Delivering and managing high productivity, low cost workplaces : A data driven perspective

After years of education from within and outside the real estate industry, executives recognise that the workplace is a tool they can deploy to enhance the performance of their people, attract and retain talent and impact their environmental footprint. At the same time, corporate real estate and facilities management (CRE&FM) teams are under pressure to save money. These emergent workplace expectations are often seen as conflicting with the goal to reduce operating costs. This paper explores the extent to which these expectations — implementing highspecification activity-based work settings and at the same time reducing costs — may in fact be the yin and yang of the workplace: perhaps, rather than being conflicting, they are in fact complementary. Through applied research and using data-driven approaches and models, it challenges some fundamental thinking about how a corporate real estate (CRE) organisation is structured; it considers how people’s behaviours influence their demands of the next generation workplaces; and it explores what this means for CRE operating models and the technology to support them.