With more global corporates setting up, growing or consolidating companies in the Middle East, building owners need to recognise and respond to trends in workplace strategy that are increasingly popular around the world. This is likely to result in a greater emphasis on designing buildings from the ‘inside out’ rather than the ‘outside in’ over the next five years.
The more widespread emphasis on workplace strategy is driving building owners to deliver more efficient and higher performing assets that can more easily be configured for better quality workplaces and contribute to the future success of occupiers.
Jones Lang LaSalle will be attending the second global workplace strategy summit at the University College of London in June. Building on the success of the first such summit held at Cornell University, this year’s event will examine the trends and thinking on a range of issues related to work and how companies use their workplaces, including design, facilities management, real estate, organisational ecology and technology.
Workplace strategy involves the alignment of an organisation’s work patterns and practices with their working environment, to enable peak performance and reduce costs. While much of the discussion on workplace strategy has related to commercial office space, this forms only one part of the broader debate about how an organisation’s plan and use their educational, medical manufacturing and other commercial facilities.
More commercial organistions are examining their practices and reviewing potential new strategies in response to trigger points such as running out of space, having too much space, or wanting to introduce organisation change. While the trigger may vary, the overall purpose of such a review is usually similar — to better understand an organisation’s requirements and identify workplace solution that will help them meet their current and future needs.
Unlocking productivity
Common business objectives of workplace strategies include reducing property costs, improving business performance, retaining and attracting staff, merging two or more organisational cultures and consolidating multiple activities in a single building. These issues are gaining increased traction among corporate real estate (CRE) teams globally.
Respondents to a recent survey of more than 6,00 organisations across 39 countries undertaken by JLL identified that transforming the nature of their workplace was one of five key areas in unlocking worker productivity and optimising real estate portfolios.
Around one-third of companies have already used workplace strategies to achieve reductions in their real estate portfolio, increase space utilisation while at the same time improving the quality of their working environment over the past three years.
While much has been achieved in this area in recent years, there is a clear understanding that more needs to be done.
We are not only advising clients on the benefits of workplace strategy but are also taking advantage of our lease renewals and organisation restructuring to implement some of these initiatives in our own offices around the world. In London, we implemented a multiple building hot desking strategy, where staff do not have a permanent desk or office but can book a different space across three separate buildings, according to which teams they are working with on any particular day.
In Sydney and Singapore, similar approaches have been adopted, creating attractive modern working environments with more open space and less private space.
Our emphasis has been on combining smaller personal spaces with more collaborative areas such as break-out rooms, ‘chill-out zones’ and recreational areas, as well as more informal meeting and conference rooms. In each case, our objective has been to create a working environment which best suits our business requirements and not just the creation of more modern, funky or trendy work spaces.
In our experience, the success of a workplace strategy depends largely on a broader change management process led by senior members of staff to inspire new conversations and behaviours. Too often there has been an assumption that if leadership talks about changes, employees will ultimately embrace them.
In reality, unless a more holistic approach is adopted, meaningful changes will be hard to achieve.
— The writer is the head of project and development Services, Jones Lang LaSalle, Middle East and North Africa.
