Habital® – Morgan Lovell

Morgan Lovell is a workplace design and fit out company with a strong workplace consultancy offer to underpin its work. It is part of the Morgan Sindall Group plc and has provided workplace solutions to a variety of commercial and public sector clients for over 43 years. As a leader in the UK office design and build sector, Morgan Lovell has to be at the cutting edge of workplace strategy and design.

Understanding the needs of its own people is as important as understanding the needs of its clients. Knowing that the world of work has changed over the last 24 months, Morgan Lovell wanted to understand the tools available to improve their solutions. The timing of the collaboration with Measuremen was perfect, as it recently undertook its own employee survey and wanted to validate and better understand the results.

Morgan Lovell has two offices in the South of England. A head office in Central London, and a Southern office in Bracknell. Having these two offices of a similar size also provided an opportunity for the organisation to compare locations and learn if there are any differences in culture between them.

Problem

Having worked with Measuremen for a number of years, Morgan Lovell knew the solutions that Measuremen provided well. However, Habital® had been redeveloped to be a forward-looking solution that would help organisations navigate the new workplace landscape that was embracing hybrid working practices. This was new to Morgan Lovell, and it wanted to know more about how it might help to better understand the needs of its employees.

The results from the employee satisfaction survey were very favourable regarding the management of the organisation. There were some issues with well-being and how valued employees felt, so the management team were keen to address this. The management team valued the feedback from their employees and wanted to improve where possible, for the benefit of everyone.

Measuremen approached Morgan Lovell to provide them with a solution that could help solve the problem they were facing. It would also provide highlights into any differences observed between the two offices. The results would be used to target specific issues highlighted in the annual survey and provide the insights needed to make improvements in each.

Challenges

As the employee survey was only completed a few months before Habital® was implemented, there was a concern of survey fatigue for employees. As Measuremen explained, Habital® is very different from the employee survey that had been shared. As the app was based on experience sampling, it provided very different insights into what employees were actually doing and where. This, combined with the samples related specifically to different elements of work-life, created a more dynamic experience for the employees.

To inform the London office about the app, Measuremen was invited to provide an overview of the app and the benefits of joining the study. Having a better understanding of the solution and what it could provide, encouraged the employees to be part of the process. The benefit of the dashboards within the Measuremen Portal allowed analysis of the participants and the impact of specific interventions during the study period.

Solution

Morgan Lovell was able to deploy Habital® at a point when staff had been able to return to the office in a full-time capacity. This provided a good basis for evaluating the return to office policy and how it was working for staff. This was part of the Habital® solution within the ABC’s, which provides insights into where staff choose to work. By analysing this data it was clear that there was a trend for employees to work more from home or elsewhere compared to the office on a Friday. However, this did not affect performance as this was on average higher than on Monday. There was also a clear improvement in mood on average for Friday as this day returned the highest average compared to all other days.

With Habital® assessing more factors related to the health and well-being of the employees it was able to pinpoint some of the specific areas that had been highlighted in the previous staff survey. Knowing that certain aspects of working practices and company culture needed to be investigated further, the Habital® solution provided further insights as to the root causes of these factors.

Knowing that employees are actively working on their physical [85%] and mental health [100%] is of benefit to the employees and the organisation alike. Recommendations being suggested to provide further access to gyms and establish better communication lines for issues within the organisation provides focussed feedback to provide all employees with the support they need to improve. As employees felt they were able to communicate well with their managers, we can determine that this is potentially a need within the organisation from an HR perspective.

One of the highlights of using Habital® was understanding how the office was performing following the period of time when the majority of staff were working from home. Following the return, many found the functionality of the office could improve with scores for acoustics, temperature, design and biophilia scoring just over 5 out of 10. These were outweighed by the ‘emotional’ benefits of being in the office, which were stated as the ability to concentrate, connectedness to the business and overall health benefits.

“Habital® was fun to use. It is very user friendly and quick to answer. A reminder tells you to fill it in but you are actually quite intrigued by what the questions might ask you, as each day they are different and sometimes surprising.” - Ashley - Workplace Consultant at Morgan Lovell

Outcomes

From the insights provided by the Habital® study, Morgan Lovell was able to intervene and provide employees with the resources they were seeking. As there was a comprehensive benefits package provided, this was communicated to employees to help them understand the resources already available to them. This included a number of health and wellbeing resources that addressed the points highlighted in the Habital® results.

The scores for the office environment were addressed by a complete redesign of the office to improve the time spent there compared to working from home.

Following these changes, it is also possible for Morgan Lovell to redeploy Habital®, to assess how the changes and interventions have affected the employee experience in both office locations.

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