Deloitte Western Sydney

With the widespread adoption of virtual working due to COVID near the end of the existing workplace lease the Western Sydney leadership asked our Experiential Design team to assist them to define their future workplace requirement. Key considerations were how to retain their close knit community when employees were keen to continue to work remotely, how could they increase collaboration & creativity and how could the workplace support them to drive regional growth, community integration and continue to shape the future of Western Sydney. Core to this was rethinking client engagement, embracing hybrid working and leveraging technology to drive better outcomes.

The future Deloitte workplace will be a destination that acts as an incubator for our employees, clients, partners and the community to come together to connect, problem solve, share knowledge and leverage local and global expertise to make an impact for our clients and the region. To achieve this it needs to be a dynamic, energetic and activated experience that earns the commute of clients and employees and is dynamic and evolving. Key to this is community activation and ownership and we worked co-creatively with the business to reimagine the workplace experience and their role in bringing this to life.

The current workplace experience reinforces traditional linear work practices with rows of underutilised workstations and offices as focus work is now commonly undertaken at home. The future workplace experience will prioritise collaboration, teaming, social and engagement activities with a focus on connecting community to leverage face to face interactions to foster relationships, trust and social cohesion. This reinforces leadership’s desire to shift towards more collaborative, team based work practices while enabling employees to balance hybrid working to suit individual, team and client needs. This improves talent attraction and retention and focuses on adding value to clients instead of manual tasks.

The impact of hybrid work has been far reaching with a heightened focus on how the workplace can foster culture and purpose and reinforce brand & identity in addition to changes to ways of working, workplace typology and digital experience. Leveraging values based design to nudge behaviour and community activation, by including places such as the Yarning Circle in the Incubator, reinforce connected community, storytelling and inclusion as part of our lived experience. A key premise of the Western Sydney workplace is adaptability and evolving experiences. Work space archetypes are diverse to suit different project teaming needs with hackable and multi-use spaces able to cater for varying needs and preferences. The incubator space is flexible to cater for seminar, dining, workshop, training and community events in addition to formal and informal meeting and touchdown activities. The future tech solution considers key moments that matter to optimise the digital workplace experience and leverage technology to showcase, immerse, interact and ensure inclusive hybrid collaboration. A community management mindset with a calender of activations, events and pop up experiences provides additional incentive to come into the office for bump moments with colleagues. This workplace is for Western Sydney's people to shape and own.