While CEOs are screaming for employees to return to the office, it appears that remote work in one form or another is here to stay. Property developers have taken notice, and many are now designing new apartments with remote workers in mind.
About 35% of US job holders are able to work remotely full-time, and 28% do so occasionally, according to a survey Published last year McKinsey & Co. Meanwhile, many companies, in response to changing workplace practices, are taking up larger-than-necessary office space because work is done less in offices and more in employees’ homes. .
But remote work can be a drag in small apartments, or those designed without this in mind. During the pandemic, employees living in small apartments often struggle. Carmine Di Sibio, CEO of consulting firm EY, SPOKE luck in November 2020: “We have a lot of young people who are in small apartments all over the world, and being in a small apartment in this environment is not good at all. We have a lot of people calling our hotlines asking for help, just from a mental state. “
Today, many developers and designers are considering remote workers.
Near Walmart’s headquarters in Rogers, Arkansas, an architecture firm called Verdant Studios is designing multifamily developments with an eye toward remote and hybrid workforces, including community spaces. for co-working.
“We’re designing for the at-home workspace in a way we never did pre-COVID,” CEO Jessica Hester SPOKE Business and Politics Talk. “Making sure people have access to comfortable, well-lit desk space has become a priority.”
Even the way units look at video calls is taken into account, he added: “Three years ago, we didn’t really think about what the background of a Zoom call would look like. Those were the things we thought about as we put that kind of space in a residential environment.”
A high-end development in Broomfield, Colorado, near Denver, called The Lock at the Flatirons Apartment there are co-working units. Also outside of Dallas in Garland, Texas, an upcoming 340-unit apartment project called iThirty will offer future tenants. access to a remote-work lounge.
While many big employers are leaving the office for nothing today.
In the Twin Cities, for example, Thomson Reuters has shut down a sprawling campus in Eagan where about 5,000 employees worked before the pandemic. Now the company will use smaller and more flexible office space with hybrid work in mind, according to THE Star Tribune.
“We want to create a modern, dynamic and collaborative work environment that fully supports our hybrid ways of working for our office-based roles,” SAYS Paul Fischer, president of Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals and co-site lead for the company’s local campus, last year.
“Given our level of vacancy in our buildings,” he added, the campus is “too large for the company’s current needs.”
Last month at Slack, a subsidiary of Salesforce based in San Francisco, chief of staff Robby Kwok according to the occupancy rate in some Salesforce offices “less than 20%” and “some of them less than 10%.” He added, “It’s very difficult to justify having all that space.”
Meanwhile Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who last year criticized mandates to return to officesaid real estate “will be a big part” of the software giant’s effort to cut costs by $5 billion.
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