On the one side, Telework or work from anywhere, results from technology enabled mobility. While this mobility creates workplace flexibility and enhances the productivity and satisfaction of the workforce, it also creates office space vacancy of 50% to 70% on average. On the other side, this vacancy creates an opportunity for leading organizations to employ Hoteling business processes to address this low utilization and create measurable value by cutting occupancy costs, CO2 production, energy consumption and improving business continuity.

For those practitioners that are just starting to plan their implementation of Hoteling and Telework or have already engaged in these processes, the following suggestions may help guide them to define, design, develop, deploy and operate their new workplace more quickly and successfully.

• Start With a Business Case: Every organization must justify the allocation of its resources and time. Take the time to create a thorough business case. Tie the workplace strategy directly to the organizational strategy. You will need this legitimacy for every phase that follows. Include assessments of cultural readiness, executive commitment, technology infrastructure capabilities, actual utilization of space measurements and facility readiness to name a few areas of investigation. Include stakeholders across several disciplines, including corporate real estate, facilities management, technology support, environmental sustainability, human resources and others will ensure that the business case and the implementation plan are balanced and positioned for success. Create both a People ROI and an Organizational ROI to ensure that the values to each are balanced.

• Base Decisions on Data: From the initial assessment phase through to ongoing operational improvements, every phase should be supported by continuous, consistent and systematically generated data over time. This is the only way to support the detailed analysis and key performance indicators that will be used to measure success now and long into the future. This will help avoid lengthy conversations about the legitimacy and believability of the data behind your metrics.

• Gain Executive Management Commitment: Gaining top level commitment speeds the deployment of any new strategy, especially one that impacts how and where people work. People respond better when they know (and see) the boss is fully engaged. No enterprise-wide deployment will be possible without this commitment. See if it can be achieved sooner rather than later.

• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: It is impossible to over-communicate the plans, value propositions, rationale, policies and procedures associated with Hoteling and Telework. But effective communications is not a one way street. Providing ample opportunities and mechanisms for questions and feedback, some face to face and some electronic, helps ensure people feel like they have some control and influence on their workplace.

• People First, Everything Else Follows : People have voted with their feet – they have left the traditional office and made the choice to work in other places. The low utilization proves that. The implementation of Telework and Hoteling processes help to formalize and leverage what has already happened. But don’t think this logic makes the transition effortless. Business improvement requires people to change, and implementing Telework and Hoteling is no different. Re-engineering work processes requires the organization to transition people from their current comfort zone (I have a permanent desk and I have my home office and maybe even a third office in another city and I like it like that) through their fear of change (what do you mean you are going to “take away my desk”) into a new better, more flexible work environment (choose where and when you work, we’re measuring output, not time in office or effort). Doing this well is the art and science of Change Management. It starts before any other activity and continues throughout the implementation and roll-out. Interestingly, middle and upper management are sometimes the ones that need the most attention and time to adjust. Don’t skimp on training for both managers and employees. It will speed adoption and ensure success.

• Technology, the Great Enabler — The workforce needs fast, robust and always on technology infrastructures to support the work anywhere, anytime telework model. People need ways to find available workspaces, locate their colleagues, and plan where and when they need to work. Workplace management needs a technology infrastructure that is designed and implemented to support the specific policies and procedures selected to control and manage the Telework and Hoteling business processes. They also need systems to measure the utilization of real estate, the amount of Telework (government) and other performance metrics for their workplace. The technology infrastructure must be flexible to accommodate the continuous changes that occur as the processes evolve and mature. What starts out as a 1 to 1.5 worker to workspace ratio matures to a 1 to 5 ratio and beyond. The good news is that people are adaptable to change, and the technology must be as well.

For more information on Telework and Hoteling visit our website:

• Hoteling
• Telework

But now, Small is the new Better! Less is More. My, my, how things have changed – everything is upside down and inside out.

Take commercial office space, for instance. Used to be that real estate executives would brag about how big their portfolio of space was…amazing to think of it! Upon meeting another real estate type, the conversation soon centered on square footage, “ I manage 50 million sq ft of office space, how about you?!” Whoa be the poor sap who had less square footage.

Then, the room would hush as another real estate executive would reveal the details of a huge new “deal” just completed. The story was about the acquisition of a new “LEED Platinum” or “trophy address” that doubled their space by signing a longer term lease for $2 less per square foot. “Look at how much I saved?”, they would shout!

But that reminds me of how much I “save” at Costco when I buy twice what I need. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Buying more than you actually use…

Is it any wonder, in this new era of Small is Better, that the deal-making real estate executives of old are scarcer than the hairs on my head, and being replaced rapidly by members of the finance and accounting professions?

Now the real estate executive bragging rights go something like this, “I’ve just implemented a new workplace strategy, reduced the size of my real estate portfolio and saved $20 million, avoided 12 thousand metric tons of C02 and cut 13 million kilowatt hours of energy consumption annually! So, what have you saved?” Small is the new cool!

The writing is on the wall. Real Estate is becoming a data and analytics driven profession. That’s the new way to compete – getting more growth out of less infrastructure. He/she who has the information has the power. Here is how you get yours:

• Measure how much real estate you actually use consistently, continuously and systematically over time. That’s the way the boys over in finance do it. (AgilQuest can show you how.)
• Use the data to determine what your workplace strategy will be. Low utilization and/or high mobility? Consider sharing ratios of greater than 1:1 people to desks to increase utilization and vacate unneeded space.
• When the business units come in to ask for more space (they always do), shut them down with hard, believable numbers – numbers they can’t refute.
• Consolidate floors and buildings, vacating unused space.
• If you can get out of the space all together, great! If not, close down what you don’t use, saving $5,000 to $8,000 per workspace in operating costs.

It’s hard to get used to Small is Better, but the sooner you do, the better it will be for your career, your company and your planet.

I know this is going to come as a shock, but the company can no longer afford to allocate a private jet to each employee. It was nice while it lasted. You will now share seating on our jets with your colleagues.

Now I know that there will be those of you who do not agree with this decision. You believe that you and your people’s productivity will take a hit because of all the time you will have to spend making reservations for air travel, instead of just jumping in your jet. You’ve lamented, “How will I know where my people are if they don’t have an assigned jet?” You won’t be able to keep all of your belongings in the jet, so you will have to put of the pictures of your loved ones, and your documents onto the network, your laptop and your iPhone instead of storing them in your jet. It will be uncomfortable, you’ve explained, that you may have to sit in a different jet from day to day to complete your work. You may even have to sit near people you don’t know, and that could be uncomfortable as well.

We have heard these objections, yet have decided to stay at the head of the pack; we’ve got to cut unnecessary expenses. Please let me explain how we came to our decision. While we knew over the years that the utilization of our ever growing fleet of jets was fairly low – we could see the jets all lined up in the hanger unused – we just brushed it off as a cost of doing business. We just continued to assign a jet to each person as they joined the company. And hey, just about every one of our competition’s hanger was full of empty jets as well. After all, our budget included the cost of ten year leases on all these jets, and we own some of them as well, so they were viewed by most as “free”. To whom were we going to sell or sublet them? This economy is not a great market for used jets. There is also the matter of attracting and retaining top talent. We have to compete against companies that are still offering personal jets to their employees.

But I’ve commissioned some research by AgilQuest Corporation that have installed systems that reliably and unobtrusively measure that which we have never measured before: the actual use of our entire jet fleet. We’re using a technique that provides this data continuously, consistently and systematically over time, making it reliable and believable. This is in significant contrast to our old one-off surveys of jet usage, which you would contest as too short in duration, done manually, done at the wrong time of the year, done in the wrong hanger or for the wrong department and, in short, not believable. Now, there can be no denying the results: the utilization of our jet fleet is under 40%. That means that on any given day, our jets, your jets, are sitting on the tarmac unused while burning money and fuel and producing CO2 at unsustainable rates.

During our study, we came to the following realization: We spend our money in one of three ways – people, jets, and technology, in that order. For our 50,000 person company, we spend about $750 million on jets annually. With our current utilization of 40%, we waste $450,000,000 annually in cash, produce 120,000 metric TONS of C02 and burn 240 million KwH of energy unnecessarily! Once we saw these numbers, we realized that no amount of perceived productivity enhancement can justify this waste and environmental impact. In addition, you all know the pressure we’re under in this tough economy to reduce costs and the terrible unemployment rate in our country. As we looked for ways to cut costs, we decided to cut jets not jobs. Don’t you agree this is the right way to go?

Some have said, “It is not our culture here to share jets!” Let me inform you now, “It is not our culture here to waste money, degrade our planet, and add to our reliance on foreign energy!”

Signed,

The CEO

PS: The above memo can be transformed from fanciful to factual by changing just one word: Jets to Workspaces. All arguments presented are actually traditional views against new workplace strategies designed to improve utilization and reduce costs and increase workplace flexibility and mobility (hoteling, alternative officing, telework, etc.). All numbers and value propositions are actually for real estate, not jets!

PPS:  Preferences vs. Effectiveness:

New workplace strategies may not be the first choice for your employees as it usually involves change.  We humans tend to resist change, even if it is (eventually) good for us.  In the words of Franklin Becker of Cornell’s IWSP, “…it is worth distinguishing between preferences and effectiveness. They are not always synonymous.”  What people WANT and what the organization as a whole NEEDS to be effective are not always the same thing.

John Vivadelli, CEO, AgilQuest Corporation

john.vivadelli@agilquest.com

• What specific data and concrete numbers will help your company recognize the benefits?
• Where do they come from?
• How do you quantify them?
• Who benefits?
• What’s the bottom line impact on productivity, profitability, and sustainability?

Telework authority Kate Lister and real estate advisor Curtis Knapp join forces and deliver the one-two punch you need to make a clear case for your telecommuting, hoteling, or workplace flexibility program.

Join AgilQuest and special guest Kate Lister, president of the Telework Research Network, for this one hour webinar on July 21 at 1:00 PM Eastern. Kate and Curtis will answer audience questions immediately following the presentation, so login from your computer, bring your lunch, ask the experts and learn how you can help your organization benefit.

REGISTER HERE

Over a hundred Fortune 1000 senior executives were surveyed in Q3 2010, the official end to the recession, to understand cost-improvement approaches, trends, effective practices and lessons learned. Deloitte’s study found businesses are reaching a “new normal” of lower revenues, economic uncertainty and high unemployment – ok, not earth shattering. But what caught my attention was the following:

• An overwhelming majority of respondents (90%) expect their revenues to grow over the next 24 months, yet a similar number (80%) expect to pursue cost improvements.
• Since the last study, 2.5 times more respondents were NOT going to meet their cost cutting goals.
• More than 50% of respondents expect to continue relying primarily on the cost reduction approaches they have used in the past—despite the fact that such approaches are less and less likely to bear fruit.

So, the net of it is that a strong majority of Fortune 1000 companies, even growing ones, expect to continue cost cutting. That may be no big surprise, but the easy fat has already been liposuctioned away and therefore fewer companies are meeting their cost cutting targets. These companies plan to use these same methods even as they see diminishing returns. That smacks of “do the same thing, but expect different results.” We humans are creatures of habit, even when that habit provides no value.

Allow me to speak heresy here – maybe the private sector should take a page from the US Federal Government’s cost cutting playbook!

On June 10, 2010, President Obama sent the following:

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT: Disposing of Unneeded Federal Real Estate – Increasing Sales Proceeds, Cutting Operating Costs, and Improving Energy Efficiency.

My Administration is committed to eliminating all forms of Government waste and to leading by example as our Nation transitions to a clean energy economy… Past attempts at reducing the Federal Government’s civilian real property assets produced small savings and had a minor impact on the condition and performance of mission-critical properties. These efforts were not sufficiently comprehensive in disposing of excess real estate and did not emphasize making more efficient use of existing assets. To eliminate wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, save energy and water, and further reduce greenhouse gas pollution, I hereby direct executive departments and agencies (agencies) to accelerate efforts to identify and eliminate excess properties. Agencies shall also take immediate steps to make better use of remaining real property assets as measured by utilization and occupancy rates, annual operating cost, energy efficiency, and sustainability.

This is not just another government proposal that gets lost in the proverbial bureaucratic shuffle. A goal of reducing real estate costs by $8 billion by end of 2012 has been set. That’s nearly 14,000 properties that will be divested. Even in the land of $ Trillions, 14,000 properties and $8 billion in annual cost reductions is a big deal, a significant cost savings.

You, Ms. CEO/CFO of Fortune 1000 Company may ask, “So what?” So what if my real estate infrastructure is my second largest expense (it is), and so what if 25% of it isn’t even assigned to an employee (it is) and so what if only 30 to 40% of it is actually being sat in on any given day? Looks like the majority of you are going to continue to reorganize, centralize, outsource to India, and you are your stamp budget (again). What you don’t understand yet, but the government does (I know that must hurt), is that you are sitting on solution to your cost management efforts – hundreds of millions of dollars of annual expense laying empty, day after day.

You may ask, “So what should I do?” The first thing is find out how much is actually being used: measure the actual use of that second largest expense. You measure everything else important, right? So measure real estate continuously, consistently and systematically over time, just like the good Sarbanes-Oxley directives require. Use the data to determine the size of the cost savings opportunity for you. Each desk costs you $15,000 per year, every year, empty or not. $15,000 times thousands of empty desks is a big number. A very conservative cost cutting estimate is 20% reduction in occupancy costs. That returns to your organization $ hundreds of millions to your bottom line, improving your cash position, earnings per share, Return on Assets, and market capitalization, just to name a few interesting key financial statistics.

So, as the economy starts to return, heed this warning from the study: “a lot of waste was allowed into the system during good times.” That’s something most companies simply cannot afford this time around. Go ahead, try something new and expect significant new results.

Written by AgilQuest CEO, John Vivadelli

This year’s conference will be held right outside of Washington, DC on September 12-13.

This is your opportunity to:

• Explore AgilQuest solutions.
• Provide input into our product roadmap.
• Talk to your peers about how they use AgilQuest to support their growing business.

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Smarter Growth

To be successful, businesses must be growing. To rise to the top or to lead the industry, businesses must expand capacity and capability without increasing cost.

AgilQuest customers have shown they know how to leverage technology and best practices to allow the workforce to grow and succeed without needing the workplace to expand at the same rate. That’s smarter growth. Whether it is software and data, training and policies, or intelligent buildings and networks, you are growing and thriving with less impact on the environment and on the budget. AgilQuest is proud to be part of your smarter growth strategies.

For more information about the 2011 Agile Workplace User Conference, please visit us at agilquest.com/conference.

The first was an excerpt from a summary of The Telework Exchange’s Spring 2011 Town Hall Meeting’s executive panel discussion about telework and its linkage to improved recruitment and retention, greener operating environments and real estate cost reduction. One of the panelists, Kevin Kampschroer, Director, Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), cited the following statistics:

“…buildings in the United States account for 40 percent of the energy consumed nationwide…”, and “…any given space in a building has a 50 percent chance of being empty…”

So the GSA sees big opportunities in defining new work processes that will use less space and thus reduce energy consumption and CO2 footprint.

The other excerpt was from a FederalNewsRadio.com interview of Cathy Kronopolus, the Regional Commissioner for GSA’s National Capital Region in the Public Buildings Service. She commented,

GSA studies of real-time occupancy of work space observed 22 workplaces across 5 agencies for two-week periods and found that employees are typically only at their desks one-third of the time,” according to a June 2010 white paper.” “…So the notion of putting three employees in the space formerly used by one isn’t that much of a leap.” One possible benefit for the Federal Government would be “…to see how can you really accommodate taking the money out of the real estate to the extent that it makes sense and putting into agency mission.

The Federal Government is now taking the next step; measuring its actual use of real estate portfolio in a continuous, consistent systematic way – the AgilQuest way – to measure its workplace and reap the benefits of implementing new workplace strategies. AgilQuest is proud to be a partner with GSA and advise on workplace strategies, measure the actual use of space to support real estate divestiture and consolidation, manage GSA’s hoteling and telework processes, and provide the business intelligence and hard data GSA needs for improved decision support.

You have to put in technology to manage reservations and measure utilization, but even when you buy from the right vendor and do the training right, it will still fail if the changes aren’t handled well and the effort to participate is too great.

We’ve found success in workplace technology only happens when:

• There is a clear reason and urgency for the change: “We must reduce costs without impacting productivity or we’re going to lose out to the competition or financial analysts will pick one of our competitors as a better-run company”
• Someone high up has made a clear mandate and communicated it, and the reason, to everyone regularly: “We are spending three times more on our workplace than those sneaky devils at Company X. We must bring our costs down in order to stay in business and the fastest, cheapest, least-risky way to do that is to improve our worker-to-workplace ratio.”
• The CFO, his CRE office and IT have gotten together to measure where you’re at now (e.g. 1.01 to 1 ratio) , have researched what is possible and practical (say 2 to 1 ratio) and determined what that will save (e.g. workspaces are $14,000 a year and therefore a 1.5 to 1 ratio would save $56M annually)
• More than one department (e.g. PMO of multi-department task force) leads the effort, establishes a goal, and works the communication, training, and regular review or that goal. The C-level has to empower and cheerlead the task force as well as promote the change and its urgency regularly.

And all that won’t work unless 1) the communication with workers isn’t frequent and valuable and 2) the effort involved in complying with and embracing the new change isn’t minimal.

We’ve made the screens in our software easy to use and quick to interact with, but some workers and some corporate cultures still won’t use them. We’ve added ten different interfaces, from smart phones to web browsers to kiosks and more, and still found some workers or departments won’t support the corporate goal if they have to log in. So, we’ve added dozens of automatic presence detection points and sophisticated algorithms to do presence and check-in without conscious human interaction.

It’s not as simple as just dropping in the latest software to check in hotelers. You really have to have long term experience in large, global organizations to get to the level of understanding what change really entails. Technology is important, absolutely, but success starts from the top, it requires strategy and commitment, and then it takes great technology with genuine experience embedded in it.

Jun 7th, 2011 – Richmond, VA – The federal government is deploying telework rapidly and the General Services Administration (GSA) is sharing its plans in a panel discussion at CoreNet’s Eastern Regional Symposium. Led by Chief Asset Officer Gavin Bloch and special advisor Naomi Stanford, the panel will discuss how the agency is developing best practices and testing their approach through “living lab” implementations inside GSA. AgilQuest’s CEO, John Vivadelli, has been chosen to share the vision behind the technology and workplace methodology GSA is implementing.

GSA has been in leader in sustainable buildings and continues to make sustainability a platform for transformation and innovation. The agency is working to reach a zero environmental footprint and to support alternative work strategies, paralleling the private sector’s efforts to drive down costs and move towards more mobility overall. GSA is leading the federal government by developing, testing and implementing approaches to support the new mobile and home-based workforce and decreasing the need for office space. Bloch’s panel will discuss the latest phase of these efforts in a provocative dialog between the participants.

The panel will discuss the challenges GSA faced when deploying its new workplace strategy, the technology to support it, the training and change management needed, and their facility redesigns. In short, everything a large organization needs to maintain worker productivity while taking cost out of real estate. With fewer dollars spent on office space and energy consumption, more of the budget can be used towards each agency’s mission. That makes getting people comfortable with the new paradigm and developing the blueprint for other agencies critical.

Real-time occupancy studies of their workspace found that employees were highly mobile. GSA has since set a goal of reducing its real estate footprint dramatically in support of President Obama’s real estate reduction directives. Executives are leading the way by hoteling at GSA headquarters.

“It is genuinely exciting to see GSA take a leadership role within the federal government effort to enhance telework and aggressively pursue deficit reduction. I’m proud that AgilQuest’s services expertise and technology platforms enable GSA to keep the government workforce productive while reducing the amount of office space required. It’s rare to see government leading the way and business following, but GSA is doing exactly what every stockholder and Board member wants their CEO and CFO to do.” says Vivadelli.

For more information on CoreNet’s Eastern Regional Symposium

http://network.corenetglobal.org/CORENETGLOBAL/ERS

About AgilQuest Corporation

AgilQuest makes an organization’s workplace as agile as its workforce. Founded in 1994, AgilQuest Corporation is a Veteran-Owned Small Business that delivers value by reducing real estate costs, lowering energy consumption and carbon emissions, and improving workplace flexibility and organizational resiliency. AgilQuest is the single source for workplace services expertise and patented technology to advise, measure and manage traditional and agile office space. Business and government rely on AgilQuest to measure the actual use of office space consistently, continuously, and systematically over time and then manage permanently assigned office space, shared workspaces (hoteling), and conference rooms to improve profitability, sustainability and agility.

For Further Information contact

Doug Lucy

Director of Marketing

AgilQuest Corporation

Telephone: 804-474-4917

Email: marketing@agilquest.com

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Spend an hour and learn about this innovative method for measuring actual use on May 19.

Solutions Architect Dave Sawdey will examine the top challenges facing space planners and commercial real estate executives. He will describe today’s best practices and the new technologies that are solving the space guessing problem with accurate, real-time data from every location.

REGISTER HERE