Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
‘Why don’t we use spaces and places differently?’ I mused. It’s not often I get so philosophical stuck in a long traffic jam on a roundabout in Twickenham, London, on a typical Saturday morning and looking enviously at a completely empty bus lane. Dare I dart forward into that traffic-free lane and get ahead of the game? After all, it was perfectly legal – bus lane restrictions are only in force for part of the day and not on weekends. Yet here we all were, car, van and lorry drivers dutifully in line and waiting our turn; so organized, so automatic, not realizing we could actually use these lanes outside of restricted hours. I wondered why so few of us took advantage of this and it struck me that we are all such creatures of habit that nobody bothered to use the empty lane. This is what triggered my question: ‘Why don’t we use spaces and places differently?’
Hardly a ‘Eureka’ moment in the grand scheme of things, and not quite in the same vein as Archimedes jumping out of his bath and streaking around Ancient Athens. It was enough for me to just escape into that empty bus lane and power down that traffic-free road while thinking about all those lost opportunities we could take advantage of, where we do not remain stuck doing the same things over and over again unthinkingly. When in fact we could do something beneficial and productive just by thinking differently.
That roundabout lightbulb moment encapsulated what I seem to have spent nearly 30 years of my life working on: a smarter approach to how we use our spaces and places. Taking on the role of instigator and constantly asking that question: ‘why?’ Why do we do things in this way, especially in the anachronistic world of property and the workplace since the evolving nature of how we work in offices today is a game-changer?
Confessions of a Lapsed Chartered Surveyor
I guess the importance for changing perspectives in the workplace and wanting to effect change both for people working in offices and business, as well as for the benefit of the property industry and the wider community, stems from my roots. Rather appropriately, those roots lay in property and land since I come from the third generation of a family involved in auctioneering and land management in Ireland. It was growing up with that legacy and understanding the importance of land that led to my interest in the rather unromantic profession of chartered surveying; it was also the reason I came to London in the early eighties to complete my qualifications.
I suspect that being from a small place on a small island always made me something of an outsider and a bit of a maverick since I was not a member of the ‘Old Boys’ establishment’ property world. It certainly makes me question how the industry operates in the UK and beyond, as it is riddled with acronyms, complexity and jargon, all of which are crying out to be reformed and simplified. Despite my different attitude, I was lucky enough to get a job at one of Britain’s largest surveyors, Jones Lang Wootton – now known as leading worldwide estate service provider, JLL. I spent 13 years there and ended up as a partner, after helping to launch a new occupier client facility, their Corporate Real Estate Services. Working for a major world-leading organization, I came to see the power of brand and corporate culture in action – factors which were key to developing a successful business in every sector.
It was in the mid-nineties that I received one of those very unusual calls from a US-based headhunter in Los Angeles, asking me if I fancied a change. After much cloak-and-dagger activity and 17 interviews later, that mysterious phone call led to a job with The Walt Disney Company. This eventually culminated in me becoming vice-president of International Corporate Real Estate, which meant I was responsible for nearly all of Disney’s worldwide corporate real estate. This involved much travel, criss-crossing the globe, with the added good fortune of being exposed to diverse work cultures and ways of doing business. So, it was Mickey Mouse who shaped both my journey and understanding of what the workplace really is, how it serves business and indeed the broader community. Walt Disney’s famous quote, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it,’ was also my mantra and it served me well then, as it does today. Additionally, I also learned the ins and outs of the media world. I discovered broadcasting and TV studios – little did I know how useful learning that side of the business would become one day…
In 2003, I received another of those life-changing phone calls. This time from a very traditional English firm of headhunters, with an interesting proposition: a major organization needed someone to help them transform their property portfolio to the tune of £2 billion.
Six months after that call, I arrived at the imposing Art Deco entrance of the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London and was given the challenge of driving the biggest modern-day transformation of one of the UK’s most iconic cultural institutions. This resulted in a 40 per cent reduction in their real estate footprint, moving over 12,000 people around the country, delivering more than 20 projects, refreshing 60 per cent of the BBC’s property portfolio and achieving an annual saving of £47 million in their property by 2016–17. Additionally, it entailed shifting the BBC’s London-centric broadcasting production to other regional hubs, such as the flagship MediaCityUK in Salford, near Manchester, and Pacific Quays in Scotland; all done while keeping BBC programmes and broadcasting carrying on seamlessly.
This incredible multi-layered restructuring really opened my eyes to the link between workplace and business performance; many of the BBC’s property schemes were actually turned into business transformation projects, so the move to a new building became a major catalyst for organizational change and helped the BBC in its wider transition from analogue to digital.
My time at the BBC was also key to inspiring my Smart Value concept. This enabled me to navigate this vast project successfully, as well as generate unprecedented levels of creative and economic value for the BBC. However, the greatest benefit in deploying Smart Value was that it also considers the wider community, particularly in the cases of MediaCityUK in Salford and White City in West London. The basic premise of Smart Value was using the BBC brand as a catalyst to attract other leading creative organizations to these once-neglected sites, which provided the springboard to develop new attractive, thriving places to live and work in. The other bonus being it also galvanized the local economies by creating jobs, not just through the companies who moved there but also through building links with universities/schools, creating innovation hubs, leisure activities and community centres.
The Smart Value formula will be analysed at greater length in Chapter 5 and the way it impacted on both Salford and White City will be explored further in Part 2 – The BBC Story.
The other important lesson I learned as Head of the BBC’s Corporate Real Estate was understanding diverse groups of people, trying to bring them together and lead them to achieve a higher aim or bring about a successful result. This could only be accomplished by breaking down communication barriers and cutting across the silos which often divide sectors and individuals.
This, in a nutshell, is the practical background of where I have come from in the industry; it has been a case of ‘working the coalface’, and not just in terms of property and Corporate Real Estate. The role has included project and facilities management, but most importantly, it has featured change management and leading assorted teams of people through large-scale regeneration and development at the highest levels. Over my 30-year career I have worn many hats, as well as Mickey Mouse ears too. I have gone from being a typical adviser/surveyor to being on the client and consumer side of property facilities, so I have seen first-hand how all of these complex and convoluted areas of the property world function from all angles.
Also, over these three decades I have seen the shifts, both in the world of work and business itself, and the monumental impact it has had on where and how people can work. I have also concluded that it cannot be overlooked anymore. Nobody can really afford to sit herd-like in the slow lane, watching how much the world around us is changing, peering mindlessly at those taking the opportunity to whizz into the twenty-first century’s fast lane without transforming or innovating to keep pace. However, like most people I also suffered from a closed mind and tunnel vision. Along my career journey I was fortunate enough to come across many individuals who made me think that as an industry we have to step back and ask ourselves certain questions: How come we have different perspectives, even within the same sector? Who has the best view of the situation? They encouraged me to see the bigger picture and to challenge the status quo of the property world. They also inspired my other professional goal to integrate all the disparate elements of the real estate industry and the workplace, to instigate change for the better, and to make workplaces fit-for-purpose for the ways we work in the twenty-first century.
Inspiring Instigators and Interpreters
Everyone has their own interpretation of how they view the world and it would be a very boring, dull place if we all saw it the same way, but certain individuals really did broaden my vision regarding my sector and its role in the workplace. Namely former RIBA President Frank Duffy, founder of the pioneering architectural practice DEGW, who was an advisor for many years, and Professor Michael Joroff, former Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, who kickstarted my interest in turning property into strategic assets.
Having access to both Frank and Mike provided me with the perfect mix of viewpoints, which enabled me to navigate the complex world of spaces and places. With this cocktail of thoughtful counsel and MIT’s academic rigour, their combined outlooks were invaluable, as well as enlightening. However, the secret sauce to the relationships we developed over the years was that we connected well as people.
Frank Duffy’s importance in the evolution of workplace strategy cannot be underestimated: he introduced this US-inspired sector to Europe as far back as the 1970s. Together with his DEGW colleagues, he revolutionized the office environment by emphasizing the importance of an organization’s changing nature and the need for the workplace to reflect this. This also extended to incorporating developments in mobile and remote working. He also introduced trailblazing concepts such as the involvement of users in the design and management of their space and the significance of differing life cycles in buildings, from structural core to interior fittings. Instead of viewing buildings as static objects, DEGW looked at them as evolving entities.
I first met Frank when I was at JLL but it was not till I went to Disney that our relationship really blossomed. Frank and his DEGW colleagues were not only creative and innovative in their approach, they were also very thoughtful and passionate in their work. He and his European team assisted me on most of the international TV channel projects at Disney and with his business partner, Despina Katsikakis, they led the charge when I attempted to introduce a workplace strategy at their vast London headquarters in Hammersmith. They also gave me insights into the importance of securing senior management sponsorship and backing for projects of this nature. Frank’s wise guidance was also instrumental in helping me with the BBC’s estate transformation and in providing strategic support in building up solid engagement with the BBC boardroom.
Since Disney was such a global organization, it also gave me the opportunity to meet the wider DEGW community across the world. Many years later, I partnered with some of the DEGW diaspora on Six Ideas – a worldwide community of people and creative thinkers resolved to tackle issues around the way we work, learn and live.
Professor Michael Joroff specializes in the field of city planning, building technology and real estate development. He is considered a leading expert in twenty-first-century placemaking and pioneered the formation of large-scale entrepreneurial clusters. Mike has helped cities all over the world plan and launch districts designed to engender innovation and entrepreneurship, through large-scale, mixed-use developments designed to serve people’s lives and their work. He has been a great influence in my challenges to align real estate strategies with business processes, ever since I did an MIT walkabout with him in May 2005. He was of course hugely supportive in the creation of the BBC’s MediaCityUK in the north of England. At my suggestion, he advised the Manchester-based Peel Group, responsible for the development of a run-down area by the canal in Salford into a vibrant, lively, creative community. This now encompasses the UK’s two major broadcasters, BBC and ITV, and other media outlets, plus education, business, living and leisure facilities.
Mike also acted as a wise sounding board for me when I was taking up the gauntlet to get involved in the BBC’s redevelopment of its White City site. This 60-acre neighbourhood in West London allies the UK’s premier science and research university, Europe’s largest shopping mall and the world’s oldest broadcaster in forming a new innovation quarter, attracting other leading organizations, small businesses and creative centres.
Perhaps one of the great accolades of my career, aside from participating in such groundbreaking projects, is when Mike described me as an ‘intrapreneur’. Defined by American entrepreneur and business school founder Gifford Pinchot, this term describes individuals who are passionate about exploring new and innovative directions to produce added value for their employers’ organizations, as ‘dreamers who do’.
A Confusing Mosaic of Players and Barriers to Change
Unfortunately, the majority of the real estate industry can hardly be described as dreamers or even ‘activators’ of ideas or progress since it is still firmly set in its outdated ways and resistant to change. Innovation is regarded as a key priority in most sectors, but there is little evidence of real change across the property world. Yet who could blame them since business has been booming in the last decade, so there is no real urgency to change – though it remains to be seen whether life after the pandemic will change this.
Matters are further confounded by the generally negative perception engendered by the real estate world, especially landlords and developers, and this creates a challenging landscape for both the residential and commercial sector. Furthermore, for the uninitiated, it can be quite daunting to pinpoint just how property markets function and who is pulling the strings. It is difficult for those outside the industry, and even those working within it, to understand the operational intricacies of property.
To make it even more perplexing, the sector which supports corporations to help them make the best use of their real estate portfolios is a subset of the overall commercial property world. It is evident in certain parts of the world that many people are confused by the terms commercial real estate and Corporate Real Estate, the difference being that commercial real estate is the umbrella name for the entire system and Corporate Real Estate (CRE) is the internal support function responsible for a corporation’s property portfolio. To minimize confusion, the acronym CRE will be used from now on when referring to Corporate Real Estate.
Additionally, another area of misunderstanding rarely addressed is the plethora of titles and descriptions associated with CRE. One can encounter a surveyor, a premises manager, a facilities manager, an estates manager, a CRE person and a workplace manager, to name but a few – and they could all be doing much the same thing. Little wonder that the outside world fails to grasp what we do and what value, if any, we bring to the table.
As I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, there are many different groups who use these titles involved in the process of providing and consuming real estate. There is also a clear need for a more united approach and one that recognizes that the overall product, i.e. the workplace, is not only an office building but an operational facility which needs to enable people to do work.
Regardless of which side one sits on the real estate spectrum, most attention is placed on doing profitable real estate deals, designing great buildings and delivering good construction solutions, with very little thought given to the operational aspects of the completed facility. For decades a gulf has existed between the delivery of a building and how it functions once it is taken over by a tenant. The various parties involved in producing these edifices have little interest in how the building will run, what is included in its life-cycle maintenance and whole life costs, as their role comes to an end on the practical completion of its construction. Yet everyone accepts this modus operandi because that is how ‘things have been done’ and mindsets are notoriously difficult to change. However, some chinks in this position have started to emerge in very recent times. For example, Lisa Picard, President and CEO of EQ Office, a US Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), formerly known as Equity Office, now wholly owned by the Blackstone Group, has a very different take on the market. She cites data from the big brokerage houses, such as JLL, as evidence of a shift, as some 2.5 per cent of the total office stock in the US currently under construction has only a 1 per cent forecast absorption rate. This also begs the question of who will occupy these buildings. As Mark Galbreath, CEO and founder of US workspace network LiquidSpace, speculates, ‘Maybe we have hit peak office?’
Never the Twain Shall Meet
One of the most notable legacies of the commercial property model today is the absence of any meaningful links between the two principal players – the provider and the consumer. Better known by their contractual labels as ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’, they are brought together through an intermediary – a broker – and bound by a voluminous legal contract, known as ‘the lease’. This non-existent relationship between the ‘consumer’, in this case senior executives and the property industry, is another obstacle in the overall system.
It is time for a rapprochement between the now outdated worlds of landlord and tenant and encourage the commercial property sector to think more in terms of consumer and provider. Denis McGowan, Global Head of Real Estate at Standard Chartered Bank, is quite emphatic in stating, ‘Landlords and tenants are emotionally disconnected. Everyone has different agendas, but we now need to come together.’ However, this will not be easy since business leaders suffer distrust and adopt an apprehensive mindset when real estate issues are tabled, fuelled further by the fact they do not have any relationship with the other side. I suspect fundamentally they are reluctant to make real estate decisions since they are usually high-profile in nature, with risks and high-costs attached too. There is always the underlying fear that something will go wrong, especially when construction or fit-out works1 are involved. Projects can be delayed and budgets exceeded. Worse still, the building might not work for the business. All of which have the potential to damage reputations.
At both Disney and at the BBC I saw the knock-on effects of bad property news on the C-Suite and how they viewed the industry with disdain and distrust. ‘What if it all goes wrong?’ was a common fear expressed around the boardroom, especially by non-executive directors and trustees.
Regardless of whether occupiers/end users of real estate are right or wrong in their thinking and views, whether they are justified in seeing our industry in such a negative light, this drives me to consider why people view things differently. No doubt it all boils down to how each of us perceives a certain situation, but it also brings to mind that great George Eliot quote from Middlemarch: ‘It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.’
The other area in which people’s perceptions often vary is in their view of the workplace. First, most people equate the workplace with the office, yet there are many millions of people who do not work in an office. Second, how Human Resources (HR) perceives the workplace differs fundamentally from how CRE and Facilities Management (FM) see it, especially since HR’s primary focus is on people issues. (From now on, Facilities Management and Human Resources will be referred to with their respective initials FM and HR.) However, given the rapidly changing nature of the game for those of us interested in the built environment and particularly regarding the space where people work in today, we need to seek fresh perspectives and start a dialogue to enable us all to see above the parapet, to view the broader picture and be able to discern the forest for the trees.
The Workplace Renaissance
We really do need to challenge some long-standing thinking – not only in relation to the overall system for providing and leasing offices but, more so, in relation to the thinking and service provided by those in the CRE and FM sector. The nature of work has changed and, for the most part, we are struggling to address the issue. We persist in trying to work in a twentieth-century straitjacket of behaviours, processes and procedures as if nothing has happened – as if we have not experienced the seismic shift of the digital revolution.
This, for many in my sector, may be outside our comfort zone, but as Frank Duffy said, ‘We live in an increasingly virtual world and we need to justify the role of “place” in the overall jigsaw.’ I contend that the virtual world is approaching far faster than most of us realize owing to Covid-19 and the time for debate and introspection is now over. This has to be approached by using ‘joined-up thinking’ and not falling into the trap of looking at an issue as an ‘either/or’ option. Take, for example, the rise of technology and the extent which it frees us from is being shackled to the traditional concept of ‘one person, one desk’, this in effect being the equivalent of cutting the umbilical cord in terms of how occupiers think about using offices and how they forecast occupancy. Office workers, for the most part, no longer need to use one particular desk with a fixed telephone and a desktop PC – although some prefer to work in this time-honoured fashion and will always do so.
For many observers, freeing office workers from the limitations of that one desk also means the loss of personal space, individual offices and the shift to ‘unassigned’ working. I used to argue that introducing ratio working was a panacea for securing optimum real estate portfolio efficiency. That was before I learned the smart approach at the BBC, which was to provide a range of work-settings which suited the work required.
Unarguably, over the last two decades moving away from the ‘one person, one desk’ concept has generated huge efficiencies and become the lynchpin of portfolio planning, to the delight of many CFOs, yet the implications are only starting to be fully understood in recent years as employee engagement, wellbeing and talent issues are beginning to be considered. Nowadays it is all about efficiency and effectiveness, according to the results of a Gallup poll, which tracked US workers daily, measuring their levels of commitment, enthusiasm and involvement in their work and workplace: only 32 per cent of employees were found to be engaged in their jobs as of 2017. The same poll indicated a similar crisis globally, reporting only a 13 per cent level of workforce engagement and with every type of organization asking, what can be done to increase levels of engagement?
One factor which might solve the problem and is fuelling the workplace revolution worldwide is the emergence of agile working. The idea being there is no ‘one size fits all’ in the way we work; instead it is all about offering people choice as to how, what, where and when they work, provided of course that the job is done professionally and efficiently. Essentially, it empowers employees to deliver results and best value to their organization in the optimal way for the individual and incorporates both the physical workspace and the digital workplace. This significant development in how people work and how enterprises can organize themselves as agile organizations has given rise to a structural change in the nature of the demand for offices.
The cutting of the umbilical cord from the physical office is a factor which stakeholders have either ignored so far or have chosen to overlook, yet for the wider real estate sector, the consequences have far-reaching implications in terms of how offices are funded, designed, constructed and leased. For the most part the supply side – apart from some notable exceptions – are sitting on the fence. EQ Office President/CEO Lisa Picard gives the best picture of the situation: ‘Every smart business on the planet, except real estate, spends time understanding what the customer journey is, learning from it and re-casting their product. Real estate just continues to push out the same product over and over again rather than asking – what does the customer need?’
Therefore, I find it extraordinary how anachronistic the world of commercial real estate still is and how slow it is to respond to changing twenty-first-century business demands and working environments. It is a view held by the original ‘workplace disruptor’ Mark Dixon, founder of serviced office provider Regus, now re-branded as IWG, who established his alternative office service back in the late 1980s. He reiterates, ‘One could not find an industry more traditional and more resistant to change than the real estate industry.’ Dixon’s pioneering serviced office model has only really impacted commercial property in the past 20 years as a result of the rise of a whole host of imitators and competitors in the flexible workplace arena. LiquidSpace CEO Mark Galbreath observes that attitudes are changing slowly in the industry with the ascendancy of alternative office space services: ‘We are experiencing a renaissance, where we are seeing a shift from asset to service mindsets.’ Will Covid-19 accelerate this?
The Flexible Space Phenomenon
The alternative to the traditional model of either leasing or buying a building to house offices, collectively known as the flexible space sector, has been in development for over a decade. The origins of serviced office/executive suite provision can be traced back to the US in the 1960s; this area was given a significant boost by the formation of Regus in 1989. However, for the most part, serviced office provision remained a quiet backwater in the overall scheme of things. They prospered to a point but remained very much the ‘poor relation’ compared to mainstream leasing.
That is until two factors emerged which proved to be real game-changers: first, the demands of the business world and the nature of work have changed fundamentally. Second, the impact of the ‘WeWork Phenomenon’2 has changed the corporate psyche as business leaders are beginning to see a viable alternative to the old-school leasing system, which is both flexible and client friendly. Coupled with the eruption of start-ups and the gig economy, the last 20 years has seen an explosion in the demand for flexible workplaces. This has spawned a variety of alternative space products that developed together with the expansion of Regus and other serviced office providers. According to John Duckworth, MD of Instant Group, which runs several million square feet of ‘space-as-a-service’ and is also a leading listings platform for flex space, this changed in 2017 when mainstream landlords started to pay attention to the activities of WeWork, who had turned into the accelerators of the flexible office market.
Rapidly overtaking Regus/IWG and other established serviced office providers, for a period WeWork became the darlings of real estate markets globally. While many question their business operations, given the spectacular failure of the 2019 IPO, they did achieve bringing about a fresh perspective to how tenants/clients consume space other than through traditional leasing.
In my view, when history is written WeWork will be regarded as the tornado which accelerated the pace of change in commercial property. Through very effective marketing and promotion, coupled with unprecedented activity, WeWork certainly attracted huge publicity. In effect, WeWork let the ‘genie out of the real estate bottle’; so much so that many other operators acknowledge that they have done them a huge favour in opening up the market. Conversely, compared to a decade ago business leaders are now more aware of the availability of alternatives to buying or leasing real estate. Unashamedly, since acting as ‘poster kids’ and influencers, WeWork’s approach has shaken up a fairly conservative market.
WeWork certainly think very differently to mainstream real estate. Ronen Journo, Senior Vice-President of WeWork, describes their approach as creating space which ‘has a magic sauce that establishes a special energy which is attractive to people’. WeWork and fellow flexible space providers are the start of a much more profound revolution in how we use and consume the built environment and one where business leaders need to take a more active role in shaping this new paradigm. Although many commentators and property people make the analogy between Regus and WeWork, it is not quite comparable as Mark Dixon focused only on creating a very innovative space solution. What WeWork did was take the workspace model and make it ‘cool’ and compelling for people and this created an emotional connection with the brand. This is not just about offering their occupiers on-site coffee baristas, free beer on-tap and lunchtime yoga sessions. WeWork were the first of the alternative workplace providers to see the potential of building an ecosystem within its spaces to enable businesses to develop and grow by fostering forward-thinking start-ups globally.
According to We Company’s Global Impact Report 2019, 54 per cent of its members around the world credit the company for accelerating their business growth and 80 per cent report an increase in productivity since setting up in WeWork premises. Dr Arun Sundararajan, Professor of Technology, Operations and Statistics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of The Sharing Economy, states that WeWork’s ‘global constellation of companies and entrepreneurs allows members to tap into and realize value from these economic spill-overs, within their local communities and across cities’.
WeWork and the other new alternative workplace providers have acknowledged the importance of the ‘people-factor’ over the ‘property-factor’ – a concept which has certainly bypassed most mainstream commercial real estate players.
Responding to the ‘Rubik’s Cube on Steroids’
Another factor in the rise of serviced offices and alternative workplace offerings is that they are flexible and agile in response to twenty-first-century commercial demands. The traditional real estate response was that it takes 12 to 18 months to deliver new spaces. This is no longer viable, especially in the last decade, as the pace of business has accelerated beyond all expectation. New ideas and products need to be developed faster, problems or crises require resolution within hours and consequently, customers and clients expect agility.
Peter Miscovich, MD of Strategy & Innovation at JLL, likens the current US corporate environment to ‘a Rubik’s Cube on steroids’ – as the pieces of the business puzzle keep changing, leaders have to keep on figuring out the puzzle while they are putting it together. This ‘always on’ business model transformation is the new normal which requires innovative levels of agility and flexibility to adapt constantly to changing conditions. Some in real estate like Denis McGowan have realized this and observe, ‘We have to be much more nimble as a property function to turn things around.’
Achieving ‘Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast’
It is a daunting task to bring about a broadening and altering of perspectives in order to adapt to the changing demands of the workplace. Sometimes we all feel a bit like we have entered the world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, confused and bewildered by all this change. One of the tenets of Six Ideas is that we should attempt to accomplish ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ and to this end, I have drawn up a list of six impediments that act as barriers to the effective use of the workplace within the real estate system, as it exists today:
• There is a fundamental disconnect in the system in that the suppliers of the physical workplace see their product as an asset while the consumer sees it as a business resource or utility;
• Enterprise workforces are changing radically, yet the nature of the places they inhabit and how that space is supported has yet to fully respond to these changes;
• The workplace as a label means one thing to HR (people focus) and something different to Real Estate and FM (property focus);
• The space and how it is managed/operated is the key ingredient which enables productivity – the current system fails to recognize this;
• The support functions (CRE, FM, HR, IT, Procurement) and consumers of workplaces operate in silos and have divergent points of view on how an organization uses and operate its workplaces;
• Everyone places undue focus on the physical ‘workplace’, viewing it purely as a destination where work is carried out. The implications of the 2020 pandemic forced everyone to re-think how and where they can work.
Sources
1. ‘It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.’
Eliot, G. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. London & Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874, p.46.
2. ‘global constellation of companies and entrepreneurs allows members to tap into and realize value from these economic spill-overs, within their local communities and across cities.’ Dr Arun Sundararajan
We Company/HR&A Advisors, Global Impact Report 2019, p. 23.
3. ‘Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
Carroll, L. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. London: Macmillan, 1871. p.58.
Epigraph
Bernard Shaw, G. Everybody’s Political What’s What? London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1944. Reproduced by kind permission of The Society of Authors, on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate, p. 330.
Notes
1 Fit-out is the process of making interior spaces suitable for occupation.
2 Founded in 2010 in New York, WeWork’s meteoric rise in the co-working/flexi-space market was fuelled by its reputation for being a hothouse for start-ups. At their peak in 2017, WeWork operated in 280 locations, across 86 cities in 32 countries worldwide (2017 figures).