Australia Post to set up 'colab' space to pilot new ways of working

Australia Post will pilot what it calls a ‘live’ workspace, in a building under construction in Melbourne.

Head of workplace Claudette Leeming wrote in a LinkedIn post that the “burnley_colab is a pilot floor where teams will explore technology, spaces, and ways of working.”

Burnley_colab will be housed in Australia Post's Melbourne Support Centre, to "take shape in the year ahead', Leeming wrote.

The company intends to use the live ‘colab’ environment “to start testing our hypotheses” about new ways of working, and to collect feedback and “layers of data and observations behind the scenes” to support Australia Post’s future workspace layouts and working models.

“Our burnley_colab experiment lies in the premise that the core value proposition of the physical workplace is to amplify the benefits of coming together; human to human connection,” Leeming wrote in the post.

She also wrote in the LinkedIn post that the experiment would cover three pillars: the desire to create an “optimal 'connected' workplace” using a mix of design, technology and team dynamics; building a mechanism to capture data on “this new workplace value proposition”; and finding ways to make workspaces more flexible and adaptive.

“What degree of adaptability is required not just over the period of a lease, but over the course of a week or even a day?” she wrote.

“How are different levels of adaptability facilitated - by fitout contractors? by smart workplace applications and management? or by the user themselves? 

“We will be testing degrees and ease of adaptability, and whether given the option, people do like to exert some influence on the set up of the workplace to meet their team's needs on any given day.”

Leeming added that Australia Post did not know how the program would pan out, particularly as “for many [participants it] will be their first real foray back into the workplace in over two years.”