Should our workspaces be treated as an employee benefit ?

[Suzy]

In a post-pandemic and post-presenteeism world where increasing numbers of employees prefer remote working to daily commuting, many employers are now seeking to operationalise the new normal and give employees greater control over both the location of their work as well as hours worked.

Whilst corporate occupiers will need to prioritise flexibility, well-being and more sustainable work-life balances for those employees seeking to limit their days spent at the office, they will likely also need to consider what type of new amenities to introduce to create a compelling offer capable of pulling employees back!   

Will be interesting to see range of ambition as corporates start reimaging their future footprint and space requirements, expect some good news here for space as a service operators.

Will others follow Standard Chartered's lead in giving their employees more flexible and a choice of locations from which to work ?   Expect many more pilot projects ahead ... as well as a few lessons to be learnt! .... will profitability and productivity be affected ? ... what are the compliance challenges ?  ... how you you effective support and managed an increasingly distributed workforce?  ... should salaries be cut to reflect lower commuting costs and less time in the office?  .... what space collaboration software and tools will be required to support the effective utilisation of a smaller corporate footprint?  

Corporate real estate is clearly becoming more strategic than ever before and as such the CRE executive need to be at the table with internal HR, IT & Finance departments actively championing ideation and co-creation exercises with a view to reimaging how their corporate footprint becomes an employee benefit and what types of new occupation performance measures and data insights should be tracked to enable progress to be measured. 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Genie