It is Thanksgiving week in the US. This is the perfect time for a little pause to look back on all the change that we have been dealing with. Self-reflection is an activity that has benefits beyond just a review of the year. It can help with stress by putting the day-to-day into perspective. It…
Author: dmusic604
If you aim to create moments of spark and connection in the workplace, mandates are the last solution you should look toward.
In every article I see about mandates to work from the office, the rationale is always the ephemeral ideas of innovation, serendipity, spark, creativity, or connection. The goal seems to be to achieve some interpersonal benefits by simply having individuals occupying the same space. If simply forcing people together inspired magical productivity enhancements, the subway…
A reversal has occurred where 3rd party commercial real estate experts are only now learning how the workplace operates in a post-COVID world.
I have had the pleasure of sitting through A LOT of workplace technology demos that claim they are able to solve the problem of hybrid working and the office. Typically, within 10 minutes of the start of the demo they prove that they have not had to deal with the real-world issues that come from…
Considerations when evaluating offices with high vs. low occupancy variability.
We all know that occupancy has changed today from what it was pre-pandemic. The aspect that has changed the most when I look at workplace utilization patterns is occupancy variability. What I mean by Occupancy Variability is that before the pandemic, almost all offices globally had consistent month-to-month, week-to-week, and often day-to-day predictable occupancy. It…
The long-term downsizing of a real estate portfolio requires a lot more than just building smaller workplaces. It must be a partnership of all areas of the business led by a strong CRE team.
I have spoken over the last six months to many corporate real estate leaders dealing with the no-win scenario of being told by Finance to cut costs by reducing space while being told by the business that there must be enough space to maintain a 3-day-a-week in-office mandate. The two directions are incompatible in the…
AI and ML have the ability to be amazing tools to help us towards the future, but they may also be short-sighted gimmicks in the quest to sell services.
In my role, I take a lot of sales calls from companies that have real estate or workplace technology that can help enterprises. They range from simple dashboards to complex iWMS and everything in between. One consistent that I have noticed since ChatGPT became a household word is that they are all spending massive amounts…
Two years after becoming the word everyone uses to describe post-pandemic working, does hybrid have a real definition yet?
Hybrid may have been the corporate-speak word of the year for 2022. Hybrid working and hybrid workplaces were all the rage as the world settled on that word to describe the flexibility they were “granting” employees to not be in the office. There was no solid definition of the word other than everyone agreed it…
Have you worked on your Corporate Real Estate narrative recently?
I say often that Corporate Real Estate is a hard business. We are responsible for implementing and maintaining offices for businesses we are often not intimately familiar with that are expected to be effective for years into the future. We must balance costs today against costs in the future while building an in-office environment that…
One of the hardest things for most professionals to do is to ask for help.
Asking for help is on the list of things that everyone needs to do but very few people like doing. Often it is Google that is our phone a friend when we are stumped instead of an actual friend. It can be difficult for us to open up the uncertain, vulnerable side of ourselves to…
Embracing contradicting ideas is an easy way to engage a team to innovate
The world of Corporate Real Estate is filled with contradictions these days. Businesses want people back in offices but they want to reduce space dramatically. Workplaces need to be more collaboratively focused but all colleagues in the office still want a traditional desk space for most of the day. Flexible working solutions are the hot…