Determining where people work will likely depend on business needs and employee preferences.
Dec 2020
Recap of Deloitte’s 2021 Commercial Real Estate Outlook- Rebuilding to Enhance Resilience:
Many Corporate RE leaders find it challenging to maintain employee productivity, culture, engagement and cohesiveness, and appropriate communication levels. If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, it is that there are major tectonic shifts in the way people live, work, and play, which has put unique pressures on certain property sectors. With this as the backdrop, let’s try to understand how well-equipped CRE leaders need to be to weather the current economic situation,
Companies that adopt a hybrid work approach within their offices will most likely begin to use offices to develop more emotional connections, facilitate collaboration, and create human experiences (see diagrams below). Examining culture, purpose, and preferences can help CRE leaders determine optimal workplace environments.
Leaders need to master the art of walking on a tightrope—balancing business recovery, seizing new opportunities, and tenant and employee engagement. This will likely require a combination of elements: breaking down functional silos, enhancing leadership and organizational agility, increasing levels of collaboration and communication, and engaging in transparent and ethical decision-making. Traversing the tightrope effectively in these ways could differentiate organizations from their less successful competitors in the not-too distant future.
In conclusion, companies will need to make holistic choices about in-office and virtual work to ensure employees feel safe and remain productive. More than 50% of respondents acknowledged that their ability to succeed in the postpandemic world would be hampered by employee concerns about returning to work. Over the next 12 months, companies will need to make choices that continue to enable work to happen in different ways and places than it did before the pandemic. This may involve redefining their cultures to be more accepting about having more work done remotely versus in-person.
