The WEX Engagement Platform

An innovation in employee engagement and workplace solutions

The key to developing a successful workplace strategy, one that supports and enables the employees to do their best work, is one that engages with and focuses on understanding the activities of the employees, the preferred and most productive location for these, and then providing the most appropriate work settings to support those activities.

Traditionally this would have been done through some form of activities capture, whether that be an observational study, a space occupancy study, sensor deployment, ID card swipes and even IT log-ins. However, the pandemic has all but made these traditional approaches irrelevant, very few employees are choosing to be in the office, most are working remotely.

Therefore, this needs a new approach, one which can inform not only the amount of space a business needs, but also how it should be designed.

So, we enhanced and redeveloped one of our online tools to create the Workplace Experience Platform, our bespoke tool for employee engagement and evidence based solutions.

The key questions when seeking to define a hybrid strategy:

Are our employees going to continue to prefer working remotely, or be back in the office?
Or will they want to do both, a hybrid approach?
What is the most productive location for their work activities and why?
What work settings enable them to do their best work?
How many employees will come back and how often?
Which days of the week will they be in office?
What will they be doing when they are in the office?
Who will they be collaborating with?
How much space will we need?
What does this mean for our workplace design?

WEX can answer all these questions and much more.

The Benefits of using WEX for your workplace

Employees are engaged in the process which leads to greater ‘buy-in’ to the end solution
Employee profiling - know how many remote workers and in-office workers you have and everything in-between!
Know how much space you need in the office
Know what and how many work settings you need to support the employee activities
Evidence to support decision making across a range of metrics
Map and understand collaboration so you can create the serendipitous interactions that lead to knowledge exchange and innovation

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So, how does the WEX Engagement Platform work?

Based on ABW principles, our bespoke employee engagement tool can be used globally. We can roll out the secure data capture portal to employees ranging from a few hundred to many thousands of employees, easily accessible from a private link. The portal collates data across a wide range of activities, tasks, interactions, collaboration and other key metrics to do with the way work is done.

Data is collated to capture a comprehensive range of activities from quiet focuses work through to informal an informal collaboration activity. This can then be reported on a team, department, building, location, or country basis.

Location Preferences & Productivity

WEX also captures the preferred and most productive location for those activities, which means that we can start to understand the number of employees in either a remote or office worksetting, and the activities they will be undertaking in each location. This allows forecasting of how many people will be in the office and on which days.

This provides rich data with which to profile the employees, feeding into the Change Management program and a recognition that ‘no one size fits all’.

Planning Rationale

Let us look at the workplace planning rationale. We assign Team Core space to those personas who attend the office most frequently, they are the 'anchors' of the team neighborhood.

Those with decreasing in-office presence, ‘Flexible, ‘Mobile’ and ‘Remote’ employee personas are able to make use of flexible team, shared team and shared floor space within the building.

These shared spaces are shared with the adjacent teams – which is where the collaboration mapping comes in.

Collaboration Mapping

So, now we know what activities the employees are doing, and their preferred location to undertake those activities; now we need to understand who they are collaborating with – capturing the opportunity to enable the illusive spontaneous interactions.

Let's join up the dots, linking those teams together who need to collaborate, identifying who, when and how frequently they need to collaborate, both virtually and in-person. This graphic shows the physical collaboration activities between teams, represented by the chords between the coloured team zones.

In this example, the Production & Engineering, CEO Office, and Customer Operations work closely together. On the right is the workplace strategy rationale showing these three teams in close proximity, using overlapping shared spaces that enables the impromptu, unplanned collaboration to take place when they are in the office.

Worksetting Allocation

And since we now know what activities are taking place in the office space (this is usually and predominantly collaboration activities), we can start to populate the spaces with the correct range and number of work settings, from quiet focus work areas through to team collaboration spaces, which also then informs the amount of space a team, company and ultimately business needs!

Stakeholder Interviews

Data captured and reported this way is only part of the story, however, this gives the workplace consultant and the client evidential employee data to support the new way of working and workplace strategy.

Stakeholder interviews are held with heads of departments and teams to better understand work processes, business needs and drivers and long run strategies that the business has, and together this gives the rich data needed to create an evidence based workplace strategy and design.

Online Dashboard Interrogation

Finally, all of the above data is presented within a bespoke dashboard that allows filtering across a range of scenarios and data segments providing a powerful tool for analysis, not only in relation to the workplace needs but also the organisations culture, tools/technology and readiness for change.

Concept Workplace Designs

Using all of the data collated through WEX, the interviews and workshops we can produce concept zoning plans and space floor plans for your future, flexible office space

Example Concept Zoning Plan