Suck it up. The role of property in supporting organisational performance has changed forever. The obsession with bricks and mortar has to shift to the employee-as-consumer experience. If we understand that user experience, then organisations can make the right decisions. The problem is, experience is now scattered across millions of homes worldwide.
Boardrooms are empty, but boards are still meeting and workplace is top of their agenda. This is an unbelievable opportunity to prove the value proposition of the workplace. But you can’t walk into a boardroom without data; you have to know how the organisation is performing now, how it was performing before, and how it might perform in the future with a new approach.
The world’s leading organisations are using this hiatus period to directly inform and evaluate the future workplace landscape. Collecting and aggregating data has never been so important. Highly empathetic organisations – those that place the employees at the heart of the experience they seek to curate – make it their business to understand what their people think, need and want because they understand the value of experience.
But the workplace machine, which can so easily strengthen or strangle experience, has a new competitor. And it’s working hard to offer employees an alternative to what they previously and unequivocally considered a central place of work. Offices and homes are currently battling head to head.