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A Place to be Happy in your Work

When it comes to designing new offices, it pays to listen and learn from employees, writes Christine Long. When you are spending at least eight hours a day at work you want to feel comfortable and inspired to greatness by your surroundings. But as three of Australia's banks are discovering, creating a workplace that promotes productivity is a challenging and multi-faceted dilemma. For National Australia Bank the process is all over bar the moving. By Easter, 2000 employees will have been shifted to their new custom-built workplace in Melbourne's Docklands area; 1500 more will follow in September. It is the final stage in a project that has taken three years to complete and involved talks with 1000 staff from across the company. NAB's joint project directors Rosemary Kirkby and Peter Affleck say their vision for the building was guided by the value placed on learning, knowledge transfer and information sharing in the modern workplace. Design-wise that meant encouraging connection between workers through large floor spaces, connecting floors with bridges of stairs and putting cafes in places where people would commonly meet. It was also reflected by creating ``quiet spaces" for staff that could not be booked ahead of time. “That's a mechanism that we use to draw people through the building and put them in touch with people that they mightn't otherwise [meet] on a daily basis," says Kirkby. Another significant influence was the feedback from staff. Kirkby says it took nine months to finalise the design of the desks so that they would accommodate the six different work styles represented in the organisation. The building is also designed to be adapted quickly and cheaply to the changing needs of a diverse workforce, particularly those on project teams. There are cafe hours and lounge spaces for employees working early or late and the building's area for project work can be quickly redesigned. Westpac has also been consulting their employees about their work environment. It plans to move workers from 11 locations in Sydney's CBD to a new headquarters by November 2006 and the company wants to incorporate worker concerns in the building. Westpac's general manager, group property Lyn Lennard, gives one example of this. ``We have what is traditionally called an ant trail where people are leaving buildings and going to another one to have a meeting." In the new building, she hopes that will be a thing of the past. The idea is to create a ``five-minute" building where staff can bump into each other and get matters resolved more easily. That means allowing people to move freely between the building's 33 floors once they have passed through the base building security. Lennard is also gaining inspiration from cafes after finding many employees were using them in their daily working life. After a 12 month national property review, Bendigo Bank decided the answer to its office space problem lay in its own backyard. It has 600 staff in Bendigo scattered across five sites and it is predicting it will need space for up to 1000 employees within five years. Last October, the bank announced plans to embark on a $40 million building project to extend its existing Fountain Court site. At the same time it is building a new office in the Melbourne Docklands precinct to bring together the 200 capital city-based employees now spread across four sites. Apart from addressing logistical issues, the bank sees the workplace projects as an opportunity to reinforce its business culture of ``good ethics, honesty and transparency". Last month the bank's board accepted a concept put forward by the joint-venture team of architects, Bligh Voller Nield and Gray Puksand . Owen Davies, a Bendigo Bank spokesman, says the building, which will include retail space, is unlikely to exceed five storeys. ``We don't want it to look like a bank vault. We want it to open up to the community and be a place for people to come and visit." Transparency is high on the list of priorities, with the final design likely to feature ``lots of glass". Other key aspects will be natural light and ventilation and wide staircases connecting floors, meeting spaces and amenity areas to encourage staff to engage with each other. With car parking space likely to be an issue, amenities will include showers and bike racks to encourage employees to leave their cars at home.