Inspire the behaviors you want in your workplace and build on your values

It’s a new world out there and the way we work is changing. Today’s workforce does not need a "warehouse," it needs a "hub" of connections and collaboration. What’s a leader to do? Savage’s Bethany Andell asks Lauri Goodman Lampson, president of PDR, a workplace consulting and design firm.

Bethany: Welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their strategies. I’m Bethany Andell, President of Savage Brands, and my guest today is Lauri Goodman Lampson, President of PDR. Welcome back, Lauri.

Lauri: Thank you, Bethany.

Bethany: Today I’d love to talk about behaviors and values in the workplace and how you approach that. You know, there’s a lot of talk about values these days and we feel like the behaviors and what you expect out of the behaviors at a company is really important, and I know that the workplace has a lot to do with that.

Lauri: Absolutely. I think the first thing to recognize is that everything about work, workers, and workplace is changing from where we’ve been in the last several decades. So, at the worker level, workers are really shifting from being managed to enabled, and that’s obvious in the technology tools that we have available to us. Work is shifting from task to purpose. The reason we do work and the time that we spend doing work tasks really is shifting to be more purposeful. So, the workplace also needs to shift from being a house, a warehouse for work and workers, to being a hub of interaction, and connection, and collaboration, so that this new workforce dynamic that we have in the workplace can truly be inspired to do their best work.

Bethany: That’s curious, because you know I’ve had clients that they’ll say one of their core tenets is approachability and accessibility, but then you have to have a security access card to even get into certain areas of the building, and just something like that can be a barrier or a contradiction to what companies are saying as a company. What are other things that you see out there or do to inspire and enable different behaviors within an organization?

Lauri: Well, Bethany we really start inside the business, so we call ourselves the inside-out firm. We really want to know what’s going on in the business, and what kind of business strategy and business objectives you’re trying to achieve, and then map key behaviors that you need out of your employee base to achieve those objectives. So, for instance, if you want more collaboration, if you want more cross-collaboration across functional groups, you know one of the things that organizations are really struggling with right now are functional silos. So, how do we get people to talk to each other across functional boundaries. You can do that through visual transparency, through the placement of people in space, really thinking about the place attributes that will inspire the kind of behavior that you really want to happen in your work environment.

Bethany: That was a great example. Thank you, Lauri, for being here.

Lauri: Absolutely. I love telling our story.

Bethany: This concludes my conversation with Lauri Goodman Lampson of PDR, and this episode of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their strategies.