Interview with Noema Paniagua, Managing Director AECC.
1. How did the need to update the AECC workspace arise?
The change in workspace emerged from the review of one of our founding objectives: patient treatment. The shift in the concept of patient care based on a holistic, multidisciplinary vision led us to also reconsider our workspaces to make them more approachable, and consequently to also review the way we work.
This was coupled with the need to seek a larger corporate space that could fit our larger staff, which has grown in recent years. The association has tripled its activity and income in the past four years, and this also meant that we needed new office space.
Furthermore, reputation and image have conditioned and defined this process of changing our workspaces, since we believe it is very important for there to be coherence between our offices and our mission of being close to our patients and our entire network of partners, who encompass everything from employees to doctors, along with medical centers, the entire healthcare network, patients, and volunteers.
2. How has the pandemic affected the way you work, and what changes has it brought about, if any, in the conception of your workspace? What things have changed compared to before COVID-19 in terms of the offices?
Prior to the pandemic, we had strongly focused on digitalization, and this really helped us during this period. However, a large part of what we do is definitely hard to do digitally.
Working remotely gives us specificity, efficacy, and optimization, but the human part is missing.
COVID-19 also helped us see that perhaps the initial design of our workspaces required some tweaking, since many of the open spaces we had first planned as spaces of collaboration and closeness were underused. It’s true that the current health protocols have come into play here, but even when the situation goes back to normal I think that the dynamic of smaller groups will continue to be important, and large open spaces are not always appropriate for certain meetings or projects.
What’s more, the pandemic opened up new opportunities to reconsider how we did certain things; for example, our presence on the street, our large corps of volunteers (which total more than 30,000), and the different prevention and information campaigns can be done in other ways. And although it’s true that digitalization opens doors, it also requires a great deal of training and preparation for our volunteers.
Keeping up the ties with an organization when everything stops being tangible is a factor we have to pay attention to.
3. What does flexibility mean to an organization like the AECC?
We didn’t have flexibility policies in the association, and actually we still haven’t formally defined them. What we have done is create protocols to adapt to the pandemic, but we haven’t yet established a clear policy in this regard. We think it’s better to wait until the situation goes back to normal and then consider flexibility in the format that best fits the way we work.
SWe know that flexibility is here to stay, and that what we’ve learned about working remotely and investments in technology are the future. However, our challenges will be to find a balance between in-person and remote work bearing in mind our activity, and our priority of caring for patients in all their dimensions. We will have to appropriately calibrate what it makes sense to extrapolate from the digital sphere and what it doesn’t. There are physical things like having a coffee, human contact, conversations, and a sense of belonging and unity whose intangible value is difficult to offset and transfer to the virtual format. We believe that a sense of belonging and connection with our organization is very important, and this is also achieved through physical spaces, the surroundings, collaboration, and the closeness that comes from a shared environment.
4. In your project to transform the spaces, and in this entire phase we are going through, have you learned anything that surprised you that you’d like to share with our readers?
This question is difficult to answer in our case, since we have so many different profiles; as I said before, our network of partners is extremely extensive. Our almost 1,100 employees are joined by our more than 30,000 volunteers, with a mean age of 60, along with patients, doctors, and others. What I do consider important is learning how to lead differently in a context of greater flexibility, and that trust entails responsibility. And we have to train ourselves for this.
5. In your project to transform the spaces, and in this entire phase we are going through, have you learned anything that surprised you that you’d like to share with our readers?
We have learned so much, and perhaps the most important thing is how difficult it is to compensate for informality and closeness, and all their value, in remote or virtual formats. We have also learned how important our stakeholders’ qualifications and training are, so digitalization and all its positive effects gain importance in an organization like ours. Finally, internal communication has been and continues to be crucial throughout this entire change and adaptation process.