Have the costs of running your office gone through the roof? Well, you are not alone. Inflation and energy prices are threatening to bring even the biggest and most successful corporate offices to their knees. And with recession lurking around the corner, business leaders are increasingly focusing on optimizing high-quality office locations to balance workplace costs and employee experience. The concept is called “flight to quality” and it will play a pivotal role for corporate offices in 2023.
What is Flight to Quality?
Flight to quality is the action of investors moving their capital away from riskier investments to safer ones. Within the corporate office sector, flight to quality is when business leaders focus heavily on optimizing prime offices while reducing focus on or eliminating non-prime offices during times of economic volatility.
Prime buildings and offices tend to hold their value during recessions and they often increase in value at a similar rate to inflation, making them safe investment opportunities.
Flight to quality has been on the rise for the past three years through widespread adoption of hybrid work. However, while most office workers adopted the hybrid way of working immediately, the majority of organizations are still lagging behind, leaving them with too much expensive, unused office space.
Optimize prime offices and eliminate the rest
To reduce unused office space, you need to evaluate each office location, identifying those that are worth keeping and those that are not. By eliminating low-quality offices you free up valuable resources that can be used to optimize prime offices. Eliminating non-prime offices also increases the occupancy rate of your prime offices, enabling you to maximize the utilization of each square foot. However, to accommodate the increasing number of people in your prime offices, you need to optimize your spaces to match employee needs and behavior.
With indoor mapping, you can gain insights into how your spaces are being used. Maybe you will find out that desks in one part of the building are always left unused or that meeting rooms are often occupied by only one person. This insight empowers you to optimize your spaces based on actual behavior, needs, and preferences.
Globally, the average peak occupancy rate remained lower than 40% throughout 2022. In other words, more than 60% of office space was left unused during peak hours. If that is the case, imagine the amount of space that was left unused outside peak hours. Gaining insights into occupancy and people flow is key if you want to optimize your office space.
Offer an employee experience that is worth the hassle
Working from home is convenient; morning and afternoon traffic is not. If you want your employees to keep coming into the office, you need to treat them with an experience worth the hassle.
Optimizing prime office locations is not only about space optimization. It is also about ensuring that these locations are outfitted with the best design and amenities to make office life as convenient and comfortable as possible.
With smart building technologies, you can create an office that knows your employees and their individual preferences. Imagine walking into a room and the light automatically brightens just like you prefer it. Or if you could just pull out your phone and with the tap of a finger, turn the blinds down outside the window next to you without indicating your location. That is convenience and it is exactly what the 2023 office worker expects from your office.
By combining your smart building technologies with an indoor map, you can maximize the value of each solution, offering employees an even better experience. The map provides employees with live data visualizations of everything from room availability through wait times at the canteen to the location of their colleagues.
Smart buildings help you create a more comfortable, flexible, and efficient workplace by enabling you to adapt your office to employees’ needs and ensuring an optimal balance between people and space requirements. This way, smart building technologies will play a significant role in the flight to quality decisions for corporate offices in 2023.
At MapsPeople we are helping Fortune 500 companies optimize their spaces by giving them insights into how their spaces are being used, enabling them to create intelligent smart building solutions, and enhancing their employee experience and productivity. If you want to know more about how we can help you optimize your spaces, reach out to us here.
February 3, 2023
