Our Major Initiatives for 2008
Each year, a poll of member challenges helps direct our agenda. To address these issues, we conduct hundreds of interviews with members to analyze the challenge and identify best practices and build quantitative databases from member-provided data. Several upcoming research and benchmarking initiatives are detailed below.
Improve the Employment Brand via Workplace Strategy
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The Challenge: Critical talent shortages emerge as the number-one concern of many CEOs, and 79% of staffi ng directors expect competition to intensify. The workplace is now a critical differentiator for attracting talent and is increasingly critical to the productivity of a workforce ever more dependent on technology and team work (average time spent in collaboration is up 33% since 2000). But, real estate executives face the following challenges:
- Unprecedented diversity of work styles as demography puts four generations at work for the fi rst time since child labor laws
- An explosion of workplace options from a few standard models to more than 2,000 distinct templates and alternative programs.
Ultimately, a misaligned workplace critically handicaps competitiveness. Observed productivity differences of 20-25% and 10% greater attrition/staff vacancies cost companies hundreds of millions of dollars, overwhelming the impact of any occupancy expense savings.
The Solution
Progressive real estate executives lead company conversations on employee value proposition and productivity, adding the workplace as a critical element. Informed by a precise knowledge of diverse employee needs, Corporate Real Estate is simultaneously improving staff recruitment and retention, maximizing workforce productivity, meeting sustainability objectives, increasing portfolio fl exibility, and reducing costs by redefi ning workplace strategy around the new realities of work. Featured solutions with measurable ROI include the following:
- Easy-to-implement workplace programs that provide immediate business benefit
- Employee segmentation playbook to capitalize on changing workforce trends
- Diagnostic tools to identify new productivity drivers for your most important employees
Member Impact
- Identify critical workplace factors, cutting through design fi rm noise, to improve employee recruitment, productivity, and retention.
- Implement best-fit workplace innovations based on applicability to your employee base and measurable business ROI.
- Deploy more effective alternative work programs for increased portfolio flexibility.
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Arm Project Leaders with a Revamped Delivery Toolkit
The Challenge: The consequences of project delivery failures are more severe than ever, with average construction cost overruns of even 5% running into the millions, a fi gure dwarfed by the multimillion dollar costs of delay to the business. Corporate Real Estate project leaders are in a maelstrom of competing demands with marginal toolkits that have failed to keep pace with the growing complexity. Traditional project management is now detrimental to success when contending with multiple stakeholders and ambiguous business environments.
- Increasing centralization of CRE and the desire for fl exible, multiuse facilities multiplies the wide array of project stakeholders.
- Greater use of external service delivery partners - up 20% annually since 2004 - diminishes project managers' sense of control.
- Complex information flows across the project delivery network overwhelm managers with data while providing limited insight.
The Solution
CRE executives must refocus their efforts beyond internal project management competencies to become effective leaders of extended project delivery networks. By redefining roles and refreshing the project "orchestration" toolkit, real estate executives can equip their teams to succeed despite ambiguity and harness the expertise, energy, and fl exibility of a "distributed" project delivery model. The output of the Board’s initiative will include the following valuable resources for members:
- Prioritization tools to enable efficient project prioritization and stakeholder communication
- Targeted performance dashboards to gauge real-team project performance
- Practical project delivery skills development resources for key project leader staff
Member Impact
- Streamline information fl ows across network partners to create effi cient and dynamic sources of real-time project data.
- Decrease project cycle times and delivery costs by focusing effort on intraproject prioritization and change response.
- Develop leading performance indicators to drive project delivery predictability, adaptability, and execution.
2008 Summary of Member Services and Research Agenda