Special Episode: LEGO Workplace Symposium 2022 (Part 3) - Breaking Behavioural Norms Through Purposeful Meetings and Office Design

In the final part of this series, listen in to the last two hot topic discussions from the LEGO workplace symposium on (1) designing spaces and (2) orchestrating purposeful meetings.

During the discussion on designing office spaces, we discuss how to create spaces that break traditional norms and influence positive behaviours. You’ll discover insights on whether activity-based office space design is effective, why one size fits no one when it comes to space design, how to interrupt traditional views of what the office should be like, and how to ask the right questions before redesigning your office space, and which metrics actually matter in office usage.

When we move on to the discussion on purposeful meetings, you’ll tune into a conversation that critiques meetings as an overused problem-solving tool and discover a way to frame the purpose of meetings in order to host and attend them more intentionally. We also explore the behaviours we need to unlearn and the way technology must change to adapt to the new age of meetings.

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Timestamps
[00:16] Episode overview
[00:43] Hot topic discussion(3/4): Designing spaces
[00:47] Spaces that serve a dual function
[06:57] Should you have activity-based spaces?
[11:02] Asking the right questions to discover an ideal space design. 
[17:58] Should you measure space usage data?
[22:04] Hot topic discussion(4/4): How to Orchestrate Purposeful Meetings
[22:10] Meetings and the fear of missing out
[24:52] How hybrid meetings can be disruptive for people joining remotely
[25:51] What goes wrong in workshopping, idea co-creation, and engagement in remote meetings.
[31:03] How often do we need to travel for work, really?
[31:48] Framing a purpose for meetings: Being thoughtful about the different types of meetings we conduct.
[34:44] Relearning our meeting behaviours: Do we need meetings? What meetings can we skip?
[40:04] How to activate better meetings through technology?   

3 Key Takeaways 

1. If you ask your team what they need from a space, they will answer you based on the paradigms they already know and have internalized. The better question to ask is “what do you want to do” and design spaces based on the needs of the primary tasks rather than based on traditional paradigms of what a workplace should look like. 
2. Hybrid meetings can be a terrible experience for people joining remotely. For example, activities happening in the room like eating and drinking can interfere with the sound quality and end up leaving the remote attendants confused about what is going on in the meeting. Technology hasn’t kept up with our new behaviours. 
3. We need to be more thoughtful about what type of meeting each meeting is: transactional? Relationship building? Output-oriented? Project check-in? Ideation? We need to re-learn our meeting behaviours to be more intentional. We need to make sure we only attend meetings in a way that brings real value, rather than merely out of habit. 

Links 

The Workplace Leader Podcast

Connect with Kursty Groves: LinkedIn | Twitter | Ask a question or pitch an idea: kursty@shapeworklife.com