There are going to be a lot of messages written to commemorate the end of 2020. It’s been a year that no one is soon to forget; a year that came out of nowhere to surprise us all. COVID-19 will have a wide-reaching impact on personal and professional lives across all countries.
As I like to say, CRE is all about bridging other functions. Our world involves supporting individuals, enabling collaboration, ensuring health and safety, meeting shifting work requirements, supporting healthy corporate financials, and many other areas. Each of these aspects of CRE has changed and will continue to change over the next few years.
Supporting individuals– What people need from the office is going to change in unpredictable ways. There are going to be significant challenges that we will need to collectively solve for many difficult scenarios.
Enabling collaboration– If there has been one key theme coming out of COVID-19 related conversations, it’s that the office will be more about collaboration than heads-down work. Most workplaces will need to change in a lot of ways for this to actually work.
Ensuring health and safety– The world has a new sense of what “clean” means for an office. It may be some time before any previous definition of health and safety returns to the workplace.
Shifting work requirements– The nature of how work gets done is changing for front-office, back-office, logistics, and retail. Previous assumptions about limitations have not just been challenged but completely broken down. Accounting for this in future real estate strategies is going to be critical.
Supporting healthy corporate financials– For better or worse, COVID-19 has had a significant impact on corporate profits for this year and beyond. As one of the largest cost centers for most businesses, real estate will need to be realigned around future financial strategies.
Long story short, 2020 has changed the very nature of corporate real estate. It’s happening fast and without a lot of detail. Many non-real estate people are beginning to think they know how to do corporate real estate, while a lot of corporate real estate people are struggling to deal with the rate of change.
COVID-19 will be with us for a long time. It will be a struggle for us to get past it but, even more, it will be a struggle for us to not overreact to it as we move forward.