Fentress helps government agencies and departments transition from a traditional office environment to hybrid offices that provide the optimal mix of collaborative and focused spaces based on workplace culture and activities. We also help government offices successfully adopt more mobile and flexible work practices and create a workspace that promotes health and wellness. We help you create workplaces that are sustainable and adaptable during these evolving times. Changing your space impacts many aspects of your office that go well beyond the workstation. For that reason, our office plans and layouts are supported by both workforce analysis and change management. The steps in our process are summarized below.
Employee engagement is a critical step in changing your space. In our view, a balance must be struck between the goals of the agency or department and the engagement of employees in space planning. For this reason, we recommend goal-setting sessions with management followed by a variety of efforts to promote employee engagement depending on the size and culture of the office. These efforts include town hall meetings, employee surveys, focus groups, interviews, and hands-on experience through space and technology workshops.
Changing your space impacts the culture and work practices of your government office. We provide change management services as a way to nurture positive change, constructively address resistance, and prepare for the cultural impact of space change. Hand-in-hand with change management is a communications strategy tailored to your office that identifies the appropriate method and timing to communicate to all stakeholders involved in a space project. In addition, training is a key element to educate employees and to make for a smoother office transition process.
We believe that space should promote and enhance the work that is performed in each department as well as employee health and wellness. Through our employee engagement process, we identify employee work styles and the type of work being performed by each employee. For each work style, we have space and technology standards to best support and enhance the work activities of that particular style. These standards include spaces for concentration, collaboration, and mobility. The space should also incorporate health and wellness features such as daylighting, air quality, biophilia, as well as antimicrobial surfaces and other features that reduce the spread of germs.
Once we identify the work styles and patterns that make your government office unique, we determine space needs through a program of requirements. The program presents a detailed list of space needs by type, including enclosed offices, open workstations, conference rooms, informal collaboration spaces, wellness areas, and a variety of special requirements. We typically program space through interactive sessions that are transparent and that engage the stakeholders.
Once the program of requirements has been finalized, the next step is to develop alternative office layouts that present options to enhance the flow of work. Neighborhoods or zones are typically presented to ensure that the different office divisions and employee work styles have the spaces needed in the right locations to effectively perform their work. Communal and shared spaces are also presented in a way that promotes employee wellness, provides easy access, and helps to break up the office into logical sections.
We have been performing mobile work for over 30 years and are experts in how to assist other government offices with incorporating mobility as a workplace strategy. Mobility has many benefits, including reducing office space, promoting employee health, sustaining the environment, and encouraging a greater home-work life balance. We assess how mobility can best fit into your work culture. We also design telework and related