Work Life by Design

Is the workplace really just a 'task' place?

This is one of the thought-provoking questions that today's guest poses, for us to ponder about our reality of work and the workplace.

Dr Agustin Chevez is the author of The Pilgrim's Guide to the Workplace. It was after reading a book on the diversity of Iguana's in the Galapagos Islands, that Gus set off on a pilgrimage from Melbourne to Sydney, to explore the impact that isolation has on the diversity of our idea's.

Fast forward a few years and Gus is sharing his insights as 34 signposts from this exploration in his book, inviting us to reimagine our workplaces.

As an Architect and researcher, Gus has dedicated his career to understanding the notion of work and uncovering environments that best support our working lives. His interest in the relationship between people, space and technology saw him pursue a PhD on the evolution of workplace architecture as a consequence of technology development.

His work has been presented at various international forums and publications. As a sought-after speaker, Agustin has delivered international keynotes and is a TEDx speaker. He has also contributed to workplace strategies in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.

Gus is the Workplace Futures Lead at the Centre for the New Workforce at Swinburne University and an Honorary Fellow at the School of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne.

In this episode we are going to find out

• How Gus took this idea that he had to explore diversity of thinking to actually, walking from Melbourne to Sydney
• What the distinction is between a Pilgrimage and a Walk and how this applies to the workplace
• How the introduction of absurdity to the workplace enables us to bring more human traits to our experience of work
• Why removing friction from our environments can impact our ability to be innovative and its impact on our personal resilience as we overcome adversity
• How the conversation and questions we're asking when approaching the design of workplaces need to change in order to create an enhanced environment for work

A fascinating conversation with someone who has incredible mind to explore ideas in a new way to challenge biases and see new opportunity.

You are going to love this conversation with Dr Gus Chevez.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Gus;

LinkedIn | Website / Book The Pilgrim's Guide to the Workplace

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One of the reasons that I first started exploring this idea of Workplace Strategy was because I am fascinated by how businesses tick.

What makes one business a roaring success and another flounder?

And one thing that continues to fascinate me is the gap that I see emerge in almost every engagement. And it's a gap that I feel like I automatically step into fill without a second thought.

But this gap is one that differentiates what we do at COMUNiTI apart.

When clients approach us, they are likely to be seeking a Design Solution. They don't go to the design team looking for a business solution.

And that is the difference. Often as the opportunity is misunderstood, or it wasn't even on the radar to begin with.

So many times, I have been told by clients, "We didn't even know that what you do is a thing!".

So today we're diving into the opportunity to transform your business that you likely didn't even know what a possibility, as I've been reminded that what I thought everyone knew, they likely don't, and that is a huge, missed opportunity for every business.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

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With more of us embracing the opportunity to work from home, it's leaving our workplaces underutilised as occupancy levels in the workplace drop. The impacts of this vary from workplace ot workplace depending on the design style and approach ranging from limited variety in the spaces available for employees to perform their work through to a lack of energy and "buzz' that comes from bringing people together in the space. As someone who engages with organisations daily in this delicate dance of who gets to own their desk and who doesn't, weighing up the commercial realities of leasing costs vs underutilised floor area and the opportunity to provide variety and choice to employees in where and how they work within the workplace, this is a topic of conversation that I am keen to explore.

So, when today's guest Dr Jenna Mikus shared an article written by BBC on LinkedIn, questioning if the hybrid office will ever feel like home, with her view of the impact of this approach I was keen to engage her in a friendly debate on the pros and cons of the "to own a desk or not to own a desk".

Jenna shared; While this sounds ideal in theory, this Choose Your Adventure approach to daily working could backfire, as it introduces the risk of proving exhausting and therefore off-putting to workers often already overwhelmed with work obligations. Not everyone embraces change, let alone adventure...especially on a daily basis.

As an advocate of creating workplaces that respond to the unique and individual needs of organisations, their teams and their people, my view is that by relinquishing individual ownership of our workpoints, we can inturn optimise our work environments to cater to a greater variety of work styles and activities, further enhancing our experience of work.

Dr Jenna Mikus is the Founder and Managing Partner of the Eudae Group, which advises clients on organizational and spatial (both physical and digital) transformational change relating to built environments curated for health and wellbeing. Her clients have included commercial office owners, operators, and tenants as well as military, government, healthcare, higher education, aged care, and more on a global scale, with particular emphasis on the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

As an advocate for bridging industry practice with academic theory/research, Jenna is also a Visiting Fellow with QUT's Centre for Decent Work & Industry, an Honorary Fellow with the Centre for Conscious Design, a former Health Equity and current Research Advisor for the International WELL Building Institute, and a contributor to Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program's Flourishing at Work Interest Group.

Jenna leverages her education across engineering, architecture, and design with her depth and breadth of work experience relating to strategy, change management, and design thinking to encourage multidisciplinary cross-pollination in theory and practice and to guide the creation/curation of intelligent, sustainable, and flourishing environments for all.

Jenna is well versed in supporting organisations to create environments that support us all in flourishing at work, having worked in organsiational change and recently completing her PhD focused on flourishing health and wellbeing, so I was pleased when she agreed to engage in this conversation, so that we could explore it from a few angles and see where we land.

This is an interesting conversation exploring the role of workplace design on the individuals that occupy them.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Jenna;

LinkedIn | Website

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

The end of financial year is a great time to check in and see how we are tracking against our goals. As someone who loves to set myself up at the beginning of each year with a number of intentions and an overarching word to keep me on track, it's a great opportunity for me to check and readjust for the next 6 months.

This year my word was Flow.

And its been interesting to see how this word has shown up, the shape its taken and the way in which it has realigned my thoughts and actions throughout the year to date.

To mark this EOFY I took myself off to a fancy "lunch for one" and what ensued was something that I have since reflected on as quite magical.

This simple act of creating time and space, allowed my mind the capacity to truly get into flow. Creating a stream of consciousness that resulted in a manifesto for COMUNiTI and for me.

But whilst I didn't intentionally design this, it certainly didn't happen by accident.

So, in today's episode I'm sharing with you the ingredients that enabled this magic to happen plus some serendipitous learnings that I've had of late and the culmination of these in forming my philosophy on why mindwander, flow and spaciousness, are the key to innovation and creativity.

Take this as a friendly reminder that creating time and space to smell the roses can have a profound impact on the trajectory of your career and your business.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

Establishing a strong and purposeful employee experience in your organisation can take an incredible amount of time, dedication, and invested energy.

So, if you could find all the People tools and resources that you needed packaged up in one platform, backed by science and data, how much easier would that make your life as a leader and give you the confidence to know that you were giving your organisation the best possible advantage?

Well, today's guest is here to tell us that this is possible. Damon Klotz, who has what could be described as one of the coolest titles, is a Work Culture Evangelist at Culture Amp, a market-leading employee experience platform.

I first discovered Damon and his podcast Culture First, in the midst of the pandemic tuning into his episode with Jen Sauer-Klein, an experience designer in the States. This singular episode gave me a new perspective on the role of our environments in how we influence experiences consciously through design, adding another tool to my tool kit.

Jen is among a number of incredible guests that Damon has had the opportunity to engage in conversation on his podcast, so I was incredibly happy when he agreed to join me here to learn more on what have been some of the most impactful conversations that he has had.

What I also learnt through this episode is the diverse career that Damon has had that led him to his current role as Work Culture Evangelist. As you'll hear Damon is quite the overachiever, prior to Culture Amp he was leading community HR groups, through to being the Global Manager of Digital Strategy for Ramsay Health Care, a keynote speaker on the future of work, and the Co-Founder of Spur Projects, a social enterprise dedicated to reducing the suicide rate of men in Australia.

And he shares how a desire to be a sports manager and leverage the community of teams has found its way through to the work he and the team at Culture Amp do.

You'll also learn more about

• Culture Amp and the wealth of data that they have accumulated from supporting the employee experience across numerous countries since launching in 2009,
• How the platform supports organisations to leverage this "data lake" to continue to enhance the employee, manager and team experience
• And how taking a community focused approach to building Culture Amp has been a key foundation in its success, growing the company from 100 to 6500 customers, and the role that Damon played in establishing it
• Plus what Damon has learned about communication, transparency and trust from his conversations about People & Culture throughout the pandemic

So many interesting highlights in this episode, along with some great additional listening recommendations over on the Culture First podcast.

Damon also leaves us with some insights into how he has consciously continued to grow with the organisation from start up to now and its various iterations, all great self-reflection points for us to consider in our own growth mindset and experience of comfort.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Damon;

LinkedIn | Culture Amp

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

Imagine having the ability to curate the entire experience that your employees take when they come to your workplace.

To influence each touchpoint of their journey.

The things that they see, hear, do... the things they feel.

In episode 127, I shared how you can use an Empathy Map to consciously design the sensory experience of your people at work, a tool that can be used both to support cultural design and physical design.

In today's episode we're going to take that a step further and see how you can take that sensory experience and apply it to every touchpoint in your employees' journey to and from the workplace.

With just three questions at each of the touchpoints you can curate your employee journey and enhance their overall experience.

Whether you have an existing workplace that could be infused with some conscious changes, or you have the open possibility to start from scratch with a new workplace, today's episode will provide you with a foundation from which you can take more informed decisions about the employee journey you wish to create for your people.

No doubt throughout the course of your career, you've experienced moments where you've questioned yourself and your ability to lead not only your team through the next transition, but also leading yourself.

Stepping up into a new role, guiding your team through a new project or perhaps you've just been swallowed up by the overwhelming wave of pressure of work.

I can empathise with you at each of these points, because I've been there too.

I also know, from the work that we've been doing at COMUNiTI across organisations, that many managers and leaders are also facing similar challenges. With our need to manage our teams in new ways due to remote and hybrid work practices, one of the key challenges we consistently identify that requires greater support, is leadership capability.

And it's an area that today's guest, Rebecca Christianson specialises in.

Rebecca is an Executive Coach, Facilitator, Speaker and the Founder of Thriving People.

Throughout her career, she has partnered with Executive Teams globally to build leadership capability and implement organisational change.

One of her many superpowers is stretching leaders to the edge of their thinking to support mindset shifts, with a view to increase self awareness, influence, effectiveness, focus and wellbeing.

With her purpose to support senior leaders to love life at the top of business.

Having been an executive leader herself, Rebecca brings her lived experience to her work, having walked in the shoes that she now supports.

In today's episode, you'll hear some of the common challenges that Rebecca observes in the leader she supports along with the one thing that we can all do to start building our own leadership capability, so that we can each build our toolkit to navigating the uncertainty of the world we work in with more confidence and ease.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Rebecca;

LinkedIn | Thriving People

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

Reimagining your next workplace is the perfect opportunity to take a step back and take a fresh look at your whole business.

One of the ways that I encourage leaders to do this, is by embracing "Shoshin".

Shoshin is a Buddhist concept meaning "beginners mind". It is about approaching a situation as if you are seeing it for the first time. When we come with curiosity, openness, eagerness, and no preconceptions, our mind is open to new possibilities.

And this is especially valuable when you are reimagining the experience that you want your people to have of work.

In today's episode we explore 4 ways that you can redesign work with empathy, using an employee empathy map.

An empathy map is a useful tool to visualise yourself in the shoes of someone else and how you would like to curate their experience.

What they See, Think & Feel, Do & Hear.

And this is especially valuable as you embark on your journey to creating your next workplace and how you can positively influence the experience that your people have of work and place.

It's also a great tool to reset patterns of behaviour in your organisation as we embark on a new world of work.

Tune in to learn more!

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

In last weeks episode I spoke about wellbeing rhythms in the workplace and the need for us all to be building in moments of self-care.

I then read an article in the Harvard Business Review by author Greg McKeown, who's written two of my favourite books and are recommended reading at COMUNiTI; Essentialism & Effortless. In this article Greg says that for organisations to build top performing teams, they should only be asking for 85% effort. The premise that when we consistently perform at 100% we burn out.

Prior to this Dr Meg Hooper and I discussed the recent legislative changes around psychosocial hazards in the workplace.

I see a theme emerging… the conversation as to the health and wellbeing of our people is being elevated in our workplaces and is at the core of all business performance.

So, this week I've invited Dr Ali Young to join me, to better understand what is that we can be doing to support ourselves individually, and what we can be doing as teams and organisations to practically support the health and wellbeing of our people.

Dr Ali Young is a health strategist, who works with mums owning and operating health practices. After recovering from burnout in 2019 and writing a book about it, she has become passionate about supporting other health practitioners, particularly mums, to navigate the same stressors with a different outcome.

In this episode Ali shares with us not only the science that backs up why we should be taking better care of our health, but if we are not giving ourselves the permission to pause, no amount of sleep, trips to the gym or healthy eating is likely to change our perception of stress and impact our wellbeing.

We discuss how a simple conversation with your team can uncover opportunities to support everyone's wellbeing and the simple changes in schedule that have led to increased performance in her own practice.

She also shares with us her three tips to ensuring maximum wellbeing in our work week.

So, why not take a walk, tune in and use this 30mins as your permission to pause.

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Ali;

LinkedIn | Instagram | Website

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience

As we cross the halfway mark of the year, this is the perfect time to look back, check in with your intentions for the year and adjust the sails ready for the second half.

One of the tweaks that I'll be making as I set myself up for the home stretch is to recalibrate my selfcare regime. As a busy mum, navigating the ebb and flow of our project load, this is usually the stuff that I forgo from my calendar to accommodate the other demands on my time.

But here's the catch >, as knowledge workers, our most valuable asset is the quality of our thoughts. We are literally paid to think!

The quality of that thinking is significantly impacted by the quality of our sleep, nutrition, movement, and relaxation [aka self-care!] all the good things that help us maintain our stress and anxiety levels and improve our cognitive function. Our ideas!

So, when organisations begin to question, why employee wellbeing should be their concern, the simplest answer is that, when your employees are well, they are more productive, which is good for business.

In today's episode we discuss.

• How our workplaces can create connection and support socialisation at work – a key factor in employee wellbeing
• How our workplaces can enhance our experience of work
• How changing work rhythms require a change in work environment
• The impacts of schedule flexibility and employee loyalty to those businesses committed to wellbeing
• Plus we take a look at Entain, and the impact that their 9 day fortnight and meeting free Wednesday is having on their organisation, aside from employee productivity and engagement

What small tweak of your sails can you maketo support you in entering the second half in your best form to see you through to the finish line?

LINKS Get your copy of Mel's new Book "The Next Workplace; Designing Dynamic Environments that Inspire Human Potential"

Connect with Mel;

Email | Insta | LinkedIn | Website | Website | Whitepaper - The Road Map to Employee Experience