A pretty good argument can be made that while the government is generally not on the leading edge of new practices, it’s a sign that those practices are here to stay when the public sector picks up on them. Within a few days of CoreNet Global reporting that many US and Canadian office tenants may decrease their average per-worker allocation to 100 square feet or less in the next five years, the Washington Post carried an interview with key executives at the General Services Administration charting their efforts to consolidate the GSA’s own headquarters space.

Specifically, the GSA’s $162-million renovation of its HQ is doing away with offices and assigned workspaces, as part of an effort to encourage telecommuting at the agency that manages 370 million square feet of federal office space. GSA administrator Martha Johnson told the Post that the headquarters revamp is “actually creating less office space for each person, so we can allow more people to report to work here when they need to.

“Everyone works out in the open,” Johnson continued. “It’s collaborative, innovative, open and technologically capable. In a way, we’re catching up to the 1990s in the business world. We want to model this for the rest of the government.”

Lest this comment suggest that Uncle Sam is 15 or 20 years behind the curve, I hasten to add that the GSA is catching up with US space users, which in turn are following the example set by their counterparts across the pond. The average per-employee allocation of office space for North American employers was 225 square feet as recently as 2010, according to CoreNet. It’s expected to drop to 151 square feet per employee in five years, with 40% of respondents to CoreNet’s survey indicating that they’re planning on allocations of 100 square feet or less by 2017. Although the majority of respondents to CoreNet’s survey said their allocations have shrunk by as much as 25% over the past five years, the trend has already been under way in Europe for more than a decade.

“The main reason for the declines,” Richard Kadzis, CoreNet Global’s VP of strategic communications, says in a release, “is the huge increase in collaborative and team-oriented space inside a growing number of companies that are stressing 'smaller but smarter' workplaces against the backdrop of continuing economic uncertainty and cost containment.”

There’s another factor, which CoreNet has also discussed lately. It’s the BYOT (“bring your own technology”) movement. As irksome as it is to be stuck walking behind someone who’s fixated on his or her smartphone, the fact remains that this is the portable “workplace” of the future. “BYOT is happening now,” Keith Perske of E-Business Strategies, a member of the technology team that helped prepare CoreNet’s Corporate Real Estate 2020 report, commented this past December. “Corporations cannot keep up with personal technology, so the next step is already happening.”

That next step is a gradual shift in corporate IT departments from managing employees’ on-site computing requirements to the Cloud as workers go mobile. With that comes a diminished need for dedicated on-site workspace, and a reconfiguration of the space that remains.

For office owners and developers, all of this is more than food for thought. It’s a challenge to rethink strategies for leasing and building out space. If corporate space occupiers are doing more with smaller footprints, what does that mean for the owner of an office property that does not shrink accordingly?