Sharon Marsh, Executive Director of Resources at Livv Housing Group and FCIPD discusses the impact a collaboratively designed transformation of their HQ has made to culture, building colleague relationships and the impact the building has had on the balance of hybrid work patterns post pandemic.
If you build it, they will come. And if you build it together, co-design it around the things that matter to your colleagues – the rewards in terms of employee culture created can be exponential.
Our ‘it’? The root-and-branch transformation of our HQ in Merseyside, a major project that marked our post pandemic recovery to protect the wellbeing of our c.400 employees by creating a central hub and place to connect with peers.
Working together with employees from every part of our workforce through a blend of forums, dedicated workshops and surveys, we co-designed a workplace that’s welcoming, has warmth, accommodates diversity and protects wellbeing.
A workplace that feels like home
We believe creating a workplace that ‘feels like home’ – that feels like a ‘home away from home’ has been crucial to our culture, colleague relationships and our employees’ relationship with their employer in turn.
At a time when many UK businesses are still struggling with workforce appetite to return to the office after Covid 19, a legacy reality of a global pandemic and home working, we’re experiencing the opposite.
Our colleagues want to be in our beautiful, bright and vibrant office footprint. And while our policy, post pandemic is for employees to come into the office one day a week, in reality we are seeing much greater weekly foot fall.
Our employees are enjoying our spaces and places that officially opened to our workforce in October 2022. In doing so, we’ve brought back that natural conversation, the chats that you’d call the ‘watercooler’ moments pre pandemic, the very human part of HR, you could say.
Going back to the future
So back to the future and the ‘if you build it they will come’. What did we create? We have a variety of desk real estate to accommodate work preference and neuro diversity. We have a blend of bookable hot desks, acoustic meeting pods with screens to ‘teams’ people in for hybrid-ability, sound proof booths for individual teams calls, cosy up chairs for reading or discussions, and of course the traditional meeting room is an evergreen constant.
We have a library zone and quiet working spaces and we have areas with lower lighting levels. We also have a living wall in our main reception area, symbolically placed by our brand mission – to create positive impact and flourishing communities.
