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…
Tag: strategy
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…
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…
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…
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…