Share these talks and lectures with your colleagues
Invite colleaguesPractice paper
People, performance and place : How using perceptive and cognitive data can create inspiring and collaborative workspaces that enable growth and innovation
Corporate Real Estate Journal,
8
(2),
118-135
(2018)
Abstract
AECOM is a leading global infrastructure services provider. A major acquisition in 2015 led to the company rationalising its real estate, bringing about the opportunity to transform its workplaces and drive cultural and behaviour change across its offices in and around London. This paper sets out AECOM’s approach to the formation of its new Greater London Campus, the drivers underpinning the project, key features of the campus and measures used to identify changes in employee performance, collaboration and wellbeing. It primarily focuses on how return on investment (ROI) was achieved, with a spotlight on the campus headquarters in Aldgate Tower, East London, and the process used to capture the underlying metrics. A key objective was to go beyond spatial metrics and people’s perception of changes in performance to direct business impact. AECOM partnered with professional services firm AON’s talent assessment team to create a bespoke method of assessing performance, building off existing world-leading psychometric tests and including leading-edge wellbeing surveys. The post-occupancy evaluation (POE) results demonstrated a significant improvement, as evidenced by a three-fold value increase in cross-disciplinary working, a 10 per cent increase in creativity measures and a 26 per cent drop in attrition rates in the central London location. The paper concludes with key messages and learning points for future workplace transformation projects. It is important to note that this paper focuses on research in practice. The working hypothesis was to seek measurable connections between behaviour, space and business performance in a live working environment. Detailed descriptions of psychometric tests and opinion-based assessment are provided along with findings from a POE study.
Keywords: AECOM; infrastructure services; cultural change; behavioural change; Greater London Campus; AON; post-occupancy evaluation (POE); psychometric tests
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Nicola Gillen is a global practice lead for workplace strategy and workplace market sector lead in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa (EMIA). She is an architect with a business degree. Nicola’s team includes architects, designers, psychologists and sociologists focused on workplace strategy, design and change management. Nicola specialises in the relationship between behaviour and the built environment. Clients include Rolls-Royce, BMS, BP, Sky, the Estée Lauder Companies, Palace of Westminster and Museum of London. Now based in London, Nicola has worked across Europe, North America and Asia. She drives thought leadership around the future of work, regularly publishing and speaking at conferences.
Hilary Jeffery is an organisational strategy consultant and change director, with a BSc. in Psychology. Hilary has 12 years’ experience of working with clients to drive culture change within their organisation, using the workplace as a catalyst. With a strong research and evidence- based approach to change, Hilary has led projects for a wide range of clients including National Grid and Rolls-Royce. Hilary is currently working in Human Resources, leading a team focused on leadership development, culture change and talent management.
Charlotte Hermans is an organisational psychologist with a background in workplace strategy and change management. Driven by a strong interest in the intersection between people and space, her primary professional ambition is to understand, promote and leverage the human element in the design of healthy workplaces that support wellbeing and facilitate positive organisational change. Charlotte is an advocate of evidence-based practice and seeks to underpin strategic workplace advice with a blend of real-time data, academic theory, and a human-centred, psychological perspective. Charlotte currently works as part of the Strategy Plus team in AECOM where she is engaged both externally in delivering change management projects across private and public sector client organisations, as well as driving a cultural change programme from the inside out.
Ramona Verhees is a workplace consultant with an MSc in Environmental Psychology and a background in Real Estate & Facility Management. Her role centres around facilitating and further developing an evidence based approach to workplace briefing. Using tested interview and observation techniques to truly understand how organisations function and occupy their workspace, Ramona is able to lead a team to identify key areas for improving the workplace. Working across a wide range of national and international clientele, Ramona provides an in-depth workplace advice for both public and private sectors.
Malcolm Louth is a HR Leader with 20 years’ experience in maximising the return on investment in people. An advocate for engaging and enabling employees to reach their full potential, Malcolm believes that organisations achieve great things when their people do. As practitioner of HR in the broadest sense, and with experience in blue-chip global clients through to owner managed SME’s across the globe, Malcolm is currently responsible for AECOMs HR delivery across Europe, Middle East, India and Africa.
David Barrett is a business focused occupational psychologist working with clients across a spectrum of challenges from large scale international psychometric, assessment, development and performance management projects. Much of David’s work focuses on how behavioural, values and cognitive attributes in humans predict work performance and assisting organisations use smart talent measurement system and data analytics to predict and advise on this. David is an honours Psychology graduate from Trinity College Dublin and holds a postgraduate MSc in Occupational Psychology from Queens University Belfast.
Robin Bott is a chartered occupational psychologist with over 10 years in the assessment field. He has delivered hundreds of assessments as well as having written thousands of psychometric questions. This has given him a deep understanding of the psychology of people in the workplace. Clients he has previously worked with include Hilton Hotels, Imperial Tobacco, Sanofi, Starbucks, Moody’s Investors Services, Lidl, Primark, Ping Pong, Wolseley, Starcom MediaVest Group, Dixons Retail, Greene King and LGA.
