Habital – Diageo

The Habital study at Diageo Brands in Amsterdam revealed useful insights into the discrepancies between workplace preferences and actual satisfaction and how satisfaction levels correlate with psychological needs and personal characteristics.

Purpose

Often, modern offices in knowledge-working environments don’t seem to be used as intended and show mixed results in terms of user satisfaction. Such was the case for Diageo Brands in Northern Europe, and more specifically for the office in Amsterdam. In a search for the ultimate set of KPIs to measure and monitor the success and effectiveness of our current workplace strategy, Diageo initiated a workplace study to contribute to their quest.

As this is a common issue in activity-based workplace environments, Measuremen conducted one of their workplace surveys as Diageo’s independent workplace data collection partner in Europe for some years now. This resulted in a unique workplace study for Diageo. After careful preparations, the study kicked off in April 2016 with a duration of nearly two months.

It was focused on measuring the gap between workplace perception and actual behaviour in the offices and consisted of two components to collect data:

1. Online questionnaire: to gain insights into workplace preferences and perception, per personality, per department, per activity and per workplace type.
2. Experience sampling: a self-reporting method to prove the actual workplace usage per personality, per department, per activity and per workplace type. 

Next, to that, each employee received a report on an individual level at the end of the workplace study. The individual feedback created awareness about the employee’s actual workplace satisfaction and workplace preferences. This stimulated employees to change their workplace behaviour in order to find the best place to work.

Outcomes

This project was perceived highly valuable by the individual employees and as the initial questionnaire (part 1) was combined with the yearly standard Post Occupancy Evaluation survey (POE), meaning employees weren’t bothered with multiple surveys that would cover the same topic. The workplace study unveiled many new possibilities, as it runs via a smartphone application and all employees within the Diageo Amsterdam office are using smartphones or tablets in the work environment. Measuremen co-created this solution with two universities and a PhD researcher (J.G. Hoendervanger) which strengthens the credibility and objectivity of the outcomes.