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In July 2021, the Shanghai Office Space Conference was held under the theme of ‘Connecting the Future, Working Freely’, bringing together leading global office space solutions, from furniture, partitions, smart offices, lighting, coffee machines to air purification, to build a vision of future beautiful and efficient office models.
NOVAH is honored to be one of the speakers at Workplace’s main venue, where he will share his valuable experience and practical cases with more than 800 industry veterans under the theme ‘The Purpose of Place, The Power of People.
How to make the office environment not only cater to people’s physical and mental health, but also focus on talent management functions? Tommy, Director of Strategic Market Space at Novah, brings out a key word: space strategy.
When interest becomes work, it can lead to negative attitudes and laziness. Conversely, when work becomes an interest, it can be twice as effective with half the effort. Disliking being controlled is human nature, while environment acts as a ‘soft management’ that cleverly replaces commands and obedience. Novah believes that Activity (A) and Business (B) can be coordinated.
Many companies repeatedly emphasize the word ‘agility,’ like a fashion trend. So, how to embody it? Easier said than done. In order to highlight functionality, we often attribute many beautiful and imaginative functions to our products. But the truth is that certain functions may not be suitable for all businesses.
If a company excessively pursues cutting-edge design, but its business nature is traditional, wouldn’t emphasizing ‘agility’ be adding to the chaos? Conversely, if a company’s business nature is dynamic but it neglects to strategically layout its traditional office space, would this not hinder the company’s ability to adapt to change?
Transformation that is detached from business is blind. Of course we hope to have a product that has both design sense and practicality while being low-cost, but let’s not forget the core issue is achieving business value-added.
Therefore, any function definition we want to give our products must first be accompanied by in-depth research and behavioral studies, providing strong support for the realization of business goals.
Novah Spatial Strategy Team based on the field trips to each commissioned enterprise and the contact communication with the management and employees of the enterprise, we have summarized our own ‘4P principle’.
People——Users who?
Purpose——What are the core behaviors?
Place——In what form (subject or accessory) does the product appear in space?
Power——Eight values of organizational and employee behavior.
We divide the purpose of space into four parts as mentioned above and project them onto five office scenarios: work, meeting, collaboration, learning, and administration. The workspace embodies a business model, so our primary consideration is the fit between space and business, the implement ability of management strategies, and the presentation of corporate culture.
Taking actual projects as an example, we will first conduct user demand research and activity trajectory observation, then use NEXT (Novah Experience Technology) to establish a model of space and behavior for office spaces, so that enterprise personnel can clearly understand the problems existing in the office space, as well as the direction of future space optimization. Subsequently, we assist in splitting up space and building spatial scenarios using marketing thinking.
In short, we don’t just provide high-quality products, but also a series of consulting services for corporate space strategies. We participate in the process and take responsibility for the results.
When working with major corporations, we also encountered a series of challenges. For example: limited resources, limited space, how can we provide more and better office experiences as much as possible? Can the original spatial design be fully utilized without causing discomfort or maladjustment? How to adapt to changes in corporate strategies as quickly as possible without changing locations or furniture?
We have discovered problems for enterprises and truly solved these problems. We activate the value of every inch of space at the smallest granularity, enhance the reuse rate of products, and support distributed innovation. Over time, you can define different proportions of functions yourself to reduce costs.
As one of the exhibitor representatives for Agile Workstation, Novah brought our Campers system developed in collaboration with Alibaba. The showroom was filled with an atmosphere of positive experience, and throughout the event, guests were willing to sit down and work briefly, resulting in widespread recognition from the industry during exchanges.
Campers Workstation System is a ‘custom package’ tailored for the Chinese Internet enterprise model, which meets the needs of explosive personnel migration; irregular reorganization and construction; and instant writing discussions. At present, the Campers system is iterating and upgrading towards the Campers ecosystem, and the product family in the future will be more perfect and promising.
China explicitly stated at the United Nations General Assembly in 2020 that it will strive to reach the peak of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.
When negative carbon economy begins to be widely practiced in China, the entire industry is thinking hard about environmental health and sustainability. The aesthetic and environmentally friendly art installation designed by the well-known architectural design company UNION at the exhibition site brings us a refreshing experience.
When people talked about offices in the 20th century, they could only think of small cubicles, while now in the ‘Purposeful Space’ sub-forum, deeper concepts such as health, sustainability, design sense, experience sense, and space utilization are constantly being proposed. The evolution of ideas depends on changes in the environment, policies, and business. As mentioned by Novah Nordisk in the main forum: In order to cope with constant change, we need strategies to help us move forward in the right direction.
Nowadays, the environment that emphasizes hierarchy is no longer attractive, and the bold changes of many traditional enterprises have also demonstrated their brand innovation to the world, accompanied by changes in traditional retail models, that is, from sales outlets to lifestyle experiences.
Therefore, purposeful space must be able to produce value: professional health, flexible movement, community community, sharing learning, focusing on efficiency, division of labor and collaboration, innovation and creation, leadership autonomy.
When it comes to the future, we think of technological intelligence.The demand for intelligence in the office field is not only the pursuit of office efficiency, but also the satisfaction of human needs. Therefore, no matter what kind of business model, purpose and people are indispensable.
The future office configuration will increasingly cater to the preferences of Generation Z. In subvenues: Agiiplus Group emphasizes agile offices, Midea Group proposes smart offices, and WeWork advocates community concepts.
To win both people and hearts, companies need to accurately grasp the personalities of Generation Z groups. For us, opportunities and challenges coexist.
Many large and mature companies have now realized the importance of choosing and designing workplaces. They are providing more diverse office spaces for their new and old employees and using them as tools to motivate employees to change their thinking and working methods. The awareness that space should be used to motivate employee behavior rather than simply being a filter to show off benefits is awakening.
By exploring the future, we embrace uncertainty together.
Office space management is a comprehensive and specialized project management, involving the full life cycle management of complex factors such as office space, customers, spatial elements, technical requirements, occupants, and environment.
As for the topic of office space and project management, the sub-forum also began an enthusiastic discussion. How did everyone carry out work supervision and management during the epidemic? How to solve the situation where enterprises lack vision and structural restrictions, and provide them with different standard applications?
As mentioned by Novah in the main venue, we split space with business models and build spatial scenarios with marketing thinking. Therefore, the number of workstations is no longer the more the better; exploring the reasonable ratio between the number of explorers and the number of workstations can empower change management.
Procurement is not simply a purchasing behavior, but rather a control over productivity. ‘How does an open space focus? How do non-open spaces collaborate?’ Re-examine office space with strategic vision to make design and operation progress together. In response, Novah said that great minds think alike.
As the theme of this conference on office space (Shanghai): Work Anywhere, there is also a sentence in Novo’s promotional manual: work is not only at the desk, but also in any space. At this conference, Novo and industry experts in space management and space designers inspired each other strategically and activated internal and external resources to create win-win.
We hope that the entire industry will work together, because a good office environment is a country’s soft power and an invisible national strength. With China’s market of 1.4 billion people, plus the improvement of the overall concept, China’s future will undoubtedly become a global focus with advantages in office environments.
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