Shared space focus

When Australia’s largest telecommunication company, Telstra, made a corporate decision to embark on a Future Ways of Working (FWoW) project, Uplifting Solutions monitor arms became an integral part of the project.

Being a global company Telstra’s focus is to provide secure and seamless connectivity to staff and customers. In a global corporate environment where time, distance, geographic location and different devices should no longer be a hindrance to remain connected. Telstra’s vision is to enable people to use any device to connect to any corporate application at any location; by delivering simplified access, increased collaboration, integration and productivity.  Also, today’s workers want flexibility to manage their personal lives alongside their work. In order to meet these demands, Telstra has implemented a number of initiatives within the business to enhance global mobility and increased collaboration.  These initiatives have not only enhanced user’s technology experiences but have enabled customers and partners to work better together and be more productive.

Telstra’s Future Ways of Working office design has less focus on individual desks and a greater focus on shared spaces to encourage collaboration.  A primary objective of the program was to enable diversity in the workplace with solutions that supported mobility and flexible working.

FWoW is designed to provide Telstra employees with adaptable and adjustable workplace settings, where they can choose from a variety of workstation configurations, and all different shaped workstations, and work in a way that best supports the particular project that they undertake on a day to day basis.  Flexibility is and choice in the configuration is absolutely integral to the different set ups, so that employees may enjoy a wide variety of working environments that enhance productivity and cooperative working.

The initial project was located in Sydney CBD at 400 George Street, where Telstra completely remodelled many of the floors in an existing commercial building, changing the layout to provide an attractive open space with a range of work group areas and productivity clusters.  All the desktops were equipped with Uplifting Solutions monitor arms, primarily the 7Flex series of monitor arms, two of which were placed on each desktop and one of which was the configured with a laptop tray.

This allowed greater mobility and flexibility for all employees, and greatly facilitated the use of different devices which could be placed on the laptop tray and then rotated or configured so as to work in conjunction with the existing computer monitor, also attached to an Uplifting monitor arm, allowing the two devices to be used in tandem for greater productivity.  This meant that any Telstra employee could work on any part of the given floor, in conjunction with their colleagues, and be confident to have a full range of ergonomic flexibility, and be able to work in a productive, comfortable and cooperative fashion with the different project teams to which they were allocated.

The 7Flex monitor arm provided the benefit of ergonomic flexibility; one model was able to be used on nine different desktop layouts with a wide range of different monitors and laptops, providing simplicity and utility.

FWoW has been a complete success and is being rolled out across the enterprise, serving as an activity based workplace model for other large Australian corporations.