Managing the Integration of
People, Buildings, and Technology
Initially, employees were skeptical about the feasibility of shedding space and
going unassigned. To quell suspicion and win support, GSA implemented a
thorough change management program that included workshops with Gensler,
e-learning courses with AgilQuest, and a series of living labs.
Gensler led a series of workshops with 35 GSA leadership teams over a period
of two weeks, sharing and building upon information that they had already
gathered: badging and utilization data, answers from a survey about work styles,
and facts about how many people are actually in the building on a given day.
"Armed with that, we modeled the data right in front of them, and asked How
many of your staff are never here? Always here?, et cetera," said McLaurin. "So
according to what you've told us, this is how many seats you need. And in nine
out of 10 interviews, we had leadership realize that this was not as scary as they'd
imagined. And that started to tell us that we could easily start to absorb far more
people into the building than we'd originally thought."
While Gensler helped to show how people would use the new building, AgilQuest
was busy helping to build bridges between the people and how the technology
platform would affect how they use the space.
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