Purpose: New ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility and diminishing organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of both workplace design and service delivery. However, structures and processes of workplace management are still traditional, and managers, together with outsourced facility service providers, often do not succeed at fulfilling the needs of mobile employees. The aforementioned changes stimulate discussions in many areas in both industry and academy. Nevertheless, workplace literature from business perspective seems to be scarce. In this paper, the focus is on workplace service offering for mobile knowledge workers. This paper aims to study the current state of workplace servitization. To answer this, the authors identify value offering elements that are used in office business market to deliver workplace as a service. Design/methodology/approach: This study follows multiple case study methodology including five case studies. Primary data were collected through interviews with workplace service providers. Secondary data included observations and publicly available data. The authors took business model design approach to study selected business offerings. Findings: The results indicate that workplace business models include elements of servitization on various levels. Physical space is no longer the central offering in the office business; instead, it acts as a component on which the service portfolio is built. The highest value from workplace comes from experience-related service offerings. Originality/value: Academically, research contributes to the workplace management studies by providing servitization perspective to a topic previously approached with a more technical and psychological point of view. This study can also support service providers and customer organizations in their quest to make service provision more flexible and experience-oriented.

New ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility
and crossing of organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of
both workplace design and service delivery. However, the processes and
structures of workplace management are still traditional and managers,
together with outsourced service providers, often fail to serve the needs
of mobile employees.

Purpose
– Although great emphasis has been given to the added value of real estate, the current studies miss the phase when the actual value is created, i.e., the production phase of real-estate services. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the current state of value creation of the commercial real-estate services from a lean thinking perspective.

Design/methodology/approach
– Value creation is studied in four Finnish cases through 122 interviews and eight workshops.

Findings
– Cross-case analysis identified six sources of waste resulting as poor value creation: sub-process optimisation instead of optimising the entire process, the price minimisation instead of cost minimisation, difficulties responding to customer value, overloaded employees, inability to make improvements, and poorly managed information.

Research limitations/implications
– Although the findings are grounded on a solid data collection and analysis, the case study nature of the research and the Finnish case study settings create limitations for the generalisation of the findings.

Practical implications
– Service providers and other process owners can use the findings to improve their value creation and increase the productivity of their service processes.

Originality/value –
This is one of the first research studies that utilise lean thinking in commercial service processes in the real-estate sector and thus provides new insight into how to increase productivity through waste minimisation.