Sanjay Rishi - The Workplace You Need Now

In the following pages, we have extensively explored the imperatives to change, provided experiences of organizations and individuals from across the world, and debated options and approaches to bringing these transformed workplaces to life. We evaluated perspectives of organizations that occupy offices, invest in workspaces, and employees who make up the workforce of today – diverse, individualistic, engaged, and competitive. Those perspectives coalesced on a distinct viewpoint: the workplace is the beating heart of an organization and will continue to be so; enterprises must pull the various levers of workplace transformation to harness the power of their workforces; creating a culture of collaboration and a sense of belonging is paramount to talent attraction, retention, and overall success of an organization.

Figure I.1 Future of Work: Workplace Framework The workplace must provide memorable experiences; a sense of purpose, belonging, and corporate responsibility; and the power to personalize through the workplace.

We bring to the book the blending of our combined career learnings – a total of more than 75 years – along with the deep expertise of our extensive group of passionate collaborators. Our experiences span careers in digital transformation, real estate strategy, enterprise strategy, innovation, and research. Examples of approaches, thanks to the collaboration of our clients cited across these pages, provide illustrative vignettes to navigate these uncharted waters of the newly emerged picture of workplace.

In Part I, we focus on the personal workplace. We start by exploring the imperatives that are changing the nature of workspaces and, in turn, suggesting that organizations anticipate and develop a strategic response to those imperatives. For the first time in history, four generations coexist in the workplace. Each generation brings with its own unique learnings, cultures, experiences, and expectations. Working collaboratively, these generations create value and success for their organizations. Yet, their preferences, allegiances, and portability across jobs and roles diverge significantly.

As much as multigenerational workers desire workplace flexibility and personalization, that flexibility is driven or limited by the availability of tools and technology. The speed of corresponding workplace evolution will be driven by the level of organizational commitment to change.

The responsible workplace, with its various dimensions, is emerging as the next major driver of change for organizations. Corporate responsibility now goes much farther than it did in the past, when it mostly comprised well-intentioned initiatives to further the corporate culture. Part IIlays out the case for change and uncovers a mandate for organizations to invest financial, human, and social capital to effect fundamental change.

We define four macro responsibility imperatives: health and wellness, environment and sustainability, diversity/equity/inclusion, and resilience. Members of today’s workforce are driving as they seek to blend working from the home, from the office, and from anywhere. They care about societal causes, including glaring problems of social and racial injustice, income inequality, and environmental sustainability. They want the workplace to support a distinct culture and opportunities for collaboration, creativity, and community, and they’re relying on their employers to build such a space. The challenge, of course, is to address the divergent needs and preferences of workers themselves. We examine four worker profiles whose divergent needs are a source of challenge and opportunity.

In Part III, we explore the experiential workplace. Experience indeed is everything – in personal lives and in lives at work. Individuals are motivated to come to work to find social interaction, mentorship, collaboration, and learning. Workplaces are evolving rapidly to accommodate these heightened needs of individuals. C-suite executives increasingly recognize that workplaces should be inviting and healthy, and facilitate a rewarding experience. Talent attraction and retention rests on this focus on workplaces that help create a brand and a sense of belonging that can be illusive in a digitally enabled world.

We unpack design influences that are affecting physical spaces. The innovation and creativity in the physical design shape the first visual experience for the visitor. Much can be leveraged from ideas and concepts that leading enterprises are creating and adopting. We further explore the intelligent experience – the coming together of the physical and the digital. In leading companies, digital transformation is enabling not only new business models but also new workplace experiences. Mobile apps are making navigation easy, space reservations efficient, occupancy management effective, and the entire spectrum of sustainable, responsive, smart workplace operations a reality.

Not unlike industries that have harnessed digital and cloud technologies to power innovation, workplaces stand to benefit from the enhanced postpandemic attention to the domain of corporate real estate. Commercial property technology – “proptech” – has been fueled by investments across the globe, and the pandemic has enabled a marked acceleration of a whole new spectrum of capabilities, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, and touchless technologies, to name a few, into the workspace.

The dimensions of transformation are diverse, with no panacea or “one-size-fits-all” approach for organizations and workers to embrace. Yet, the trends, the needs, and the capabilities for transforming workplaces are undeniable and the opportunity vast. The call to action has never been louder and the foundation of support never stronger, for organizations to navigate their individual journeys through the labyrinth of options.

The workplace of the future is here and now, and the lines between where we live, work, and play have become blurred. The experiential workplace is now the new metric by which spaces are being evaluated, as organizations seek to optimize their use of space while fostering employee engagement and productivity through dynamic workplace strategies.

We conclude the book in Part IVhaving described the emerging demand, the paths to fulfilment of those demands, and the risks of inaction. Relying on the assessments and views of the entire ecosystem of workspace participants – investors, occupiers, brokers, managers, proptech entrepreneurs, corporate real estate officers, human resource leaders, chief information officers, and more – we aim to help organizations and individuals think through the continuum of needs and priorities across six facets of workplace transformation.

Since many of these issues and trends are still emerging, with no one “right answer” for the workplace, we have sought to provide a strategic framework whereby companies can discover the approach that will meet their unique corporate management, organizational, workforce, and cultural needs. The proposed framework is a tool for decision-making and capital investments that can be customized to each organization. It reflects approaches that leading organizations are adopting to fit their particular circumstances.

From climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, crises, and mass disruption – the likes of which we have experienced in past eras – we have seen devastating and yet fundamentally transformative consequences emerge. Across history, crises have catalyzed innovation and business model transformation, and have been followed by a sense of optimism. The idea for this book first emerged just as the world had been turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic and hopes of a quick recovery had been lost. For months, humanity reeled with uncertainty, fears, grief, and loss, and socioeconomic challenges that, combined, more closely resembled a gripping science fiction movie than real life. From dining with friends or cheering at a baseball game to taking a child to school and heading to the office, normalcy was displaced.