Workplace Design & Its Impact on Employee Well-Being - Getting Hybrid Work Right

The Getting Hybrid Work Right call series has become a well-attended and wide-ranging discussion for HR leaders on all aspects of hybrid work. On this week's call, i4cp CEO and Co-Founder Kevin Oakes and Senior Research Analyst Tom Stone facilitated a conversation with special guests Caitlin McKenna, Global Head, Human-centric Innovation and Melissa Walker, Senior Director, Well-being Product Manager, Human-centric Innovation at JLL, a leading professional services firm that specializes in real estate and investment management. The focus of the conversation was on workplace design and its impact on employee well-being. Here are some highlights from the call:

  • JLL was recently a finalist for an i4cp Next Practices award for their corporate workplace re-entry strategy. Given the nature of JLL’s business, they seized the opportunity to return to the office relatively early but in a comprehensive and very intentional way that then served as a model for their clients. This included a great many elements, such as COVID tracking and contact tracing, an employee resource center, real-time and pulse survey employee sentiment gathering, a re-entry playbook with local nuances, a "Taking Care of You" work-life balance initiative, expanded caregiver support, socially distanced floorplans, new technology, FAQ resources, internal and external marketing campaigns, expedited rollout of JLL Virtual Learning, and more.
  • As a result, they had close to 60% of Americas JLL employees safely re-entered to a JLL office at least one day a week by April 2021, and didn't have any COVID-19 outbreaks at their locations.
  • We asked a poll of participants on the call: By the end of 2022, what will be your organization's office space footprint compared with pre-pandemic 2019?
    • 10% More primarily because of organization growth
    • 4% More primarily because of the need for more space for collaboration, social distancing safety, etc.
    • 41% About the same
    • 2% Less primarily because our organization is or will be smaller
    • 40% Less primarily because of the shift to more remote / hybrid work
    • 4% Don’t know
  • JLL has undertaken a research study called "Experience Anywhere," and McKenna and Walker shared some insights with us (full report will be forthcoming in Q2 of this year). They partnered with Art Health Solutions and studied 300 volunteer employees split into three cohorts: a control group, a group that received various resources, and a group that received those resources and had a wearable device to track bio-metric data. They did a baseline reading for a month, and then began the study.
    • They studied cognitive performance via brain games and the like, e.g., after meditation activities.
    • They studied emotional well-being.
    • Biometric data included information such as daily steps, heart rate, etc.
    • Some interesting early findings include that remote workers tend to do less daily walking, and that managers / executives are not taking enough breaks in their day.
  • In 2020, i4cp released a seminal report titled Next Practices in Holistic Well-Being (available to the public), which focused on six areas: physical, mental, financial, career, community, and social/relationship wellness. i4cp members have access to a wealth of additional resources that are part of our Employee Well-Being series.
  • JLL has also made available a whitepaper titled Workforce Readiness Must Include Workplace Wellness.
  • A critical element is making sure managers and leaders both communicate the organization's principles and guidelines around well-being and work/life balance, but that they also model those principles through their own actions (e.g., taking vacation time and truly unplugging when doing so).
  • Walker noted that many people, especially those who shifted to remote work, have spent the past two years customizing how they work in various ways: times of day, locations, and more. So expectations for a return to a traditional office location, even if only part of the time, can't be linear in terms of five days a week, at the an office in the morning, take a lunch break, then back at the office until 5 or 6pm. People's expectations have shifted significantly, so reasons are needed to work at each location and at each time of the day.
  • McKenna described JLL's client offering called "Dynamic Occupancy Planning," a system that is helpful in today's hybrid work world. Employees request a space reservation using the tool, which triggers an AI engine. A space demand log is created, the AI engine recognizes common needs over time, and assigns space that best fits needs and preferences.