Office
Attracting Talent and Tenants in the “Multiverse of Work”
By: Phil Mobley, Avison Young Over the past decade, users of commercial space have increasingly viewed their locations and spaces through the lens of talent optimization: Attracting it, retaining it, and getting the most out of it while at “work.” The most forward-looking companies looked at their workplaces not just as places to gather, but as a vital support system for their people. To help their tenants deliver these high-performance, experiencefocused workplaces, building owners and managers ramped up their focus on amenities, both physical and digital. This came at a cost, of course. But in the context of competition for talent—and, by extension, lease deals—the investment was a bargain. Or so everyone in commercial real estate thought until the COVID-19 pandemic forced most knowledge workers to retreat to their homes, many of them for a year or more. Now, some companies—especially the big tech firms who have long been at the forefront of workplace design—are selling a new twist on the workplace as a recruiting tool: The flexibility to work remotely. Remote work is not new. According to a 2020 survey by Global Workplace Analytics (GWA), about a third of knowledge workers worked remotely at least one day per week before the pandemic. Now, three quarters of them want to keep it up. And a Gartner study suggested that 60 percent would only consider a job that offered remote flexibility. Has remote work rendered obsolete the kind of human-centered workplaces that cutting-edge employers have been building for the last few years? It now appears that the CRE industry will avoid the nightmare “death of the office” scenario. But the picture remains cloudy. In a systematic review of years of academic research and business data collected both before and during
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Tenant Experience Guide | October 2021
the pandemic, Avison Young uncovered some principles that will guide the next evolution of workplaces optimized for human performance. We call it “The Multiverse of Work.”
Why do we still need offices? To the amazement of many, knowledge workers were quite productive at home during the pandemic. But maybe this should not have been so surprising. Academic research had already shown that, under the right circumstances, remote work could be a productivity accelerator. Ctrip, a Shanghai-based travel agency, conducted an experiment in 2013 that showed a 13% productivity gain among call center employees who started working remotely. When the company later opened the remote option to more employees, they saw an even bigger boost. They also reported higher job satisfaction and lower attrition. But the full story is more complicated. Call center work is less complex and collaborative than most other knowledge work, not to mention easier to measure. Ctrip’s results may not be generalizable. Furthermore, employees who worked remotely were less likely to be promoted, and when given the choice, half of them went back to the office. Other research suggests that workers spending too much time (more than about 50 percent) remote start to lose connections with coworkers and supervisors, to the detriment of performance. Pandemic-era surveys also showed nuanced results. In the GWA survey cited above, only about one in every six knowledge workers sought to be remote every day, with the vast majority wanting the ability to go to an office at least occasionally. And according to workplace research firm Leesman, workers want to split their time roughly evenly between home (or another convenient remote location) and the office.
