We understand how influential the right work environment can be to enhance productivity, innovation, and collaboration. Balancing business objectives with staff preferences is a complex endeavor, and creating a successful work strategy that integrates workstreams such as HR and employee experience, operations, technology, compliance, finance, and real estate can be challenging. While there are many resources, articles, and points of view of what the future of the office should look like, very few, if any, focus on how to create the optimal plan that can be operationalized. We work with clients to deliver and operationalize a plan that supports your employees – no matter where they work.
No matter where your organization is in the process, our tiered process achieves everything from visioning and goals, discovery and analysis, creating a playbook, change management, user experience, and space planning and design.
Need help reshaping how and where your people work?
Tell us about your business and the challenges you're facing, from hybrid collaboration to retention. We'll build a plan made for you and help you put it into action.
Success Story
How Northleaf Reimagined Its Toronto Office HQ for Growth, Brand & People
The new office now spans 45,000 square feet over two floors, delivering a modern, brand-aligned workspace that enhances employee engagement. The final design reflects the firm’s commitment to providing an optimal work environment, with dedicated workspaces.
HOW IT WORKS
Our Workplace Strategy Approach
01. Kick-off
We begin by meeting with key stakeholders to clarify your goals and timeline for the project. After conducting a thorough assessment of your workforce, workplace and change plans and collecting all pertinent data, we assign roles and responsibilities to team members and develop a project schedule.
02. Discovery
Leveraging a variety of tools and methods, we work with different levels of your organization to gather qualitative and quantitative information. We then utilize these findings to create the project framework, establishing overall project goals, drivers and measurements for success.
03. Analysis
Utilizing the findings of the Discovery Phase, we identify key drivers and insights and begin to conceptualize the new workplace. We consider several scenarios and address the opportunities and challenges of each to identify the solution that makes the most of your square footage.
04. Recommendations
We present any viable workplace scenarios to your leadership team before making a final recommendation. Once a scenario has been selected, we develop an actionable workplace strategy that supports your organization, enhances the employee experience and informs your broader real estate plan.
YOUR NEEDS
Core Service Offering
Workplace Strategy
We align people, process, and technology to create a business environment that increases productivity and enhances the employee experience.
Change Management
We manage workplace change by proactively and transparently engaging your employees to ensure a successful transition and implementation.
Workforce Strategy
We offer a robust workforce analytics solution that measures employee behaviour so you can make informed decisions about the future of your workplace.
Employee Experience Advisory
We help you navigate a host of programs and tools designed to enhance the employee experience and give you an edge in the war for talent.
Program Management
We implement workplace standards across multiple sites to ensure a consistent experience.
Occupancy Planning & Space Management
We leverage space utilization data to help you effectively manage space, enhancing your ability to control cost and achieve flexibility.
Design Standards
We help you establish design standards to ensure your physical space reflects your culture, reinforces your brand, and promotes a seamless experience for every employee and visitor.
Workplace Technology Advisory
We are technology agnostic and offer you objective insights and guidance as you contemplate the optimal technology solutions for your workplace suite.
Workplace strategy defines the plan; change management delivers it. Workplace strategy aligns your people, processes, and technology to determine how your space should work and what the future of work looks like for your organization. Change management is how that plan is operationalized, by preparing employees, addressing resistance, and supporting leaders so the strategy holds in practice. Most successful workplace transformations need both working together.
There is no single correct hybrid model, because hybrid work is a spectrum rather than a binary choice. The right model depends on your culture, the makeup of individual teams, your leadership style, and staff preferences. We help you locate where your organization sits on the spectrum, which ranges from fully in-person to fully remote, and recognize that different teams may land in different places. The most sustainable policies are built collaboratively with both company and team leaders, then revisited as you learn what works.
A strict return-to-office mandate is not the only option, and it is not always the most effective one. Research by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are just as productive, equally promotable, and more likely to stay than fully in-office staff. Rather than defaulting to a mandate, we help you understand what your own attendance and engagement data is telling you, then design a policy that fits your culture and supports retention.
Low office attendance is often a symptom of deeper organizational factors rather than the core problem, and attendance is not the same as engagement. Upgrading the physical space alone rarely changes behaviour. The more reliable approach is to cross-reference attendance data with engagement scores and factors such as commute distance, so you can see who is coming in, who is not, and why. That insight lets you pull specific levers, from flexible hours to belonging and inclusion programs, and measure what actually moves the needle.
The most common reason workplace transformation projects stall is a lack of aligned leadership vision. When executives and team leaders are not aligned from the outset, the project loses momentum, and securing that alignment is often the hardest part. Other frequent challenges include resistance to change among both staff and leadership, long planning timelines, and underestimating the effort required to map the employee experience. Continuous testing and adjustment of space, technology, and policy is what keeps a project on track.
EXPERTISE
Our Experts
WORKPLACE SOLUTIONS
The traditional office layout and a one size fits all mentality is a thing of the past.
We know that for most organizations, a hybrid structure is inevitable. But a hybrid model isn’t one size fits all – it’s a spectrum. Understanding where your organization falls on the spectrum is the key is creating a sustainable workplace strategy.
We know that for most organizations, a hybrid structure is inevitable. But a hybrid model isn’t one size fits all – it’s a spectrum. Understanding where your organization falls on the spectrum is the key to creating a sustainable workplace strategy.
During this multi-part Work + Place Thought Leadership Series, we will be walking you through the key pieces leaders need to be thinking about as they create and implement their Return to Work plans. This includes everything from finding the right hybrid work model for your organization, achieving cost neutrality, technology considerations, how to implement your strategy and more.
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