Copy from the Pre-Orgatech Interview with Frame (Link) - 11th October 2022
Marco Huber is the senior vice president of workplace strategy DACH & CEE for Jones Lang LaSalle Work Dynamics. The company advises and accompanies small to multinational companies in their strategic transformation. He and his team focus on the spatial, technological, and human experience aspects of workplace strategy. His talk at The Next Space: The Empathetic Workplace at Orgatec on 26 October will explore how real estate can once again create intentional workspaces which serve the needs of employees and their employers’ strategies.
How did you get your start in strategic workplace design?
I started as a banker at Credit Suisse, then moved to the project management department, where I was eventually able to take responsibility for the new branch concept. That was the starting point of where I merged my customer experience orientation with built space. I continued at UBS with the renewal of the branch concept and then also the international workplace and customer experience concept in 2010, which gave me responsibility for the bank's overall strategic corporate architecture.
The theme of your talk ‘The purposeful office: How real estate can work again for workers’ suggests that real estate’s mission and the needs of workers differ, how does real estate currently fall short for workers?
Today's biggest challenge – accelerated by the pandemic – is that we have made a substantial change in the way we work and live, which means the personal and professional requirements of the employees are changing significantly. This also affects the conception of location, the space and its design. Today, however, we still have real estate developed according to old practices, which don’t consider things like the amalgamation of our home and work lives.
Was there a time when it met their needs and how can it meet their needs ‘again’?
Yes, before the pandemic, for example. Then the office was better equipped than the home in terms of work infrastructure so it seemed natural and clear that you would work in the office. This meant the perception of work performance was strongly linked to the office because it provided the technical and social infrastructure which made work itself possible. The general consensus of workers was that ‘I can work well in the office’.
Today, however, everyone is aware that industrialized office work is behind us and that the future lies in co-creation and community, not only because we now have the technology, but because we can hand over repetitive tasks to AI. The remaining tasks require connection and interaction, which our workspaces should facilitate. We can and must design and use real estate to meet this new reality. When our offices achieve that we will again have workspaces which meet our needs.
How does real estate development help lead workplace innovations or are they mostly client-driven?
It's both. The ultimate goal from a business perspective will be to provide the right environment which fosters the business strategy. This experience will be implemented in the built environment and interacts with the surroundings. So real estate developers will try to drive innovations which will then increase the market value of the real estate, which includes how buildings are developed from the inside and aspects like workplace wellbeing. Clients also promote innovations as an important articulation of their own values and a way to differentiate themselves from competitors.
How is office design inextricably linked to a business’s strategy and culture?
Office design and a business’s strategy and culture are completely at interplay with one another. Today, we can measurably translate corporate strategy into space and how it’s used, but we can also observe how the space influences the strategy – directly and indirectly. This is something many business leaders became aware of during the pandemic. Now it's a matter of executing and implementing it properly.
What role does empathy play for you in the design of the workplace?
Empathy is core to workplace strategy, because human experience lays at its heart. To develop it properly and align it with the corporate strategy, you really need to understand how the individual user parties think and feel. This gives you the opportunity to develop real key performance indicators and measure against them.
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