Productivity Begins With Workplace Strategy

NEW YORK CITY-Knowledge workers are often most productive in workplaces that support collaboration and creativity—but how do managers ensure the environment in which those key professionals work delivers on its promise? Companies typically have focused on facilities costs rather than real estate's potential to support employee performance and results, so many times there are hurdles to overcome.

A typical knowledge-oriented organization spends significantly more on its workers than its space. For these companies, productivity is not about presence—that is, sitting at a desk—it is about performance. The right workplace strategy can help increase shareholder value, achieve business goals and create a high-performance, cohesive corporate culture.

This tension between cost and the need to invest in strategies that create value is a shared challenge for corporate real estate executives around the world. According to JLL's Global Corporate Real Estate Trends 2013 survey, 72% of corporate real estate executives face high expectations to deliver clear enhancement in workplace productivity and 65% are charged with transforming the quality of the workplace.

The JLL workplace strategy team has identified five workplace principles that support increased shareholder value, improved business performance, a cohesive corporate culture and other corporate objectives:

1. Work is what employees do, not where they sit. The focus of work and workplace is no longer about square-footage per person, but about revenue per person.

2. Think membership, not ownership. The traditional one-person-per-desk model does not best serve knowledge workers. The most productive workplaces create non-territorial neighborhoods by function. These workplaces provide a wide range of environments—formal meeting zones, casual brainstorming spots, IT stations, private spaces—for different kinds of work.

3. Do more with less. The “ownership model” of assigning a seat to every employee is no longer sustainable, given that 50% of desks are vacant on an average day in a typical company. In North America and Europe, for example, job sharing, telecommuting and virtual meetings have significantly decreased office space usage. Vacancy translates into underutilized real estate and a less-productive environment. 

4. Provide choices to enhance productivity. Companies must find the right balance between supporting individual and team productivity. When employees have greater control over how and where they work, they are empowered to choose the space that is most productive for the task at hand. With spaces that support quiet or confidential work, as well as virtual or face-to-face collaboration, the workplace can drive cross-pollination of ideas, employee engagement and foster a sense of community. It may sound counter-intuitive, but employees who are given greater autonomy are often more engaged and loyal to an organization, even without personal desks. 

5. Flexible workspaces translate into agility. In a fast-moving, ever-changing economy, the organizations that can adapt to the market and economic forces succeed—and those that are built on a flexible workspace model have the advantage because their culture is wired for fluidity. People and technology are in the right place at the right time, which drives innovation.

In Conclusion

Productivity depends on the ability of a company to get the most out of its employees in line with the organization's objectives. The right workplace can shape culture, promote collaboration, inspire ideas, respond to trends, improve performance, build retention and grow the bottom line.

Bernice Boucher is a managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle. The views expressed in this column are the author's own.