This is the first of a series of papers we're writing to explore what's going on in workplaces and what methods can be used to draw organisations and end-users into a more constructive dialogue about people, their devices and spaces.

1. WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES
SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES
Towards a digital workplace strategy with Konica Minolta
Paul Chaplin
Business Innovation Centre EU
Konica Minolta Inc.
TRANSFORMING

2. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 2
There is a growing divide in working practice between what people want to do with information at work, and what
organisations are able to offer. It is a divide often born from good reasons, such as security and cost efficiencies, but
also occasionally bad ones, such as ingrained cultures or narrow focus on the short-term. But whatever the cause, it only
becomes possible to unlock new opportunities and create greater social value in a business through closing this divide.
To achieve this, we are advocating a change in workplace practice, so that employees are enabled by technology rather than
restricted by it. This means setting specific design processes within, and between, organisations that consider both employee
needs and broader system requirements at the same time. The emphasis must be on understanding what is happening in a
specific workplace, and working with the people who see the problems first hand, rather than basing technological decisions
on the description of a utopia which rarely materialises.
Our belief is that companies need a composite design strategy. On the one hand, it must contain user-centred approaches to
aid understanding of how advanced technology in workplace design can meet employee needs. On the other, there must be
a system oriented design approach, to understand how technology should be created, sourced and deployed within the wider
organisation, and the subsequent effects of doing so.
In order to demonstrate this approach, in this paper we will consider the divergence of ‘workplaces’ and ‘workspaces’, why
it matters now, what new challenges can be anticipated, and conclude with an approach to framing systemic workplace
strategies which focus on meet the needs of people within an organisation.
To begin this exploration, let’s ask a question:
INTRODUCTION
What is the difference between
a workplace and a workspace?

3. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 32
At first, the distinction between workplace and workspace appears artificial, a simple matter of semantics. But the
more we explored conversations with clients, consultants and within our own organisation, it became apparent that
there is an important difference between the two.
THE WORKPLACE IS COMMUNAL. It is the responsibility of the employing organisation; all of the
people, devices and spaces in which that company’s work takes place.
THE WORKSPACE IS PERSONAL. All of the personalised workspaces created for individuals; the
tools, devices and resources they’re provided with to carry out the work they are responsible for.
The workplace is determined by the organisation’s policy, whilst each workspace is (to a greater extent) down to the preference of
the individual. Why do we need to draw this distinction now?
In the distant past, workplaces were the workshops where things were made. They tended to be small and singular where a few
people gathered under a master to learn a particular craft. Skills were learnt with physical materials and acquired through hands-on
experience and observation of others; the apprentice would copy the journeyman, the journeyman would copy the master. Learning
from others broadened capabilities on the path to becoming a craftsman.
The industrial revolution transformed many small workplaces into large-scale factories, where physical objects such as cloth and
latterly complex assembly such as cars. Everyone worked around and inside the machines, housed in specifically designed factories.
Then, during the shift to knowledge economies, a typical office held both the workplace, and all of the individual workspaces of
which it was comprised. These of course appeared in a variety of styles and systems, such as open-plan format pioneered by
Quickborner in Germany in the 1950s, or the Herman Millar ‘Action Office’ which gave us the cubicle in the 1960s.
The uniting factor throughout all of these eras is that work belonged in a single geographical place. There was no need to distinguish
between workplace and workspace because they were one and the same thing.
WORKPLACE OR WORKSPACE?

4. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 4
Until comparitively recently, the whole workplace, the entity that the organisation must look after, was bound by the physical
location. The workplace was the site where every individual’s workspace was kept. It was easy to manage and maintain.
But now, the workspace an employee might demand to do their job effectively has a near-endless scope. Workspaces are
highly diverse in location and time, shape and size, across your devices and theirs. How can you design a workplace that can
deliver what every individual employee is starting to expect?
WORKPLACE
WORKSPACES
PROJECT TITLEAbstract
Process map
Process map
Data
Inputs
Name new Planet:
76 15 23
WORKPLACE
www.
WORKSPACES

5. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 54
We no longer have all our tools and knowledge in one physical location. Electronic data represents our work in many differ-
ent forms and versions, often scattered over a number of systems, some of which we own, some of which are shared. We
assemble, disassemble and rebuild tasks or processes, often repeatedly, both virtually or physically. This flexible practice is
made possible by a combination of technology advances and evolving working policies.
What we create for ourselves are increasingly known as ‘workspaces’, and can appear wherever we want to work, within a set
of boundaries determined by our role, company culture or industry. More and more employees are becoming nomadic, and
are increasingly adept at crafting their own different workspaces. It may be through selective connections and interactions
with other people, choosing their own mix of devices (both the software and the hardware), or selecting carefully the spaces in
which they feel they are at their most productive.
This is the modern workspace sought by employees of all generations, and when done well it can bring with it the feeling of
effective and natural interaction, despite being physically remote.
It has been pocket technology, much more than just portable computing, that has facilitated this mobility. The smartphone
has become an engine that generates new ways to find and interact with others when we choose, or even to be found and
interacted with when we haven’t.
What’s interesting is that real mass adoption of pocket technology at work started with the end-user demand, rather than the IT
function supply. The locked-down, IT-approved mobile device disappeared quickly (and in the case of some brands, famously)
as employees started requesting that their more powerful, flexible personal mobile devices be integrated into their work lives.
This has given rise to the most commonly heard phrases at work today; “I can do this at home, why is it so difficult here..?”
This is the heart of the matter. As workplaces and workspaces become more separated, how do organisations design technol-
ogy systems in support of user needs, not in spite of them?
The obvious answer here is to employ user-centred design processes to build the technological infrastructure your organisation
provides to employees. Starting with well focused research at the point of use, talking with users and understanding their
problems, iterating solutions to test and using data to focus direction and deployment are all core parts of the method that’s
being increasingly used in a variety of different fields.
But only using user-centred design methodologies in isolation runs the risk of creating a bottom-up shopping list of demands.
Without a view of the whole system within an organization, an understanding of the workplace and not just the workspaces,
then the job is only half done.
–– 14% of the UK’s workforce was working from home in 2014 – the highest since
records began but still the majority is made up of self-employed people (IPPR)
–– Research by Citrix indicated that employers in the US, China and India are provid-
ing or expanding teleworking environments for remote working, more than employ-
ers in Europe – almost 20% difference between the US and France.
–– Six years ago, the proportion of people using teleworking outside working hours
was higher than using teleworking within working hours. By 2015, this number
balanced out – more people are working remotely than ever before (Gallup)
UNDERSTANDING WORKSPACES
Contrast the origins of workplaces with where we are today in most developed economies. As individuals and teams,
we are considerably less bound by office geography:

6. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 6
For organisations, the conversation and research around employees within workplaces has never been louder. There are debates
about the value of ‘workplace happiness’, the meaning and value of productivity, and concerns about the risk of paying too much
attention to well-being of individuals. Combined with this, there’s a new generation of employees coming through who’re not
looking for long-term salaried roles, but more short–term contractual work on projects they’re passionate about.
Proportion of part-time self-employment in selected Europe-24 countries, 2007 and 2012
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Netherlands UK Sweden Germany France Poland Spain
Source: IPPR calculations using EULFS (Eurostat 2014b)
So at the same time as you need user-centred design approaches to understand current employee needs, you also need to
hold a system orientated design view of how your organisation works as a whole, and will work into the longer term.
As an example, taking a cue from the Stewart Brand’s ‘shearing layers’, you might choose to breaking down your system into a series
of layers, from the slowest moving (ECONOMY) to the fastest (SKILLS), allowing you to think about the effects on the workplace:
1. ECONOMY: Over time, the nature of work and its contracting process is going to change (e.g. nearly half EU residents
have expressed a preference to be self-employed). If you want greater flexibility in terms of resource contracting, then new
flexible workspaces will be needed. Planning your building and service infrastructure to reflect this shift needs to start now.
2. COMPANY: The workplace and workspace represent a basis for competition for new skills – if you need a new genera-
tion of skills, you need a new workplace strategy which reflects a ‘to be’ state. Your workplace must be more open and
adaptable to change than your competitors.
3. DIVISION: New disruptive businesses are taking workplace and workspace strategy seriously as a reflection of their values
and operational model; for instance, AirBnB’s Chief Employee Experience Officer replaced a traditional HR role and runs
cross-functional teams addressing workplace quality. Divisions must be involved in determining their own environments.
4. TEAM: If you want to assemble powerful cross-functional teams to address specific business challenges, you need
depth of knowledge and stability, agility and adaptability. Great teams today are a flexible combination of long-term and
transitory, specialists and generalists. To work together well, look beyond traditional remote conferencing and files sharing
tools to form new workspaces, with new workspace tools and methods, especially around physical-virtual collaboration.
5. SKILLS: Digital workplaces will become more commonplace – you will need to understand what they are and how to
develop a digital workplace practice, selectively testing and deploying new digital workplace services. Start to understand
which skills are more prized throughout your organization: who become the de facto experts because they understand
how to do useful things others do not.
UNDERSTANDING WORKPLACES

7. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 76
With our Japanese heritage, we believe in transforming workplaces as a learning practice, rather than big bang
approaches across whole organisations. There is an opportunity now to build workplaces and workspaces like never
before, which begin to take advantage of a new wave of technology, striking a dynamic balance between what people
want and what is available through policy and tempered by legislative requirement. But this requires a methodical
approach. Our suggested approach is as follows:
1. Engage in a method or process which seeks to identify common understanding of workplace challenges, for example
around information flow, and assemble the ideal solution from the components required. This system-view allows a
general map of the organization to be understood, from which user-research requirements may be specified.
2. Collect research from specific areas and disciplines, identifying from the people within different parts of the organization
the issues and opportunities they see when it comes to their personal workspaces. This user-view of the organisation
must have a wide enough sample to build up the map with specific requirements by role and division.
3. Establish a cross-functional working party with a vision such as ‘Workplace 2020’ and involve end users and works
councils as appropriate, to test hypotheses which emerge from combining the system and user views. For instance, this
may be trials of prioritised practices and technologies to gauge feedback across the cross-functional teams, so as to
validate tools before making practical steps towards adoption.
HOW MIGHT THE JOURNEY
TOWARDS GENERATING NEW
WORKPLACES AND SPACES
BEGIN?
As with Brand’s model, we can see that these layers are all related, dependent on one another, and more robust because of
the different pacing. A sharp change in the fast skills layer, for instance, will be absorbed by the slower moving, sturdier team
and division layers underneath.
To understand workplaces and workspaces requires a new dialogue, between the system-level workplace, and the individual-
level workspace. This means an inter-disciplinary approach involving human resources functions, facilities management,
information technology, finance and end-users.
In essence, creating a dialogue means establishing a two-way conversation which is educational, informative and transfor-
mational, so that workplace practice creates the right environments for effective workspace management by individuals and
groups. It is less about designing perfect solutions to be deployed once, but designing systems in which teams and people
can safely discover and refine the right solutions as they go. This way, responsibilities become more widely recognised and
shared and ideally, that workplace personalisation becomes enabled by policy.

8. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 8
Let’s take this approach, and see how it would work in a specific scenario.
If workspaces can be created anywhere, the workplace has to demonstrate special features to make person-to-person
communication especially effective. As one CEO sees it, the workplace is much more important as an environment in which to
communicate face to face, than it is as a piece of real estate. To make this happen is less a matter of policy and more a matter
of designing different facilitating environments, however temporary.
If the ideal facilitating environment is one which adapts to the needs of what or whom it contains, then we can infer that
technology will play a significant role in helping organisations create these facilitating environments. Adaptive workplaces that
rely on a combination of technology and capabilities should result in environments which change in realtime, or near-realtime,
according to the presence or absence of people. They are design to act as an environmental chameleon which changes to
blend in with whomever is present.
WHAT MIGHT THIS LOOK LIKE?
How can we use our three step approach to begin to design such a workplace?
Firstly, the system level map. This can be pulled together at a sketch level from a fusion of organisation charts, building maps, meeting
rooms calendars, travel data and device/service usage. Every organisation already has the data to use as a basis for workplace and
workspace adaptation, but often it’s not brought together to create a global view of what is happening in the current given state.
Rather than use this map to arbitrarily decide on what technologies will suit a business, it should be used to steer the
second step, a granular, user-up piece of research that tests some of the hypotheses that the system view throws up.
For instance, here are three hypotheses we imagine may come up in a system view around adaptive environments:
–– Environmental adaptation – heating, light quality, air-quality, workspace allocation should be attuned to the individual desk
level wherever possible, and optimised against the cost of used / unused space
–– Context adaptation – individual files should be made available automatically according to personal or group requirement,
aligned to calendar, project and process management systems, obviating the need for teams and individuals to search for
every data file needed for a scheduled meeting
–– Information systems adaption – the platforms needed to access different systems become invisible to the end-user. We will
be able to access different systems without the need for different tablets, screens and devices – and the information we need
will adapt to where we are and what we’re doing.

9. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 98
These hypotheses must be tested at an individual user level, rather than simply validated from the system level. How does it
feel for people working in an office where the environmental aspects are dictated to them automatically, irrespective of whether
it’s based on personal data? How unnerving is it to walk into a meeting unprepared, relying on a system to gather the right files
and folders for you automatically? Are you happy to lose all personal devices, and work on public surfaces instead?
Matching up the workplace system view with a proper understanding of the workspaces people want creates a dialogue
between the two realms, and in doing so, means you can learn what an ideal working environment might look like from both
the company and employee perspective.
This leads us to the third step, the trialing of potential solutions within given contexts. This often means using new technolo-
gies, or minimum viable prototypes of them, in specific situations that emerge both from a user-up perspective (“we want this
to be better”) as well as the system view (“if we solve this, it helps a lot of people in the business”).
Let’s look back to our adaptive technology examples. The environmental elements (heating, lighting and so on) could be
explored using an assembly of off-the-shelf consumer technologies blended with larger-scale workplace ones, to see how and
if groups of people can create common comfort. Should it prove useful in small environments, this sort of test can be used to
set the requirements for a larger more robust system throughout the organisation.
For context adaptation, you might set-up a ‘hand-cranked’ file system that everyone on a particular project relies upon – one
person in the background creates a file system as if it were automated, to see how supported the participants feel they are.
Before finding out if automation is the solution, it’s easy to use this methodology to test the real effects it might have.
Finally, for information systems adaption, you might create a temporary combination of adaptive services for a team working
on a sales pitch, and track progress of the ideas, the feelings of the participants in the room, as well as the end result itself
which emerges from a new way of working. Asking people to test a whole new way of working for just one specific project
allows them to express ideas and feel confident whilst working ‘inside’ that prototype, rather than feeling anxious that they are
permanently losing ways of working they currently rely on.

10. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 10
In our work so far, we have seen how employing both a system oriented design approach (to understand the workplace
requirements for technology) and a user-centred approach (to describe workspace requirements) offers a framework
that can both meet employee needs and overall organisational requirements.
Having specific design processes to follow, which makes the most of current and emerging information flows, means that
different layers in the digital workplace are recognised in an open and collaborative decision-environment. It can be done
in relatively small scale ways using prototypes of what will become robust systems operating at scale. This way, workplace
strategy shifts from the tendancy to simply patch-in technologies to designing environments that have lasting, positive,
measurable effects, that are widely adopted by people, whatever their generation, across the emerging world of work.
CONCLUSION

11. TRANSFORMING WORKPLACES & WORKSPACES SYSTEMS AND USER-CENTRED DESIGN APPROACHES 110
As a 140 year old manufacturing company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Konica Minolta may not be immediately
associated with workplace services. Yet in fact, the company has been quietly present in all manner of workplaces –
especially offices – over that time, and today is found in over 1.5 million locations in Europe alone, providing everything
from multifunctional printers and copiers to medical equipment.
From this vantage point, we understand a physical environment can be in shaping people’s interaction with technology,
together with the implications for cost and creativity. We work closely with leaders and teams from information technology and
facilities departments, and more recently with human resources as understanding of workplaces and workspaces develops.
HOW WE CAN HELP
To further explore how machines and people interact, we have devised a digital workplace toolkit which maps out the way
information flows between people, devices and spaces. It works by creating dialogue between the system level of the work-
place, and the user level of the workspace.
Over the last year, we have been testing this approach with clients in both the public and private sectors; listening and learning
in different work environments. Konica Minolta is pleased to facilitate such dialogue on workplaces and workspaces with our
clients, and welcomes approaches from organisations with an interest in developing their working environments towards 2020.
You can reach our digital workplace researcher at:
paul.chaplin@konicaminolta.eu

12. Konica Minolta
Business Solutions Europe GmbH
Europaallee 17
30855 Langenhagen Germany
Tel.: +49 (0) 511 74 04-0
Fax: +49 (0) 511 74 10 50
www.konicaminolta.eu
03/2016Image(s)orFootage(asapplicable),usedunderlicensefromShutterstock.com
Further titles planned
–– Balancing Automation with Human Regulation (June 2016)
–– Establishing Digital Workplace as a Practice (September 2016)
Further Recommended Reading
–– The Changing Workforce, Nick Martindale, July 2014, Confederation of British Industry
–– How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand, 1994, Penguin
–– Workspaces That Move People, October 2014, Harvard Business Review
–– The Craftsman, Richard Sennett, 2008, Penguin
–– Self Employment in Europe, 2015, IPPR
–– Five trends that are dramatically changing work and the workplace, Knoll, 2011
–– Four fundamentals of workplace automation, Chui, Manyika and Miremadi, McKinsey
Quarterly, November 2015
–– Gallup Workplace Study, US Sample, August 2015