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How to roll out a flexible workplace strategy

Use this checklist to ensure that your real estate portfolio supports your business, employees, and needs for physical space.

The pandemic accelerated the way organizations think about their workplace and workforce. Rethinking workplace strategy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For most companies, it’s one step in a comprehensive and holistic transition that considers the business, work and workforce, as well as the physical space it occupies. Finance, real estate, human resources, IT, and other top leaders should collaborate to avoid disconnects between departments, and make sure everyone works toward common goals. It also helps to use a project management office (PMO) to oversee the process, and follow change-management best practices. 

This new checklist will take you through the steps required to design a flexible workplace strategy. Highlights include: 

Step 1: Determine demand. Gather data from department leaders to understand the changes they think are needed to operations, corporate culture, management and talent acquisition to accommodate new ways of work. Use the information to come up with an initial hypothesis for what business and workforce strategies would support hybrid work. 

Step 2: Formulate a real estate portfolio plan. Sketch out a preliminary plan based on what the hypothesis means for the existing portfolio. Consider how work will be done in the future—we predict more space dedicated to collaboration and socialization, with less for individual tasks.

Step 3: Implement the plan. Set up a PMO with a dedicated team that can be hyper-focused on the project, answer questions, and make sure work is completed by pre-set deadlines. Use pilots to test office location or design, and pulse surveys to measure what works. Keep employees in the loop. They need to know what to expect when they return to the physical office, even if it’s only a few days a week.

To get started, download the full checklist, and find additional resources here.

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