Having chosen your procurement route, you should appoint the appropriate space planners to carry out a space audit and to produce your accommodation strategy. The accommodation strategy will cover all the points raised in the brief.
It will be important to get a clear understanding of the nature of your company’s business. This will normally be achieved through a series of interviews with key staff. The bigger the company, the more interviews may be required.
The objective is to understand not only how the company functions as an entity, but also how it interfaces with its customers, clients and suppliers. Be prepared to answer questions that might seem irrelevant to the process of space auditing. Remember, a company functions at many different levels, from the finance department, to sales and marketing. Each will have its own unique relationship with the rest of the company, its customers, clients and suppliers.
The idea of the space audit is to find out how to make the company function more effectively, financially. Financial success, however, will be influenced by more than working patterns alone – image, location and facilities such as transport, recreation and shopping will all affect staff attitudes and therefore productivity. All of these aspects will be considered during the interview process.
How you and your staff operate
Next, the various kinds of work carried out by individuals within the organisation will be studied. Information will be gathered by means of interviews and also by means of questionnaires, sent to relatively large numbers of staff. Subjects covered will sometimes be very general, sometimes very specific, because this process is about finding out not only how staff work themselves, but also how they work with other people. This process will ensure that the right kinds of working environments are provided for the needs of your staff.
The questionnaire will ask how important an aspect is and how the current provision matches up. In this way, shortfalls in important areas, or over-provision in unimportant areas can be identified and eliminated.
The questionnaire may be sent out in paper format, it may be posted on an Intranet site or sent by e-mail to respondents. Paper and e-mail work better than Intranet as a means of getting good levels of response. Look for 50% response rate as an ideal for electronic media, although this is difficult to achieve with Intranet questionnaires.
An example of a space audit questionnaire
The needs of your staff, however, are not the only consideration. There are all the issues in the brief that you will not ask the staff about – the property and business triggers.
You may wish to revisit the property and business triggers checklists in ‘Relocation or reorganisation? – Look at your business and property’ (or see links below). Please use the link below. To return to this action, simply use the ‘back’ button in your browser.
An example of a proximity diagram
From all of this information, an ideal model of the organisation can be built, detailing exactly how much space your business will need and in what format or layout. It will tell you how much space each department needs, who needs to be next to whom, who needs to have access from visitors, who needs special environment
