ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked debate about the role of the traditional office, but the workplace transformation that it triggered also raised the broader issue of physical spaces in general. What will the places in which people live and work look like a few years down the road? With the commercial-real-estate market in flux, and with many employees working remotely or in hybrid situations, leaders may need to take a new look at office space and think about how to redesign it for optimal networking, collaboration, and connectivity both now and in the future. Here are some factors to consider.

AN IDEA

Imagine your workplace in 2030

Chances are that the traditional office tower may morph into a markedly different structure in the next decade. Leaders may want to think of buildings not as just four walls but as places for communities and experiences, suggests McKinsey senior partner Aditya Sanghvi in a video on how high-rises may evolve in the next few years. “The high-rise of the future isn’t just office for 50 floors,” he says. “It’s office for ten floors; it’s multifamily for 15; it’s a hotel for ten; it’s a club area at the top of the building. And that, to us, is the real future of the high-rise.” With a people-centric orientation, the buildings of the future may also offer a range of amenities, such as cleaning services, childcare, eldercare, and pet grooming. “We don’t believe that it’s possible for the world to go back to the way that it was,” says Sanghvi. “The [organizations] that will be the most successful will be the ones that carefully monitor exactly how our behaviors have changed already and how they will continue to change.”

A BIG NUMBER

6

That’s the number of new imperatives that real-estate operators and investors may need to deal with in the coming years, suggest McKinsey senior partner Daniele Chiarella and colleagues. Facing pressures from increasing inflation, rising interest rates, climate change, and evolving patterns of office attendance, real-estate companies can no longer rely on building or buying assets that are just physical spaces. Rather, they need to consider helping tenants create workplaces that offer a competitive advantage: “In office buildings, this new mandate means partnering with employers to understand how they want their employees to use spaces,” the McKinsey experts say.

A QUOTE

“Much of today’s office space won’t meet the needs of tenants and workers in a hybrid world.”

That’s McKinsey senior partners Vaibhav Gujral and Rob Palter and colleagues in an article on the urgent need for office space to be configured differently from how it has been in the past. “The traditional allocation of 70 percent of space to desks and offices needs to be fundamentally challenged,” they say. Given a potential “oversupply of space and a scarcity of offices purpose built for hybrid work,” the authors urge real-estate operators and tenants alike to consider such amenities as smart conference spaces, collaboration areas, and “a food-and-beverage ecosystem of restaurants, lounges, cafeterias, [and] pantries, all digitally accessible.” Biophilic design—incorporating natural elements, such as organic shapes and vegetation, into built environments—also improves employee experience.

A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

For open-source software development company GitLab, office space is a nonissue: the organization has been fully remote from its inception in 2011. Despite the absence of a physical footprint, GitLab has instilled close connectivity and a highly collaborative culture among its employees, according to cofounder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij. “We invest in working practices that enable asynchronous communication, and we’ve committed to educating and supporting other companies through the global transition to remote work,” he says in a discussion with McKinsey. For example, all changes that the organization’s developers make are documented and kept up to date in an online handbook that is available to the public. Meetings have clear agendas, and issues are resolved with “clear next steps, owners, and delivery dates,” Sijbrandij explains.

— Edited by Rama Ramaswami, senior editor, New York

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