The Challenge
The City of Ghent had a historical and highly outdated infrastructure. The supporting city services were scattered across various buildings throughout the city, none of which met the needs of a modern, customer-oriented government. The City decided to consolidate all city services at the Zuid site in three buildings. This decision had several objectives: improving accessibility to city services for citizens, increasing collaboration between departments, and reducing the square footage used for office environments. The latter led the city to explore the possibility of implementing activity-based working.
Our Approach
brainmove was hired to guide the city in implementing a new way of working, where employees would no longer have a dedicated, assigned workspace, but would share workspaces instead. The City decided to involve brainmove in testing new collaboration principles through various pilot projects.
The new workplace concept started to take shape within the organization, but the City lacked a clear, unified framework to guide these changes. In collaboration with the MAT, we developed a clear vision of “working smart” based on stakeholder interviews and several workshops. This vision was rooted in the BBC (Building Based Collaboration) model and perfectly aligned with the City’s strategic objectives: strengthening service delivery, embedding sustainability, enhancing attractiveness as an employer, and ensuring employee well-being.
In the next phase, we developed the general principles for a tailor-made activity-based workplace concept for the City, based on the experiences gained from the pilot projects. We used a participatory approach with creative workshops and developed a methodology to map organizational profiles and objectively define workplace needs.
Each of the three buildings at the Zuid site was assigned a specific function. In collaboration with a project group, brainmove set up a development path for the concept of these buildings and provided advice on accessibility, service delivery, and safety.
The Result
Over several years of collaboration, brainmove developed a comprehensive, tailor-made workplace concept for the City of Ghent that could be applied across all renovation projects. In connection with this, we supported the development of a renewed service model with a clear division between back-office and front-office functions. Additionally, we created a targeted approach for guiding the involved stakeholders and supported the new way of working. Through our approach, we were able to reduce resistance and engage employees in the change process through “safe” participation and clear communication. We also activated leaders to work with their teams to ensure the success of the “Smart Working” initiative.
