Some may believe that this goes without saying, but no Workplace can be successful without a strong partnership between IT and Corporate Real Estate. In my experience, this needs to be said over and over because the relationship does not occur naturally. These two groups have fundamentally different goals as organizations.
The workplace is where employees do the work of the company. This means they need an environment to be productive in (CRE) with the tools to use in that work (IT). One without the other will lead to lost productivity. Yet neither is fundamentally focused on the workplace as their core activity.
IT has a priority to ensure the hardware, software, and systems across the entirety of the organization are operating, upgraded, maintained, safe, protected, and productive. Most of this activity is behind the scenes and supportive of all offices, not any one specifically. The biggest issues in the world of IT are global vulnerabilities and corporate-wide systems. They have limited resources to focus on any given workplace outside of the standard setup and deployment.
CRE has a priority to ensure that offices and workplaces exist to support the business, yet they do not typically have direct control over (subjectively) the single most important component – the technology. CRE knows how to deal with the real estate industry to find locations, construct them, maintain them, and provide non-technical operational support. They are professionals with a background in dealing with landlords to negotiate leases, contractors to build out the space, and vendors of all types for the maintenance. They have limited skillsets to also support on-site technology.
Workplace Experience can only be successful when these two groups work in partnership. It means having CRE people with technology backgrounds and IT people with workplace operations experience. When these two groups do not have a mandate to collaborate and ensure the right workplace is implemented and maintained employees will suffer. Once the workplace experience is put in wrong, there is no easy fix. It’s something that must be done at the start or the cost (in time, dollars, and frustration) only grows.
Some companies have tried to deal with this by creating a third group specifically focused on workplace experience with the responsibility of bringing the CRE and IT groups together through standards and rules. Yet this removes the direct responsibility from those two groups and creates a gap for the problems to continue within. Often, this is the attempt to fix the problem where CRE and IT aren’t getting along and, in that case, can at least pull them closer to where they should be. But it is not a long term solution.
The only real solution is to ensure IT and CRE both know they have to play nicely in the sandbox together. This cross-functional activity is too important for the company to get wrong.