It is not just brick and mortar anymore. In today’s competitive business landscape companies have to adapt, and adapt quickly, to attract and retain top talent. Your office space can definitely be a tool to charm the next wave of a highly skilled workforce. Businesses are focused on creating a diverse and inclusive environment for their employees, in doing so, they must also be sensitive to how they design and build their spaces. Diversification translates to having a workforce with varied backgrounds, cultures, beliefs, genders, and ages. How is your space design welcoming to your employee population?
Today’s talent pool has a revolutionary set of expectations from when I first started in CRE Brokerage in the late 90’s. The playbook for building and designing workplaces in the 21st Century has significantly changed. The simple idea of building a community of companies to share a communal office space and simultaneously have their autonomy has given rise to the giant co-working industry. Co-working has disrupted the traditional office space design of the lonely cubicle and isolated private offices with creative open spaces. Inspiring innovative workflow by giving your employees greater freedom of their workspace and how to interact with their team, and in some instances other companies within the community. This new workspace and workflow design has been termed the Agile Office.
During my stint as a software consultant, a brief hiatus from commercial real estate brokerage, I learned about agile as it related to software development. The short form definition for the Agile Method is software development teams using incremental, iterative work sequences to respond rapidly to the unpredictability of building software. In today’s start-up culture economy, it is this unpredictability which motivates decisions of how to acquire, design and build space. Growth for start-ups and spin-offs can be unpredictable. Will they experience explosive exponential growth or a slow and steady rise? A company may experience an unpredictable pivot from their initial business plan and must be able to innovate quickly. Not only must the company’s processes be agile but the office space from which it operates must allow an agile work environment.
This is the quagmire office landlords and tenants find themselves in today. The large institutional landlords are being asked to create flexible office environments, and many of them are partnering with co-working companies, basically turning co-working into an amenity that is offered.
There are several ways you can create your very own agile office environment. I have worked on and assisted in implementing agile office requirements for TAMI tenants before the co-working craze became mainstream. Agile office environments give your workforce the freedom and independence they need to collaborate, ideate and create.
Please contact me to discuss how you can find your independence from the traditional office and design the freedom of an agile one.
