The Flexible Workplace

Abstract

The highly competitive and dynamic business environment of today has resulted in an increasing pressure for efficiency of the main resources. As corporations seek to quickly respond and adapt to the changes in the environment, strategic decisions about the workplace become fundamental as it entails the two most expensive resources of any organization: human capital and real estate. Within the wide range of flexible workplace options now available in the market, co-working is of particular interest due to its exponential growth in the last years; as this trend continues to grow and companies start considering it as part of their accommodation strategy, understanding the value of co-working in corporate real estate becomes essential. The aim of this research is to understand how co-working as a real estate strategy can contribute to the performance of a corporation, while meeting the flexibility demands of the organization and its knowledge workers. By means of a qualitative methodology, the research involves five case studies of front-runner organizations, and semi-structured interviews with co-working providers and workplace experts. The study results in the identification of six strategies that organizations, in different stages of maturity, can pursue to incorporate co-working as part of their real estate portfolio. The strategies include temporary space solutions, such as Swing Space or for Temporary Projects and Staff, and complementary space solutions, such as Core and Flex, Expansion Space, Testing Market and Touchdown Space alternatives, that corporations can implement, according to their requirements, to drive business performance.