Over the past two years, more non-real estate people have begun dabbling in real estate data. I have pulled together more occupancy and utilization charts in the past 6 months than in the past 6 years combined. I have gotten so good at describing the difference between peak, average, and seasonal occupancy patterns that I…
Tag: leadership
If you aim to create moments of spark and connection in the workplace, mandates are the last solution you should look toward.
In every article I see about mandates to work from the office, the rationale is always the ephemeral ideas of innovation, serendipity, spark, creativity, or connection. The goal seems to be to achieve some interpersonal benefits by simply having individuals occupying the same space. If simply forcing people together inspired magical productivity enhancements, the subway…
The long-term downsizing of a real estate portfolio requires a lot more than just building smaller workplaces. It must be a partnership of all areas of the business led by a strong CRE team.
I have spoken over the last six months to many corporate real estate leaders dealing with the no-win scenario of being told by Finance to cut costs by reducing space while being told by the business that there must be enough space to maintain a 3-day-a-week in-office mandate. The two directions are incompatible in the…
There’s a giant purple elephant in the work-from-the-office mandate room that no one wants to talk about…
Let me start by saying this is not a post intended to shout down mandates or say they are wrong. What I want to address is the unintended consequences that have come up in most mandates throughout 2023 and the impact those consequences have on future real estate decisions. There is tension between real estate…
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…
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…
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…
“Needing people in the office” is a fallacy of logic that leads to bad real estate decisions.
Let’s just start off by acknowledging that most real estate hot takes this year start by trying to pretend the world is not still in the middle of a pandemic. The reality is that most of the world (but parts are still in pandemic restrictions even today) relaxed or eliminated their COVID-19 restrictions between June…