BizBahrain April 2016

CBRE | Real Estate Analysis
For example, in CBRE’s inaugural
Global Occupier Survey, 57 percent of
the 229 executives surveyed identified
employee attraction and retention
as the most important driver behind
their company’s workplace strategy.
Meanwhile, 85 percent said that
they had used space restructuring to
impact cost in the past year. In short,
workplace strategy has to deliver on
multiple objectives.
“Today’s corporate real estate
executive must balance new workforce
desires with a realistic workplace
strategy that brings talent and expense
management into simultaneous focus,”
according to the report. So even if
the “place” grabs all the headlines, a
disciplined approach is required to
balance multiple objectives and deliver
the exceptional outcomes business
leaders are demanding.
The right starting point is
business strategy-understanding an
organization’s “plan to win” in the
marketplace. These plans evolve
constantly, and real estate executives
must translate them into more specific
questions that real estate can solve.
Translating business needs into the
right workplace solutions is important
work. Even if corporate real estate
executives are not responding to a new
shift in their business, the best among
them are never developing workplace
strategy in a vacuum. They are always
working through a variety of real
estate and business strategy filters and
questions, as illustrated in the figure
below.
who needs what size of office at which
corner of the floor on a moment’s
notice.
One organisation’s plan to succeed
will not be another’s. Flexible, activitybased
work environments may be
just the ticket for one company, while
well-appointed, traditional offices may
still be the winning formula for another.
But whatever the answer, the important
point is that workplace strategy never
starts with the debate about open
plan vs. traditional, or amenity-rich
vs. barebones, or CBD vs. peripheral
locations, or how many square metre per
person. What matters is each company’s
unique strategy, its plan to succeed,
and how that plan translates into the
approach to talent, market presence and
workplace environments.
CBRE’s Online Magazine: BluePrint
www.cbre.blueprint.com
Written by: Karen Ellzey and Carrie
Thompson.
For further information, research and
commentary on Bahrain’s real estate
sector, please visit:
http://www.cbre.com/research-andreports
or email Bahrain@cbre.com
Some of these questions can have
more than one answer. For example,
many leading companies are opting
for hybrid spaces that afford 10 or
more distinct working environmentssome
open, some private-in the
same facility. This allows workers to
choose the type of space that works
for them, based on the type of work
they are doing at different points
throughout the day. The flexible nature
of these environments mean that the
company’s workload-and workforcecan
expand and contract without
requiring precise predictions about
Main Drivers of workplace strategy globally
May 2016
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