Reducing your real estate footprint is really hard. It won’t be easy but it will be worthwhile. Smaller footprints often promote communication and flexible working which can bring advantages if properly managed in the business. None of these are easy. None of these can be done in isolation. None of these will work if real estate decisions are decentralized.
- Convince people to work from home sometimes and make fewer seats available.
- More collaborative seats and fewer offices.
- Don’t let the office design their floorplan, follow your standards.
- Don’t plan empty seats for growth, grow through seat sharing.
- Don’t have offices where you would have less than 10 people.
- Invest in individual IT – you can’t reduce space if people are tied to desktop PCs and hard phones.
- Take time to think about real estate every single week – have a true central point of real estate control.
- Ignore the complaints. Everyone complains, simply do what is right for the business.