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Introduction
Towards the end of 2015, the Centre for People and Buildings (CfPB) partnered with Hospitality Group to start the futures forum study. Several organisations in The Netherlands expressed an interest in exploring what expected trends and developments might bring to the evolving work environment of office buildings in The Netherlands. A consortium of 11 large (>1,000 employees) Dutch (semi-) governmental and financial organisations provided the necessary financial support and stakeholders for the study. The research goals were to discover and describe generic trends and their implications for the future workplace and office environment. This was to translate them in The Netherlands’ context and to be able to set a future agenda for the organisations’ supporting services towards 2025. The research started at the end of 2015 and concluded one year later, i.e. at the end of 2016.
Objectives
The study had three main objectives. First, to recognise and describe common issues in facilitating the future employee from a human resources (HR), information technology (IT), CRE and facility management (FM) perspective. Second, to understand what issues for the future workplace should be addressed in a communal way by the organisations’ support services. And finally, setting a future agenda for supporting services in The Netherlands towards 2025.
Method
To gain insight into perceived future directions, several methods were used to bring together the perspectives of different stakeholders. First, a literature study provided an overview of the current state of articles and research. This was to focus the direction of the study, to sum up some of the contemporary views on the issues and to provide a framework of eight themes for the topics considered in the study.
Using this framework, three explorative steps were taken in the research, namely, focus groups with end-users, a Delphi study with a panel of experts and finally a “pre-design” session. By using these different steps, an attempt was made to approach the topic of future workplace developments using a “wide focus”. Deliberately, both end-users and experts were consulted, and in the final step, a translation was made from the study’s results to practice implications.
Focus groups were held with end-users within the participating companies (±120 end-users in focus groups of maximum ten persons). These focus groups were used to explore...