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: Workplace
Considerations for Moments of Spark and Connection in the office.
The single best reason I come across for why offices are still critical to business strategy is that they are enablers of collaboration. Specifically, when people are together, it can generate moments of spark and connection, leading to innovation and creation. I cannot fault this reasoning because I have personally felt and experienced those sparks…
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…
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…
The CRE Everything App is finally losing traction.
A big trend over the last couple of years was every CRE Tech vendor building out their app to be the operating system for the workplace. They loaded in desk booking, conference room booking, wayfinding, social capabilities, amenities ordering, events announcements, security integration, and anything else they could think of. The goal was for employees…
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…
If your employees are “coffee badging,” it means that you have lost their trust and your culture is in jeopardy.
Coffee badging is a phenomenon that has been around for a while. It is the term for those employees who show up in the morning (badge in), grab coffee, stay long enough to be seen, and disappear as quickly as possible. It is also a trend that is increasing in offices. This trend is a…
Workplace technology post-pandemic has changed almost as much as the physical workplace model has.
Some days it feels quaint to look back at how we worked five short years ago. Video calls were not common. Hybrid working was a niche concept. Most of our days in the office were spent plugged into a desk. Most of our days were AT the office. One thing that recently struck me is…