It is incredibly easy for real estate people to focus on the office. Most of our metrics are space first because that is what we can control. Cost per square foot, square feet per person, square feet per desk, and desk per person are all space-centric. Sure, some of the have people as a denominator, but they are fundamentally a measure of design efficiency, not people efficiency. This reflects the reality that measuring people impact from a real estate standpoint is more than simply hard, it is usually impossible.
One of my favorite moments in CRE technology pitches (not going to call it PropTech) is when a salesperson chooses to go down the “measuring productivity” route. They know they cannot do anything they are about to say after bringing up those words, but they think it sounds great and can help them win business. I politely challenge it every time just in case they have cracked something unexpected, but it is mainly a chance to walk back their claim that they can somehow measure the productivity impact of real estate. No one has yet and I still doubt anyone will.
Everyone understands that the workplace affects productivity, but quantifying that effect has been a ghost for decades. There are many things we can point to that degrade productivity (this list is certainly not exhaustive):
- Not having enough desks/conference rooms/private spaces
- Technology in the office that does not work as expected
- No space for breaks or lunch
- Space layouts that lead to large amounts of noise for everyone
- Poorly implemented desk booking tools that cause people to simply not come in at all
While we know what degrades productivity, we can only guess what improves productivity. Good design seems to play a role, but no one can define a standard definition for “good” as it varies dramatically by company, team, and even individual. Even throughout the course of a day, the things that make a person more productive can shift hour by hour based on their activities.
At this point, many reading this may be yelling out “AH HAH! He’s about to talk about Activity Based Working design philosophies.” Nope. ABW takes this assumption that it can classify the things people do into definable buckets and then create spaces specifically for those activities. This is where it all breaks down. The best analogy I can come up with for why ABW is just a fad is to point at iPhone versus Android users. They both are smartphone users but the way they use their phones points to some fundamental differences in how they get things done. Simply defining “smartphone” activities would miss huge differences between the groups. Breaking it down further into separate iPhone and Android activity spaces would similarly be self-defeating as the two groups still very much need to work together. Preferences and needs are based on specific activities, not generic types of activities.
If corporate real estate is about people first but we are not able to measure it, what should we do? Start with the understanding that real estate is as much art as it is science. Often, we will know good or bad design simply when we see it. No one loves row-on-row of 5-foot desks crammed into a space. Everyone knows it is a bad design that does nothing for productivity. It is done because it is space efficient and helps with space numbers. Similarly, no one knows the “right” number of conference rooms a space needs. But everyone knows when there are not enough.
Designing to strict space metrics and standards is an easy crutch. It is important always to step back and ask, “Is this good for the people that will be using the space?” If the answer is anywhere near “no” then start over and try again.