The Way to Enough

Designing the Hydro Flex Work Space

A group of Hydro employees has gathered to describe how Hydroflex works. Their impressions have some import: Hydro plans to build a new headquarters near Oslo, and lessons learned from the work experiments will influence the building's design. How many workers must it accommodate -- and how many will work at home? Which interior designs make workers most productive?

The connection between work and design is critical. As the discussion unfolds, however, a surprising message emerges. These experiments aren't just about flexibility. Nor is the new headquarters just about heightened productivity. Underlying all of the planning is the pursuit of something more important: diversity.

Kjerstin Skeidsvoll, 29, a consultant in the HR department: The idea of Hydroflex is this (she flashes a vision statement on the screen): "To work effectively, unconstrained by time or location across the organization." You want to become a more flexible organization. Hydroflex is about getting out of rigid thinking. You need to concentrate more on the product you deliver and less on how much time you work. The distinction is important for the office building.

Erik Gudbrandsen, 29, a psychologist who works in Hydro Data, the company's information-technology department: With the new building, the question is not "What should the modern office look like?" but rather "What kind of people are working here, and what kind of work is being done?" At Hydro Data, our starting point for Hydroflex was simple -- lack of space. From there, our goal has become something grander (he uses an overhead projector to flash a vision statement on a screen): "We will have flexible working conditions that enable all employees, their families, and the organization to achieve balance in a functional and satisfying way." But Hydro Data is also an internal service provider for Hydro divisions. We show people how to use technology as an organizational-development tool. And for those customers, our goal is diversity. For example, we don't want to make it impossible for people to work for Hydro just because they have small children. If we exclude one part of the work world, then we won't have enough people, and we won't have enough talent.

Skeidsvoll: If you can offer this or that solution, more people will be able to work here. To attract and keep the people you want, you need to give them flexibility and freedom.

Redefining Diversity

In offices throughout the United States, "diversity" is an issue that people discuss exhaustively -- but to little effect. We have built a complex apparatus and a thriving industry for confronting human differences. The effort is admirable, yet diversity remains an inherently self-limiting goal -- a matter of pursuing equal opportunity by coding employees according to race, gender, or national origin.

In Norway, where only 5% of the population is non-Norwegian, diversity has a different meaning. "Diversity doesn't necessarily concern gender, ethnicity, or culture," Sohlberg says. Nor does it mean allowing for the possibility of difference. Rather, diversity means cultivating difference and puncturing conformity.

For Hydro to compete globally, its managers must seek out different perspectives -- and make use of those perspectives. They must understand that the measure of an organization's creativity is directly related to its diversity. "A company can't be creative when it employs a group of homogenous people," Sohlberg says. "Creativity and innovation come from putting unlike people together."

But there's something more -- a proposition that's ingenious as well as intuitive. Diversity, Norwegians argue, is personal. "You have a lot of diversity within yourself," says Sohlberg. "In an organization, one has to be conscious of that kind of diversity." Because people aren't one-dimensional, they can contribute in a variety of ways at any given moment -- and in a variety of ways over time.

Which leads Sohlberg to yet another modest proposal: "What we need," she suggests, "is career development based on each stage of a person's life. Atle has young children, so he should travel less. People who are young and single or who have no children often love to travel. And they should. You should be able to plan your career according to your phase of life."

That "timed-release career path" that Sohlberg describes does not as yet appear in Hydro's HR packets. But it's under discussion -- a future weapon in the company's competitive armory.

And, ultimately, this is all about competitiveness. "The diversity issue is so important because the world today is more complex than ever," Sohlberg says. Only those people who have rigid mind-sets and narrow responsibilities are free to work every day from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. -- in the same location, sitting at the same desk, without distraction. In the global economy, the company that insists on that kind of competence will eventually cut itself off from the talent that it needs to survive.