How To Refocus And Rationalize The Office Of The Future
FM:Systems
Empowering organizations to reimagine and transform their workplace experience for employees.
Written by: Brian Haines, Chief Strategy Officer, FM:Systems
Facilities, corporate real estate, security and IT professionals are working to figure out the proper response to the hybrid work boom. Their goal sounds straightforward enough: Make sure their real estate portfolio offers the ideal size, configurations and locations to support the types of interactions and activities their organization is trying to encourage in each space.
Easier said than done.
The problem is that making the right decisions without knowing what the future holds or how employees will want to use the space moving forward is nearly impossible. And given that real estate is an organization’s second-largest cost center, and has a massive impact on the experience of the first largest cost center, employees, that’s a big deal.
The best advice for figuring out how to best manage real estate investments—and for maximizing productivity at the lowest cost—comes down to “refocus and rationalize.” This is true for business development leaders new to office technology, but in this article, I focus on leaders looking to make the most of their investment in digital workplace solutions.
Step One: Refocus The Way You Think About Space
The first thing to do is refocus the way you think about space.?It’s no longer enough to think about the workplace as just a monolithic physical entity. The workplace is anywhere work gets done—home or office, plane, train or automobile. With the office now just a cog in the wheel, its role needs to be specific and explicit.
Given that remote setups can support focused work better than the office, there’s simply no need for someone to come in just to work solo in a cubicle. Rather, the office stands out for its ability to foster collaboration, culture building and a sense of unity that can only be achieved when people are together in a physical environment.
The pressures of the Great Resignation and the need to create the best overall quality of life for staff, along with lingering concerns around health and safety, simply emphasize the need to think about the office differently now.
But once you know that the space needs to change to support more “we” space than “me” space, how do you make sure the changes you make support the mission of the business?
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Step Two: Rationalize Existing Spaces To Serve Your Mission
To optimize real estate, you need to understand how people actually use the space you already have. Only then does it become possible to identify what you can do to fill the gaps between the kind, amount and locations of space you have and the optimal level of each.
First, inventory what you have. This goes beyond building a spreadsheet of locations and square footage. The baseline is to build a complete representation of your real estate holdings to know what you have and where you have it. Go as deep as you possibly can to source details on each facility.
Think about badge data used to enter buildings, analytics from room booking software , WiFi connectivity data, and environmental sensors sharing indoor air quality reports. Pull in everything that can identify when people come in, when they leave, where they go in the space and the environment they find themselves in once they’re on site. If you can’t measure it, the lesson is that you need more data. Start there and then come back once you have this.
Next, look for patterns of concern. Which areas of the office are regularly underutilized? What kind of activities do those areas support? Which spaces are always full and could be expanded? Those are your first hints at which changes to prioritize.
Finally, look for gaps between intention and behavior. Did everyone who booked a desk or a meeting room for a day actually show up? Of those who didn’t, what temporary conditions present in the office may have changed their intention? If you can’t test those questions and challenge your assumptions, then again, you simply need more data sources. Options like occupancy sensors at desk level and/or overhead counters work great for this.
Make Change Sustainable
One very important thing to remember is that the ultimate goal of this process is measuring real estate, not people. It’s both more effective and easier to make changes to the environment to optimize the experience of people than to change the behaviors of people to suit the environment.
Similarly, while optimizing the workplace is a data-driven process, the human element of work can’t be ignored. As employees come back, making sure they know how to interact with the space is going to make a big difference in how they experience the change and how they perceive their employment. Inform them of new Covid-19 policies and make it clear why all changes are taking place. Provide an open forum for discussion of these changes and make sure people feel comfortable and empowered to provide feedback.
Refocusing and rationalizing the physical workplace isn’t a one-time job, either. It requires continuous optimization and a long-term commitment to improvement. Embracing the opportunity to continuously optimize the in-office experience will be the best way to maximize both the employee experience and productivity in both the short and long term.
One final piece of advice: start today. The sooner you start collecting and measuring data about the employee-office relationship to find your gaps and figure out ways to address the new role of the office, the sooner you’ll reap the benefits.