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…
Offices versus Homes: Should the office be competing with homes in an attempt to draw employees back?
It has become standard fair in real estate circles to talk about how the office is in competition with people’s homes. The thinking goes that if employees can either work from home or the office, then the office must be made more enticing to draw people toward that option. Unstated in this theory is the…
Empowerment means encouraging others to tell you no.
I love the idea of empowerment. Selfishly, it means that I get to use my own judgment to decide the best course of action in my own world. Terrifyingly, it means letting my team use their own judgment to decide the best course of action in their worlds. [As an aside, my team is fantastic…
I am terrible at disconnecting from work and taking real time away, but I am told practice makes perfect.
I am out of the office right now. [Note: this post was intentionally written before I left so I would not eat into my actual time away!] This is weird for me to say since I have been a full-time work-from-home person for over a decade now. Being out of the office is my default…
If you mandate 3 days a week in the office, you are not offering hybrid work opportunities.
Mandates are the rage yet again. We went through this in the middle of 2022 when COVID-19 restrictions first began disappearing. Then again at the end of 2022. Now again in early 2023. It is a never-ending hot topic for business leaders who have no clue how their employees worked before the pandemic, how they…
This is a message for all the mentors in this world who do not know that they are mentors.
I have been blessed in my career to have a number of managers and leaders that I have been able to look up to and learn from. Most of these individuals probably never even realized that I was learning from their actions and behaviors. Some of them may not even remember me at all. But…