We just completed a useful experiment. For two weeks we tracked the hours spent by my team walking back and forth between the five locations that now house us. It turns out that we are spending 1.5 FTE staff time, or £80K per year, walking. No doubt this has consequential health benefits but the University didn't budget for this. I'm more concerned about other losses - all the waste effort, missed opportunity and general dysfunction that occurs when teams can't work naturally together.
We are about to reorganise ourselves with the express aims of breaking down silos, reducing handoffs, improving teamwork, improving the first time fix rate, reducing waste effort and, above all, getting better at innovation and problem solving. We categorically know that we can't do this without a new, properly designed space in which to operate.
Great meeting today with Estates, turning these ideas into a proper business case for investing in a new open plan environment - one in which people can work fluidly together, choosing where they want to work based on the task at hand. Spaces need to be designed accordingly, some being appropriate for quiet concentrated work, others more for project or problem solving teams. And please can we have some social spaces in which to have the kind of relaxed conversations which make for accidental genius? Good things happen when people can talk to each other without appointment or agenda.
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