Effective workplace design isn’t random. It isn’t born out of thin air. It does not come about simply by throwing a few pieces of office furniture together and calling it a day. You won’t get there, effectively, by starting at the end, or the middle for that matter.
All workable workplace designs start with a purpose. It needs to have a reason for coming into existence. It needs to be able to accomplish things to make the business better. It needs to answer the questions; why am I here, what do I need to do for you, and how? Without asking the right questions, one cannot expect to generate the best answers.
Your workplace is one of the most special aspects of your business. It is the center of everything, that is, for your business. It is ground zero for creative ideas, strategic planning, customer communication, vendor relationships, team building, and sales generation, just to name a few.
Much of Excellence is Practice
-Thursday, September 30, 2021
Much of excellence, in any field of endeavor, is practice. So said the late Anders Ericsson, Comrade Eminent Scholar, and cognitive psychologist. He’s spent much of his life demonstrating that elite-level performance doesn’t come from the inherent, mental, or physical domains. He has demonstrated many times over, those who reach the top of their game get there by practice, a type of practice, different from the way most people train, something he called “deliberate practice.” In other words, "perfect practice makes perfect."
Businesses often start from a single creative idea, often had by one person for an innovative service or product. The challenge? No idea, irrespective of how creative it is, in its original form, ever lasts forever. New ideas come to the forefront to supplant old ones, and old one evaporates with new ones giving rise to trendiness. When paradigms change in science, technology, and societies shift, the world thinks and conducts itself differently. If businesses do not replicate these shifts, they will often come to see themselves on the proverbi...
Design can do a lot of things for the user. With clothing, it can flatter the body, making you look thinner, sexier, or shapelier. In the kitchen, it can make the chef more organized and creative. For the writer, it impacts the way she puts words to paper, giving the reader access to a wide range of emotions.
The modern conference room is a place where you communicate with your team, negotiate with vendors, argue points of contention, make proposals to clients and sometimes just go to relax. Many people make mistakes when designing their conference rooms.
Company culture lives in the reasons WHY a company is in business. Out of this WHY (or purpose), company culture is born. Because the WHY lives in the heart, everything a company says and does, and how it looks, smells, and tastes (if you will) exists for that reason. We call this company culture.
Many companies are only concerned about how their brand looks on the surface and how they project themselves to their audience. Any company that has been in business for a while, however, knows that the surface will get scratched. Someone will say the wrong words to a customer who is already irritated, a product will be delivered to a customer that doesn’t meet expectations, or the service department won’t act quickly enough. When a scratch reveals a not-so-nice core, it makes recovery that much more difficult.
I’m sure we’d all agree that creativity is vital to any company’s DNA. This trait is crucial to companies in all rapidly changing industries, and currently, I’d assert that includes most of us.
Effective companies use data to create systems to grow by. From this data, they constantly invent new technology in order to better manage human capital. Currently, the technology side of things is being produced at a much faster rate than the human side of change. Technology seems to change every day, while humans adapt at a much slower rate.
