The Designer Contractor Journey
In this episode of the Design and Hospitality podcast series we bring to you a collaboration between a designer and a contractor featuring insights from seasoned interior designer Firas Alsahin, Co-founder & Design Director at 4SPACE and acclaimed contractor Tarek F. Ardakani, General Manager at EMKAY Interiors I Fit-Out.
In this episode, our speakers bring into focus the impact of a seamless synergy between designers and contractors, weaving together artistic vision and practical execution to elevate any project’s success. The duo shares insights into overcoming common collaborative challenges and the need for adaptability and innovation to navigate the dynamic interior design landscape. From a designer's perspective, Firas sheds light on the art of selecting contractors, emphasizing the specific qualities that contribute to an ideal partnership. Join us on this episode as Firas and Tariq unveil the secrets to inculcate a successful relationship to help deliver design excellence.
Transcript:
Into
Welcome to the Design and Hospitality Podcasts! This is your weekly dose of inspiration, brought to you by INDEX and The Hotel Show.
In each episode, we invite visionary architects, industry experts, tech pioneers and enthusiasts to unpack bold ideas as we explore the latest global trends shaping the industry's future. So, turn up the volume and enter a world of creativity and insights.
Welcome to Index Podcast in collaboration with Workspace, where we uncover exciting interior design stories from a workspace point of view with renowned figures of our industry.
I'm your host, Shweta Gupta, the Senior Conference Manager for Index and Workspace, the show that transforms spaces with design, product and technology, coming to you this May.
I would like to introduce Emma Davis, who is the Chief People and Culture Excellence Officer at Masafi and will talk about the importance of prioritizing employee wellness and how to create a healthy workplace culture.
Emma, you have truly been at the forefront of promoting wellness and employee engagement for your organization.
So can you tell us, what are some effective strategies for promoting employee wellness and creating a culture of health and well-being in the workplace?
Good morning, it's so lovely to be here today.
And that was a title and a half, wasn't it?
Well done on getting that right.
Doesn't quite fit on business cards.
So one of the things that we looked at when we looked at well-being and employee engagement at Masafi was first of all our surroundings.
So our offices were in our cause and people expect to come into like a warehouse environment and it be very kind of industrial and then they walk into our office and it's like, wow.
Our CEO had this vision of this space that was engaging, bright, light.
We have life plants, we have plants everywhere.
Biophilic design done right.
He, you know, and it was his vision that this was a great workspace.
and one of the things we did was we used to all have offices.
I can't work with my team well.
I can't engage with the business well if I am trapped in a box.
It was a bit like a fishbowl.
So one weekend, he phoned me up.
He was like, should we take the offices down?
I said, let's take the offices down.
So we did it overnight.
We took it down.
We didn't tell anyone we were going to do it.
And in the morning, the leaders were like, where's my office gone?
And when we, maybe we should have told them in advance.
I don't know, but when we discussed it, we said, you know, actually what we want you to do is we want you to be, we want you to be with your teams, we want you to be able to talk, we want you to be able to instantly make decisions and be agile rather than being, oh, hang on a second, I've got to walk eight miles around to that other office.
So workspace-wise, that's what we did.
But at Massafi overall, what we've done with employee wellbeing and changing our culture around wellness, we thought differently.
COVID changed everything, but we didn't use it to define us.
And I think we always talk about post-pandemic, pre-pandemic.
We aren't looking at it like that.
We're looking at this as the future and this is how it should be.
So for us, our employee wellbeing strategy is something that is at the forefront of every decision we make as a business.
That's fantastic, honestly.
I think what we've seen in most cultures as well is that, yes, customers are important, but I think the mindset that is changing is employees are actually your biggest asset.
They are, and they are, the biggest cost to your business is your people.
So if you're getting that wrong, you have got some cost coming somewhere, whatever that looks like, and it's about prevention.
So for instance, medical insurance and things like that, wellbeing, that they're there to help us once we're sick.
If we prevent people from getting sick by doing things right, surely we're saving money.
So at Masafi, we're doing a step challenge at the moment, hence my good morning on the treadmill.
I'm determined, I am determined this time to be in the top 10 of people doing the challenge.
So it's around the health, the wellbeing, all those different things, but there is some saying out there, pizza and parties don't make for a wellbeing strategy.
It's bigger than that, but it is not brain surgery.
It's doing the right thing for your people all the time.
Absolutely.
You know, continuing this conversation, it's very important to understand how employers actually understand the right balance of productivity with the importance of wellbeing, because I understand that there's a thin line between being too free and between being too micromanaging.
Absolutely, and I think research tells us that micromanaging doesn't work.
But then you have the other side of things where if you do no managing at all, what happens?
And people like, people do like to be managed, but people really, really love to be led.
So it's about leadership.
It's about looking at your leadership team and making sure they're making the right decisions.
I was talking to our CFO before I came here today.
I was talking to her about this podcast and talking about what we've done and how proud we are of what we've achieved.
And she spent Tuesday afternoon in the desert with her team.
She took them all out, they had a barbecue, they chilled out and they spoke.
And you know, productivity, she said it's closing, it's month-end closing, but what she got back from her team as a result of that, you can't even measure.
It's, she saw productivity spike the rest of this week because she took them away, she talked to them about what she was expecting, what our big goals are for this year.
But also, something that's really important about that is when she did it, on a Tuesday afternoon.
What she didn't do was ask her team to come out on a Tuesday evening, or a Saturday morning, or a Sunday afternoon, and come away from their families.
We get very little time outside of work.
We're at work for a lot of time.
Absolutely.
If you're suddenly saying, oh, well, our wellbeing is we want everybody to run a marathon, so we're all gonna train every weekend, that's going to turn most of your staff off.
Absolutely.
If you say, we want you all to come and do a beach cleanup on a Monday morning, we're gonna provide the transport, we're gonna work together, we're gonna be there, we're gonna be present, you will get productivity from your staff.
And I think that there's been this thing where we've all gone, oh, wellbeing is we must all go out and spend time together, we must socialize together.
A lot of people don't want that.
They want to be with their families.
That's their well-being time.
So it's how employers use that.
And we have seen, by doing things during work time, productivity has spiked.
You know, as you mentioned in the example, what I really liked, I understand that month-end is the busiest time for finance and accounts especially.
And considering that they went out in the afternoon during month-end, I think that's a very bold statement out there, that if you don't, especially during this busy time, love and treat your employees with that sort of relaxation, it's no point doing it when things are anyway slightly calmer, so that's a great initiative right there.
And that came from the CFO.
That wasn't a HR said you must do this thing.
I think it's really important that HR is seen as the people who push wellbeing.
If that's the case, it's being done wrong.
Where we're getting it right is where leadership teams are coming together with that sense of wellbeing.
Fantastic, and I can already see how that really impacts the workspace completely.
From a more internal perspective now, because you mentioned earlier about your biophilic designs that Masafi has, so I'm gonna pick on that right now.
How do you think these sort of designs really support the well-being and productivity internally within the office environments?
Okay, so one of the things I'd like to talk about, and it's very important to me, is inclusivity of all.
So if you are designing a workspace around a CEO or one leader or one person's vision, you're not gonna get it right.
Now our CEO talked to everybody.
He understood, he said, what do we need?
What do you like?
What works for you?
How is this going to make you more productive?
So we do have an open plan workspace, but when you're thinking about design and workspace, you do have to think about including everybody.
So people who may not be able to work in an open plan workspace, what do we do about that?
How do we make sure they're considered?
What we've done at Masafi is we have private areas, so we have workspaces where people can go and work, closed rooms, a bit like a podcast room if you like.
We're building pods so that individuals can just go and work in there because whilst remote working is a thing, actually we found the majority of our staff didn't want to remote work.
So we looked at the design element for that.
So how does that bring people together?
And we must remember, one of, I know I said a lot about not doing social activities during working hours, but one of the things that we come to work for is that social element.
Yes, absolutely.
That's, you know, we get so much from that.
We really, really do.
And I think, as long as we're talking about that in the right way, rather than enforcing people back into the office or firing everyone, which I'm not sure was a great media message to send, But I think that let's look at the social element.
Let's look at how people, especially here, because we're all expats, majority expats, how does that social element come into your office?
So for instance, we created our Inspiration Station.
Wow.
So I love our Inspiration Station.
So what does that look like?
It's amazing, I'm gonna have to take you guys there.
Yes, I think we need to get inspired by your Inspiration Station as well.
So we had some graffiti artists come in and completely design a warehouse.
so we used a whole warehouse and people were like, this is a lot of space, this is prime space in our cars.
But the CEO, his vision was, make a social space where everybody can work better.
Yes, we have ping pong tables, yes, we have football tables, and everyone was like, oh, that's so last century.
No, it isn't.
Actually, I see people using that space, people who don't even work together, and all of a sudden, you've got a different atmosphere in your office, you've got a different culture, you've got a common goal that everybody wants to achieve for Masafi.
We all want to be the number one brand of water because everybody's coming together in that space where we've got the room to be energetic together.
We've done yoga in there, we've done some meditation.
But we use that space for our town halls, those kind of things where we bring everyone together and say, you know, how are you, what's going on?
We have an incredible barista and an incredible coffee too, that helps.
So consider me done for visiting it for the coffee especially.
You know, Emma, you've spoken about all the different aspects and you know how you're really working together, but I do want to touch base on something really important that struck me in this conversation.
You spoke about leadership.
So just coming to that, a very important aspect of leadership is also measuring ROI.
Because while you put these fantastic initiatives and you know, while you're doing everything out of your good heart and good will for the benefit of the employees, you also do want measure a certain ROI from these well-being programs that are put together.
So how do you think companies actually measure successes of these programs?
Okay, so as a first point, you don't need to spend a fortune on well-being.
You really don't.
If you've got the right culture and the right behaviors and the right leaders leading your business, you can't put a price on that.
And I always say this to people, You can't, I can't tell you what you get from coming to work for us because you've got an amazing leadership team but you've got these people around you.
I can't put a value on that.
But I also don't spend 15 million dirhams a year on wellbeing with our staff.
Yes, we invested in the inspiration station.
What we invested in was our people and making sure they felt amazing.
Now, a story which I am sharing is our return on investment for that happened in 2022.
We have had our best year.
Now I know that Dubai population's increased.
We have had our best year with employee satisfaction.
We hit unbelievable scores.
And again, we haven't invested like millions of dirhams into this.
We've just sorted the behaviors out.
We've told people, we hope you feel well.
We did invest in our medical insurance.
I know that's prevention.
But we've also got within our medical insurance some things that do do the prevention rather than the cure.
So that's important.
And if you said to our CFO, what was the return on investment, she would tell you it was priceless because of what we've seen from our numbers this year, in 22, our satisfaction and how she feels about our business and the feeling.
And yeah, priceless is the word I would use.
But it's being measured, it is being measured in sales figures.
I think the biggest thing that we get from this is that retention is actually a really big ROI as well.
And congratulations, first of all, for those skyrocketing numbers and doing as well as you can.
But I think it's just great when you align the leadership team with what the goals are, when everyone comes together as a team, it's not my team, your team, it's just one team, that's the Masafi team.
And I think that's exactly what you have gone there and established as the senior leadership.
So Emma, I just want to understand a bit more on how do you think companies today, across industries actually, can really bring that wellness element?
If this has to be your small suggestion or something that every company can adopt without, as you said, spending millions of theorems, a great closing statement, suggestion to everyone out there.
Start listening and really listen.
Don't assume you know what your employees want.
We've all made this assumption.
We've assumed that we know our employees want to, right again, back to a marathon running.
We've assumed our employees want us to do that.
We've assumed our employees want us to go and do X, Y, and Z.
When you make those assumptions, you're likely to get it wrong.
Start listening, start really, and you have to have a psychological safety culture within your business before you can listen, by the way, because people won't tell you the truth unless you've got that psychological, yeah, real, I feel safe here and I feel safe to voice my opinion and I feel safe to share that.
That's the first thing.
Listen, psychological safety culture and be present.
Be present with your people.
If you aren't, then you're gonna be in a different space from them all the time.
And I'm, again, not suggesting that you're always with them.
But when you are with them, when you are being that leader, be there for them and really listen.
Well, I hope a lot of companies take this into account from our lovely Emma.
Thank you so much Emma for joining us for this podcast.
I myself as an employee can feel so much of that energy and that positivity just by having this conversation with you, so thank you for your time and we hope to have another one with you very soon in a lot more detail to talk about a lot more exciting projects that Masafi clearly have been doing for their productivity and wellness of employees.
Thank you.