Corporate real estate optimization is a multi-disciplinary process. It can span from changing light bulbs to restructuring your company's finances. Optimization also happens on both the daily level and on a big-picture level that can span years or decades. Here are four ways you can optimize your company's real estate for better performance in the near, middle and long-term.
After years of open-office layouts, employers are finally figuring out how to use them to shrink spaces and employees are starting to speak with a clear voice. Many of them say that they hate the office layout. However, when you dig into the data, it's not the open office that they hate. It's its drawbacks, and they can be managed with a bit of creativity.
So what do employees hate about open offices? There are a few common complaints:
No ability to make phone calls or have conversations without being overheard.
A lack of ability to work without interruption.
Intervening noise from other employees.
No personal defined space.
While one way to solve this problem is to go back to a traditional closed-floor plan office layout with private offices for everyone, most companies aren't going to do this. Instead, they can use some (or all) of these techniques to mitigate these typical complaints:
One of the ways to manage sound levels in an open floor plan office is to add the right kind of sound. A background sound like white or pink noise can help to both prevent it from seeming eerily quiet. At the same time, a constant, pleasant sound gives people's brains something to focus on instead of a neighbor's conversations.
Private spaces -- like small impromptu conference rooms -- can serve the role of offices. Workers that need a place to make a private phone call or that just need some time to think can use these spaces to duck out of their cube or workstation and get some work done. The key to making these work is to include enough of them in your office layout that they can be used on an as-needed basis instead of needing to be reserved.
These spaces have a second benefit, too. When a group of people need to get together for a collaboration session, they use the spaces for it. This saves them from disturbing the people around them.
One of the biggest benefits of an open floor plan office layout is that the space you save by getting rid of private offices and large cubes can be reassigned to more productive uses. Larger break rooms or employee cafe's don't just let workers get out of their cubes. They also make it possible for lunchtime chatter to turn into productive business decisions. Shared work areas for printers and other office machines can reduce your IT budget by saving you from buying everyone a printer and scanner. Employees also have to get up, walk around and bump into each other to use them. This also shifts conversation away from the cube while contributing to a healthy level of non-disturbing background noise.
Finally, one of the best solutions to the problems with an open office layout is to let employees escape it periodically. While part of the reason for an open floor plan is to increase employee collaboration, the reality of the modern work place is that your team spends a lot of its time physically apart. Accepting this reality and allowing your employees to choose to work from home (at least part time) gives them the opportunity to have a space that they control while also lessening the load on your traditional office. That way, when a worker is at the office, it's because she wants to be and, hopefully, because she's open to leveraging your open office layout's benefits.
While having a big picture strategy is an important part of maximizing your company's corporate real estate investment, the strategy gets executed in the area of tactical commercial real estate. The nuts and bolts of what is happening with your portfolio make up the building blocks that you need to achieve business goals. Here are some tactics that are crucial to support your strategic initiatives:
While you might not be building out your industrial space with elaborate employee cafes or mahogany-lined board rooms, industrial properties need a tenant improvement budget, too. While much of what you put into your space will come in the realm of fixtures rather than TIs, going beyond basic lights and climate control can make your industrial space much more effective. Here are the best five types of tenant improvements that you can put in the next space you acquire for your company's portfolio.
Choosing a lease term isn't always as simple as it seems. The old rules of thumb -- that long-term leases are cheaper while short-term leases are flexible -- still hold true. However, given that business is changing at a faster pace than ever before, more and more companies are finding that the flexibility benefits of a short-term lease are cancelling out the savings that can be found by signing for a longer term. The ease of management that comes from commercial real estate software also supports this decision.
Finding industrial space for your company requires a unique corporate real estate strategy. With industrial property, the details of the building tend to be more important compared to other property types. You probably wouldn't disqualify an office space because it has 9 instead of 9.5-foot ceilings, but in an industrial property, small differences in clear height or in column spacing can have significant impacts on efficiency. As you develop your corporate real estate strategy for industrial properties, here are five factors to consider:
Continue ReadingAre $6 per square foot operating expenses reasonable? How about 20? As with many corporate real estate questions, the answer depends on many factors, starting with what they're being benchmarked against. Depending on the type of benchmarks you need to set, you can tap into different data sources -- both internal and external -- to help you figure out whether or not your operating expenses are reasonable for your particular market conditions.
Continue ReadingYour space is bigger than you think it is. Then again, it's also smaller than you think it is. The reason for this is that there are two different ways of measuring spaces in commercial real estate, and the difference between them can add up to thousands of dollars per year -- even on small spaces.
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