Not many companies agonise over their physical environment the way Circus Oz does. The design of its new office and rehearsal space in the edgy Melbourne suburb of Collingwood was a ten-year process. And when you walk in, you get the sense that it was all worth it.
Many of the decisions in creating the new space were based on how the company could increase collaboration. Circus Oz's previous home was an old heritage-listed post office and an old heritage-listed Navy drill hall that happened to be adjoining. The buildings were connected by a little corridor and tiny courtyard where the bins were kept. The performers kept to the rehearsal space in the Navy drill hall and the office staff stayed in the post office. Rather than encourage collaboration and innovation, the space inhibited it.
In direct contrast, the new space is built around a huge central rehearsal space that breeds collaboration. Every workstation is no more than 4 metres from a window that looks onto the main rehearsal space. ‘It means that everyone from finance and marketing, through to the receptionist, can stand up from their desk and just take two or three steps and look through a glass window and go, “Oh, right. That's what they're working on today”', explains Mike Finch, artistic director and joint CEO. ‘And we deliberately didn't completely soundproof the rehearsal space, because we wanted people to be able to hear what's going on in the background — so when the band is playing in the building you can hear it as a really dull thudding.'
The kitchen overlooks a three-storey atrium that runs down the spine of the building. When the performers go up to the kitchen to take their lunch break, the office staff take theirs too, so they all sit and eat together. Finch describes the conversations that now happen because of interaction that the new design encourages. An admin person will say to a performer, “I saw you doing that thing down there. It was really interesting. Can I come and take some photos of that for the latest Twitter post?” Marketing starts to talk to acrobatics and then ideas come up organically. They go, “Oh, that reminded me of this YouTube clip that I just saw last night”, and they tell the acrobat about it and the acrobat goes out and tries it that afternoon and then a new idea appears.'
Circus Oz's office has become an unofficial hub for the contemporary circus community. ‘When someone comes to Melbourne from a travelling show', says Finch, ‘they will drop in at Circus Oz. You get a sort of cross-pollination and a disruptive effect from outsiders who have been working in a different context. They might have been in a dance acrobatics show in Europe for the last two years, but they've dropped in to see the work that's going on in the rehearsal space. People then fire off some brand new idea that wouldn't have occurred to anyone working in isolation.'
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While a ten-year design process for an office is at the extreme end of things, most offices unfortunately receive little to no thought about how the design will affect people's innovativeness, productivity and wellbeing. Nine out of ten offices I visit through my work at Inventium are grey, dull and illuminated by horribly artificial fluorescent lighting. Meeting rooms are often characterised by windowless white or pale grey walls, sparse ‘decorations' and beige furniture. Not the kind of environment that inspires creativity.
And interestingly, in many of the major meta-analyses that have been conducted into what drives a culture of innovation, one variable has been noticeably absent: the physical environment. Yet there is a significant body of research that clearly demonstrates the impact that our physical working environment has on our work experience and on our ability to think and perform in certain ways. As such, this final chapter focuses on how you can begin to manipulate and change your physical working environment so that it becomes one that fosters, rather than hinders, innovation.
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Of all the ways to change your physical environment for the better, those involving nature have received the most attention. In one such study, Marlon Nieuwenhuis, from Cardiff University, and her colleagues were keen to investigate the impact of greenery on people's happiness and productivity at work. In an initial study, they decked out half an office in greenery and left the other half bland. Three weeks later, employees in the green half said they had felt more focused and productive as a result of the plants.
In a follow-up study, the researchers installed plants in a call centre, so that every single employee had a view of at least one large plant. Three months later employees reported feeling significantly happier and more engaged at work, compared with their counterparts on a different floor who had not received any greenery.
In a final experiment, the researchers invited 33 people to complete a task in either a green or non-green office environment. Those in the green office completed the task significantly faster and without any additional errors. Nieuwenhuis and her colleagues found that overall, productivity could be increased by up to 15 per cent simply by bringing in a few plants — a finding that is extraordinarily easy for offices to implement.
Research shows that exposure to nature also has a beneficial effect on creativity. Ruth Atchley, from the University of Kansas, and her colleagues studied a group of people who were going on a four-day hike without any access to technology. Half of the hikers were asked to complete a creative problem-solving task prior to their hike, and the other half were asked to complete it on day four of the hike. People who had experienced four days' immersion in nature, without any technological distractions, performed 50 per cent better in the creative problem-solving task. This study emphasises the important role that nature can play in creativity. Taking breaks from technology can also be beneficial.
The beneficial role that exposure to nature can play in lowering stress levels which, in turn increases creativity, has also been well documented by researchers. Stress levels can also be lowered by physical elements such as lighting and views of the outside world. Julian Thayer, from Ohio State University, and several of his colleagues investigated the impact that the office environment has on stress levels. Thayer recruited 60 people who worked in either a traditional office with poor views and lighting, or in a more modern building that had better views and natural light. The researchers found that employees working in the office space with poor views and dimmer lighting experienced higher levels of cortisol, a hormone that is released in response to stress.
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Ravi Mehta, from the University of British Columbia, and his colleagues were interested in the impact of noise on creativity. Sixty-five students were brought into the lab to complete a creative problem-solving test. The students were split into four groups: high noise, medium noise, low noise and no noise. Prior to the experiment, the researchers had created an ambient sound mix from a combination of real noise from cafés and the street. Mehta and his colleagues found that those in the medium noise group (70 decibels) performed significantly better than those in the low, high or no noise groups. Interestingly, after the study, participants' moods (for example, whether they were happy or sad) were measured to rule out their effect on the results. The researchers found that background noise had an effect regardless of participants' moods.
In a series of follow-up experiments involving tasks such as generating new ideas for a mattress manufacturer, it was found that the medium noise-level group outperformed all other noise-level groups, with their ideas being judged as significantly more creative. In addition, the researchers measured participants' processing disfluency (which is essentially a person's level of distraction), as this had been shown in research to lead to abstract processing and thus greater creativity. Immediately after the task, people were asked how distracted they had felt during the activity. As suspected, those in the medium noise group had experienced a greater amount of distraction than those in lower noise groups.
In one final experiment, Mehta explored whether a moderate level of ambient noise also affect people's likelihood of adopting innovations. To explore this, 68 students were brought into a cubicle located in the student lounge area on campus and were presented with various choices of traditional versus innovative products. Noise level was also monitored, given that it was a real-life environment (as opposed to a lab). As hypothesised, it was found that when exposed to a moderate level of background noise, people were significantly more likely to adopt more innovative products than more traditional ones.
When thinking about your office, consider zoning off areas with different sound levels. While silence is needed for certain types of work (such as highly focused work, or teleconferences), consider having some parts of the office where there is a moderate level of noise for those involved in work requiring innovation. Mehta's research suggests that 70 decibels is a moderate sound level — it's similar to the level of sound you would hear when walking down a typical city street.
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The past few years have produced some conflicting research into the effects of colour. Janet McCoy, from Arizona State University, set out to investigate the type of environment people seek out when they have creative work. Amongst other things, McCoy found that participants were likely to avoid cooler colours and be more attracted to warmer colours for creative spaces. In a second study, McCoy found that people produced significantly more original and interesting collages when working an environment that had different shades of colour than they did when working in a monochromatic environment.
In more recent years researchers have found that blue and green also have a positive impact on innovation due to their association with nature — when people are exposed to either of those colours, they report feeling more relaxed. For example, several researchers from the University of Munich brought a group of 65 people into the lab to complete a creative problem-solving task. However, before engaging in the task, some people were shown a green login screen while others were shown a white screen. The researchers found that those seeing a green screen performed about 20 per cent better on the creative thinking task.
In further studies, green was pitted against red, blue and grey and emerged every time as the winner. The researchers suggested that the colour green was so impactful in enhancing creativity because it reminded people of nature — and, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the benefits of nature to innovation (not to mention productivity) has been consistently shown.
While studies into colour are somewhat contradictory, what we can be sure of is that some colour is better than no colour. So rather than settle for a drab, grey office, throw in some colour wherever you can.
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There is a lot of research into the impact of exposing ourselves to diverse and unexpected stimuli. Maria Clapham from Drake University found that people who were exposed to a list of 60 unrelated sentences performed significantly better on an idea-generation task than those who had not seen the diverse stimuli. These findings suggest that exposure to lots of unrelated information gets the creative juices flowing. Indeed, the more thoughts and experiences you have floating around in your brain, the greater your chance of having creative and lateral thoughts.
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While you have hopefully found the suggestions made in this chapter so far very practical, I am aware that some readers might also be feeling a bit helpless if you have no authority to make major changes to your office building. If that is the case, then this final piece of research should be useful. Researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK examined whether giving people control over how they decorate their workspace increased their productivity and satisfaction at work. They found that those who did have control over furnishings and decor were 32 per cent more productive than their non-empowered colleagues.
Unfortunately, some organisations are unmoved by this kind of research. In 2012, when several thousand BHP Billiton staff came to work at the company's West Australian headquarters, an 11-page document gave very clear instructions on how the office and desk space were to be used. Under the company's ‘clear desk' policy, the only items that were allowed to remain on employees' desks at the end of each day were their computer monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and mouse pad, a telephone handset and headset, one A5 photo frame and ergonomic equipment. And in case that wasn't clear enough, the document included a photo to show what a clear desk looks like. Staff were forbidden from bringing in their own pot plant or even personalising their screensaver.
In direct contrast, Christine Gilroy, group general manager of innovation at construction company Mirvac, ensured that employees at Mirvac had full control over several spaces that were designated for innovation. After learning about some of the core principles that lead to creative workspaces, Gilroy realised that their offices were almost in opposition to these principles. In response to this, Gilroy set the challenge of transforming the rooms into amazing creative spaces.
A call was sent out for volunteers who were keen to transform the spaces. They were given four weeks and $15 000 to make the transformation happen. ‘It was like The Block but for corporates', explains Gilroy. ‘We got a really diverse team of people who had never worked together before. Each brought different strengths to the project. While we did have some volunteers from construction and design, we also had lots of accountants and personal assistants and all sorts of different people.'
Gilroy had no idea what was going to happen, and prepared herself for a disaster after one of the team's construction works accidentally triggered a call to the fire brigade. But the end result was some amazing creative spaces that are now almost fully booked for various innovation projects and workshops. ‘There were so many benefits from the project. Not only did we get these great spaces but it showed what happens when you empower a team of people. It was an opportunity for them to showcase all the other talents that they had outside of work.'
In a similar vein to Mirvac, the Australian arm of global pharmaceutical company AbbVie made the conscious decision to take a collaborative approach to an office move and redesign for their 300-odd staff. Managing Director Kirsten O'Doherty invited people to form teams to work on different elements of the office move — from the physical environment, to culture change, through to going paperless.
‘We had about 60 people across the business involved in one of the teams', recalls O'Doherty. ‘They actually did all the work. The teams made all the changes for going paperless, they designed and picked a lot of the arrangements for furniture, and had input into the entire office layout.'
One of the distinctive features of the new offices is its zoning. While the entire office consists of hot-desks, part of the office is a ‘quiet' area for those who need to get away from the noise to focus. Other parts of the office are designed for talk and collaboration. And the kitchen was centrally located — it's a place where everyone comes together for meals and various events.
‘We wanted to create an environment where you have people bumping into each other all the time. We have definitely seen a really major change in that someone could be sitting next to a person in pharmacovigilance one day, someone from finance the next day, and someone from medical the day after. Everybody moves around all the time and people have made very genuine comments about how much more connected they feel. How much more they feel they know about the business. How many more conversations they're having. And fewer emails.
‘To encourage the collaboration and ‘bumping into' effect, we have a barista who works in the kitchen. It's now the first place most people go to in the morning and if you were to visit the office at 8.30 or 9 am, you would see everyone's in there, chatting, catching up with each other and getting a coffee.'