As the world emerges from quarantine, businesses leaders have been tasked with determining how best to re-enter the office. Recently, we have seen the trend of a more prolonged and cautious approach to office re-entry. The primary goal is to keep everyone safe as we settle back into a new way of working. An extensive list of research illustrates that proximity to one another and social interaction can boost motivation, productivity and innovation. However, perhaps there’s a healthy balance between working in the office and from the home. Colliers’ preliminary research shows that 45% of Americans would like to work from home one to two days a week.

Colliers’ Client Experience (which includes our Workplace Advisory and Portfolio Strategy Consulting teams) has developed a framework that considers the intersection of infrastructure, business requirements, and people as critical criteria to help determine who to bring back and when. By analyzing the conditions of these three key business and real estate drivers, employees who fit the conditions of all three parameters would be the primary candidates to return to the workplace.

Company leaders need to be working with their human resource and business unit leader task forces in order to identify which talent is crucial to bring back and how best and when to bring them back. We also provide two personas of different individuals in separate geographic areas to illustrate how different realities on the ground can affect the parameters and the decisions business leaders need to make.

To learn more, click here to download our full whitepaper on this topic.

About the Authors:

Ron Zappile leads Colliers’ Portfolio Strategy Consulting services for Occupier Services in the Americas focusing on providing strategic corporate real estate advisory services and delivering high-quality portfolio and workplace optimization plans for corporate and institutional clients.

Keith Perske leads the Workplace Advisory practice for Colliers International in the Americas. His team helps create environments that engage employees, drive culture, promote wellness and enable productivity leading to competitive advantage.

Chris Zlocki leads Consulting for Colliers’ Occupier Services platform. He oversees service lines including portfolio strategy, workplace advisory, flex workspace, supply chain solutions and workforce analytics. As the Head of Client Experience, Chris also leads efforts to grow client relationships and expand service offerings for our global enterprise clients.