Should you stay or should you go?

November 29, 2016

We drive into the future looking only in the rearview mirror.

Marshall McLuhan

What worked for your company yesterday won’t work for it tomorrow.  You know this, which is why your R&D, product development and application engineering teams constantly push new ideas forward in the market.  But there are moments in every organization’s life when more than product innovation is required.  Change is constant. Making room for shifting employee demographics, new technologies and disruptive business processes requires a re-imagination and re-purposing of the physical space where you work.  B+H’s portfolio optimization practice offers an organized methodology that helps companies embrace these changes, and develop new strategies to enhance your organization’s ability to navigate times of change.

Do you know who works for you?

One of the biggest adjustments every company will need to make in the short-term is around who constitutes their workforce, and how this group’s expectations and needs are different than those of previous groups.  Who is this cohort of change agents? 2016 marks the first year when Millennials constitute 50% of the American workforce.  Many current day workplace strategies reflect the needs of previous generations; yet this dominant group has different needs and expectations than their Generation X peers, and is almost unrecognizable to their Baby Boomer managers.

Should we stay or should we go?

One of the biggest challenges we help clients with is deciding what to do with their existing corporate campuses. There are three steps to helping leaders evaluate what they need to do, where they need to go to accomplish it, and how they should implement the solution:

What?

All successful strategies begin with an understanding of the business operations strategy. We evaluate the business process and define the operations alternatives.

Where?

Location. Location. Location. The core of our location strategy services is economic geography; aligning the assets of the business environment with the business operations’ needs – and the expectations of the workforce. The ultimate location decision is supported by a comprehensive and objective rating of the scenarios’ performance against strategic drivers and project criteria, as well as implementation risk and operating costs. We call this our Probability of Success Matrix.

How?

Even the most compelling location strategy will fail if change is not managed effectively. We carefully program and manage a solid transition and risk mitigation plan before asking people to move.

Connecting the Dots.

Portfolio Optimization is all about connecting key business objectives to real estate solutions that facilitate their success – without an agenda, in a collaborative process. The economic, demographic and workplace data sets tell a compelling story if you know how to integrate them and evaluate their probability of success.