Understanding terms like workspace VS workplace can seem like a geeky little semantic game, but in reality, it’s a vital step in addressing the employee experience at your company.
The importance of the spaces, both physical and virtual, in which employees share their skills and conduct their business is pretty immense.
In fact, when you start reading up on the matter, you’ll come across large, serious academic studies that concern workspace design for knowledge exploration, the productivity and organisational commitment, and more. Once the academics get involved, it’s safe to assume that there is a lot more to a given topic than meets the eye.
Let us break it down by starting with the basic definitions and then take it from there.
Workspace VS workplace – The definitions:
Workplace: A workplace is a physical location or space where you meet up with co-workers and managers to do your work. It refers to the collective sphere in which the team gets its work done.
Workspace: A workspace is the space where each individual does their work. It can be a cubicle, a hot desk, a table in your kitchen if you work from home, or a window-side seat in a coffee shop if you have ‘hipster’ leanings.
That’s the basic difference in physical, real-life, brick-and-mortar, office-with-a-lobby-and-a-kitchenette terms. When you move into the digital realm, the same distinctions apply, but with a bit of a twist.
Digital: The digital workplace is the collective space a team shares in an online environment, e.g., a collaborative interface like Slack, Trello, Asana, etc. Think about it like a digital conference room of sorts, where everyone is engaged simultaneously.
Digital workspace: A digital workspace refers to an employee’s personal set of tools that they use to do their job, including their laptop, mobile, specialised software and other programmes and devices they require to attend to their tasks.
A workplace is collective and caters to group requirements, a workspace is singular and pertains to the individual.
Employee experience should be a business priority for any organisation that wants to go the distance. This is not an opinion; it is a fact based on a variety of statistics.
Consider the following:
Trailblazing companies are five times as likely to have workplaces that are designed with employee experience in mind than their less innovative contemporaries.
A positive employee experience can increase productivity by as much as 12%.
Employee satisfaction and engagement increased for 69% of companies that chose to invest in healthy building features such as air quality, acoustics, ergonomic layout and indoor greenery.
Employees who have control over the design and layout of their workspace are not only happier and healthier, they’re also up to 32% more productive.
More than a third of job candidates are willing to settle for a lower cost to the company if a business offers an employee-centric workplace, great digital UX and top-notch tech.
85% of respondents to a survey on office mobility stated that they want to see more flexible work policies and spaces.
Read more: 5 Ways employee experience can drive competitive advantage
How to improve your company’s workspaces and workplaces:
Now that we’ve established that physical and digital workspaces and places have a direct impact on business productivity and performance metrics, it only stands to reason that these have to be optimised as far as possible. Here are a few ways to do so:
1. Be open to multiple ways of working
Employees need spaces to do four distinct things – focus, collaborate, learn, and socialise.
To accommodate all four of these modes of working, progressive companies need to create physical and digital spaces that can be shifted and altered to suit the needs of employees who won’t necessarily be in the same mode at any given time.
Physically, this means that offices should ideally have completely private spaces where employees can work alone, open, inviting spaces where they can collaborate and enjoy blue-sky sessions, as well as smaller meeting rooms, areas for presentations, and zones for relaxation.
On the digital front, it means that employees should have access to collaborative zones and focused private time as and when they need.
Read more: 8 Reasons why the employee experience should be a top business priority
2. Gather data on how your employees work
The best way to find out what your employees need and want in their workplace and workspace is simply to ask them. Pulse surveys and questionnaires are very useful in this regard. Alternatively, you can also have one-on-one or group discussions to determine if there’s any spatial friction you need to be aware of.
Companies like Mars Drinks took it a step further by using sensors to determine how often their employees’ actual desks were in use. The resultant data told them that their employees were spending very little time at their designated workspaces, instead choosing to roam around the office in search of spaces to accommodate different modes of work. This insight was then put to good use in terms of an office redesign.
There you have it – the whole workspace VS workplace debacle untangled once and for all.
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