Enabled by new technology, the number of private offices and cubicles continues to shrink as more people work from home, on the road, or in shared desk or unassigned seating environments.
HOK’s space management teams typically work from our clients’ offices, where we help them proactively manage their occupancy requirements to align with their company’s business needs.
Effectively managing the physical spaces that an organization occupies, whether a single floor or multiple sites across the world, requires an understanding of the supply and demand, i.e., space data (the supply of each type of workspace) versus occupancy data (the actual utilization of space types). Corporate real estate (CRE) and facility management (FM) groups can use this data to configure and allocate their spaces accordingly.
Companies with large national or international real estate portfolios don’t always know exactly how much leased or owned space they have, making it especially challenging for CRE groups to optimize their physical occupancy of these spaces. To leverage the workplace as an asset that brings value to the organization, they need to know which spaces they can let go of, what they need to keep and how they can optimize that space.
Integrating the following five pillars of space management will help CRE and FM groups ensure that their workplaces are as effective as possible.
1. WORKPLACE STRATEGY
A workplace strategy provides the framework for making decisions within an overarching set of goals. The structure may include:
- Financial strategy: leased vs. owned
- Portfolio strategy: building types, i.e., Class A, B or C
- Location strategy: proximity to customers and talent at the right cost
- The actual workplace strategy: how to occupy the real estate
A good real estate strategy provides a responsive, flexible workplace that accommodates an organization’s changing requirements. The goal is to minimize change costs by limiting the need for customization while boosting productivity.
Companies typically update their workplace strategies once every 3–5 years and only refresh 5 percent of their portfolios in a year. This explains why workplaces may go 10–15 years without updates—much longer than most organizations want to wait. This gap between strategy and implementation reinforces how important it is to separate space planning from occupancy planning.
The growing popularity of coworking spaces demonstrates that companies are looking for flexible space that supports their rapidly changing business needs.
Organizations that incorporate more end user flexibility in their workplace strategies won’t have to search outside their portfolios to satisfy their space needs.
