Slowly but surely, we’re moving back to to the office. At the very least partially. What remains unclear is what the split between working from home and the office will look like, how our behaviour in the office will change, and what this means for office design. To deliver the optimal employee experience and adapt to the new Hybrid Workplace norm of tomorrow, Corporate Real Estate teams need to be agile and adaptive. This means accurate utilization insights are more important than ever. In this first article in a series of two, we describe how Corporate Real Estate teams can leverage utilization technology to work on key Hybrid Workplace priorities.
Priority #1 – Portfolio Reduction
Underutilization was a known problem pre-Covid. With enterprises adopting more hybrid workplace strategies in which working from home plays a larger role and COVID pressuring revenue streams across industries, cutting real estate costs has become a priority.
Understanding what areas of the portfolio are under-utilized and translating these insights into portfolio downsizing is the agenda for most CRE teams. Without actual insights in utilization across the portfolio this is like taking shots in the dark. In order to attain essential insights in utilization, leading enterprises are looking for scalable technology solutions that provide real-time insights.
HubStar Utilization Solution for Portfolio Reduction:
- portfolio insights
- consolidation statement
In this phase of re-entering our offices, it’s vital to understand which options there are to make responsible choices to optimize the portfolio. Therefore, HubStar (previously Lone Rooftop) has launched Portfolio Insights, which highlights peak utilization and resulting consolidation opportunities per building. With this functionality, it’s easy to compare these numbers to last month’s or last years metrics to get a more comprehensive picture of the current situation. We’ve also added a consolidation statement section, to help you gather ideas for how to consolidate your portfolio. This functionality can be seen as a precursor for more restacking and scenario planning tooling that will be launched later this year.
Priority #2 – Hybrid Working
Many companies are providing employees with the choice to do their work where it best suits them. This will lead to employees coming to the office mainly to collaborate for 1 to 3 days per week. It will be difficult to justify each employee having an assigned desk. That is why many think future offices will be turned “inside out” from 70% desks and 30% collaboration space to 30% desks and 70% collaboration space. Desk booking and room booking solutions paired with sensors has become a hot trend for managing the workplace. This is important in ensuring that visitors, employees that usually work remotely and part-time employees are assured of adequate workspace without the expense of providing these individuals with full-time assigned workspace.
But before acting on concepts like these, many are looking to inform the thesis through the use of real-time space utilization technology. Actual space utilization data collected via a variety of data sources, enables data-driven decision workplace design and will ultimately be the most cost effective way to address this challenge.
HubStar Utilization Solution for Hybrid Working:
- New patterns
- Preview on: week ahead alerting
Workplace Strategy professionals are in sync that a new form of hybrid working will crystalize in the months to come. Hence, we’ve updated our Patterns report, which allows you to understand a team or a building’s pattern of utilization for the average work week. Our customers derive insights such as the set of core hours of use and ideal operating times for building services, staffing and cleaning hours for service areas from this report. More alerting functionality is available to notify you and your team whenever the actual utilization diverges from the expected pattern. These new features will help keep you and your planning in sync with what’s going on in your buildings in realtime.
Keep an eye out for part two of this blog series, in which we discuss priorities #3 and #4: data-driven space design. In case you’re interested to learn how you can apply utilization insights to optimize your buildings for the Hybrid Workplace, book a meeting with one of our experts below.
