Municipality of Utrecht
Rethinking work, re-imagining workspaces
Introduction
The Story of Municipality of Utrecht
The Opportunity
Real estate, facilities, IT, and HR worked on creating personas to use in multiple housing scenarios. After using all available information to make them, it did not take long before they realized it was a time-consuming exercise. Not only that, it turned out to be hard to create a consensus using subjective data points.
The municipality of Utrecht wanted to seize the opportunity to not only find a technology platform that helps them gather meaningful data in a matter of weeks. But they hoped to find a tool to speed up and upgrade the accuracy of creating fitting work environments.
Why Reworc
Reworc was the chosen platform because it uniquely connects workplace consulting with design. Not only did Utrecht need a proven way to collect behavioral and satisfactional data, but it also wanted to ensure that everything created from that point on would be sustainable for the future.
Reworc’s focus on involving all people within the organization and understandably visualizing the information was what triggered the municipality. The platform digitalizes all building blocks, and workplace logic makes Reworc indispensable. The expectation is that the post-pandemic work environment will continuously change until a suitable standard has been found.
Until then, Reworc is the only software solution that gave Utrecht tools to learn, adapt and build, keeping their employees happy and engaged.
How Reworc responded
When first approached by the municipality, we decided that because of the scale of the operation, it was wise to cut the project into 2 phases.
In Phase one, the focus was on redefining what work means.
We started with creating data-driven personas that could serve as a red line throughout the process—next, defining the building blocks and work settings for the new workplace concept of the municipality of Utrecht.
In multiple workshops, Utrecht defined what types of behavior support what kind of setting and building blocks. We created a distribution key to allocate areas to people for all different kinds of activities and behaviors. Thus the ‘’Space logic’’ was digitalized into an easy-to-use template for distributing and dispensing spaces.
In Phase 2, the focus was on digitalizing all new rules and gathering and translating user data into a new office environment.
Through extensive training and practice, Reworc ensured the software platform was used effectively, getting the most out of the benefits.
It's an opportunity to focus on the basic questions. What do you do, how do you do it and why do you do what you do?
The Results
As mentioned in the introduction, the municipality of Utrecht houses a very diverse group of people.
It is essential to create a support base to get everyone thinking in the same direction. We tackled this first challenge by involving all employees and communicating with them correctly.
Since the municipality had just changed its workplace concept and was not received very well, the team of professionals saw the opportunity to do things differently.
Using Reworc’s innovative analytical and programming tools, Utrecht equipped itself in a way that whatever the necessary changes will be in the future, can do it in mere days instead of weeks.
Using Reworc is how Utrecht keeps the work environment flexible, saving a lot of time in the process.
Whenever the municipality needs to move small groups of employees, it now requires only a couple of hours to analyze their needs and adjust or create necessary spaces.
