One of the truisms for most corporate real estate teams (whether project management or facilities) is that more people are in the office during the middle of the week than the start or end. This effect is more pronounced in certain businesses and countries, but is fairly consistently seen everywhere. It has existed for multiple reasons over time:
- People take holiday and sick leave more often on Mondays and Fridays. Even before remote working was a thing, long weekends were still a thing.
- People travel on Mondays and Fridays. If you are going to visit a client or vendor, people tend to still leave during the work week so visitor levels are higher during the middle of the week. Visitors tend to draw others into the office.
- Work from home is most common on Mondays and Fridays. This one may be self explanatory.
- Team meetings are most easily held during the middle of the week. Due to all the above, it’s often easier to get schedules coordinated for Tuesday through Thursday.
Enter our current real estate planning environment where long-term remote working levels are planned to increase dramatically. The mid-week occupancy effect is going to be even more exaggerated. Instead of offices being built for occupancy throughout the week, they must be built for the most exaggerated peak day. To many, this feels wasteful and inefficient, which it may be to an extent. But it is also a long-term reality that is just being seen by people new to thinking about real estate.
There is nothing inherently wrong with having Tuesday to Thursday having 20 to 50% higher occupancy levels than Monday and Friday. It’s a reality of business similar to how some brick and mortar retailers make most of their sales on a few weekends throughout the year (e.g., Black Friday). Planning to this new peak level still reduces the total real estate requirement while allowing employees to work how they want. It’s a win/win.
Some real estate groups are trying to shave the peak and spread demand through new operational methods. These include not allowing internal meetings during the middle of the week to push those to Mondays and Fridays or requiring reservations for anyone coming into the office. Both of these can work but they run into some fundamentals of real estate that are always challenging to overcome. Primary to this are the laws of human nature.
One thing real estate operations people figure out early in their career is that the people in the business are going to do what they are going to do regardless. They bring in the revenue, they hold the client relationships, they ultimately hold the budget, they know they can set (most of) the rules. Real estate telling them they cannot hold a certain type of meeting during the week does not usually work well. It gets the smile and nod but the meeting likely still takes place. Nothing is wrong with this necessarily, it’s just the way the world has always worked. Shaving peak occupancy through operational requirements means that the business must be the ones to enforce it. You can bring in a team of real estate and facilities people to try, but without having a business leader at the head they will never get the traction they need.
The best way to shave the peak that I have found in all my research is simply giving people full flexibility to work where and how they want. The one action that brings people into the office (and thus in during the middle of the week) are managers who either explicitly or implicitly pushing their teams to make an appearance in the office. Reducing this single variable is the best thing for both employees and the workplace.