COVID-19 has dramatically changed our working habits leveraging this change is an opportunity to accelerate remote working & enshrine it as a standard corporate practice. Rarely has such an opportunity presented itself. Holistica is an industry expert on space management.
1. Over the past years many companies’ efforts to reduce their long-term committed operational expenses for both real estate and facilities established with varying success programmes of work to incentivise staff to work remotely.
2. These programmes often struggled to achieve both the financial and remote working targets across the organization for many reasons, related to inadequate policies to govern the change, ineffective technologies and the fears of loss of control or potential short-falls in staff productivity as well as the sense of exclusion from day to day organizational life.
3. Whilst the programmes generally channelled investments into technology to enable the transformation, little was don at a holistic level to ensure the full success of the programme, specifically, HR policies were not set, management were not seen as advocates of the change & reverted back to classic office management, the entire collaboration experience was poorly done and failed to focus on meeting experiences.
4. Then came the COVID-19 crisis where western governments forced a full working lockdown which had the unprecedented effect of accelerating the remote working volumes so that nearly all office workers are now working from home. This was achieved in amazingly short time frames, roughly two to three weeks.
5. With over 5 weeks of full remote working experience both managers become quickly oriented as well as staff who become fast adopters. There are significant company and staff benefits in continuing with this trend. Staff commuting times and costs, company OPEX burnt up in real estate for main & contingency offices spaces.
6. With the real prospect of the pandemic crisis developing into an economic crisis, management should leverage recent experiences to reduce workspaces and ultimately compress OPEX. Our estimates are that offices in a fixed mode operate at 15 square metres per employee, which can reduce to 7 respectively.
7. Holistica is an industry expert on space management and has an assessment tool to benchmark remote working progress which can be leveraged through a brief interaction, furthermore with Holistica’s project experiences it is possible to draw-up plans inclusive of IT, change management and HR quickly and deploy the relevant metrics to accelerate your remote working ambitions.