Lori Louis of JLL and Loftwall CEO Bryce Stuckenschneider discuss return-to-office plans, flexible corporate space, supply chains, and pilot programs.
A Q&A with JLL's Lori Louis on return-to-office, agile workspaces, and the supply chain reality of the post-pandemic office.
This conversation was a Q&A interview with Lori Louis, Global Product Owner at JLL with a focus on space design, and Loftwall CEO Bryce Stuckenschneider. The conversation covered returning to the office, the future of work, the supply chain crisis, and the agile workspaces JLL's clients are demanding today. Edited for brevity.
You are not kidding. Like many, we have been tracking the return to work for the last two years and altering plans on a near-quarterly basis. Most recently my team has been tasked with creating strategies for our Fortune 500 clients to entice people to return to the office. Not return as if the pandemic never happened, but return to a new way of work.
As far as large enterprises go, there are no places that are back at scale, anywhere in the world. Excluding perhaps China, we are not seeing companies pushing any significant volume of their employees back to a traditional work environment. Most of the companies we work with are still in wait-and-see mode.
The role has absolutely changed. We call this phase the Future of Work. In early 2020 it was focused on pandemic response — we put together playbooks and protocols that have just been sitting on the shelf since then. From late 2020 until now, JLL's focus has been all about reconfiguring and optimizing space that already exists.
Although there is less of a need for space than there was three years ago, the requirements for spaces have changed. Study after study shows that as people come back, they expect to be significantly more spread out from their coworkers than they were before the pandemic.
With the data at our disposal, we believe this is something we will see happen in 2022. That said, there is huge acceptance that work is going to look completely different than it did in the past. People have developed new habits and new expectations for what they get out of work.
If people cannot get what they want out of an employer, they will go work somewhere else — because they absolutely can.
Companies stopped putting up a fight about a hybrid approach. They are realizing that flexibility means different things to their employees. While some look at it as how flexible are you about when I come into the office, the trend has evolved to when I am in the office, how flexible is that space for me to do the work I came here to do.
JLL's clients are not making radical wholesale changes across the portfolio. They are running pilot programs and test cases for a new way to approach work. That represents an acceptance from some of the world's biggest companies that they do not have it figured out yet.
Absolutely. It is the companies that are responsive and agile that will end up winning in this era. The days of incumbent relationships with convoluted pricing and months-long lead times are gone. Those brands will not be able to keep up with the way work is being done now.
The nature of work is just so vastly different. Most people are coming into the office two or three days per week with an agenda — for collaboration, problem solving, seeing other adults, fixing issues. They are there because they chose to be. The shape and design of an office has to reflect that.
There is more emphasis on reconfigurability and reusability. The traditional depreciation cycle of furniture is being turned on its head. The former way was — well, it is a five-to-seven year depreciating asset, if it does not meet our needs, soon enough we will be able to write it off. With the needs of today's office changing almost monthly, companies can no longer just get by.
Bryce Stuckenschneider is the CEO of Loftwall, a Texas-based manufacturer of products focused on bringing privacy and division to the workplace.
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