The New World of Work and Changing Workplace Concepts
Workplace concepts in India are changing, driven by technological advances and changing demographics. In 2018, India’s office property leasing market absorbed 46.8 million sq ft, which is 12% higher than the previous year according to data from Knight Frank India.
“It’s an incredible market and one of the most interesting growth markets in the world, being the powerhouse behind many of the large global enterprises. We’ve been tracking the market for workplace here and we think it’s a very exciting market now that it’s mature, it’s taking workplaces seriously, it’s innovating, it’s the powerhouse now behind global corporate enterprise,” says Philip Ross, Founder and CEO, UnGroup. He was speaking at the first Worktech conference held in India last month.
“The way we use the workspace is changing and the way we express is changing from uniform to individual. What is considered work is also changing — from processing to socialising. It’s about visual connectivity and shared experience,” says Ulrich Blum, Associate at Zaha Hadid Architects. “Buildings in the future are about data. A building that does not generate data is not valuable anymore. We are doing research driven by data analytics to improve the overall quality of the workplace.”
“What’s exciting about the new world of work is that it is this real combination of people behaviour, psychometrics and anthropology, overlaid with digital disruption, which is really driving incredible change and trying to define what a digital workplace experience should be,” says Philip Ross.
Co-working Spaces
Co-working spaces are becoming ubiquitous in cities across India. According to Knight Frank’s Global Outlook-2019 report, in the last three years, around 350–400 Co-working or flexible workspace operators have come up in the country, attracting startups, freelancers, SMEs and large enterprises as clients. According to JLL the space absorbed by co-working service providers rose threefold to 3.44 million sq ft (Jan-Sep 2018) while the share of co-working in total office leasing more than doubled to 10 percent. In the year-ago period the co-working space absorbed was 1.11 million sq ft. According to the JLL report, nearly 40–45 % of the demand for co-working spaces comes from large enterprises.
“What interests me globally is that it’s where young people are choosing to spend their own money to find a workplace and a community. So I think what makes co-work quite unique is that it’s no longer about renting a desk and having a coffee point. It’s about a sense of energy and vibe, it’s about hosts in a community. It’s about cool space, and the interesting space to work, not your usual corporate office,” says Philip Ross. “The explosion of Wework and some of the other players demonstrate that there’s a real demand for a new product. I think it’s just a very interesting criticism of the industry that has been so slow at realising that there is a need for something much more innovative as a product for the workplace.”
Specialist Co-working Spaces and Guilds
In ancient, medieval cities, the first buildings in the world were guild buildings and the guilds were the first professional clusters. So if you go to London, Salzburg, Flanders, the old cities of Europe, the guild buildings are still there and these buildings were built for each guild. There’s a guild building for the mercers, one for the tanners, one for the goldsmiths.
“We now see co-work going back to the same direction. Some of the new co-working buildings opening up around the globe focus on just a profession or a particular group,” says Philip Ross.
In London, for example, the Ministry of Sound which is a big music and clubbing brand has opened a co-working space called The Ministry and it’s just for people in the music business. In Los Angeles, NeueHouse has opened a co-working space aimed at people in the film industry. In New York, The Wing has opened a co-working space purely for women.
“What we find is specialist co-work and guilds coming back. Due to concerns around privacy and data confidentiality, the big corporates will end up creating their own co-working concepts and maybe even bring in an operator The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), one of the biggest banks in the world, has a new building in London and they have put in side it a co-work incubator : RocketSpace from San Francisco. So that’s a bank that’s embedded a branded third party co-work inside their building to kind of create the energy that comes from co-work,” adds Ross.
There are now co-working providers that are much more aligned to the experience of an up scale hotel — like Number 18 in Stockholm and the Clubhouse in London. “Work life balance is now an old fashioned word, it’s now work life integration. We can’t separate work and life. This is often felt in high profile private equity organisations where they do work long hours and their work and private life begin to blur,” says Ross. “We looked at about 14,000 different co-working concepts globally. So it’s a huge industry that we are tracking.”
One of the things that will propel co-work is the fact that the technology that we’re going to use more and more is bring your own device (BYOD). Many corporates are using VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) — hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine (VM) running on a centralised server. So the cloud really is powering a different vision for work. The connectivity with 5G will be almost unconscious. In a few years time, it’ll just be incredible connectivity. So the cloud is delivering applications and data, your devices, whatever you carry. The connectivity is just ubiquitous that it propels even more, what’s next for the workplace — no longer having to go to an office for anything. So that’s another kind of big kind of shift we’re going to see in terms of where work will go.
One of the biggest issues for companies with co-working is they’re worried about people poaching their staff. So if you have a building full of startups that are looking to recruit, it’s very dangerous to put your own great people in there, because they’ll be tempted to work for a startup. So I think some people are nervous about locating inside co-working because they think they’re going to just lose their people.
“If different companies come together under one roof and they are exposed to each other they learn from each other and the different ways of seeing things could actually transform the businesses,” according to Ulrich Blum.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen’s 1970 finding that there is an exponential drop in frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases still holds true (Allen Curve). “Senior people are the least connected in our present layout,” says Ulrich Blum.
The Future of the City : CBD to Poly-centric
The future of the city is really interesting and one of the obvious areas is any city where traffic is a problem, you don’t need to move to work. However, you need to be in the same place to collaborate. So we’re seeing what we call a poly-centric city. So we do now predict the death of the classic CBD (Central Business District) and the move to this idea of a poly centric city. It’s a little bit like going back into the early cities where you have the districts or the arrondissements — so if you go to Paris, you still have the clothing district, you’d have the food and markets district and that’s how many cities evolve. So we do predict new marketplaces. So you may have tech clusters and if you’re in tech you want to be in the tech cluster whether it’s Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Valley in San Francisco or Silicon beach in Los Angeles : the classic clusters are where you get driven. In Bangalore, India, my impression is that the tech-clusters have been driven by physical space, just the scale of new buildings.
“A lot of cities that you see are chaotic. If you look at China, of course, they have beautiful street systems. But then what’s being built is usually quite chaotic because the the different blocks are sold to different developers, and it looks like a mix of styles and nothing fits to each other. So I think there’s a craving of people to have cities with homogeneous expression and a unique identity. Since buildings might look the same in USA, Europe and India that feels like a shame : It would be better if there would be very unique, very site-specific regional architectures that are consistent or homogeneous, rather than chaotic. That’s a good thing because it creates identity. Identity is something people need. People want to belong to places with an identity,” says Ulrich Blum.
Spaces that enable large communities to operate are being created by Zaha Hadid Architects: Buildings with super-floors and mega-floors accommodating 2000–5000 people per floor; Giga floors (Unicorn Island in Chengdu) which accommodate 5000–10000 occupants per floor.
“I think India has interesting cultural differences and challenges and it’s an exciting time to discuss this. I hope with Worktech, we can bring some of the best ideas from all over the globe and take some of the ideas from India back to other parts of the globe, and begin to educate some of the large multinational companies who are extending themselves in India, by employing many tens of thousands of people here, that actually the workplace in India has to be very different. They can’t just stamp the European and North American uniformity and that now the time is right to think about what Indian workplace looks like, in the future,” says Ross.
Large Players Disintermediating and Disrupting the Market
“The fact that Wework has had such heavy funding from SoftBank is astonishing, so they’d be able to extend what they’re doing on steroids. They’ve moved into learning, kindergartens, gyms and now they bought a food company. They’ve really pushed the boundaries so other co-working operators are trying to catch up. The property industry is catching up so the developers and the investors are working out a response because companies like Wework disintermediate the market. This is very worrying for the developers and the real estate agents. Wework is now the biggest occupier of offices in London. The critical mass is quite worrying to the markets, because Wework has their own architectural group; they don’t use architects. So there’s a bit of concern now that if this move carries on, a lot of the traditional supply chain will be affected,” says Philip Ross.
“They typically get the developers to pay for the fit-out and they typically ask for rent free arrangements. So Wework can expand very quickly, without any capital. So you can see how it’s good for them. But for the developer, it’s a big risk because they’re in fact paying for Wework to open up,” he said, while speaking about Wework’s collaborative arrangements with developers around the globe for accelerated expansion.
ZH AI initiative
The ZH AI initiative (Zaha Hadid Analytics and Insights) is led by Ulrich Blum and Arjun Kaicker, Head of User Parametrics at Zaha Hadid Architects.
“We are the workplace team of Zaha, but we noticed quite quickly that what we do has a lot to do with data and that data analytics is really something that drives workplace development and the way we think of a workplace, that’s why it was important. It becomes much more about analytics and producing insights from data and data driven design. It’s much harder to do data driven design on the building, than if it’s about a flexible workspace,” says Blum. “We are five people at the moment, but we draw when needed, from a much larger code team that has more than 10 people. So we have a core team and we have other talent that would come in when needed.”
“We’re experimenting with different sensors like occupation, temperature, CO2, noise, air quality and we use cameras to look at the movement and behavioural patterns. We want to try more sensor types. I see our office installation in the lab, where we explore these technologies in order to then be able to suggest to our clients the best possible way we measure productivity. We have a very nice company called opensensors.io, and they have a nice sensor platform. So all our sensors send the data to them, and then we use the API to bring it back and do things with this data. What we do, which is quite unusual probably, is we use a software called Grasshopper and it’s visual programming. We use 3d Studio Max for visualisation, Unreal and Unity for VR, BIM software like Revit and CATIA,” he adds.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have the space to really experiment with new workspace concepts. And my department is only three years old so we want to practice what we preach. Being very close to each other good thing for our business. We would like to push it along quicker because we have the vision, how to take it further, but we don’t have the decoding ability to write the algorithms so quickly. What’s important about the work we do is to really to work with all the design teams and all the project teams to create better workplace buildings. That that is one of the key things we do,” says Blum.
“We want to use algorithms of nature to shape future buildings.” Speaking about the team’s influence on the design process Ulrich Blum says, “it’s becoming bigger because our colleagues now understand that we can bring a lot of valuable, meaningful intelligence to the project at the beginning. When you configure your building there are fundamental decisions that have such a huge influence on the building later on. We help people to create good floor plans that work for companies. We do it by our algorithms, analysing options and giving people feedback. It’s not whether they use it or not, we will give them the insights and that generally leads to a better designed building.”
“We still have a challenge communicating with developers that a building is not just hardware but also software. Facility managers are still a challenge. There needs to be a vision. They should be the drivers of these flexible spaces. It will be very exciting to have city like buildings that feel their users and react to the needs of the users. I see the challenges that are still ahead for facility managers to use BIM, because BIM is far more on the planning side, a bit on the delivery side, but not very much in the operation side of things. So there’s a huge gap to fill for the software,” he says. “I think that the kind of architecture we do makes also a lot of sense for India, the reason being that India is a knowledge society with all the tech companies developing amazing new products. So in this creative process, I believe special architecture would be beneficial.”
