In May 2016, a team from Momentum helped celebrate a milestone with workplace experience and benchmarking firm Leesman as they opened their New York office. Momentum is proud to have been an early North American partner of Leesman's, and that relationship has shaped how we approach workplace design-build strategy ever since.
As the world's largest independent workplace effectiveness benchmarking platform, Leesman captures how employees experience their workplaces through a standardized survey, learning what activities matter most to them, what spaces support those activities, and where the environment is getting in the way.
Momentum integrates the Leesman Index into our credit union and community bank workplace strategy process, using the data to give every building occupant a voice in the design of their future space and to identify what's working well enough to carry forward. The survey covers seven areas: collaboration, technology, environmental design, furniture and layout, indoor environmental quality, facilities and services, and organizational strategy.
We recently sat down with Momentum President Mark Alguard — who was at the 2016 celebration and has been applying Leesman data to credit union and community bank headquarters and branch design projects for over a decade through Momentum's plan-design-build process — to reflect on what the partnership has produced.
What drew you to Leesman when you first encountered them?
"They weren't trying to sell anything. They weren't trying to push any sort of building solution. It was all about listening to the employees and figuring out what their work days looked like — in terms of activities and the tools and spaces they used — and then getting to the bottom of what elements of the workplace environment were important, what worked well and what could work better. At the scale Leesman was collecting data, we realized we could find correlations between these data points and an overall lift in workplace experience and productivity."
Ten years in, what has the data actually shown you about how credit union workplaces have changed — or haven't?
"We pretty much always uncover a strong level of dissatisfaction with environmental quality elements — things like views of the outdoors, lighting quality, acoustics, temperatures, and aesthetics. These elements have some of the most well-studied and highest correlation with productivity and engagement. Low quality, dull, and uncomfortable environments have a significant drag on employees — greater fatigue, lower engagement, poorer connection with their work, and lower productivity. One shift I've seen over the past ten years is the increased demand for spaces for collaboration and relationship building. Employees are placing a lower priority on their individual workstations and offices in exchange for much better, stimulating, interesting, and supporting collaboration and amenity spaces."
Is there a project where the Leesman results pushed the design in a direction you wouldn't have gone otherwise?
"We frequently tell the story of a team that was so dissatisfied with their views of the outdoors that we designed a building that was split into a V-shape so that we were nearly able to double the number of people sitting near a window. This building design was more expensive but we ran the numbers early and the credit union felt it was well worth the investment."
That kind of decision is easier to make when the data exists to support it. When you consider that 90 to 95 percent of an office building's lifecycle costs go toward employee salaries and benefits, the math on investing in workplace experience shifts considerably. In an industry where the demand for data-driven decision-making capability continues to grow, particularly in credit union workplace design, Leesman gives us the precision to have that conversation with clients.
Curious how the Leesman Index shapes our workplace design process? Let's talk.