few years ago, Bill Bouchey, director of interior design at HOK’s New York studio, worked on a project renovating the Montreal regional headquarters of a large financial institution. The project proved emblematic of contemporary workers’ evolving preferences and the ways companies are striving to both accommodate and encourage those workers in their new habits. The undertaking saw the company reduce its footprint on its main campus in downtown Montreal and open up new space at two smaller facilities — one located uptown and one located in a transition area between urban Montreal and the suburbs.
The goal, Bouchey says, was to respond to trends such as remote working, flexible working, and hoteling to allow employees to work “in a more agile way, including being able to work remotely part of their workweek and part of the time to travel to other locations that were connected to the corporate culture but weren’t necessarily all the way downtown.”
In the new arrangement, workers who resided in the suburbs might split their time between working at home, working at one of the satellite facilities, and working at the main campus, depending on their inclinations and the demands of their jobs. The company “wanted to use this project to help attract and retain people,” Bouchey notes. “They know that people are looking for flexibility in how they work and conduct themselves as corporate professionals.”
Emphasizing Agility and Flexibility
The changing nature of work has created challenges for companies as they develop new headquarters and regional hubs and renovate existing ones.
“Technology has changed everything,” says Meredith O’Connor, an international director and co-chair of the Headquarter Practice Group at JLL, so that new models for the workplace “seem to change almost by the month.”
In response, companies are prioritizing agility and flexibility in their facilities — both in the design of the spaces and in the strategic decision of where to actually locate them. In the case of the Montreal project, research demonstrated the paths that many of the companies’ commuters were taking to get downtown, enabling the company to identify convenient locations for the satellite offices along the route.