Change Your Space, Change Your Culture

Recent studies have exposed some scary and dangerous realities about the workplace:

• More than 70 percent of the workforce either hates their job or they are just going through the motions
• Half of all office space is wasted

The dimensions of this crisis sparked a high drama pursuit for answers. Like big city detectives, leaders from well-known and respected American companies raced to stop the killer of collaboration and creativity. Then they discovered strategies to turn the workplace into a landscape of innovation.

This book is the outcome.

We know that employee engagement is the key to innovation; workers must care about the job at hand. But what do you do when dreariness and disconnection are baked into the workplace? How does business change the culture, leading to places of creativity, resiliency, and growth?

The leaders behind this story learned that the answer has been hiding in plain sight, that office space itself can be the portal of significant change. Months of original research and fieldwork all led to the breakthrough insight that business must redesign the spaces where old and dangerous habits live.

The authors expose deadly flaws in the way office space is commonly approached, bid, and designed. The whole process has been trapped in the sclerotic thinking of space as “sunk costs.” Which leads to the practical conclusion that design is not important, only minimizing the cost of design. That has led to workplaces as soul-killing environments of stressed, fragmented, and disengaged workers.

However, by designing space as a flexible, open, and engaging workplace, employees reconnect with the work.