Cost, Culture at Odds in Workplace Strategy

NEW YORK CITY-The subtitle of CoreNet New York's panel discussion Wednesday evening on portfolio planning and workplace strategies was apt: “Where Finance and Culture Collide.” As moderator Brady Mick, architect and workplace strategist with BHDP, put it, portfolio planning focuses on the “macro” of corporate priorities, while workplace strategy has to contend with the “micro” of individual employees' concerns. Another way of summing up the dichotomy that panelists described between corporations' desire for cost-effectiveness in space utilization and employees' personal willingness to buy into it is to cite the old adage about leading a horse to water.

“Changing the culture of an organization is one of the hardest things to do,” said panelist Benjamin Kochanski, deputy regional commissioner for the Northeast and Caribbean region with the General Services Administration. As administrator of 25 million square feet of leased and owned federal office space, Kochanski based his observation on the difference between yesteryear's constantly growing facilities budgets and today's GSA mandate to shrink the office-space footprint across the portfolio.

“They're saying, 'we don't know how to do that,' ” he commented. Kochanski added later that many government agencies' idea of co-location is “having different offices in the same building.”

Chris Staal, global head of real estate and facilities at Thomson Reuters, used the word “fiefdoms” to describe the turf-guarding attitude on the part of leadership of individual business units within the organization. Although he noted that “finance has become much more forward in the whole planning process now,” Staal said that actually shrinking space across a portfolio becomes more complicated when, as in the case of Thomson Reuters, there's a steady stream of new business units being acquired and existing ones being divested across the globe.

And while the cost of renting space figures prominently in the corporate trend toward using less of that space, “To our partners, it's not enough of a reason to change,” said Bethany Davis, workplace strategy lead with the Boston Consulting Group. However, Davis and her fellow panelists described the steps they're taking toward gradually changing the culture within their individual organizations. The GSA, for example, is about to implement a six-month pilot program in which 100 government employees will have no assigned workspace, Kochanski said.

“It's more about persuasion and example than a mandate,” said Staal. The one-hour discussion at the Time-Life Building Wednesday evening was organized by the CoreNet chapter's Strategy and Portfolio Plan Community.