Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Work/Life Think Tank at the American Medical Systems facility outside of Minneapolis. The Think Tank is the brainchild of Kathy Kacher of Career/Life Alliance Services. It’s a place where Human Resource professionals get together regularly to discuss the evolving nature of work and how to best support it. Kathy invited me to talk about the new workplace from the real estate perspective, an often discussed POV in the world of corporate real estate but seldom heard in the HR world – which I found interesting.
We all know that for the new workplace to be successful, it requires an alignment of three key groups – HR, IT and real estate/facilities. Each of the members of the HR/IT/RE triumvirate have a stake in the game and bring much to the table. HR uses policies, training, support, compensation and metrics to drive recruitment and retention of top talent. IT provides the technical tools, collaborative vehicles and networks to drive digital efficiency and security. Real estate provides and supports a network of affordable places where people can choose to be productive. Align all three and you have a productive workplace by any measure. If one group fails to pull their weight, however, productivity suffers.
The question at the Think Tank was “So who leads? HR, IT or RE?” My career and study has been on the corporate real estate side so in my experience, the most successful mobility programs have been driven by the real estate and facilities group. The programs at Sun Microsystems, Bank of America, HP, Johnson and Johnson and others all were driven by real estate. It makes sense too. It’s part of corporate real estate’s DNA to drive multi-year, multi-disciplinary projects that are funded through several channels. It’s what we do.
But also speaking at the Think Tank was General Mills and they presented their very successful and mature mobility program that was driven by – wait for it – HR! The truth is, Mobility, which is called things like ‘workflex’ in Human Resources, is often implemented through policy by HR who then must reach out to IT to support digital, portable work. Sometimes HR doesn’t even engage real estate, instead choosing to develop the program exclusive of space changes. I think that’s sub optimizing Mobility and here’s why.
Early in the week we were able to meet with a senior executive/CFO at a very large financial institution to talk about the three groups critical to the new productive workplace. He agreed that it was the positional visibility of the CFO/COO who would see the obvious benefits of Mobility. But when asked who he would see leading the charge, he said real estate and facilities. He said it was because real estate has the most obvious savings opportunity; i.e. reducing the overall size of the RE portfolio. Talent attraction and retention (HR) and efficient digital work (IT) are important to the CFO/COO, but cost savings in real estate really get their attention and cause them to act to align, from the top, HR, IT and RE.
Some bottom line observations:
- It takes all three groups – HR, IT and RE – to make a workplace the most productive and affordable it can be.
- Use the cost savings as a sparkler to get the CFO/CEO’s attention so the alignment of the three can be driven from the top.
- Leverage the prowess of each group to design and deliver the program: 1) the project delivery and resource coordination prowess of real estate; 2) the change management, work practices and performance measurement prowess of HR, and 3) the pipe building and app roll-out prowess of IT.
- The required cross-discipline skill sets are seldom found in-house. Nor should they be. Hire out.
http://askebiz.com/blog/mobility-%E2%80%93-who-takes-lead