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 reflects the corporate culture. We need to be both customer relationship managers as well as vendor relationship managers. There are significant accounting, legal, design, negotiating, project management, and technology skills that anyone in the arena needs to be at least proficient in. But all of it is trumped by the need to be great communicators.
The story about how our workplaces are intended to function is nearly as important as the delivery of the workplace itself. If we cannot articulate the vision for how our offices are intended to work, we will always struggle to get buy-in from our business partners and great designs from our third-party partners. The story of real estate is the story of how colleagues experience their day, how our business accomplishes its mission, how our leaders push the company toward the future, and how we see the future and its effects on everything we do.
With the dramatic changes to corporate real estate post-COVID, the story of our world must change just as dramatically. We used words like flexibility before, but now the same word takes on increased meaning and importance. We used to talk about work-from-home and its influence on how employees use the office, but now work-from-home is central and here to stay. Collaboration was important before, but increasingly it is central to office designs. Workplace technology has evolved as much over the past 2 years as it had over the combined 10 years prior. It should be no surprise that the way we talk about our CRE environments is not resonating as strongly as it used to.
If we do not know the story we are trying to put in place, we cannot be successful.
If we cannot paint the picture of how our workplaces should work, we cannot be successful.
If our business does not understand or agree with the direction we are taking them, we cannot be successful.
If we are changing direction so rapidly that our story is inconsistent month over month, we cannot be successful.
Communication is the foundation of real estate. We must be able to effectively share the story of what we are doing so that we can ensure the right people understand the how, why, when, and where that goes along with it. It is not easy to create this story, but it is important. Take the time to work on it regularly. The dividends will be huge.