Diane J. Hoskins, FAIA, NCARB Co-CEO at Gensler
The war for talent is getting more intense with every passing day and potential employees now find themselves firmly in the driver’s seat.
Record low unemployment is putting enormous pressure on U.S. companies and top organizations are seeking new ways to compete for the best and the brightest. This March, a Barron’s article by Avi Salzman reported that we are facing a “great labor crunch,” including a shortage of at least 8.2-million workers across the U.S. over the next 10 years. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the labor shortage is so acute in some regions of the country that even if every unemployed person across the Midwest filled a job opening, this 12-state region would still have 180,000 unfilled positions.
In this unprecedented climate, workplace has become an important strategic tool of many top companies, helping them attract and retain good people.
However, at the same time that labor shortages are upon us, the question of where and how people work is undergoing significant change as new technological and real estate models become more prevalent. Not all of these changes have had positive results for companies trying to attract talent. Many organizations are realizing that the move to disbursed, nomadic workforces has depleted their culture and limited the growth and development of their people. Also, it’s been proven that arbitrarily reducing square footage per person in a workplace can impact the ability for people to focus at work.
At the recent “Future Offices 2018 Conference” in New York, a range of speakers offered important insights into how top organizations are using their respective workplaces to their advantage. From BuzzFeed’s Julia Goldberg who spoke about how and why organizations are leveraging design and technology to attract top talent, to Tracy Hawkins of Twitter who talked about how the workplace can trigger new behaviors and shape organizational culture, it was instructive for me to hear other top executives from around the world describe how the workplace has become a critical component of their business strategy.
For more than a decade, the Gensler Research Institute has studied the relationship between workplace design and business outcomes. The results are clear: people thrive in companies and organizations with certain types of workplaces. We are finding that these workplaces are based on four trends that the Gensler Research Institute forecasts as driving the future of the workplace, and which organizations should embrace to create success.