The Top 3 Challenges of Creating a Workplace Strategy in 2024
Contents
The average person spends 81,396 hours at work over their lifetime.
As a workplace innovator, your end goal is to make those hours positive ones. And in 2024, that’s going to require a lot of rethinking and squashing of established workplace norms.
However, there are some pretty hefty roadblocks in the way.
The primary one being that the physical workplace hasn’t kept pace with what people want and need.
Many organizations have made massive improvements. But overall, today’s work environments aren’t helping employees or leadership teams.
59% of employees are quiet quitting. 47% would quit if forced back into the office full-time. Only 25% say their leadership teams are engaged, passionate and inspiring.
How can you build a better work environment amongst changing hybrid work patterns and disconnected employees?
A workplace strategy is how you get there.
What is a workplace strategy?
A workplace strategy is a plan that aligns work patterns with the work environment.
Its goal is to align employee experience, business objectives and cost effectiveness.
A solid workplace strategy isn’t an easy feat to pull off. That’s because it brings together multiple stakeholders including HR, Corporate Real Estate, IT and many more.
Key elements of a successful workplace strategy include:
- Workplace experience
- Hybrid and flexible work policies
- Workplace design
- Corporate real estate portfolio optimization
- Workplace decarbonization
- Employee wellbeing
- Leadership communication
Why do you need a workplace strategy?
It’s tough to balance cost effectiveness and an incredible workplace experience. Complex hybrid work patterns, budgetary restraints and lofty company objectives make it tougher.
A workplace strategy helps you strike that balance.
Without a workplace strategy, the work environment can’t support work patterns. That means a poor workplace experience plus damaged productivity and culture.
Without a workplace strategy, corporate real estate teams have no way of knowing what’s working and what’s not. That means a risk of investing in decisions that don’t pay off.
And finally, without a workplace strategy, stakeholders work in silos. That means it’s impossible to adapt as work patterns and global conditions change.
Here are three of the most common challenges you may run into as you create your workplace strategy in 2024.
The top 3 challenges of creating a solid workplace strategy
1) Not having a clear vision for your organization’s future of work.
Everyone’s chomping at the bit to predict exactly what the future of work will look like.
But the truth is, no one has all the answers.
And when it comes to your workplace strategy, making decisions based on the latest study or what other CEOs are doing creates a workplace that isn’t yours.
Without a guiding vision, your workplace strategy is rudderless. That means that it might fail to get off the ground in the first place or stall shortly afterwards.
A few things that influence your organization’s vision for the future of work are:
- Leadership’s views remote work and location flexibility
- Your organization’s culture
- The strength of your employer brand
- The expectations of your target talent
- Medium and long term business objectives (e.g. cost cutting, office portfolio rightsizing)
How to get your corporate real estate resize right
2) Not measuring workplace habits and preferences.
The purpose of any strategy is to set goals and priorities, and create a framework for getting from your current reality to your desired outcome.
Work patterns and preferences make up that current reality.
So without quantifying how people are using the work environment right now, the resulting workplace strategy will be built on sand. Goals and priorities will either be completely unrealistic or meaningless.
One of the most common mistakes is using data that doesn’t reflect what employees actually do when they’re in the office. For example, badge swipe data.
Some trends to look for when measuring workplace patterns and preferences are:
- The most and least popular types of spaces. This is a reflection of how employees view the purpose of the office
- The most and least popular days of the week
- How workspace usage (i.e. space utilization rate) changes over time
5 Space Utilization Metrics for a Better Workplace in 2024
3) Not investing in the right spaces to support your organization’s vision and work patterns.
Even if the first two challenges are avoided, this is where the whole workplace strategy could come crashing down. That’s because deciding on the right office spaces is where rubber hits the road.
So if investing in the right office spaces doesn’t happen, the workplace strategy breaks down.
This could happen for a variety of reasons, most of which are avoidable.
42% of organizations experience budget cuts last year. Budget cuts could make leadership pump the brakes on any new workplace investments. However, the right types of spaces make the office run more efficiently, which cuts costs in the long run.
Another reason is that measuring work patterns reveals the opposite of what leadership expected.
For example, most employees come into the office for collaboration. But over 50% of office space is still dedicated to individual work. In this scenario, aligning the work environment with work patterns requires lots of tearing down and renovations. If leadership believes the cost of making these changes outweighs the benefits, the workplace strategy stalls.
This is a flawed approach. When it comes to building a better workplace, making no decision can lead to an outdated office that no one wants to use. The costs of maintaining a mostly empty office (energy, maintenance, carbon emissions) can be worth millions.
How to Optimize Your Office Space Without Losing Your Mind
As a workplace innovator, what can you do to avoid these challenges? Explore the solutions in this on-demand webinar. We’ll cover:
- A 3-step process for defining a workplace strategy that boosts connection while reducing costs
- The top 3 pitfalls that lead to epic waste
- 4 tactics to get started
