Focus on quality in workspace: work as a destination experience
According to a new survey by JLL of more than one thousand corporate real-estate (CRE) professionals in 13 key markets around the world, investing in quality space is set to be a greater priority than expanding the total footprint.
Quality defined
Let’s talk about what quality space is and what it means to employees and corporations.
Quality for an employee is about rationale for engagement, comfort and ability to flow and produce the kind of work one wants to achieve. To be in a quality environment is a feeling of being valued and supported by the space and the community who inhabit it.
For corporations, quality space has more economic elements such as efficiency, production and proper ulitization of resources as well as employee retention.
Flexible digital experiences
For an employee, many do not mind coming back to an office space provided it has the same agility and flexibility we enjoy WFH. So workers aren’t about to give up on flexibility easily and more than half of all organisations (53 percent of the JLL survey) are set to make remote working permanently available to all employees by 2025.
No less than 67% of employees participating in a survey by digital experience (DEX) solution provider 1E agree that “digital experiences in personal life are better than digital experiences at work.” This 1E survey also shows 95% of employees saying they “struggle with digital friction such as software and network issues, workplace application access problems, and slow devices.”
Another aspect of quality is the space you inhabit is well used and for purpose. The JLL survey also discusses many of the ESG and energy efficiency discussions happening around workplace design, examining discussions on improving carbon efficiency, influencing new locations, embracing circular design principles and exiting less carbon-efficient space.
But let’s go back to quality, not quantity. Summarizing our points above, quality includes flexibility, agility, energy efficiency, design and a feeling of connection and engagement.
Creating quality and measuring it
So how is a quality workspace created and maintained?
It may be hard to say, as the JLL survey also points out that six out of ten companies currently fail to capture real estate data in any meaningful way. So many lack a baseline as to what is the norm in terms of occupancy, number of logged in hours, capacity and employee movement.
We are trying to create a flow to enable the employee, the customer, the manager all to have the tools and the environment together well integrated to create an optimal environment for constructive work.
Part of a discussion on quality is about the digital experience of work and what that means to be able to flow properly with ideas and collaboration. A recent Gartner analysis predicts that within the next three years, 50% of IT organizations will have established a digital employee experience strategy, team and management tool — an increase from 5% in 2021.
Communication is key
When it comes to quality in work, communication is a critical factor. If we feel that we engage in a more meaningful way and get the resources we need to create flow in our work, we will go not only out of obligation, but for the workplace as a destination.
So in terms of both impact on talent recruitment and retention as well as corporate reputation and employee satisfaction, we need to figure out how to rebuild trust and communication in the workplace and how to build for quality experiences. In other words, we need to recognise that process design, technology orchestration, leadership, and creating communities / tribes amplifies engagement across distributed work.