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…
Tag: strategy
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…
Flex in Corporate Real Estate is taking on a whole new meaning.
When someone says “flex” to a person in CRE, it usually is shorthand for coworking. It means space that is on a short-term agreement that may or may not be shared with others. In most cases, the focus is on smaller use cases meaning the need for a handful of people up to maybe 10k…
“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…
5 not-so-simple steps for building a Real Estate Portfolio Strategy for 2023 (and beyond)
I hear the question “What will real estate portfolios look like in the future?” a lot these days. Words like Hybrid, Flexible, Resilient, Agile, Mobile, Collaborative, and Smaller keep playing on repeat in real estate strategy sessions. However, these are usually just descriptive words in these sessions without much data to back up what they…
Operations are always both deep and wide and should significantly influence your strategic plans
One of the most important aspects of any strategic plan is understanding how it will impact actual day-to-day operations. If a strategy cannot be reflected through the daily work that happens, nothing will actually change. The thing about operations is that while many think they understand it, no one person can actually know everything that…
The data is never completely in. Change is a function of everything.
At heart, I’m a data person that believes strongly in non-binary solutions to problems (there are always more than two options to any decision). I like to understand the information that both leads to a question being asked before then also looking at the information that would inform a decision. There are no beginnings or…
How should a good workplace experience be designed? A semi-detailed examination of the trade-offs to real estate strategy.
At the WorkTech New York 2019 conference this year, the final speaker of the day was brought in to challenge the status quo of how a room of real estate professionals think about real estate. He made the argument that since the advent of the cubicle the workplace has gotten progressively “sadder.” It’s an argument…