Met Office to host UK's first Creative Workspace conference

The Met office is to host the UK's first Creative Workspace meeting to help businesses understand how they can improve productivity by creating more inspiring workplaces.The Creative Workspace Group is facilitated by UK WON, the leading workplace innovation network, and in addition to the Met Office, includes drinks company Innocent, award-winning architects Grimshaw, software developers Red Gate, and business process outsourcing multinational Capita plc.UK WON is a not-for-profit organisation whose stakeholders include major employers' organisations, trade unions, policymakers, professional bodies and universities committed to disseminating workplace innovation.Chief executive, professor Peter Totterdill, said: "The Creative Workplace Group has been established as a small, closed network of inspiring organisations from different sectors, each committed to building creative, versatile and productive places to work and to sharing experiences and problems with other members."Creativity is an everyday behaviour with employees actively encouraged to contribute ways of improving the organisation through new products and business streams or better ways of working."At the Met office, a small core of innovators began a process of 'guerrilla' tactics exploiting the organisation's grown up attitude towards managerial responsibility and decision-making to drive the process forward, firstly by visiting other businesses such as Google and Innocent and learning from the experiences they found there."Gary Holpin, business consultant and innovation architect at the Met Office added: "Our own experience of developing workplace innovation clearly shows the potential of unleashing the latent creativity that already exists within organisations."One of the keys to this is developing better ways of communicating and sharing knowledge and the Creative Workspace Group is designed to do just that."A day long Creative Workplace meeting will be hosted by The Met Office at its Exeter headquarters on June 10 and this will be followed on September 23 by an event at pioneers of hi-tech architecture Grimshaw who were responsible for the design of the Eden Project Biomes.A third event will be held at Innocent (London, December) and this will be followed by a Consolidation Workshop in spring 2016.