Joseph White, Director of Design Strategy at MillerKnoll, dives into how the workplace can improve employee wellbeing, foster a sense of community and connection, and help organizations navigate, prepare and design for change.

In a video for Business Reporter, Joseph White, Director of Design Strategy at MillerKnoll talks about how the workplace of the future should be a living, organic network of diverse environments with intentional variety that can equally support individual, team and community work, while being set up to respond to the changing world around us.

Traditionally, workplaces have been geared towards efficiency and quality assurance requirements resulting in a sea of workstations. With the changing needs and expectations of the employee and the organisation, it’s no longer enough to expect work to play-out in a uniform manner. To create a physical space more aligned with the organization and employee needs, an inquiry should be made into desired outcomes, the processes and support required to achieve them, and how experiments with the physical environment could be supported.

To achieve this, Joseph provides three questions all organizations should ask themselves before starting any workplace project.

1. What are the outcomes that we seek to achieve as an organization? And are we aligned across the organization?
2. What current working processes and support can help our teams achieve those objectives? And what could be better?
3. How can we use our physical environment to experiment with new ways of working to deliver better outcomes?

MillerKnoll has been conducting in-depth research into human behaviour and the relationship with the built environment. This has helped to inform the products its collective of brands make. By helping organizations uncover the purpose of their place, MillerKnoll’s Design with Impact frameworks focuses on how changes to the physical environment can improve employee wellbeing, foster a sense of community and connection, and help organisations navigate, prepare and design for change. With this, the workplace becomes a tool for work rather than a container for it.

To learn more about MillerKnoll’s novel “Design with Impact” approach to creating impactful workplaces, read the article, watch the video and visit millerknoll.com/design-with-impact.