There has been lots of research to support the notion that good office design has a positive impact on the productivity of staff. However, the results of the latest ‘Great Places to Work’ survey pose some awkward questions for those trying to sell to glamorous new office space to would-be tenants.
I have just read the results of the 'Great Place to Work' (UK) 2016 survey (see www.greatplacetowork.co.uk) and found it interesting that none of the measures used to rank the winners appear to relate to the physical or locational needs of staff. This raises an obvious question, how important is office design and specification to productivity? Indeed, to what extent do employees' responses to questions such as 'Do you look forward to coming to work here?’ correlate to the "funkiness" of the office or their average commute time?
It would appear that no matter how many table tennis tables you invest in or how close you locate to a tram or tube stop, unless you have the right leadership and culture it will be impossible for you to create a great place in which to work. The burning question for real estate professionals like myself therefore, is whether the quality of the carpets or the speed of the lift car are irrelevant. If they are, then developers, architects, interior designers and surveyors ought to take note. Ultimately, we need to know whether more emphasis ought to be placed on people rather than on shiny new hi-tech buildings with elaborate fit-outs. The fact that this year’s winner in the ‘Large’ category (Softcat) tends to occupy low rent, refurbished office space, suggests that the answer to that question is an emphatic ‘Yes’.
If this conclusion is right, we might well be over-designing and over-specifying our office buildings. We might even be building them in the wrong places! This is important because commercial office buildings have a huge impact on our environment and economy. In other words, getting this stuff wrong is costly for us all.
The challenge is that few on the producer side (i.e. architects, developers, property agents) have an incentive to "de-specify" their product as this would theoretically reduce rents and capital values or at least, slow down their growth. There is therefore a real danger that we will continue to waste valuable resources and make it even harder for our businesses to invest effectively in the one thing that makes them great, their people, rather than their premises.
This is a complex issue and no one size fits all, as we know. But maybe these types of HR survey could be combined with property and FM surveys such as the Leesman Index (see www.leesmanindex.com), to create something even more powerful and insightful?