Let me start by saying this is not a post intended to shout down mandates or say they are wrong. What I want to address is the unintended consequences that have come up in most mandates throughout 2023 and the impact those consequences have on future real estate decisions.
There is tension between real estate reduction goals and work-from-office mandates. The prototypical mandate from companies has been something along the lines of picking any three days you want each week but you must be in the office at least three days. Most of them have some leniency built in to account for travel, personal time, or sick leave, but they are generally straightforward. Let us set aside the rationale for the mandates and focus only on the outcomes.
In the best-case scenario (which I have yet to see any evidence of existing but for the sake of argument, we will assume it exists), all colleagues pick three days every single week and come in consistently while accounting for natural out-of-the-office reasons. If there are 100 employees in that office and all five days of the week were equivalent in their selection process, there would be an average of 48 people in the office on any given day. (100 employees x 3 days per week x 20% out of office any given week = 240 days to be divided across 5 weekdays = 48 employees per day.) We know this is not the lived experience of any normal office though as people tend to avoid Mondays and Fridays so what is more common would be 20 per day on Monday and Friday with about 70 per day on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Therefore, you go out and build an office to accommodate 70 employees for three days a week (but unfortunately, this was not enough of a reduction to create a positive payback on space so you probably just did a bit of a reconfig on the existing workplace). A few months later, the business leaders begin moaning about how they are paying for an office only used 3 days a week. You point out that you could build for the 48 average, but then you would have angry people during the middle of the week because that is what employees prefer. At the end of the day, they can all see the ability to reduce real estate but their mandate is making it impossible.
In the more typical mandate scenario, the same math as above applies for the planning purposes of the workplace but the reality is that occupancy never comes anywhere near those numbers. So the workplace is designed for 70-person peak days but the reality is only 30 ever actually show up. To the business leaders, they now have a mandate that is not being followed AND an office that is clearly oversized. Which one has to give?
- If you downsize the office, it becomes blatantly obvious to everyone that the mandate is not expected to be enforced.
- If you do not downsize the office, you either have to deal with a clearly empty office or become ruthless in forcing people to come in even though all evidence says it will create a morale problem.
Neither is a good choice for most leaders, yet it is the conundrum most businesses that have implemented a mandate a faced with. This is the big purple elephant in the room. The mandate was supposed to solve all of their problems but somehow it only made everything worse and more obvious.
The third option is to play the center and lock the elephant out of the room. Put one foot in both camps by pushing for higher occupancy but designing real estate for what the right answer should be based on reality. This lets you adjust upward if employees do come back because you gave them positive reasons to be back while also getting your real estate savings by building to reality. It is the incremental approach that relives at least some of the tension depending on how you play it.
Unfortunately, Door 3 is not available the moment you mandate an approach to the office.