Digital transformation has fundamentally altered how and where business gets done.
Ever-evolving technology is constantly changing the way Nitesh Land works.
Future of Work
Flexible work models have benefited both companies and employees throughout the pandemic, allowing businesses to keep running and people to keep their jobs. However, corporate real estate leaders are grappling with how to permanently incorporate flexibility into their space planning and portfolio strategy.
Managing a portfolio that provides the maximum amount of flexibility to employees sounds daunting. But just as work models have changed, portfolio optimization must also evolve. In a supply-driven portfolio, our typical approach is to plan and then act, but businesses have moved away from a “plan, then act” world to a world of first act and then optimize.
To understand demand-driven portfolios, we can apply three concepts from the software world: Agility, User Experience and Modularity.
Future of Work
There is an old saying in software design: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” The real estate industry could benefit from this adage.
Occupiers create risk when they try to create efficiency without understanding its necessity. In real estate today, our analogue is long-term lease. We make long-term commitments and spend enormous amounts of capital, ignoring uncertainty, to reduce the cost per square foot.
The results are predictable. The average corporate real estate portfolio is 35% vacant, without even taking seat-sharing into consideration.
Future of Work
In software, great technology is built not by describing features, but by understanding people’s needs and solving their problems. A user experience (UX) flow describes the individual experience of moving through an application—a series of screens or actions driven by user needs or demands. If the user stays in the application longer or gets to the desired end state faster, we can conclude that the UX has improved.
Real estate leaders need to adopt the same viewpoint towards their office. If people come back, they find it valuable, which is good. By setting real estate goals focusing on the employee experience, with intangibles like culture, productivity or delight, real estate companies have recently progressed on providing optimum employee experience. Organizations consistently create policies and rules that begin with a simple and pervasive view.
Future of Work
The future real estate is driven by results. Specifically around utilization and cost, remaining agile, paying attention to user behaviour and maintaining simple systems. If one can deliver something that gets more people to utilize a space for the same cost, they have succeeded.
Each change is treated as an experiment, something to be tested, monitored, scaled up or down based on outcomes. In other words, the demand-driven portfolio doesn’t require workplace strategists—it needs workplace scientists.