Side of Design

Recruitment and Retention by Design: Supporting Talent Through Space

BWBR Episode 70

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0:00 | 29:24

n today’s competitive labor market, companies across sectors are grappling with the same question—how do we attract and retain top talent? As organizations grow, evolving industries require increasingly technical skillsets, and people-first cultures that prioritize employee wellbeing continue to rise, leaders are seeking innovative solutions for recruitment and retention. 

We sat down with Healthcare Practice Leader Ryan Johansen and Science + Technology Practice Leader Nate Roisen to discuss the challenges and opportunities they’re seeing in their respective markets. A key takeaway they share: design can make all the difference.

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Welcome And Topic Setup

Matt Gerstner

This is Side of Design from BWBR, a podcast discussing all aspects of design with knowledge leaders from every part of the industry. Hello and welcome to Side of Design from BWBR. I'm your host Matt Gerstner. On today's episode, we'll be talking about how design can support recruiting and retaining talent, a challenge that clients across all of our markets are struggling with. Today, we'll focus on the healthcare and science and technology markets. And joining me are healthcare practice leader Ryan Johansen and science and technology practice leader Nate Roisen. Thanks for making time to be here.

Ryan Johansen

Thanks for having us. This is great.

How Shortages Hit Healthcare

Matt Gerstner

All right. So let's just kind of dive right into this. You know, if we can. Can each of you give us a brief overview of like how staffing challenges and talent shortages are impacting each of your market sectors?

Ryan Johansen

I can start from the healthcare side of things, Matt. Staffing challenges are really forcing the way healthcare systems rethink how care is delivered. The biggest impact is currently on access. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 92 million people live in a primary care shortage area and 137 million in a mental health shortage area. So this largely affects our population and especially our rural population. But it's not just a numbers game. So it's how do organizations draw that talent to those areas that are seeing those shortages.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, yeah. I can see how that would be a big challenge, especially as you go towards rural America where we're dealing with more regional hospitals or other smaller clinics. Like getting that talent into those areas would be incredibly important.

Ryan Johansen

Getting them there and keeping them there, absolutely.

Talent Pressure In Science And Tech

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. Yeah.

Nate Roisen

And I don't think it's any different for science and technology, really. I we have so many different clients that are relying on highly specialized workers in whatever field it is, whether you're primarily office-based or whether you're working on a laboratory or production floor. There's just fewer people out there that have the skills and training and capabilities to hold those jobs down. And so keeping the people that are there today and then trying to figure out how to make yourself an appealing destination for people that might be coming at some point in the future is uh is a big deal that we that we grapple with when we're doing a design project. And I and I and I do think that it's like, okay, in the spectrum of things that really matter for an employee a person's decision to work for one company versus another, space is like one of the factors, right? Right. Like so, you know, there's what are the health insurance benefits, what is the culture, what is the what is the pay? Yeah, right. You know, all these things are stuff that that we can't control. But I think one of the things that we see is quality facilities, quality work environments are a little bit of a leading indicator that the company cares about all those other things as well. So an investment in an employee is really a holistic deal that also includes the place where they work. And the if you're if you're if you care about one, it's likely that you're probably doing doing the hard work to make a good environment in some of those other areas that are that are really outside the design control.

Making The Office Worth The Trip

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, and I can see how that could really help an employer stand apart from a group because I would, in my opinion, I would guess a lot of employers out there are looking at their packages that they're offering their employees, and they're all trying to be competitive because specifically in these markets, you're really looking for skilled workers. Right. So to draw them in, that package has to be there across the board, and the space can really make a difference if one space is just you're just not feeling it.

Nate Roisen

Yeah, and I you know, it comes down to some relatively simple ideas. I think pre-COVID it was a lot of the challenges that we saw organizations grappling with was really just a shortage of space.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

It's like we need to cram more people into an ever smaller available footprint, and uh they're just gonna have to be happy with their tiny workstation. Oh, okay. Nowadays it's a it's a completely different environment. There's a glut of office space really across really any metro area that we work in.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

And so we've been starting to see in the last few years organizations bringing more people back to work, but more in a hybrid way, um, where you might not be in the same seat every day, you might not be in the office every day. And and and the question has shifted from you know, how do we cram people in to how do we make the building a place someone wants to go? Yeah. And I mean, to me, that's things like just access to daylight, right? Uh old office buildings in the 80s would put, you know, the big shots on the windows. And if you were a worker bee, you had uh you got to live in the cave in the middle of the floor plate and never get to see the sun. And you know, that's something that is a really simple design move that you can have great private offices that open up onto an open office area that has good access to daylight, and it makes everybody's life better.

Matt Gerstner

Right.

Nate Roisen

And you know, those kinds of little moves are basically free in the in the scheme of you know, what does it cost to build a project? It's just a matter of organization. So thinking about how you spread the amenities of a building around, make make different areas feel inviting, not a total sea of cubes, break things up, locate break areas effectively, locate the work areas, the labs and production floors effectively, like all those things are are things that we need to deal with when we're when we're looking at a design project. And simple decisions can make a huge difference. Yeah.

Ryan Johansen

Yeah, I think COVID really taught us that a lot of work can happen from anywhere, right? But I think the way we design space, why are people coming into the office? What do they need to do into the office? And making sure that that office space then, or whatever type of space it is, is making the the job that they're there to do easier, right? Remove some of that friction, the closed doors in the office. You can you can do that at home. If you're coming into the office, let's have that collaboration, that team multidisciplinary activity space so everybody can cross-pollinate.

Cost Myths And Amenity Hype

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. Yeah. I I can absolutely see how access to daylight, the collaborative effort can really improve an employee's disposition, if you will, at work. You know, and if you're a happy employee, you're probably gonna do better work, right? So when we're thinking about this, what are some of the misconceptions that clients bring to the table, you know, regarding the relationship between retention and recruiting and and how do we go about countering those?

Ryan Johansen

Aaron Powell I think one of the misconceptions is that this is all going to cost additional dollars, right? We're gonna need additional space, we're gonna need additional money, it's all on top of and in the healthcare world, really a lot of what the dollars are being earmarked for is that care space, right? So it's all about the patient space, all about how you take care of the patient. But in order for the the patient to be taken care of and taken care of well, the staff needs to be taken care of as well. So I think it's making sure that clients understand that this doesn't have to add a whole lot more space. You still need space for for staff to work. How you lay that space out and how it functions in and amongst that care space uh really makes a whole lot of difference. And it doesn't have to cost a dime more.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, yeah.

Reduce Friction With Practical Design

Nate Roisen

I mean, I think, you know, there are in like the early 2000s, the big tech companies, Google and Facebook and all them, it was like amenity-based. Yeah. Like, oh, if we give people access to a five-star dinner buffet, they're gonna want to come and work for us. Right. And, you know, when you have like boom time tech sector pockets to pull from, like maybe that's a maybe that is a great way to get people into the office. Give them a ping-pong table, give them a pool table, give them access to food or coffee or whatever. I don't see tons of those amenity type type spaces as a huge draw. It's really more about just kind of improving the plain old spaces that are currently there. If there's a break room that that doesn't have good access to daylight, let's give it access to daylight. Or is it too far if you're working in like a clean room environment and and you need to gown in and out of the production floor? Is the break room too far from the production floor and our employees spend their break time walking back and forth to the break room? Um, well, let's get it closer to the gowning entrance. So like some of these are sort of I don't know, they might be more nuts and bolts kind of challenges than like what type of filet mignon they should get at their lunch buffet. But they really do matter and they and they push us to think about uh think about design in a in in different ways than than we might have otherwise or might have done in the past.

Ryan Johansen

I keep coming back to the term um reducing the friction. I I was at one of the conferences and they were talking about the economic status and how do you drive economic growth in a in a community, right? You need that flow of money needs to be there. Remove the friction from the flow of money, and it's gonna bring businesses in, right? So in in our context, how can we remove the friction that those staff experience on a day-to-day basis? In the healthcare setting, that friction of our spaces are noisy, right? There's a lot of activity, there's a lot of distraction. How do we provide spaces that reduce that noise level, provide that daylight for a respite area, things like that that can really go a long ways in that staffing and recruitment realm?

Nate Roisen

I can definitely see how that would help. Rooms like restrooms actually are kind of important too. I mean we we have this one client that has a kind of 80s-era existing facility, and and some years ago we went through and and renovated all the restrooms in the building. And pre-ADA, this is actually total sidebar. This is an example of how ADA benefits everybody. Okay, there would be like an 80 square foot room with four toilets and two sinks in it, right? I mean, you were you walk into these restrooms and they were cramped. Yeah. And it's like, well, that's not a great place to relieve yourself. No, no. So little things like getting a proper restroom that has good flow and minimizes the touch points and is hygienic so people aren't feeling like they're carrying microbes out the out of the room with them. Yeah. I mean, those things matter. Prayer rooms are something that, particularly in the twin cities where there's a reasonably large Muslim population, yeah. You know, 10 years ago, it might be like, oh, the prayer room, we we I guess we probably better give them one. And you know, here's a uh a disused conference room with uh a noisy air HVAC and and just enjoy it. Yeah, or it might be a space that is something else and it just doubles as it, right? And and as we're as we're seeing you know that that workforce shrink, we're seeing a lot more employers say, hey, these employees are valuable, let's give them a space that actually complies with the you know religious practices they want to follow and has the ablution spaces and has the pointing towards Mecca and some of those other things that can get built in with just again, you're putting the same finishes in the room one way or the other, but that that extra little thought of how do we how do we make this a welcoming space and how do we make it something that actually complies with what the people are going to use it need makes a really makes a huge difference in the daily life of the workers that are using it. And personally, that's you know not a space that I would ever use, but I can only imagine that the message that the employee that's using it gets is that this company cares about me.

Matt Gerstner

Yep, I'm valued.

Nate Roisen

I'm valued here. And that's such a I I can only imagine that that's a huge parameter as they're thinking about, well, where do I spend my time and and make my money?

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, you know, I'd I'd keep thinking about as we're talking about this, about why do I want to go into the office, you know, if I have what I need at home, you know, and it's and I'm comfortable here and I have daylight and you know, all those little things. It's it's your it it home for a lot of people is their comfort place. And so those reasons to come in, reducing the friction, like you're saying, Ryan. And in reducing friction, Nate, you're talking about why is the break room a hundred feet down this corridor? You know, it's talk about friction, you know, you're wasting time, and it's the time that you're supposed to have to break, to, you know, to reduce your stress. So it's yeah, I keep thinking about these things. That's yeah it it it all seems so important.

Nate Roisen

Yeah, there's we have clients that have like pretty big campuses, and and you'll be in a design meeting and you'll hear about something like, oh yeah, there's a walking club that does a lap around the entire facility and and it's you know three-quarters of a mile to make that loop or something. Yeah. And they're really worried that um this project that we're planning is going to interrupt their loop for a period of time under construction.

Matt Gerstner

You know, it sound it sounds silly, right?

Nate Roisen

It sounds so silly.

Matt Gerstner

But it's it's so important to their their mental daily health.

Design Moves That Change Staffing

Nate Roisen

And and sometimes you can't really do much about it, but it's also something that you get a little sixth sense for of like you hear about it in a meeting and it's uh okay, yeah, sure, we'll keep the walking loop open. And if you don't make the effort, like six months later, you're gonna get uh some big shot at the at the site is gonna be like, hey, what happened to the walking loop? And now you're gonna be dealing with it anyway. So these are the kinds of considerations that you can fold into, fold into a design process and and think about what those questions and friction points to Ryan's, Ryan's statement are gonna end up being, and then you know find a way to think it through and and address them if if you possibly can.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. So when we're thinking about these projects, you know, maybe that we've already done, or maybe they're on the table right now, even. What are some specific design interventions that you've seen make a measurable impact on staffing?

Ryan Johansen

When I was thinking about this, I think of one of our clients really struggled with the old adage of physician offices are in the back corridor, right? Like I have to have my physician office that is my space that I'm always gonna go to. Well, when you do the studies and find out how many times a physician is actually in that office, it's in the morning when they show up and it's uh it's at the end of the day when they're gonna leave, right?

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Johansen

The rest of the time is really spent in that in that care space. So one of the projects we did, we couldn't quite get uh administration over the hump of let's not have any staff offices, right? Because this was a recruitment thing for their physicians. They needed to make sure their physicians were satisfied, right?

Matt Gerstner

Right.

Ryan Johansen

So we actually created the team collaboration space where the providers have a space and the nursing and staff has a space all within the care team care delivery space. And then we had shared offices in the back hallway that could be repurposed in the future if they weren't using them, right? So we we had that intermediary step and staff quickly learned that the only time I'm in that private office is when I need to hang my coat up for the day or pick it up on my way out. Or if there's a difficult situation and they need their place of respite. So do we need to have individual spaces of respite? No.

Matt Gerstner

R ight.

Ryan Johansen

Do we need to have those for the collective? Yes. So they found that they they worked much better with their staff. They had more time with the patients when they're working out of the care team delivery area, as long as they had a a respite space to go when something happened, that was all they needed.

Matt Gerstner

That's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, just better use of space is what it comes down to. Yeah.

Nate Roisen

You know, a lot of times we work on projects that are kind of basic on on the outside.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

You don't really know it's a sort of nondescript box, and then inside it's like magic is going on in there and they're they're making medicine or computer chips or whatever. One of the things that we've had some success with is just finding those moments where people that might not necessarily be on the production area all day, every day.

Matt Gerstner

Okay.

Nate Roisen

Can actually experience and actually be connected to the the things that are going on in the building. Oh. Um, and and it is a space you might call it a tour route. It's generally just a hallway. But the question is how do you organize that hallway in order to open up in specific areas, create collaboration zones, create moments where as people are walking by, maybe on their their three-quarter mile group walk, they can actually see and experience some of the some of the amazing things that they're that their company does. Those are such important part of the design puzzle for any project. And and the better that you can execute that space and make it thoughtful and make it make it work for the multiple things it needs to do, the more likely you're gonna have that connection to to whatever it is that that's trying to happen in a particular site.

Ryan Johansen

Yeah, as you were talking there, Nate, I think about, you know, it's easy in the healthcare realm to think about the providers and the the nurses and and those types of staff. But there's think about a hospital organization, they've got IT folks, they've got billing specialists, they've got, you know, you name it, they've got all those different people. How do they how do they feel connected to the mission of what the healthcare organization is providing in the in the long term to the patient?

Nate Roisen

So yeah, well, I'll step out of my my S&T lane here. And I mean, there's a large health system that's one of our clients, and I had uh I had an aunt who has since passed away who was in and out of one of those health systems for like the last three years of her life.

Matt Gerstner

Okay.

Nate Roisen

And one of the things that her and her her husband, my uncle, talked about was how every member of that organization that they interacted with was a total pro.

Ryan Johansen

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

From the people cleaning the rooms to the people coming in to actually be do the healthcare work to the volunteer. Everybody understood the mission and was like committed to making this really difficult time in my aunt's life as good as possible. Right. Yeah. And, you know, that that that's the kind of thing. Like maybe it was a billing person had to visit them someday. Well, that billing person is pretty important when you're the one sitting in the room there. So yeah, I think I think you know, we see the same thing, right? I mean, there's 10 people that are sitting in the office for every one person on the production floor in some of our in some of our sites, and and trying to give them a sense of purpose is ultimately meaningful, maybe hard to measure, but it's ultimately meaningful.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, yeah. I can see how that'd be difficult to measure, but having the people that aren't necessarily daily dialed in and connected to, for lack of a better word, the product of what you're doing, but giving them the opportunity to connect with it. I can see how that'd be so important. I mean, like Ryan, you're saying, from a billing specialist or even custodial engineers or whatever it might be to be connected to the healthcare side of it in some way, shape, or form. And then the the corridors with pockets to view or gather, you know. That's I can see how that'd be super important to just the ability of staff to connect and feel empowered in the mission of the company.

Nate Roisen

Yeah, and a lot of times it it's best when your client is thinking on that wavelength with you and and you you pitch it and they go, Oh yeah, that's an amazing idea. Let's do it. Yeah. Sometimes that happens, but a lot of times your client is focused on uh, you know, how do I deliver the project on schedule and on budget, and it needs to meet these regulatory requirements. And and, you know, there's there's a lot of moving parts that they're trying to deal with. And sometimes it's easy for those considerations to fall off the table. Yeah. And then you get you get to the end and you have a functional project, but it isn't it isn't quite as good as it could have been. And so I think that's where a lot of times we end up as as maybe not the voice that's like, oh, I was responsible for this, but the voice in the meeting to say, hey, you know, we could do something like this. What do you think? And and that triggers, oh yeah, there is some value in you know, X, Y, and Z that is maybe outside the boundaries of pure function. What exactly do I need to make the thing work and no more?

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

But not that far, right? And and still works within budget and schedule and and those kinds of things. Yeah.

Matt Gerstner

All right. So thinking about staff, does design for staff well-being and happiness correlate specifically to larger budgets? I think we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but you know, or if we put it another way, are there ways to incorporate staff and well-being into projects of all sizes and scopes?

Nate Roisen

Well, I mean, like I said, you know, we're we're we're doing restroom projects right now. We have one site that used to be way more people working there every day than there is today.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

And that's just due to automation and and it's an older building. So anyway, you walk into the restrooms and there's like 20 water closets on the wall. I mean, these restrooms are designed for like large shifts of people to be moving through. Well, they don't need that nowadays. So again, small little project, we can make the restroom half the space and or half the size and give the other half of the space to some other function.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah.

Nate Roisen

In that particular instance, this was like literally a standalone project. Hey, help us figure out what to do with these gigantic restrooms. And we were able to come up with some good solutions. But having that mindset at any scale, I think, you know, it scales up and down, right? I mean, it could be, you know, you had the A V in a conference room or or something that's just really micro scale, but now you can have a hybrid meeting as opposed to when it was all echoey and unworkable before. So those types of things, we've seen a lot of different examples of those, and even at a really small scale.

Ryan Johansen

I agree. It it I don't think it matters the scale of the project. I think it it can apply anywhere. It's little things, even like the ergonomics of the space, right? Making sure that the desk or the work counter is at the appropriate height for the staff that are utilizing it, right? That's gonna have a big impact on if there's somebody working in that room for eight hours a day, day in and day out, that's gonna have a significant impact on their overall wellbeing.

Trends And The Cheap Building Trap

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. Yeah. And in the end, it doesn't have to cost more, right?

Ryan Johansen

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Not if you put it at the right spot in the right time. Exactly. Exactly. If you don't think about it and have that intentionality up front, then you're going to pay for it. Or somebody's going to suffer until you pay for it. Right. Right.

Matt Gerstner

So what are some of the trends or innovations that we're seeing around workplace design and employee satisfaction?

Ryan Johansen

My favorite trend is that team-based work setting, right? I think how to fit that multidisciplinary work and collaborative approach is really my favorite.

Nate Roisen

Yeah, and I I just like the decompressing of any given office area's floor plate. There's just opportunities that get made up. I mean, sometimes I compare it to the white space on a piece of paper. Yeah. Right? Like if you're cramming as much text as possible in the piece of paper, it's going to be hard to read. And you increase the margins a little bit, you create more paragraphs. Suddenly what might start off as like something dense that your brain revolts at is like, oh, I understand the message. And as we start to see less stress to just cram as many people as possible in, there's there's a lot of different opportunities that get opened up for how do you use the leftover space? What do you create for collaborative zones and whiteboard areas and technology? And some of those are really fun to see come to fruition.

Matt Gerstner

Okay. All right. So any trends you're seeing that might just be a passing fad?

Nate Roisen

We see a lot of former office functions that are being underutilized today.

Matt Gerstner

Okay.

Nate Roisen

And there is a lot of pressure that gets put on our clients where, you know, someone says, hey, there's a building that's available for a million dollars and it would cost us a hundred million to build a new one. Why don't we buy it? And the devil's in the details in terms of taking that existing distressed building and converting it into like a production floor or a laboratory. And all the different things that you run into in that conversion process drives a lot of cost. Maybe less than building a new building, but maybe a lot more than what a financial model early on might have predicted. So just in in terms of what we see, being able to kind of help our clients evaluate the suitability of an existing structure for what they want to use it for and direct them into an area where they're at least going in with open eyes if they are trying to do that that type of a remodel process, or having them look at something that that might be a little bit different than their initial thought, but serves their needs better.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah, I can see that. I mean, in a lot of urban areas, you know, we're seeing we're seeing a lot of buildings being converted into like residential housing of some nature, you know, apartment buildings, condos, that kind of thing. It's it's happening in a lot of areas. But when you're talking science and technology, high-tech, or you're talking healthcare, these buildings were never designed around those functions. So yeah, so you could wind up like, yeah, it might be inexpensive to get into, I can see that. But it was never really designed for what you're trying to do in it. So to convert that might be cost prohibitive in some cases.

Ryan Johansen

Yeah. And what are the compromises that you're having to settle for, I guess. Along that way, right?

Advice And Leadership Buy In

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. So being you know, being a a a good a good resource for our clients and being that steward to say, hey, like we'll let's analyze this really carefully first so we know exactly what everybody's getting into. I can see how that'd be important. And the fad of just buying a building because it's cheap, you know, isn't necessarily the way to go. We've talked about a lot of things going on here in both healthcare and science and technology. What advice do you have for clients heading into a design project to help ensure that they and their staff are getting like the most, you know, the most out of their dollars that they're investing?

Ryan Johansen

Yeah, Matt, I think about this and and if a project does nothing more than do the same work in a prettier space at the end of the day, what's the point? Right. We need to make sure that going back to that, identify those frictions up front. What are those frictions? Let's take care of those during the design process. It might take a little more time, it might take more effort, right? In order to do it right up front, but doing it right up front is going to reap lots of benefit on the back end. Yeah. That's my advice. You know, don't sell yourself short in, hey, we got to get this project done just as fast as possible. Let's put new finishes in there and call it a day, right? Because you're not going to get the outcomes that you're looking for.

Matt Gerstner

Yeah. Yeah.

Wrap Up And How To Connect

Nate Roisen

I totally agree with that. I think just an as a corollary to it, having that high-level buy-in of you know, the leadership of an organization that we are doing this project and here are the strategic reasons behind it. It's going to allow us to do X, Y, and Z in a way that might be different or more efficient or somehow better than than what we're looking at today. And I care about this. Right. I mean, I think part of the if if the only thing that the CEO of an organization says is I care about this project, changes the attitudes of everybody beneath them. I can see that. And, you know, depending on whatever level of the organization that message is coming from, really drives a different mentality as you know, that vision is being translated into some kind of reality. And the better or the more buy-in you have up up at the highest levels, the better that the end product ends up being.

Matt Gerstner

Ryan, Nate, you've given our listeners a lot to think about today. So thank you both for all the time and insight you've given us.

Ryan Johansen

My pleasure.

Nate Roisen

Wonderful.

Matt Gerstner

And to our listeners, until next time, see you on the other side. This has been Side of Design from BWBR, brought to you without any paid advertisements or commercials. If you found value in what you've heard today, give us a like, leave us a comment, or better yet, share us with your network. You can also reach out to us if you'd like to share an idea for a show or start a discussion. Email us at sideofdesign@bwbr.com.