My trade is to ask questions about the workplace then make sense of the answers. That has been a particular challenge with the question, ‘what are offices today?’ What seems clear is that the various actors in the workplace ecosystem look at offices through very different eyes. Urban planning and development professionals still view offices as a distinct category of real estate and most real estate professionals view offices in terms of the delivery of floor space. Some things have changed,however. For some time, the hybrid economy of serviced offices has turned the product into a service. But, in many cases this has simply made the leasing of space simpler and more flexible. As Neil Usher says in his workessence blog, “while co-working is declared to be disrupting the institutional stuffed shirt that is the commercial rented sector, the sprouting centres come to increasingly resemble the corporate world at which their earlier incarnations cocked a snook”.
That may indeed be true for many serviced offices, and a few co-working hubs. But, what is happening now, in pockets of activity, appears to be that the “experience economy” is starting to pull offices through into a contemporary “place experience” sub-economy.
Rob Harris’ book Property and the Office Economy a decade ago, helped to simultaneously consolidate my thinking, and to spark new questions. In fact, it appears that we could have three perspectives on offices, as follows:
- Offices as a ‘product’ : floor area, for a price (rent)
- Offices as a ‘service’ : space and service, for a simple fee (daily, monthly, etc.)
- Offices as ‘experience’ : more than the sum of (a) + (b); attraction; added value;