Look north: Manchester event to pose the big workplace questions

How can we ensure employee wellbeing in and out of the office? How can data help us build more functional and sustainable workplaces? How can we make better investments to support the workplace? These and more critical questions will be the topics of discussion at WORKTECH Manchester. Taking place on 28 June at Circle Square in Manchester, this conference will delve into the hot topics facing people, place and technology in the workplace arena.

What should you be looking out for?

Sex, drugs and data

Elizabeth Nelson, Co-Founder and Head of Research & Innovation at Smart Building Collective Certification, will be giving an unconventional keynote address, tackling everything from hormones to data collection in her quest to move the evolution of smart buildings forward and create office spaces that work better for people and the planet. Meeting the needs of every single person in an office might sound like a big task, but it’s one that Elizabeth Nelson is unafraid to tackle.

Hybrid health

How do we support employees when they’re in the office and at home? This is the question that Lucile Kamar, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at ITN, will be posing to the audience. With a large-scale shift towards hybrid working, we may need to rethink our wellbeing strategies to keep up with the changes in how we work. Leaders and employees will need to address how they talk about wellbeing, inclusion and diversity in order to make real and lasting changes within the workplace.

This talk will be followed by a session with a panel of experts to discuss how companies have addressed this need for a new approach to wellbeing in the world of hybrid working.

Efficient investment

In this presentation, Katie McDwyer, Senior Manager at Accenture, and her colleague Diulia Severgnini, a Digital Workplace Consultant, will discuss how companies can make sure that their investments in technology are financially viable. In the last few years, companies have been reassessing what technology they need and adapting the workplace to offer a better experience to employees to bring them back. This has required a significant amount of investment in new technologies, but how do companies ensure that these are worthwhile? Far too often decisions to invest are made in isolation as a result of siloed thinking – this can have negative effects for the outcomes of investments. In this unstable economic climate companies cannot afford to be making rash decisions. This discussion will equip companies with the tool they need to make smart decisions and build cost efficiency into their digital workplace strategy.

AirBnB your offices

Before Aaron Taylor Harvey was Creative Director of Spaces Of, he was the in-house architect for AirBnB and worked on a series of stunning offices all over the world. Making office spaces fun, interesting and exciting may not sound like the most challenging task, but when companies were trying to bring staff back to the office after the pandemic and were encountering resistance, the importance of a magnetic office was revealed.

Enter AirBnB Destinations, an approach to creating compelling and engaging workspaces that people want to use. In this talk we are taken for a whistlestop tour of some of these destinations and we will gain insight into how elements that came out of these projects can be reused in other spaces, helping us all to create offices the employees are excited to return to.

Book tickets and find out more about WORKTECH Manchester here.