Fast Company published an article confusingly titled The return-to-office mandate is here. So is the open office. One has to go. To pull some background forward, the author states they are someone with dyslexia and ADHD who has struggled to work effectively from traditional corporate designed offices. Right off the bat, sentence number one, we…
Tag: design
Power, Community, Empathy.
Welcome to 2025! This is the year we finally get a direction, figure out together where corporate real estate is going, and make a plan to get there! Or not. I’m not sure anymore to be honest what is going on. As I write this, it is nearing the end of January. Not even a…
A surprisingly difficult question to answer in the current world: what is the role of the workplace in how employees work?
Most everyone reading one of my posts works in or around Corporate Real Estate. This self-selected group has probably spent an inordinate amount of time in their career thinking about what a workplace is, how they are designed, how employees use them, and the attributes successful workplaces have. But one big fact has been brewing…
Growing connections is about mastering all types of communication from written to virtual to in-person.
I must admit that I have grown to dislike the phrase “collaborative workplaces” (even more so after getting through putting these thoughts together!). I was on the bandwagon for most of 2022 and 2023, but it has ended up on the same list for me as hoteling and hot desking. Looking back, the office has…
Your new collaborative workplace spaces are not doing what you hoped, are they?
For three years now, the two catchwords of Corporate Real Estate have been hybrid and collaboration. Hybrid captured the idea that employees would work from home (much) more often. Collaboration captured the idea that employees would be together, talking, brainstorming, innovating, and not doing heads-down activities in the office. Neither worked out quite how many…
Let’s talk a bit about conference room utilization and “efficiency.”
If you want to hear me go off on a brain dump of thoughts, one of the good ways is to ask me how to figure out how many conference rooms by size an office needs. I have sat through so many bad vendor demos of how to do this analysis that I am extremely…
Considerations when evaluating offices with high vs. low occupancy variability.
We all know that occupancy has changed today from what it was pre-pandemic. The aspect that has changed the most when I look at workplace utilization patterns is occupancy variability. What I mean by Occupancy Variability is that before the pandemic, almost all offices globally had consistent month-to-month, week-to-week, and often day-to-day predictable occupancy. It…
Activity-based workplaces have a fundamental flaw you must address upfront or be in danger of a bad workplace experience.
Everyone is about hybrid working. Which naturally changes the way people use the office. This leads us to ask what they are doing in the office. And all this eventually leads to the question: What if I design my workplace around these activities my employees perform? Surely, designing around activities is an efficient methodology. The…
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…