The new measure

TAKING A NEW

MEASU

RE

Complexities in the relationship between workers and their workplaces have only grown through the pandemic, meaning complexities in how levels of service for hybrid model offi ces are to be calculated – as well as what needs measuring in the fi rst place. Bradford Keen and Martin Read report

he many recent surveys considering the postpandemic future office may vary in scope, but not generally in result: a new reality in which office workers spend perhaps two to three days in the office is a recurring theme. And if this plays out, the implications for the economy – in terms of recalibration rather than size – are seismic. The idea of ‘blended work’ ecosystems before the pandemic has simply been hastened as a result of it. And inevitably, the introduction of different uses for the workplace will continue to stress-test FM teams as the function continues to pivot away from emergency mode towards routine enablement of the hybrid model.

So what will this mean for the office? Nicola Gillen of Cushman & Wakefield, considering the early impact of hybrid on CRE, talks of there being “an increased focus on community, both corporate and local place, to connect and provide a sense of belonging to a group of people with wellbeing at the heart of the development. That’s really increased as a priority for occupiers”.

Says Gillan, “we’re seeing less desking and more community spaces, and overall a flight to quality”.

According to Russell Wood, while hybrid occupancy levels are likely to be at between 40 to 60 per cent, the operational requirements for FM teams will, he believes, intensify as routine adaptation takes over from the fixed servicing of space as the top item on an FM’s task list.

“Those coming into the office are doing so to pitch new clients, for example, and we need to support that by providing better facilities through enhanced LED lighting and improved quality of meeting rooms

STATISTICS FROM LEESMAN’S ‘STATE OF THE ESTATE – CRE LEADERSHIP 2021’ SURVEY POST-PANDEMIC, WILL YOU GIVE EMPLOYEES CHOICE OVER WHEN THEY USE THE OFFICE?

41%

No decision has been made yet

37%

We will offer complete freedom

13%

We will decide for them

57% Hybrid model where employees can use our office and their homes

28% Hybrid model where employees can use our office and their homes and third space

9%

We will use a system that is based on a rota/first come, first served

0% All employees will be working in the office full-time 0% All employees will be working remote full-time

HAS YOUR ORGANISATION MADE A DECISION ABOUT WHERE EMPLOYEES WILL BE WORKING ONCE THE PANDEMIC IS NOT RESTRICTING THIS?

9% Employees predominantly office-based

6% No firm plans

0% Employees predominantly home-based

and updating meeting room software.

The necessary professional capability to do this has been positively enhanced by the crisis, says Wood.

“The last eight months have made us more resilient, personally and professionally, We’ve become more multiskilled in our separate functions and done a lot of re-education about the pressures of front of house or mailroom teams to make sure these operate more efficiently.”

It is this newly wider capability, and organisations’ awareness of it, that will allow FMs to lead on how future service demands are calculated.

POLL OF WORKPLACE FUTURES SUMMER CONFERENCE ATTENDEES WHAT SHOULD FM’S TOP PRIORITY BE DURING NEXT YEAR?

22.9 % Hygiene, safety and compliance

11.4 % Sustainability, societal impact and energy management

Service uncertainty

For catering, says Lucy Jeynes, determining a contractor’s level of exposure to risk needs to be part of any fresh discussion of service.

“With occupancy much lower than before, why would you expect a catering company to take a commercial risk?

5.7 % Gett ing the workforce back to the office

15.7 % Digital transformation and technical innovation

11.4 % Employee productivity and efficiency

31.4 % Creating new hybrid forms of workplace

1.4 % Something else

WORKSPACE VOLUME

PULLING IN TWO DIRECTIONS

On the face of it, a longer term reduction in office space needs is an inevitable implication of hybrid working, yet survey data implies that offices need also to ‘up their game’ if they’re to compete with the comfort of homes. But cutt ing space while investing in the quality of what remains may prove too crude an assessment.

In one sense, we’ve been here before – and more than once, says Nigel Oseland. “If you look at BCO (British Council of Offices) figures, we’ve increased density by 40 per cent over the last 20 years,” he says, assessing typical space-to-worker figures. “Even in the last 10 years we’ve lost about two desks’ worth of space per person across the whole building. We’ve been running them at ridiculously high densities. That’s bad for noise and an infringement on personal space, especially as desk spaces get smaller – 1.4m, 1.2m or even 1m. And of course, it’s also not going to help with cross infections.” Enough is enough, is Oseland’s message. “If people are in the office 50 per cent of the time, we shouldn’t be thinking about taking away 50 per cent of the space. We can reduce the number of desks, space them out and bring in more space for collaboration and focused work such as pods and quiet rooms.

“The facilities manager needs to think beyond the desk and the meeting room. The office will be a much richer mix of different work sett ings. And the home… is part of the workplace now; there’s no going back.”

Antony Wiltshire of Edelman agrees with much of the emerging consensus about hybrid’s focus on collaboration. “People want something different,” he says of his own firm’s employees, “space to collaborate, quiet areas, technology that welcomes hybrid collaboration and, above all, space that inspires, welcomes and delivers something they simply can’t replicate at home.”

One aspect of this flexibility can be the use of zones within workspaces that can be customised to the requirements of different teams or departments – with such zones able to be swapped out when needed.

Chad David Smith, VP product strategy at iOffice, talks of ‘clever zones’ that can be set up to limit the use of space to certain areas. This allows colleagues to work relatively closely in team units but also allows facilities staff to prioritise these areas for cleaning and implementation of safety measures.

And Ian Jones has been thinking on the same lines. Talk at ITV is of introducing hot-swappable furnishing units that are customised by team type in working group ‘neighbourhoods’, as much to allow greater ongoing adaptability of his buildings’ overall workspace as to sustain the sense of community within teams. He’s trialling it now with a view to wider roll-out.

“We’re bringing people back into the office to sit in these neighbourhoods. But if we want to change the office quickly, we can just lift up a block.”

It also gives each group some autonomy. “It allows them to work in a more agile way.”

“We haven’t made all the rules and we haven’t got it completely sorted but we’re in the middle of changing the way we work – something we always wanted to change but never did.”

“You may need to consider a subsidy on your catering contract so that there’s always a standing amount of availability, even if hardly anybody comes in [to the officer], as a lot of catering contracts are based upon a commercial footfall.”

Other likely options are likely to include not providing a catering offer on a given weekday, or even shutting down the office on a day to allow for costs on both sides to be better understood. These decisions need to be balanced within a wider hybrid working framework.

For David Sharp, questions about change to service need to include environmental control systems.

“Are you looking at the next six months or next 60 years? Because [environmental control] systems are going to be much more self-regulated,” Sharp predicts.

“They’ll know what’s in the air and stop whatever is happening before it reaches hazardous levels. Ventilation is huge for FMs to pay attention to. Noise is very important too.”

“To suddenly move to an environment where you’re not in control of the lighting and the noise – that’s going to have an impact on FMs”

Taking back control

Of course, those working from home have greater control over that environment as it affects them specifically. Office choices about heat, ventilation and other components always represent a compromise in favour of the majority in attendance.

“To suddenly move to an environment where you’re not in control of the lighting and the noise – that’s going to have an impact on FMs in the way they use spaces and furniture and fittings.”

Consulting ISO 45003 (psychological health and safety at work) will also provide insight for workplace and facilities management teams, says Sharp.

“It lists some of the softer things we all need to consider that we never used to, such as employees’ financial security, social interaction and support, inclusion, recognition, reward and accomplishment, personal development and growth. That’s FM; you can build the environment and structure work to maximise delivery of those things.”

THE NET ZERO DIMENSION

SUSTAINABILITY – HOW HYBRID COULD HELP

With employees increasingly spread between homes, offices and third spaces, sustainability calculations and considerations are likely to require fresh thinking

Monica Parker is blunt in her assessment. “An organisation’s biggest sustainability win can be achieved through the shedding of real estate, something that can only really be achieved through shared desk scenarios coupled with hybrid working.

“Along with hybrid working comes less commuting, and tracking the sustainability gains from reduced commutes will be beneficial.”

Also, “with greater adoption of videoconferencing, long-haul air travel can be cut too”.

“Our role dovetails with HR and IT more than ever before,” adds Antony Wiltshire. “Fewer att endees reduce our footprint, our waste generated, the food and water consumed and toilets flushed. We expect business travel to stay far lower than before, and we have less IT equipment in place across the office – 50 per cent fewer monitors and docks. There’s also less printing, less cleaning consumables and food stocked and purchased.”

Twenty years ago, Nigel Oseland tried to calculate his own carbon emissions when at the office and at home. It was a difficult task but one that should be achievable these days with the help of a sustainability consultant. His conclusion? Hot-desking and agile working solves the sustainability calculation conundrum; leaving offices half-empty, lit and heated is wasteful, but when space is properly managed, balancing desk space with other spaces and understanding when work zones need to be heated or cooled, it becomes more environmentally conscious.

At ITV, Ian Jones has commissioned a company to calculate homebased and office-based carbon emissions. He’s asking for a “very simple study” using data that ITV has supplied on people, building sizes, electricity bills. He is eager to determine the shift from roughly 2,500 employees travelling to the office to around 600 and how that might affect the environment. He’ll then contrast this with the energy used in people’s homes and is optimistic that the gap would be negligible, making carbon emissions from homeworking and the agile new workplace roughly the same as it was with all employees working on site.

“The challenge, beyond the right measurement tools, is making data relevant to end users rather than esoteric and ephemeral,” says David Sharp. “Employees need to be fed the data of how they are contributing to their organisation’s carbon footprint in easily digestible chunks such as ‘how many cups of X or how many miles have I saved today?’ Or ‘how does this affect my grandchildren’s lives?’”

How all of this employee data feeds into an organisation’s broader corporate targets will require an application that can deal with it on a granular level. The good news, says Sharp, is that “these tools, if they don’t yet exist, definitely will soon”.

WHY OCCUPANCY DATA IS ESSENTIAL

Occupancy monitoring solutions exist to help you improve a building’s performance using data-driven evidence that takes the guesswork out of space optimisation, says Irisys True Occupancy

Your commercial real estate portfolio is one of your most significant and most costly assets. It takes strategic foresight to ensure that this space aligns with your business objectives.

As businesses embrace the hybrid working model, creating occupant-centric spaces that meet employees’ changing needs is essential. More fluid working patterns, the need for collaboration zones, and the move away from static workstations all have a role to play in how commercial property is shaping up. Occupancy solutions provide the necessary insights throughout this process to ensure the transformation is a success in the short term, and continues to be in the long term.

Why collect and monitor occupancy data?

To err is human. Often, what we perceive is different from reality. The peaks and troughs of daily use obscure our perceptions and experience by eliminating the friction and niggles that often occur in workplaces. How often have you struggled to find an available space for collaboration work or tried to book a meeting room for a large group only to find that all rooms are occupied by individuals, small groups or ‘no shows’? Making real-time occupancy data available to building users can put them in the driving seat to make informed decisions and boost their productivity.

The end result? Your building users will enjoy the space more, you’ll create a workplace that boosts productivity, and you’ll enjoy fewer expenses associated with energy wastage and space underutilisation.

of workplace utilisation. Are those areas as heavily used as they appear to be? Do more than two people ever use that large conference room? Objective observation is, therefore, required to analyse what’s really happening.

That’s where occupancy sensors and occupancy data come in. It is hard, reliable data that empowers businesses to make informed decisions. In a world that increasingly requires flexibility and real-time responsiveness to changes, truly understanding how your space is actually being utilised is vital.

Uses for occupancy data

The real benefits of occupancy data lie in how it is used. At a high level, it enables property and facility teams to make informed decisions about their real estate portfolio, with huge potential cost savings. Do you need to build that new office? Could you downsize or sublet some of your current space? Can you redesign the space to meet changes in employee needs?

Further cost savings can be achieved by integrating realtime occupancy data with other building systems to automatically control functions such as heating, lighting, and ventilation based on demand – while also improving employee comfort. Some businesses have been doing this for years using simple PIRs for crude control systems, but what if you could tailor this further to adjust dynamically based on the real-time capacity?

Additionally, occupancy data can improve employee wellbeing If you would like to learn more about how the True Occupancy solution can help your business optimise space and drive efficiencies, request a demo with one of our experts at trueoccupancy.com/demo

Introducing True Occupancy

The True Occupancy solution from Irisys is a complete building occupancy ecosystem. It captures, processes, and presents the vital occupancy data you require to truly understand and optimise how your building is performing in both its commercial and people-centric objectives.

Occupancy data is collected by accurate people-counting sensors and aggregated in a cloud-based platform called True Data. This data is intelligently processed to give users a full picture of how the building and space is being used in real-time. True Data integrates with third-party systems within the building to facilitate intelligent building automation, whilst reports and dashboards provide insights for impactful space utilisation and optimisation decisions.