PODCAST TFE LEARN: “Are other people there and is there food?” These are some of the most common questions tenants and workers want to know when considering if they want to go back to the office, according to chief executive of Equiem.
It’s just one of the insights that Gabrielle McMillan’s company Equiem, a tenant experience platform, has picked up in a major report it has just completed on tenant preferences, shared on the latest TFE Learn video/podcast.
The survey is the sixth the company’s done and given the size of this outfit that kicked off in Melbourne in 2011 and now has staff that numbers around 200 in 18 countries, it packs a punch.
Among the most interesting findings is that 95 per cent of employers now offer some sort of location flexibility. More than half of officegoers said they are more productive working hybrid – meaning two to three days in the office and the rest from home.
The top motivation for people to go into the office among the 5000 participants was food.
Despite the rise in work-from-home settings, the survey found that people want to come into the office to seek spontaneous collaboration and human connection, McMillan said.
Along with this, the other two things officegoers wanted to know was who else would be there and what events were on.
Many participants stressed the importance of using technology to find answers to the questions.
According to McMillan, one of the survey users said they like how convenient it is to have information available “at your fingertips” because of the inefficiency of information passed through an office.
The survey also looked at technology use and sustainability actions.
The level of comfort with artificial intelligence (AI) was mostly rated a five out of 10. Many workers still held a high degree of scepticism about AI in the workplace.
As for sustainability, about 3500 of the 5000 participants in the survey (70 per cent) rated sustainability as important across their offices.
Yet, it found only about 1900 of the 5000 participants (38 per cent), knew about the building’s green efforts.
Interestingly, sustainability was ranked more important in Asia Pacific countries comparatively and there was lower awareness of sustainability in the US and the EU.
McMillan said she accredited this to the partial skew in the survey, which was focused only on users on the Equiem platform. Some of the largest Australian landlords are using the platform. And companies such as Dexus, Lendlease and GPT are “more sophisticated” in what they’re doing and how they’re communicating it.
Meanwhile, the US was heavily hit with rising interest rates causing landlords to struggle. This influences how they are spending their time and what they can do. McMillian added that the anti-sustainability sentiment in the US is going to change the reporting of green efforts.
McMillan said a key takeaway from the survey was the notion of buildings shifting focus from ESG to bringing down operating costs and retaining tenants.
She said she doesn’t think this is due to a lack of care but rather indicative of the pressure placed on the rising real estate industry following rising costs of servicing debt and energy.
The survey is one aspect of the company’s work in the built environment.
The company started out small with an aim to connect landlords with end users of the building. It grew to a global scale and “transcends so many different buildings.”
It was founded by Lorenz Grollo, developer and part owner of the Rialto Tower in Melbourne, who still has a significant share of the business. Grollo had been trying to crack the eternal conundrum of landlords – how to enhance tenant experience to make them “sticky” as well as how to capitalise, if possible, on the captive market that these tenants, sometimes numbering in their thousands, represented.
It has up to 30,000 companies on its platform across Europe (including the UK), North America (Canada and the US) and APAC.
The platform covers an integrated system for landlords to interact with and manage flex spaces and building occupancies.
One service is a complementary piece of consulting called a building health check. The check profiles the different technologies in the building, analyses how they are being used and how easy it would be to integrate the technologies to one system.
The platform’s next issue to tackle is a rising problem around visitors in and out of the buildings and security access, McMillan said.
AI could be the solution to this issue with a self-service information centre. The company launched a theta version of a self-service centre powered by AI at Canary Wharf in London.
– with Tina Perinotto