, managing sleep & fatigue, office workstation ergonomics, keeping fit to sit and staying active to reduce sedentary ill-health behaviours, neuro-diversity in the workplace, and similar.