Season Three of Workplace Trends With Liz Elam

In this season of Workplace Trends, we focus on the evolution of office spaces, hybrid work, hub and spoke, new ways of corporate engagement and the demand for keeping up with employee needs post-pandemic. The podcast series is released quarterly and in our third season, Liz Elam interviews leaders in the real estate industry to confront the changing face of real estate and how flex is to be a great trend in corporations post-pandemic.

Here are some of our favorite sound bytes from this season:

I later found myself still productive, still working, because that’s what you do when you like to create and are still passionate about your work, so I just continued working remote and found myself having a much healthier lifestyle. – Liran Rosenfeld, Creator of Yoko Village

Being immersed by such stunning nature where you have massive rain or when you are on top of a mountain, or living in a forest, it can be lonely. But when you are around a group of like minded people, then the whole thing changes. Solitude can bring you down, but being a part of a community brings immense joy. – Liran Rosenfeld, Creator of Yoko Village 

We all need a place to work, and working from home is nice, but it’s more about working remotely than from home. After some time you want to have people around you, you need people that inspire you.- Liran Rosenfeld, Creator of Yoko Village

There is a lot of vacancy right now in the market. This is where the world starts to turn a little bit, and it’s not just New York, we are seeing all over the country and other parts of the world where we are going to see some gaps form in markets that you wouldn’t normally get to see. That’s where I think the beauty of evolution and disruption happens. – Melissa Schilo, JLL Flex America Solutions Lead for Flex Workspace

I do not think the office is dead, I think we are starting to reach fatigue in the work from home system. – Melissa Schilo, JLL Flex America Solutions Lead for Flex Workspace

63% of employees want to come back to the office in some way shape or form, and also work from a third workplace or home. The office is never going to go away. It is absolutely going to be that hub where you can communicate, collaborate with your colleagues. – Melissa Schilo, JLL Flex America Solutions Lead for Flex Workspace

There has been so much HR, facilities, IT, business continuity core team forming that I would love to see it continue. The value in that core team and their ability to really understand how to deal with a crisis but also plan long term is very valuable and should not change. – Karen Davenport, Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Strategy Consultant

Traditional offices with hierarchical offices with a sea of cubicles where you are elbow to elbow has to go away. When you look at it, it’s not healthy, it’s not even sustainable, and it is certainly not what people want. But There will be place, companies large and small want to have that camaraderie and want people to come together. – Karen Davenport, Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Strategy Consultant

It’s not a mystery. We know how to make spaces more sustainable, we know how to incorporate human beings into our spaces and that is not the corporate real estate footprint that exists today. – Karen Davenport, Corporate Real Estate and Workplace Strategy Consultant

There has been a move to a little bit more private space in the regions in spaces that would have previously been very open, just because of different occupier profile, maybe more corporates or even people from corporates taking a space. They want to be around people again and be out of the home, but still need private space to come together. – John Williams, Head of Marketing at the Instant Group

What people have learned over the last year is not necessarily the animosity against the office per say, but animosity against lack of choice. They are freaking out because they were able to choose over the last year and now can’t choose anymore, and this is where the problem lies. – John Williams, Head of Marketing at the Instant Group

Like all business markets, we sort of are backing down the hatches and prepared for the worst, and doing everything we can and yet gone into the pandemic having delivered and managing around 3 million square feet of space and it looks like we are going to come out of it managing 6 million square feet of space globally. Clients want those agile options. – John Williams, Head of Marketing at the Instant Group

Flex is all encompassing. It could be executive suites for individuals, team offices, it really is the solution or the many solutions to the high barriers to entry in the office market. Instead of a 5 to 10 year lease, how do people that aren’t able or willing to sign those contracts have an efficient and attractive place to work that helps and supports them. – Jerome Fried, Director of Real Estate for Industrious

From a Real Estate standpoint, partnerships make a lot more sense for a flex offering and are going to allow flex to grow at a rate that makes a lot of sense, and that will catch up to the percentage of the experts of flex that will be of the office market. – Jerome Fried, Director of Real Estate for Industrious

Using this partnership, using the capital to continue to fine tune the product, increase the service offerings, enrich the tech, and be the service offering for the top enterprise users, you are going to see continued growth. – Jerome Fried, Director of Real Estate for Industrious

Click HERE to listen to Season 3 on Real Estate of Workplace Trends with Liz Elam and be sure to subscribe. It’s juicy!