Working next to home, but not at home. Everything indicates that this concept will end up prevailing in the coming years, which will force a reconfiguration of city models and the ways large companies organize themselves, moving from having a single large headquarters to multiple smaller locations closer to the homes where their employees reside. This is the vision with which major real estate consultants and the human resources departments of larger companies are already working, having been able to verify the advantages of teleworking thanks to the pandemic, but also its drawbacks.
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"Until now, we have separated the geographical core of life from that of work, which has forced us to commute daily by car or public transport; but this is over. Today, talent wants to work next to home; it is the great global aspiration, because working close to your home, within a fifteen-minute radius, is what truly means having quality of life. It is a very profound movement, because it clashes with everything we have done until now, it collides with the city model we have developed. The great challenge is to see how we reverse this model and reintegrate work centers into neighborhoods," reflects Xavier Güell, director of the CBRE real estate consultancy office in Barcelona.
According to Güell, the Catalan capital has everything to emerge victorious from a paradigm shift that post-pandemic reality is accelerating. "Barcelona has the ideal size to bring work centers back to where people live; we must rebalance neighborhoods, that is, build more homes where there are practically only offices, as in 22@, and enable more offices where the population is concentrated, as in the Eixample. We must reintegrate both uses harmoniously so that people can go to work walking or cycling, with the consequent environmental benefit. Today, sustainability criteria are key in the decisions companies make," explains the expert in an interview with The New Barcelona Post.
The director of CBRE, who already advises his clients in this direction, is convinced that the "centrifugation" of offices to the periphery or the duality between housing poles and business parks is an exhausted model, so now we must work on the rebalancing of uses. "Companies must be located according to where their employees live; it is a radical change of concept, because before people went where the companies were, but now companies will go where people are, that is, talent," he emphasizes.
Companies must be located according to where their employees live; it is a radical change of concept, because before people went where the companies were, but now companies will go where people are, that is, talent"In this context, Barcelona has a great opportunity to bring offices back to the center; in the coming years we will see the reconversion of buildings into offices, it is a movement that makes a lot of sense for investors and we are already starting to see it with some operations," advances the CBRE executive. According to Güell, for many years the city center experienced the craze for transforming all types of properties into hotels. With the moratorium, this avenue is exhausted, so all projects have focused on residential uses. However, the new regulations that require building 30% of VPO in new developments discourage investors, so "building offices in the center makes sense again."
In the consultant's opinion, in the coming years we will see "relocations" of offices, that is, companies that once left and will now return to the center to be closer to their workers. This movement does not mean, according to Güell, that business parks on the periphery will cease to make sense. "These peripheral properties will continue to be useful, as they are ideal for companies that employ many workers who do not live in the city center; they precisely prevent vehicles from unnecessarily entering the center," he argues.
But, in a post-pandemic context, will offices still be necessary? "I am fully convinced that they will; physical offices make all the sense in the world, they will continue to be necessary because teleworking will not be imposed, it will be another tool because physical space beats teleworking in comfort, technology, social interaction, creativity and team building," says the CBRE expert. "Corporations must change their mindset and adapt to what talent wants, to work fifteen minutes from home, not the other way around," he emphasizes.
Teleworking will not be imposed, it will be another tool because physical space beats teleworking in comfort, technology, social interaction, creativity and team buildingIt must be taken into account that the available surface area in cities like Barcelona is very small, so it will be very difficult for companies to find all the square meters they need in the city center. According to Güell, technology, partial teleworking, and new office designs mean that today not as many square meters are needed as before, but, in his opinion, the most important thing is to adopt afractal model, that is, segmenting workspaces and having two buildings of 5,000 square meters instead of one of 10,000 meters.
"Companies must adopt a fractal structure, that is, replicate themselves in a decentralized manner into smaller, well-interconnected operational units. They must establish a multi-centric office location plan and locate themselves in areas that concentrate a higher density of employees," he explains. For example, a company that now occupies 6,000 square meters in 22@ could come to occupy only 2,000 meters in 22@, 3,000 square meters in Eixample, and 1,000 more meters in Sant Cugat.
Limitations
Güell admits that this model is not applicable to all economic sectors and that it is utopian to think that 100% of employees will walk to their companies. But he asks for the collaboration of public administrations to promote and facilitate changes of use to ensure that Barcelona is in a privileged position in this global capacity to attract talent. "Cities are the center of this transformation process, the new paradigm puts people at the center of the equation and this means that the success of companies and cities will be measured by their ability to attract talent," he concludes.
Some believe that covid-19 may cause the opposite, that people will leave cities and go to live in areas that until now suffered depopulation. "I very much doubt that there will be a great exodus of people; it will depend on each city and will affect more those that do not know how to reinvent themselves. But, one thing is very clear: it is in cities where things happen."
The learnings from teleworking: freeing oneself from the tedious 'commuting'
The confinement we experienced in 2020 has generalized teleworking and we can now draw some conclusions. The main advantage for employees is that teleworking eliminates travel times, the so-called commuting, according to industry jargon. According to data recorded by the transport application Moovit, in Barcelona, commutes to work by public transport have an average duration of 50 minutes, a period slightly shorter than Madrid's 62 minutes. For its part, studies by the consulting firm Nielsen confirm that 41% of Spaniards take more than an hour to get to their workplace, which means losing more than two hours a day, that is, a full working day a week spent in a car, a train or a bus.
Commuting, therefore, directly affects the quality of life, which is why teleworking, massively implemented due to covid-19, has been experienced as a liberation by many citizens. An example of this liberation effect is a survey conducted this summer by CBRE of more than 10,000 people in 18 countries. When asked about the biggest advantage of teleworking, 92% of respondents pointed to not having to commute daily to the office and avoiding traffic jams and crowds on the subway. This response clearly outweighed the advantages of reducing the risk of contagion or increasing work-life balance.
However, working from home has a flip side linked, fundamentally, to our physical and mental health. The great risk of turning a home into an office is sedentarism ---one of the main causes of death in the world according to the WHO--- and the fact of not having transition spaces between the different facets of life. All the relational and creativity-stimulating aspects provided by physical offices, which are also equipped with much more technology than we have at home, are also lost.
A hybrid model is therefore imposed, that is, work systems that combine teleworking days with office attendance days. According to CBRE, this hybrid model will also evolve, as it does not end with the inconveniences of either teleworking or in-person work, it only limits them to a certain number of days a week. What is the solution then? According to Xavier Güell, the solution to this new paradigm is "the fractal model", that is, a company model that replicates itself in a decentralized way into smaller, interconnected units, which translates into a "total paradigm shift in the way companies locate and size their workspaces".
In this scenario, neighborhoods take center stage, as they are "the most harmonious and compatible dimension with the daily life of human beings". According to CBRE, the fractal model based on neighborhoods offers benefits in terms of health, sense of community, sustainability, quality of life, productivity, work-life balance, and attraction and retention of talent.
Talent, at the center
This entire revolution has talent as its main protagonist, since digitalization and the intensive use of technology mean that today the truly differentiating element is the human factor, that is, everything that machines cannot do. "Before, we lived in a capital centric world, that is, companies went where power and capital were, and people had to go where companies were; now the center has been reversed: we moved to the people centric model, where the center is talent and, precisely thanks to that technology, people can work from wherever they want, that's why companies will have to go where talent is, it's the other way around," Güell emphasizes.
And where will talent go? To the place that offers a higher quality of life, a better balance between work and family life, and where one can avoid travel times. In this race, Barcelona, due to its climate, communications, network of universities and business schools, gastronomy, scientific infrastructure, urban planning model, and city size, starts from a clearly winning position. Let's take advantage of it.