Evolution of CRE towards hybrid model

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.