One of the things that intrigues me about the discussions around new ways of working is how you measure the success of a workplace project. Whether its Activity Based Working, Agile Working, Flexible Working—or whatever you like to call it—it always seems to be presented as great leap forward in transforming an organisation.  The project sponsors always say that people would never go back to old ways of working, it was transformative, etc., etc., etc.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a firm believer in new ways of working. I’ve written a lot about the inevitability of technology-driven mobile working.

But where is the data? Productivity in white-collar work is notoriously difficult to measure. Maybe the next best thing is to measure and benchmark staff perceptions before and after a transformative workplace project.

Colliers International in Australia recently created new workplaces for our three  eastern seaboard offices concurrently. We thought this would be a perfect opportunity to see if we could measure the performance of the workplace after the transformation.

So we are using Leesman over the next few weeks to survey staff perceptions of the new workplace. We chose Leesman because they have a huge database of standardized responses and, quite frankly, there didn’t seem to be any other comparable tool available.

We’ll be analyzing the results over the next few weeks, so watch this space for updates on how effective the survey is in measuring the success of our own workplace transformation project.