Month: June 2023

In planning workspace infrastructure, it’s the time to reboot, use our learnings from the pandemic, keeping in mind the needs of today’s employees and the mandate for sustainable growth. While achieving corporate goals will always remain the fulcrum of strategy, it’s important to factor in the fresh challenges and ensure that staff members are happy.

The acute uncertainty that gripped the world over the past three years has forced all organizations to rethink their commercial real estate strategy to cut capital expenditure and ensure they stay afloat. While there’s no one-size-fits all plan, the new overwhelming favourite infrastructure mould is a combination of physical and virtual workspaces to meet the demands of the hybrid work model.

Today’s offices are designed to offer the flexibility to scale up or down with the minimum of fuss, while making room for emerging work cultures and elastic timings. Without optimizing a hybrid commercial real estate (CRE) strategy, companies can’t optimize the hybrid work model. Even before Covid-19 struck, there was a clear slant towards remote and hybrid work mode. The pandemic simply turbo-charged the trend, and clearly, this is the new normal.

However, at the end of the day, the shift towards a hybrid CRE model has to support the bottom line, and to ensure that, a robust workplace data analytics system must be put in place that would shape the flexi office strategy. Tomorrow’s workplaces will be defined by key factors like agility, flexibility, equity and productivity.

Let us look at key factors that make up an efficient hybrid workspace:

# Flexibility: Being nimble in planning office infrastructure is the currency of today, whether it is working out logistics or strategizing business. It’s important to offer a flexi workspace to the employees so that work can be fun while productivity gets boosted. More open and minimalistic workstations can promote better intra-office communication and ideas sharing. This enables the management to get the best out of its collective human resources capital. When your employees are happy and talking to each other, you get better output. That’s a given. So, think re-engineering of workspaces, think hybrid CRE to cater to today’s ever-morphing requirements.

# Efficiency: As we come out of the morass inflicted by the pandemic, companies are scampering to make up for lost time. While aiming for higher productivity and accelerating recovery, most organizations are opting for a hybrid work model where employees can choose how and from where they would like to work for best results. The combination of physical and virtual workspace facilities makes business collaborations location-agnostic. This saves substantial cost and time in commuting, while offering the workforce the freedom to choose their comfort zone and work out the right balance in workspace environment.

# Uniformity: While equipping employees to work from various locations, it is critical to ensure uniformity in the core culture and identity of the organization, the amenities extended and workspace ergonomics. The dynamics of the hybrid work model can work perfectly and to everybody’s benefit only when instilled with the core values and ethics of the company and organizational synergy across all locations.

# Location-agnostic: The vastness of India’s sheer geographical size was never really leveraged before the pandemic when corporates fished for talent. The search was always skewed by the candidate’s location or willingness to relocate. Now, that large pond of human resources has become easy to reach and harness. The hybrid work model and concomitant CRE infrastructure has enabled companies to hire talent from anywhere, even smaller cities, and equip them with the benchmarked work environment and amenities to function with elan from their location of choice. Such a flexible work model has been a genuine game-changer. Being location-agnostic is enabling companies to retain manpower, while boosting productivity at the same time.

Corporate housing is a short-term rental model targeted primarily at the business traveller or any person looking for an extended-stay full-service accommodation. Needless to say, in the post-pandemic world of hybrid work mode, many medium and large corporate entities are looking for such apartments which they can rotate among their travelling executives.

Even for freelance professionals looking for an extended-stay option as an alternative to hotel accommodation or for those relocating to a new city, such short-term hospitality models, also known as “serviced apartments” or “extended-stay apartments”, are attractive solutions. For the latter group, this allows them the leeway to settle in a bit before they can plan moving into a more permanent accommodation once they know the city better. Sometimes, such accommodation is also perfect for medical stays when you want to be close to the hospital your loved one is in.

As opposed to a hotel room, a corporate apartment is not just a bed and bathroom. It’s a fully furnished unit usually offering a clutch of amenities like a fully-equipped kitchen, TV set, coffee-maker, dishwasher, refrigerator, cleaning services, etc, besides of course a reliable wi-fi connectivity – all included in the rental tariff. In other words, one can actually live off a suitcase, while enjoying a “home away from home” feel.

While a majority of clients would typically stay for a couple of weeks or on the outside, a month perhaps, the rent-out policy for corporate apartments is usually quite flexible, with tenants sometimes opting to stay for even months together. In case of unusually long stays, sometimes a monthly rental arrangement is also worked out.

What are the obvious benefits of staying in a corporate apartment?

# Less expensive: Corporate apartments usually work out less expensive than hotel stay, while you still feel at home.

# More privacy: This arrangement gives you much more privacy than a hotel room since you don’t normally have a fleet of cars parked outside, deal with a constant flow of temporary guests, or have to go out for every meal, since you would have a fully-functional kitchen.

# Less noise: Corporate apartment properties are usually located in quieter residential areas instead of bang in the heart of the commercial district, hence more peaceful.

# Bonus features: Sometimes, if you are lucky, you could have access to an in-house gym, indoor sports or swimming pool.

# Home utilities: Corporate housing will normally come with gadgets and appliances like TV set with cable/DTH, refrigerator, dishwasher, iron, washer-dryer, coffee maker, microwave oven and the like.

# Connected 24×7: All such apartments come with a highly reliable broadband wi-fi service built into the package so that be it work or entertainment, you are always connected, never missing a beat.

# Less paperwork: Moving into a fully-serviced corporate apartment usually entails very little paperwork and minimum waiting period unlike entering into a proper lease rental agreement for a conventional rented place. Just take your keys and start living with everything cared for. It’s a convenient and pragmatic solution for short-term stays.

# All-inclusive package: In a full-service corporate apartment, the package normally includes all utilities including water, electricity, cooking gas, etc. To sum up, corporate apartments constitute both a product and a service. While the apartment itself is the product, all the allied facilities that come with the accommodation can be referred to as the service package.