What is a great work environment for one person may be just so-so for another. An easy example of this is temperature. Many people like the workplace a chilly 68 degrees – and an equal number are very uncomfortable unless it is 72 degrees. Neither is wrong – but if you don’t find a way that people can work in a good temperature, they are less productive and possibly less engaged.

A well designed and maintained ideal workplace setting must have two basic components:

First, the ideal work setting needs a physical workplace environment that provides healthy and safe space environmental conditions. These healthy conditions are present when a range of physical environmental conditions, including but not limited to temperature, air quality, light, sound, elements of nature, are within established and healthy values.

Second, the ideal work setting also requires a supportive corporate culture where employees feel safe to express themselves, not being judged even if mistakes occur for well-meaning action, being free of prejudice and are not impaired by other unfair conditions.

The benefits of an ideal work setting apply equally to the employees and the corporation.

For employees, staying inside a healthy and safe physical environment improves wellbeing as harmful elements of the surrounding environment are removed or at least minimized. Employees who are working within a supporting psychological environment, based on a supporting corporate culture, reduce their stress, and provide them with room to be as productive as possible and live up to their professional potential as possible. Supporting healthy physical and psychological environments improves overall health by lowering avoidable environmental stress.

For corporations, providing healthy, safe, and productive work settings has significant payback opportunities as employee productivity increases and retention of valuable talent improves. In a tight labor market where valuable talent acquisition and retention is becoming major challenges companies which provide outstanding workplace settings have a competitive edge.

It has been proven that investments in ideal work settings offer a very favorable ROI. (link to our paper)

We at Great Places and Spaces have created a roadmap to achieve ideal workplace settings. Our proprietary assessments can quantify how close the actual workplace setting is to an ideal workplace setting by calculating a composite score that includes physical and psychological aspects of the workplace setting.

The Roadmap contains four areas each of which characterize a certain quality of the workplace regarding the physical and the psychological conditions.

The physical and psychological scores of the assessment determine where on the Roadmap the actual workplace settings are located. From that position on the Roadmap the most effective pathway can be identified to achieve the best workplace settings, which can be achieved with the allocated budget.

In this way a far better ROI can be achieved than using conventional workplace improvement strategies, which determine the physical settings and corporate culture independently.

We have developed assessment tools which determine how the individual employees experiences that prevailing workplace conditions. Different from conventional workplace assessment products which focus on either the physical or the psychological workplace conditions and the assessment combines both conditions into one system. This has a significant advantage since improving workplace settings requires attention to both the physical and psychological workplace settings.

The assessment is being taken online and the result and input data are kept strictly confidential. This safeguards that employees can freely express their experiences and do not fear retribution by their superior. Therefore, distorted survey results are avoided, and a realistic view of the workplace settings can be gained.

Typically, a pool of employees will take the assessment and the results are presented to the client in a summary report that provides important statistics so that informed decisions can be made to improve potential deficiencies in the workplace.

The Workplace ROI tool takes pertinent data from our proprietary assessment and determines what investments in improved workplace settings should have the highest ROI.

In our experience the ROI of investments in the physical workspace and corporate culture are site and situation sensitive. Smart investments are made when the specific workplace improvements are based on actual data and not guessing or replicating what has worked for other companies.

The Workplace ROI uses 10 categories each for the physical workspace and the psychological workplace and calculates the expected ROI based on the survey data.
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Ideal Work Setting℠ page

We offer coaching assistance to implement improvements to lead to the adoption of Ideal Work Setting at the organization. As the first step the current situation is determined through an assessment. A gap analysis is performed and opportunities for improvement are identified.

Coaching of the decision makers secures a successful implementation of the workplace improvements.