The GSK Workspace Performance Hub : Promoting productivity and wellbeing through office design

Reflecting employees’ needs in the physical workspace should form a key part of a company’s ethos. As a major global healthcare company with a large real estate portfolio, GSK identified an opportunity to explore the impact of the work environment on employee experience and performance in the face of the growing attraction of co-working spaces. GSK’s Worldwide Real Estate and Facilities (WREF) team, alongside leaders in innovation, strategy and science, designed and developed the Workspace Performance Hub (WPH) as a way to measure and quantify this impact. The WPH facilitated the testing of a number of environmental variables on the occupants’ physiology, wellbeing and productivity. The WREF team and their partners, EY Seren and ART Health Solutions, designed a rigorous scientific approach to safely explore the impact of workplace design and environmental factors, such as temperature and biophilia, on 70 GSK employees (50 in the WPH and 20 in a control group) across a six-month period. The study showed that physical environment has a considerable impact on employee health, wellbeing and performance. Participants experienced an increase in cognitive performance after their residency of the WPH, while also reporting a reduction in stress. In addition, occupants saw a rise of 17 per cent in innovation cycles during their stay. The greater variety of workstations, circadian lighting and biophilia also meant that the WPH residents were more active and had a lower resting heart rate than their control group counterparts. While further research is required on a larger scale and across a variety of personas representing different working styles and cultures, this pilot study demonstrates that by creating better, tailored human experiences, organisations can create environments that bring value to the business and their employees.