How your workplace can transform company performance

Valerie Bonnin, Director, Incendium Consulting

 

Real estate executives and their teams have their work cut out for them. We expect them to provide a workplace experience that meets the radically new expectations of millennials and Generation Z, while supporting fast-changing business needs with ever-shrinking budgets.

 

Incendium Consulting is an independent, expert corporate real estate (CRE) advisory firm which specialises in helping clients rise to this challenge.

 

Incendium was formed in 2014 in response to market demand for independent, innovative, flexible and expert advice that solves complex CRE problems. Today, Incendium supports clients globally with:

• Strategy and operating model development, including senior team recruitment
• Designing and implementing a supply chain strategy
• Developing portfolio solutions, including how to respond to the growing demand for flexibility

Incendium recently joined The Instant Group, the world leader in flexible workplace solutions, within which it can now provide integrated end-to-end workplace solutions to clients.

 

Uncertainty and the challenges it presents

 

The biggest challenge faced by Incendium’s clients is uncertainty, due to the increasing pace of change across their businesses. CRE teams need to constantly evolve the workplace to better enable business performance, attract and retain new generations of talent, manage accelerating changes in technological advancement and lead the sustainability agenda.

 

Several issues stand in their way when rising to these challenges: how to do more for less, and do it faster, often with insufficient board-level support. Corporates continue to face pressures not only to evolve quickly to keep up with technology, but to continue to generate cost efficiencies alongside the changes. Perception also plays a role – real estate and FM are still often viewed as operational commodities that can be continually squeezed, and often lack strategic consideration at board level.

 

However, this is changing, and successful companies are typically beginning to view their real estate and supporting services as enablers, not line items.

 

Outsourcing as an enabler

 

In a world where outsourcing and its viability are back in sharp focus due to a number of high-profile collapses, Incendium believes the strategic outsourcing of services can still be a key success factor in enabling workplaces to transform company performance.

 

Done right, outsourcing can provide flexibility to scale efficiencies, performance improvements and market expertise up or down; it also frees up valuable in-house management time to focus on strategic direction rather than tactical delivery. However, for outsourcing to be successful, it requires the establishment of deeper, partnership-style relationships where all parties commercially benefit and the ultimate customer (the occupier) is always the priority.

 

Transforming the workplace

 

In order to successfully transform a workplace, Incendium guides CRE leaders into considering real estate and FM as enablers of a better workplace (not just an operational area to cut costs). Incendium also advises that outsourcing can provide significant financial and operational benefits, but requires a deep and equal partnership underpinned by trained, well-led teams of motivated staff.

 

With the right support, clients can be ahead of the change curve and deliver the workplace of the future.

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Why not challenge Incendium to unlock your Corporate Real Estate potential?

Find out more at incendiumconsulting.com