Ensure a modern workplace experience

The modern workplace experience is now being centered around employee experience (ex), also known as tenant experience — though that isn’t always the case. Here are three common outdated approaches to workplace experience that we’ve seen in the market:

• Investing ONLY in physical amenities and services to differentiate your assets. Physical amenities alone — such as fitness centers and conference rooms — no longer necessarily differentiate your assets. Tenants already expect them. Furthermore, in the age of COVID-19, these physical amenities may not add any real value on their own. Amenity build-outs can take years to plan and often cost millions of dollars, wasting valuable time and money for needs that may have shifted with market preferences before you can deliver them.
• Using little tenant or building data to make decisions. The data that property managers collect is often unstructured, coming to them through many different, disparate systems and a select group of tenant representatives or other stakeholders. This makes it difficult to uncover actionable insights. Typically, asset and property managers know very basic things about tenant companies, such as how much square footage they occupy, their lease expiration data, and their industry. However, little is known about what tenants and employees actually do in their buildings, and what they consider to be valuable. Without granular tenant data, it’s almost impossible for CRE leaders to understand how tenant companies make decisions about their workplace.
• Leveraging disparate, unintegrated technology systems. Property managers often struggle to identify quality partners due to having to navigate a vast technology landscape that may or may not already work with the systems in their buildings. In the end, this creates an unwieldy building ecosystem of technology tools. Without streamlining the process, it can be incredibly difficult to manage the complexity associated with such a wide array of partner technologies. The systems become disparate, prohibiting a seamless end-user experience and the ability to scale across multiple buildings in a portfolio if desired.

These approaches leave something to be desired and complicate mandatory building processes that ought to be streamlined for efficiencies. Instead, taking a new,  customer-centric approach — which is the result of the commercial real estate industry’s value shift from the buildings themselves to the people who occupy them — requires a focus on blending the physical and digital workplaces to create engaging and memorable experiences. The modern workplace will differentiate portfolios and meet tenants where they are — even those who have adopted more flexible and hybrid work models.

This new employee experience framework gives building occupants more control over where and how they want to work, causing the workplace to transcend the four walls of the office building. This also means that the industry has reached a point where improvements to the physical office environment can no longer enhance the tenant experience on their own — rather, technology is needed to bridge the gap between the physical office and the digital workplace, while also connecting dispersed employees in a way that is both engaging and thoughtful. Such omnichannel office experiences can include everything from plugging into a building’s various technology systems to ensure that the building occupant journey is tech-enabled, to increasing digital programming through virtual amenities that all can partake in.