I have spent some time reflecting on my posts over the past year. There has been a strong workplace slant to them. On reflection, this makes a lot of sense. The problems facing CRE professionals are down to how to design and build an office for the post-pandemic world. For most of my time on…
Tag: strategy
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…
CRE leaders need to stop thinking in terms of weekly occupancy and shift to a monthly framework.
Most conversations I have with people about workplace occupancy include the phrase “days per week in the office.” Over the past two years, this way of thinking about occupancy has become increasingly problematic when considering how people actually work. It can be hard to overcome the hybrid propaganda about 2 to 3 days per week…
It is time to retire all “Return to” concepts. If your Return has not yet happened, it probably is not going to. #CRE
The world is now mostly two years beyond the end of almost all COVID-era restrictions. A “New Normal” has been established through intentional action or unintentional patterns forming. Headlines that continue to talk about Return to Office or Return to Work (with Amazon causing the most recent ruckus) are missing the point about how people…
Not every decision needs to be data-driven.
I am a data-focused person who uses data to develop strategies, guide site plans, plan budgets, and generally make decisions. What people do not see are the many, many times when I decide not to use data to back up a particular point. The editing process is tricky that way, it is impossible to see…
The question of the year in Corporate Real Estate: What is success?
Welcome to 2024. If we thought 2021, 2022, and 2023 were wild real estate years, we had no idea what was still ahead. I have already put my wagers down on the fact that there will be no “return to normal” as defined by how things worked before COVID. But I am increasingly thinking that…
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…
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…
Have you worked on your Corporate Real Estate narrative recently?
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…