One of the regular questions I hear among corporate real estate professionals is how to bring employees back into the office through workplace design. It’s a fascinating question to me because it assumes a couple of interesting beliefs:
- It is better for employees to be in the office than out of the office
- Workplaces should be desireable to work-from-home employees
- Real estate should make decisions around who is supposed to be in the office
This question is surprisingly dangerous for a real estate team to ask without trying to understand the foundation of work first. Many real estate people I talk to seem to have a belief that they are competing with work-from-home alternatives. As if work-from-home is something they need to beat.
But corporate real estate should be focused on bridging all the many ways that employees can work productively. Work-from-home is just another way that employees spend their time. This should be accounted for as part of the overall real estate portfolio strategy. The same way that employees with consulting or sales responsibilities will spend days working from client sites.
A workplace is not simply desks, walls, and furniture. It should include all the things necessary for employees to work. Phones, wifi, LAN, file servers, email systems, productivity tools, conference tools, visitor systems, and all the other aspects of work should be accounted for. The work experience for colleagues in the office should not be dramatically different from those working outside the office.
Designing for a workplace that is intended to draw employees back into the office means usually one of two things: 1) the previous workplace was so unproductive/undesirable that it pushed people out of the office, or 2) the workplace is going to be given features that are either unavailable to them in other work environments. The second option may sound acceptable but in reality, it means that either more investment is going to be made in the office than necessary or artificial limits will be placed on employees outside the office. This creates a “haves” and “have nots” type of environment which can deteriorate a culture.