Workplace strategy consultancy PLASTARC has been awarded an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to continue its work with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). As part of the engagement, PLASTARC will contribute to the GSA’s Workplace 2030 Initiative, which will introduce new workplace amenities for federal agencies across the nation. The contract, awarded in summer 2022, is a five-year renewal of a pre-existing contract, under which PLASTARC used its human-centric workplace expertise to help the GSA analyze pre-existing data and conduct ongoing research through the lens of emerging workplace trends.
The engagement of the IDIQ contract will be a continuation of PLASTARC’s ongoing work with the GSA. After peer-reviewing and contributing to the GSA’s Return to Workplace Strategy Book, which facilitated office reentry in newly hybrid workplaces, PLASTARC leveraged its experience with science-backed research techniques to conduct a full assessment and redesign of the GSA’s employee engagement toolkit. PLASTARC’s background in social sciences helped expand the toolkit to include new experiential and quantitative data sources, so that the GSA’s workplace strategies could more thoughtfully account for the day-to-day experiences of both its own and its client agencies’ employees.
In its work with the GSA, PLASTARC has advocated for an emphasis on technology and work-support as centerpieces of the GSA’s mission. As spaces are updated to serve the evolving needs of a distributed workforce, organizational and technological infrastructures must be implemented to ensure that facilities can adapt. Toward this end, PLASTARC developed a new, multi-faceted feedback system that the GSA and its clients can use to capture the diverse day-to-day needs of any federal workforce. This system includes a workplace survey, a day-in-the-life self-quant mechanism, a distributed environment assessment, and a set of workshops.
In the immediate future, PLASTARC will continue helping the GSA to identify effective workplace changes by providing recommendations for two pilot offices in Ft. Worth and Chicago and evaluating the efficacy of those solutions. PLASTARC’s extensive background in change management will also be utilized to communicate new developments with federal workers across the country, as research methodologies and practical solutions are scaled and applied to GSA’s nationwide facilities. Over the coming years, PLASTARC’s fluency in human-centered design will uniquely position them to continue to serve federal employees in collaboration with the GSA.