The Hindu Business Line : Office buildings — New and big need not be the best

Does the transition from the nondescript start-up premises to the spanking “big company premises” always mean greater satisfaction? The answer is a no. Many founders and CEOs realise that new and great buildings do not necessarily mean greater employee pride, belonging and engagement, and older buildings do not necessarily mean poor pride and diminished engagement levels.

Ganesh Chella

Organisations of every size are growing, adding headcount and quickly running out of office space! Many of them encounter several small hardships in the premises that they initially occupy and the founders and CEOs take great efforts to assure their employees that they will soon move to a spanking new premises with all the modern facilities.

So, does the transition from the nondescript start-up premises to the spanking “big company premises” always mean greater satisfaction?

Interestingly, the answer is a big NO. To their dismay, many founders and CEOs realise that new and great buildings do not necessarily mean greater employee pride, belonging and engagement, and older buildings do not necessarily mean poor pride and diminished engagement levels.

How do you explain this? And is this important? At a time when everyone believes that new and big is a sure insurance against employee disenchantment, here is a reality check.

The start-up spirit

Ask anyone who has been part of a start-up and he will recollect with great joy the excitement and fun of the start-up days. The days when all the great plans were made, the dreams were dreamt and the visions were shared.

The small non-descript office or garage that was the original corporate headquarters seems to add to all the excitement.

The founding team that was witness to all this excitement sees the office as the birth place, the place where it all happened. For them, leaving this “birth place” and moving out can actually be an emotionally painful process.

Like all of us have special memories about the place where we grew up, for the founding team, the first office is quite special and moving away from that place is actually quite hard.

Delayed gratifications

The start-up premise tends to promote the value of delayed gratification — people generally seem to be fine with waiting to get what they all want. They seem to be fine with the small sacrifices given the big vision and bright future ahead of them.

Strangely, when they move to their new premises, they suddenly experience the feeling of belonging to a “big company” or having “arrived”. The founding team finds it difficult to help the next generation of employees understand the “sacrifices” they had to make to build the business.

For the next generation, it becomes difficult to understand and appreciate the past sacrifices and demonstrate any level of delayed gratification.

People soon start complaining about food, the elevators, the parking and so on.

What was run like a home now needs world-class facilities management! What seemed to be complete non-issues suddenly seem to become a problem and the founders wonder why!

real role of the physical work setting

A couple of years ago, I was meeting a cross-section of employees in a BPO. While most of them were located in their large new premises, some worked out of their smaller original premises which was, at one time, a large house. In the course of my interviews, I realised that the employees in the smaller premises seemed much happier.

Given the structure of the building, they were forced to be seated in small groups, facing each other. They also ended up having a group identity which seemed to help them manage their stress and enjoy their colleagueship and their work.

Way back in 1927 (80 years ago), Elton Mayo commenced his landmark experiments in the Western Electrical Company’s Hawthorne works to study the effect of lighting on worker productivity.

Almost by accident, he discovered that worker productivity depended less on lighting conditions in the work area and more on the worker’s perception that management was interested in them.

Mayo proposed that higher productivity could be gained through better communication and emotional connect and involvement between workers and management.

He also observed that worker satisfaction was a function of recognition, security and the sense of being part of a team.

The social aspects of work got finally acknowledged and signalled the birth of the Human Relations approach.

This discovery of Elton Mayo is relevant even today. Like he pointed out about the temporary impact of lighting, the novelty of a great campus with its grand architecture is temporary.

Founders and CEOs who believe that the new building is a surrogate for the emotional connect and great bonds that they enjoyed in the start-up days are in for a rude shock.

In my conversations with hundreds of employees who have moved premise, they tell me that they see their CEOs and leaders far less often than they used to and that they somehow feel they no longer enjoy the close relationships that they used to.

The way out

Am I therefore recommending that organisations continue to work out of ill-equipped and poorly designed work places? Not really.

While founders and CEOs go to great lengths to find world-class architects to design their buildings, I wonder if they spend any time designing the new work relationships.

Do they really spend time discussing how the social needs of employees which were so well fulfilled in the early days will continue to be met as well in the new place?

Do they also take into consideration the additional efforts they will need to invest in keeping the communication and emotional bonds as spontaneous, alive and strong as it originally was?

Put simply, leave the old furniture behind, but please carry the spirit along and even add to it!

(The author is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR Consulting firm. He is also the co-founder of the Executive & Business Coaching Foundation India Limited. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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