A Day in the Life of a Collaborative Workspace

“Cultivating a collaborative culture” has become a common element in many a modern corporate mission statement -- an onus carried on the shoulders of various disciplines within the business.

 

For IT, supporting a culture of collaboration means ensuring employees have desktop tools and meeting room technologies that facilitate conversation and enable seamless content sharing. Similarly, Facilities must make sure that employees have workspaces -- big and small -- that are conducive to different kinds of collaborative work. And the HR team must ensure that the overall workspace and technology strategies jibe with employee expectations around collaboration.

 

The real success comes when these three disciplines work together in creating workspaces with collaboration in mind from the get-go. Examples are littered throughout Silicon Valley, where digital companies have turned the collaborative workspace into an art form, and beyond. Here in the heartland, two great recent examples are the new headquarters projects from McDonald’s and Zurich Insurance North America.

 

Despite the widespread imperative to build a collaborative culture and some great examples of businesses that have gone to work on this mission, many organizations struggle in meeting the mandate. Too often, IT, Facilities, and HR live in silos, hamstrung by an inability to collaborate effectively. We hope to help break down the walls, and to provide you some inspiration for your workspace in the below infographic, in which we imagine a day in the life of a workspace where collaboration is second nature. (Infographic download available here.)