04 December 2009

Schiavello Forum

Size Does Matter. Indesign Editorial Director Paul McGillick reviews the recent forum held at Schiavello in Sydney.

The Schiavello Forum with the topic, One Size Does Not Fit All, had its Sydney outing at the Hilton Hotel last week with an audience of over fifty people drawn from the architecture and interior design professions.

The forum canvassed the new workplace – flexible, multi-cultural, collaborative – and its potential for enhanced creativity and effectiveness in organisations.

One thing the Sydney forum had over Melbourne was the physical presence of Dr Jacqueline Vischer, an environmental psychologist based in Montreal who had been video-linked to the Melbourne event.

She described the environment as “a tool for work” and spoke of the challenge of “managing enclosure”. In short, the problem of open plan and the need to provide for both privacy (concentration, individual work and opportunities for reflection) and team-based activity (creative collaboration).

Like Kerrie Field (head of HR for St Vincent’s and Mater Health Sydney and Best HR Leader 2008), Dr Vischer stressed the need for “space for reflection”. This can be a physical space (such as the reflection gardens at St Vincent’s and Westmead Children’s Hospital), but also head space, essential for creativity.

Dr Vischer also confirmed what many of us have long suspected, that Australia is well ahead of North America in this regard where, she said, clients would question paying people to do nothing and look out at an attractive landscape.

Kerrie Field stressed the need for the work environment to embrace diversity and innovation. This would only happen, she said, if it was a place to connect and belong, imagine and create, inspire and motive, grow and develop, and provide community and a social network.

And just to show that all this theory does work, Eric Dodds spoke entertainingly and insightfully about his enormous corporate experience doing just this – like transforming the stagnant culture of the NRMA. Workplace design, he said, was “a part of organisational transformation” where change management was vital.

Like the other speakers, he emphasised that, since we spend a very large part of our waking lives at work, it was essential that we ”feel good about coming to work”.

Certainly, attendees felt good about coming to the Schiavello forum. Let’s have more of them.

Paul McGillick
Editorial Director, Indesign Publishing.

You can watch the full forum on Schiavello's webpage.