Location, location, location. For years, these have been the three main criteria of selecting an office building for your company. They have been repeated as a mantra by developers (including Skanska), agents and clients.
The place your organization is based and the ease of getting there are both key as they determine employees’ willingness to work at the office. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to support this thesis but we also have numbers to prove it. We teamed up with Colliers to do a survey among office users in which we asked, what encourages office workers to come to the office. A good location and comfortable commute turned out to be the top indicated attractors, followed by relevant amenities in the building and its neighborhood. To find out more, have a look at the report with the results of this survey here.
Tenant and investor perspective
The survey helped us better understand office users’ perspective, but how about tenants’ and investors’ views? Location is crucial for these groups as well. Other important factors include cost, modern design aligned with (employer) brand identity, technology that future-proofs the building and – more and more often – alignment with ESG (environmental, social, governance) criteria. If renting or buying, could the office contribute to tenants’ or investors’ sustainability objectives?
The importance of ESG
ESG and sustainable development have become one of the main trends in the business world. Sustainable development is attracting more strategic attention from companies, due to topics such as:
- Climate change having an increasing effect on people and societies across the globe
- Growing social awareness of the impact businesses can have on the natural environment
- Evolving employees’ priorities and expectations of their employers and/or new regulation
Your office can help deliver on sustainability strategy
When buying, designing and building or renting office real estate, it’s worth remembering that this decision may have considerable impact on your company’s ability to deliver on its sustainability strategy. An office that supports environmental, social and governance goals can have a positive impact on this ability, while serving as a physical manifestation of company’s strategy and values, especially if they link to United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which many companies’ do.
Read more of Arkadiusz’s blog posts on LinkedIn
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