MetroWire Media hosted its annual Office Summit on September 22 at Gather at 2345 Grand in Kansas City, Mo.
Panelists Jeff Blaesing, vice president of JE Dunn Construction; Jason Carter Solomon, senior vice president of Landmark National Bank; Janelle Matlosz, partner with Perspective Architecture + Design; Miles McCune, president and founder of Range Realty Partners; and Kristine Sutherlin, associate with Burns & McDonnell; joined moderator Richard Wetzel, partner with Centric, in a candid discussion about the office workspace aftermath as we bounce in and out of the pandemic.
The majority of the discussion anchored around the corporate struggle of bringing employees back to the office after many months of working remotely.
“We need to create ways to engage each other at work more. We are encouraging others to get up and to talk to others. It’s amazing how much coordination and discussion just didn’t happen when we were working from home,” said Sutherlin.
Blaesing said that during the pandemic, employee culture and development were lost.
“We have people that have been working at JE Dunn for 18 months and they really haven’t been in an office. They haven’t spent time with people who have been in the trenches for years and years and years. I know that’s how I learned — by sitting at a table in a trailer on site and listening to foremen, project managers and our trade partners,” Blaesing said.
Matlosz, whose firm has 20 fully vaccinated employees, said their employees have been back in the office since May and they feel very safe when they go to work; however, employees at the larger corporations are still working from home.
“What we’re finding is the CEOs of those corporations are really struggling with how do I get my culture back? How do we get everyone back? And they’re really struggling with that because they’re worried about employee retention, how to keep their employees. A lot of them don’t want to come back to work,” said Matlosz.
McCune said the patience of the decision-makers at the larger corporations is wearing very thin. They want to get their employees back into the office.
“You can talk all day long about employers losing patience with folks coming back to the office, but I think that really does have to be tempered with the human element of ‘Am I going to be able to attract the best and the brightest who can contribute to my team without empathy.’ And, I think that is what is missing from the equation, and has been missing for a very long time,” said Carter Solomon.
Carter Solomon said he would encourage employers to allow flexible work schedules, which will help attract diverse candidates.
The five-day work in the office schedule soon may become a thing of the past.
“A lot of the larger companies copy each other and have a lot of this 3/2, 4/1. You come into the office three days a week, you get 2 days off. Almost every company has talked about that. It would be shocking to me if a company didn’t adopt something like that,” said McCune.
Matlosz said her firm and many other companies have adopted the hybrid model where employees set their own schedules.
“We’re treating them like mature adults. I feel like that alone has helped our culture so much because they feel trusted and empowered,” said Matlosz.
She said that those companies that aren’t flexible will see employee turnover.
Carter Solomon said he’s seen very little default during the pandemic from his lending customers who own office buildings because tenants have been paying. Tenants are locked into their existing lease terms and have not relinquished space. But, he said, that could change when leases are up for renewal.
“I think what’s going to be interesting is as you roll out of leases going into renewal time and as deals start to mature, how people will kind of shrink down their footprint if the current trend continues,” Carter Solomon said.
Carter Solomon said investors are looking at buildings built in the 1960s as prime candidates to reformat, rather than tearing them down. There is an opportunity to reinvigorate existing office space to fit smaller floor plate users as demand for larger square footage decreases, he said.
McCune said companies will be using their space a little differently than they did in the past. And the panelists agreed that attractive office space helps attract and retain employees.
“We’re finding that most of our clients that we work with are wanting to spend a lot more money on their office space for retention and attraction,” Matlosz said.
“All of the sudden, it’s not just the tech companies with the cool office space,” said Sutherlin.
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View MWM 2021 Office Summit photo album here.
Mark your calendars for the MWM Industrial Summit on November 17, 2021.