Traditionally, Corporate Real Estate (CRE), HR and Technology teams have existed as separate departments. Miscommunication and friction are commonplace, and relationships often fractured. And yet all are vital in achieving the same strategic business goal – to optimise the employee experience, and in doing so support the attraction and retention of talent and enhance productivity.
Whilst each team may strive to meet this objective in various ways, the overlap between responsibilities is significant, and each rely on one another to accomplish their objectives and track progress. The pandemic has shone a spotlight on this 3-way relationship, and with the rise of home working, organisations have been forced to consider how CRE, HR and Technology can work more harmoniously together. Pre-COVID, JLL’s 2019 Future of Work survey, found that over 45% of CRE directors indicated that they expected an increase in collaboration with HR and IT departments in the next three years. No doubt this figure is now substantially higher.
As the new ways of working become embedded for the long term, organisations are moving beyond traditional cost-based drivers to a more holistic approach focussed on workplace productivity, data-driven decision making and employee experience. Without close collaboration between CRE, HR and Technology, implementing and tracking such drivers will at best be challenging, if not impossible.
We are without doubt moving to a future where CRE, HR and Technology exist as a single department but until then, it will be the companies that can maintain strong, collaborative relationships between these team that will succeed. It’s crucial that leaders remain assertive and ensure a continued focus on these relationships; if not it’s all too easy for teams to drift and objectives diverge.
Allocating business partners and maintaining regular meetings is beneficial but adopting a shared balanced scorecard that delivers insight common to the objectives of talent attraction, retention and productivity can be the most effective. Such a scorecard can support data driven decision making by tracking KPIs such as office attendance, workplace utilisation, engagement scores, attrition, promotions, complaints and resolution times. It provides an insightful window into how the activities of each team can support a shared business objective, but above all helps drive accountability and highlights the importance of strong collaboration between these teams.
Together, CRE, HR and Technology can be a formidable weapon in the war for talent and key to transforming a business as a result.
