If you want a team to spend an inordinate amount of time on something, tell them Maybe to a suggestion. Maybe is the most dangerous word in any language. It carries with it the implication of “Yes, this is almost close enough to move forward” but also “There are things you need to fix but…
I am starting to think that the term “Hub and Spoke” cannot apply to office workplace strategies.
The hub and spoke concept is coming like a freight train to corporate real estate. It works as a rough picture of how workplace portfolios might evolve, but operationally I cannot imagine how it would actually work. For those not familiar with it, the hub and spoke concept has been one of the dominant approaches…
2023 will be known as the year when businesses began to understand how workplaces are actually used
Since the dawn of corporate real estate, businesses have seen it as a necessary function but not one they wanted to think about the strategy of. In most companies, the closest most leaders came to thinking about their real estate strategy was when the office they sat in was up for a project and they…
“But what can we do in our offices about Mondays and Fridays?”
If you are in corporate real estate, the odds are good that this is one of the top 5 questions you have been asked over the last year. In the US, everyone knows that office occupancy is very low on Mondays and Fridays. [Note: it was probably low on Mondays and Fridays before the pandemic…
Arguing against a position you support is an effective weapon for process improvement and preventing groupthink.
One of the traits I picked up early in my career is a desire to poke holes in whatever I was working on. If I did not challenge my own thoughts and deliverables at the start they would make it through and get caught later by others. Sometimes that later would be too late to…
What is Flexible office leasing in the work-from-home and hybrid era?
I have spent most of my time in 2023 thinking about flexible real estate. It is a topic that seems both urgent yet also surprisingly undeveloped. It is both the future and still very much non-existent in most markets. But the questions swirling through my head are many. Let us start by clarifying, this is…
Corporate Real Estate should always be first about people. Offices are a byproduct of giving people a space to excel within.
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,…
Yes, technology in the workplace is rapidly evolving. But if you do not get the basics right first, the new stuff will never work.
Let’s talk workplace tech (no, I’m not going to talk #PropTech because that is just marketing jargon). It is a fun and vibrant topic that never fails to draw interest. If you want to cause a debate between companies, discuss the pros and cons of Teams versus Zoom versus WebEx versus Google Meet for calls…
Some thoughts on why Industrial Engineering and Corporate Real Estate are such a good match.
I have a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. The only reason I knew what I would be doing after graduation was that I had completed two fantastic internships with UPS Supply Chain Solutions and they were offering me a job. It just happened that the role was in their facilities engineering team that built…
Improving Employee Experience goes hand-in-hand with reducing real estate costs. 5 areas to reduce costs while improving the experience.
There is a stereotype that improving employee experience within a workplace requires increasing costs. Companies often attempt this approach in practice but it rarely actually works for a few obvious reasons when you step back and think about it. Cost and experience are related but it follows a curve. The more you spend, the more…