How Bringing People Together is Transforming the Way a City Works
The City of Edmond’s new City Center Complex will significantly improve the city’s efficiency by moving multiple departments into a single, centralized location. Previously, the city’s staff operated out of five older buildings spread across town. The new facility, currently under construction, will unify those departments under one roof. The City Center Complex features a 60,000-square-foot City Hall building, a 14,000-square-foot Municipal Court and a public parking garage.
Other organizations can take inspiration from Edmond, demonstrating that centralizing services can improve efficiency, foster teamwork and make services more accessible.
Greater Efficiency with Centralized Departments
Centralizing departments into a unified location can have a transformative impact. By bringing teams closer together, organizations make collaboration easier and more frequent. In fact, 87% of business leaders believe developing the right workplace model is crucial to their organization’s success, particularly for employee engagement and productivity.¹
For Edmond, simply getting the right people together was a challenge when the departments were spread out across the city. REES worked with the city to determine which departments have the most interactions and then placed them in close proximity. Offices for city planning, engineering and code services are located on the first floor, while the mayor, Edmond City Council, the city manager, city attorney, risk management and others are on the second.
Interdepartmental Collaboration
A joint study by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) and Rob Cross, Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Business at Babson College, found that companies that actively promote collaborative working are five times as likely to be high performing.² For Edmond, while each department has its own designated area, the overall layout for departments is contiguous. Conference rooms, breakout spaces and informal interactive areas are strategically positioned throughout. This promotes a culture of employee collaboration.
Streamlined Services
In a large company or city, it can be difficult to know the right person or department to contact. Establishing a single point of contact streamlines communication and minimizes delays. Companies that effectively organize and manage customer experience can realize a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction.³ Cohesive systems benefit teams and customers with faster, higher-quality service—an approach the City of Edmond is using for its citizens.
The City Center Complex creates a “one-stop shop” for accessing city services such as planning and permitting. The layout includes welcoming lobby areas, conference rooms for larger meetings and smaller focus spaces for one-on-one consultations. Staff-designated areas are securely located in access-controlled zones. Additionally, the City Council Chambers has greater capacity for citizens to attend meetings, promoting greater engagement and providing a safe, functional environment for community dialogue.
Organizations looking to create an engaging, innovative workplace can look to the City of Edmond’s City Center Complex as an example. The centralized design enhances efficiency, improves collaboration and strengthens community engagement. By adopting similar strategies, corporate leaders can establish agile, collaborative organizations that serve their teams and stakeholders.
To see other examples of how REES used design to transform corporate workplaces, click here.
Sources
¹ Brodzik, Christina, Sue Cantrell, Kraig Eaton, John Forsythe, Michael Griffiths, Steve Hatfield, Lauren Kirby, David Mallon, Shannon Poynton, Nic Scoble-Williams, Joanne Stephane, and Yves Van Durme, “2023 Global Human Capital Trends Report”, Deloitte, January 9, 2023, https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/articles/glob175985_global-human-capital-trends-2023/GLOB175985_HUMAN-CAPITAL-TRENDS-2023.pdf.
² Samdahl, Erik, “Top Employers Are 5.5x More Likely to Reward Collaboration”, Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), June 22, 2019, https://www.i4cp.com/productivity-blog/top-employers-are-5-5x-more-likely-to-reward-collaboration.
³ Ehrlich, Oliver, Harald Fanderl, David Malfara, and Divya Mittagunta, “How the operating model can unlock the full power of customer experience”, McKinsey & Company, June 28, 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/how-the-operating-model-can-unlock-the-full-power-of-customer-experience.