Having just joined 'case4space,' a think tank of leading architects, interior designers, strategists, furniture manufacturing companies, corporate services people and corporate occupiers, one question we’re examining is about leadership.
There’s a lot being said about who will lead the new workplace and work-practices models of tomorrow. Will that shift be evolutionary or revolutionary?
More likely, it will be revolutionary. It could even be termed an ‘insurgency’ when we consider the impact of today’s bottom-up world.
First, it’s still the case that HR and IT are not necessarily on the same page as corporate real estate and workplace departments when it comes to working together on the migration to the new ‘work-life support’ model.
We play well apart from each other in our own sand boxes, and get together for big ‘events’ like mergers or headquarters relocations, but that’s about it – with a few exceptions.
Many professionals on our side of the industry consider that CRE and their service provider partners are already playing that integrated leadership role, in the form of what CoreNet Global’s Corporate Real Estate 2020 research identifies as the new ‘super nucleus’ of the corporate enterprise.
But separate research done in 2012 by CoreNet Global and Sodexo actually shows that more HR and IT people run the workplace function than CRE people.
Yet, whether the support model for the new ways of working like a super nucleus is control-based or collaborative may not matter.
That’s because if employees, especially younger workers, push hard enough, we could see a ‘bottom-up’ insurgency happen, a sort of ‘CRE Arab Spring’ that’s customer-driven and more organic than any company organizational chart can determine or define. Google’s Building 43 case study comes to mind as one actual example of that so-called ‘insurgency.’ Employees in a sense will vote with their feet, as we saw a few years ago when Google made that option available for today’s kind of flexible work. Then it spread through the company’s global network like wild fire.
Employees as insurgent leaders, enabled – of course – by ‘digitality’: social media and social networks.
It’s another form of disintermediation, and it won’t matter who’s in charge if CRE, HR or IT are not cognizant of it or proactive about it.
What are the impacts for any one of us positioned along the workplace supply chain? They are considerable when you think about how strategic shifts like this often change design and syntax outcomes, and thus client-user preferences. It’s another reason why the research and development of more empirical ways to study the now highly-social nature of work, and the implications it has on employee engagement, wellness and productivity, are so vital.
Like a lot of other scenarios we’re facing, there is more complexity now than ever before, including these kinds of ‘emergent phenomena’ just described.