Commercial office space: Time for a workplace intervention

Abstract

Traditional office work is giving way to a new vision that, in turn, is leading to new considerations about office buildings and designs. The traditional office — designed to assign workers to dedicated spaces where they can be easily monitored — needs to change. When today's organisations assess the utilisation of their office space, most find that the cubicles in their workplace are 50–70 per cent vacant at any given time. No longer tied to their desks and paper files, workers are using mobile technology, moving around the office and using alternative workspaces based on their specific requirements or situations. As a result, corporate real estate professionals and office building owners need to re-evaluate their office portfolios. Workplace transformation is about rethinking how, where and why people work. There is an opportunity to re-imagine the physical office environment to drive business growth, employee engagement, collaboration, innovation and, ultimately, productivity. Today's organisations can transform their workplaces by investing in technology, creating alternative workplace solutions for employees and connecting the workplace design to the organisation's mission and brand. This paper explains some of the critical steps to getting there. Through re-calibrating office strategies and designs and reducing office costs, organisations are able to redeploy valuable resources into human capital and technology to deliver productivity gains.