Putting productivity gains at the heart of corporate real estate

Corporate Real Estate can be a key lever in addressing the productivity challenge.

Organizations are constantly striving to achieve greater productivity, especially in the current cost-conscious environment where businesses are looking to maintain cost savings and profitability gains and getting the most out of corporate restructuring. 

Workplace
A well executed workplace strategy focused on the configuration and design of the workplace can increase productivity by 10% as well as reduce employee absenteeism. In EC Harris’ own case, when executing a new workplace strategy at its headquarters, fee turnover/FTE increased by 7.5% and retention improved 10%.

Successful workplace strategy and delivery must be linked to business planning and corporate strategy. Effective solutions create interaction, enable joint working, break down silos and support the integration between differing grades and types of workforces. This creates more motivated, higher performing overall teams devoted to core activities.

Organization design
In times of economic challenge, all organizational structures should be examined for optimal effectiveness.
An effective checklist for productivity effectiveness includes:
■ How does the CRE organization and its constituent elements deliver the agreed objectives?
■ How much of the team is focused on checking partners’ or vendors’ technical ability rather than enabling performance and managing internal demand?
■ Is the CRE organization more focused on administration rather than production?
■ Is the team clear on accountabilities and the decision making authority?
■ Are production related processes lean and focused or are they about compliance/accountability sharing?
■ Does the CRE organization have the appropriate IT platform to support operations and provide Management Information that enables rapid and precise decision making rather than loose opinion formation?
■ Can the performance of the team be measured in business terms?

Focusing on these aspects of the organization design of the CRE team and optimizing them can directly lead to step changes in productivity - frequently delivering up to 25% benefits.

Management information and value measurement
Critical to the transformation of CRE functions to deliver long-term value, it is necessary to develop and implement a holistic performance management system which addresses people, process and technology across the CRE function and its supply chain.

This is done by:
■ Identifying measures that would promote performance beyond the strategic property objectives
■ Developing detailed and measurable definitions to ensure consistency and alignment with benchmarks
■ Developing a performance management framework to enable each level of the organization to set targets and then manage initiatives to achieve them
■ Developing the supplier performance management principles and methodology
■ Designing an IT platform to capture the measurements with appropriate functionality to support day-to-day decision making
■ Embedding new ways of working across the organization and support performance management through 1:1 coaching

Barclays created a single platform for measuring and reporting on performance based on a single set of KPIs and dashboards which provided one source of information at Board, Executive, Management and Supply Chain levels. This delivered a single source of consistent information, reducing workloads and allowing a focus on the ‘go forward’ position.

This approach helps to knit all elements of a CRE programme together and creates a vision for the future in a simple, straight-forward manner
 

Jonathan Berney, Head of Client Solutions, Asia at EC Harris