In the past decades, a place of work was all about efficiency. The office building needed to be reachable so we saw the upsurge of industrial areas close to the cities where companies would have their office spaces. These were fitted out in the most efficient way too (cubicles anyone?). The open office (office gardens as some called them) became popular as to improve on cultural bonding and open communications.

Working from home was considered a bit odd still. No one was able to control what you did in that home office. Were you actually working? That mentality of management, to control the hours you worked vis a vis the output of your work slowly changed and traffic jams (mostly in dense countries and cities like London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris) resulted in more and more people opting to become more flexible with their working hours.

The office would slowly transform into a hub, where efficiency wouldn’t be the key focal point. Giving people a sense of “home”, allowing for inspiration and creativity and using the office as a tool in recruitment of talent became more and more important.

Nice lunch options, showers, a roof terrace maybe, a ping pong table here or there and facilities like day nurseries for kids, and gyms would pop up further augmenting the company’s reputation as a place where you are really cared for, as talents.

The health scare of 2020 has further pushed the envelope. Companies are more and more convinced that the workplace is a tool. To create and sustain a company culture, to offer connections and to inspire innovation. The focus needs to be on the users of the space. Not the space itself!

Working from home became the norm, almost, in 2020 but most companies struggled with the shift, missing daily interaction, the joint learning, the coffee machine banter and the necessary network options. This was all taken for granted for far too long.

A hybrid model can solve all this. We see different enterprises, small and big, considering hybrid options where the corporate office is seen as a hub, a central space where employees periodically gather, with a mix of working from home 1 or 2 days per week and working “near home” in a location close to where the job is, the client is, the meeting is or where the employee feels he can do the job at hand best.

Progressive firms will increasingly offer their staff a “work place allowance” and let them spend the budget there where they prefer to work. In recruitment, don’t be surprised if today’s talent will ask themselves: “what are my options to work flexibly with this company?”. So, even with companies and people returning to the office, it won’t be “business as usual”. And like with any trend we saw in the past, the companies who are most fit and agile to make the changes are the ones to benefit most from these changing circumstances.

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Many business and industries in the past decades have been shocked by the sudden attacks from left field. Competition arising, not from the ranks of the colleagues ( Virgin Record Stores competing with HMV’s record stores) but from completely different industries. Every industry seems to get its turn, even those that are seemingly centuries old and traditionally quite unmovable (pun not intended). Whether its the building industry ( 3D printing), or cattle / meat farmers ( fake meat products) or the commercial real estate industry.
The signs were on the proverbial walls, and mostly ignored. The covid scare has change matters swiftly, globally. And slowly but surely, the commercial real estate world (CRE) is coming to grips with that changing mindset. Changing, because it can and changing because it must!

We, in our CRE industry, start to realise that office spaces are more fluid, that office spaces can be anything where you do your work. It used to be that building, in that industrial area, or in that CBD, with desks, computers, men and women in formal clothing and a 9 to 5 rhythm.

The internet and mobile computing have ushered in a renaissance, where people can work on the ski slopes, on the beach, in the train and …. well basically, anywhere. The companies, or the employers now feel forced to institutionalise these concepts, the WFH and WNH models. In case you are wondering: WFH = working from home and WNH = working near home. Envisioning this new world, companies are focusing more on the 3 Ws: Work, Workforce and Workplace. With Work being that what the enterprise wants done, and Workforce and Workplace being the two major cost factors to get to that work.

The internet and mobile revolutions have already resulted in a transformation of being “always on” but the Covid pandemic has forced a new focus: always on resilience. The logical approach to this brave new and ever-changing world comes down to the same steps as ever, but the steps are quite different in how they are taken:

1. It starts with the business strategy… who are you, what do you offer, why do you do it and how do you do it
2. People strategy is next: what roles do you need, how do you organise these, how do you find them, lure them in, keep them, pamper them, motivate them and reward them
3. Workplace strategy becomes key as the changing environment will have an impact on the design of the workplace, what does the best equiped space look like for a given role… does the accountant need the same office as the creative copy writer, or the researcher or the recruiter?
4. All this then results in a transformed CRE strategy, where variable and flexible become key words which have never really been present in CRE before….

Different priorities will come to the surface and new insights will be needed, but at every step on the way toward this new future of work adaptability and accountability will define future-proof enterprises.

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