Since the dawn of corporate real estate, businesses have seen it as a necessary function but not one they wanted to think about the strategy of. In most companies, the closest most leaders came to thinking about their real estate strategy was when the office they sat in was up for a project and they participated in the planning and design process. Global real estate strategy is something that everyone wanted but no one wanted to put the time and effort into.
The 3-day in-office mandate is a terrible idea. However, it is a symptom of leaders beginning to understand the role of the workplace in their company’s success. It is a positive sign that non-real estate leadership is taking an active role in understanding how their employees actually use workplaces. Bad ideas have a tendency to evolve and get better over time. 3-day mandates will eventually become 2-day mandates with floating days which will become 3-day targets that will go back to being full hybrid. This process will take several years. Leaders tend to back up new strategies for at least six months before changing.
Leadership involvement in the employee-workplace interaction will necessarily become more intimate with their overall real estate strategy. They will begin to question being downtown versus the suburbs, the value of coworking to replace small offices, workplace technology investments, desk booking versus unallocated seating, peak versus average design standards, and what their target model should be a decade into the future.
Do not get me wrong, this process is going to be PAINFUL for legacy real estate teams. The very people they have been trying to get more involved will jump in with both feet and a belief that they are already up to speed on the basics. There will be a long learning curve. But if handled with care, this will actually place real estate and workplace teams in the strategic conversations that it should have been in the middle of for decades. In the long-run, this should lead to better real estate and workplace outcomes even if it leads to some short-term bad decisions.
If all goes well, the world will view the 3-day mandate as an era of learning what not to do so that we can all get on with the right way to do things.