the highly regulated government and intelligence agency facilities where Leidos employees provide expertise.
Leidos’s new headquarters opened just as the world was shutting down in 2020. The sparkling new facility in Reston, Virginia, was not vacant for long, however. Leidos’s mission-critical work brought people into the office spaces designed to promote a sense of belonging, teaming, and energy. Digital technologies deployed across the offices allow seamless, touchless, productive connectivity and navigation across the airy, bright spaces.
What makes these organizations stand out is that their workplaces reflect their distinct brands. Their real estate portfolios are designed to add value by attracting and retaining scarce talent in a time of unprecedented demographic shifts. Their workplaces transcend the simple function of a place to work.
The undeniable reality in this postpandemic world is that workplaces as we know them are on the verge of unprecedented transformation. The pandemic shattered long-accepted individual, business, and societal norms, and unleashed uncertainty at an unforeseen pace and magnitude. Demographic shifts, health and safety, and digital disruption are among the drivers of these accelerating trends.
These three organizations are by no means exceptions of foresight, and the following pages unravel many such stories of innovation and differentiation. Enterprises large and small, public and private, are grappling today with challenges, as well as opportunities, shaping their pursuits of success. Industry sectors and communities are assessing cyclical versus structural shifts as the post-COVID-19 world takes shape. Corporate C-suites are adapting to new realities and uncertainties.
These trends have been clearly evident over the last few years. Never before in history, however, has the topic of workplace been top-of-mind for the C-suites and leaders of organizations. Likewise, never before have individuals challenged the nature of work.
The pandemic shall pass, as pandemics always do, but the learnings and experiences of a year-long world of virtual work will remain. The monumental change that organizations and their workforces had to endure also surfaced a number of questions that companies must now grapple with.
What are workplaces of tomorrow going to look like? Is a virtual work environment truly conducive to productivity, innovation, culture, and collaboration over the long term? How will organizations attract and retain talent in the future, and drive performance and culture for their people? How will work evolve? How must capital be deployed to harness the promise of tomorrow? What is the right balance of work from home and work from work? And, most important, how can we optimize our work, workforce, and workplace?
From a workforce perspective, personal desires, preferences, needs, and wants dominate employee desire to contribute to success today. Workers are asking themselves, “Where should I live? Where should I work? How do I work? When do I commute and how do I collaborate?” With the untethering of work from an official workspace, the individual is exercising the “I” at work.
The good news is that the next few years hold the very real promise of being judged by history as the inflection point of innovation and growth. Now is the launching point for a new approach to work, workforce, and workplace.
Harnessing today’s and tomorrow’s digital capabilities will unleash the creativity and ability of individuals and workgroups to tailor the way ideas proliferate and responsibilities are executed. The very real drive toward a better world is becoming manifest through multiple dimensions influencing workplace strategies. Sustainability and social responsibility deliver economic benefits, while also addressing the more altruistic goals of a healthier planet.
This book offers a comprehensive exploration of the workplace of today and its various influences. It provides a window into the probable and a glimpse into the possible. A personalized, responsible, experiential workplace emerges (see Figure I.1).
In the following pages, we have extensively explored the imperatives to change, provided experiences of organizations and individuals from across the world, and debated options and approaches to bringing these transformed workplaces to life. We evaluated perspectives of organizations that occupy offices, invest in workspaces, and employees who make up the workforce of today – diverse, individualistic, engaged, and competitive. Those perspectives coalesced on a distinct viewpoint: the workplace is the beating heart of an organization and will continue to be so; enterprises must pull the various levers of workplace transformation to harness the power of their workforces; creating a culture of collaboration and a sense of belonging is paramount to talent attraction, retention, and overall success of an organization.
Figure I.1 Future of Work: Workplace Framework The workplace must provide memorable experiences; a sense of purpose, belonging, and corporate responsibility; and the power to personalize through the workplace.
We bring to the book the blending of our combined career learnings – a total of more than 75 years – along with the deep expertise of our extensive group of passionate collaborators. Our experiences span careers in digital transformation, real estate strategy, enterprise strategy, innovation, and research. Examples of approaches, thanks to the collaboration of our clients cited across these pages, provide illustrative vignettes to navigate these uncharted waters of the newly emerged picture of workplace.
In Part I, we focus on the personal workplace. We start by exploring the imperatives that are changing the nature of workspaces and, in turn, suggesting that organizations anticipate and develop a strategic response to those imperatives. For the first time in history, four generations coexist in the workplace. Each generation brings with its own unique learnings, cultures, experiences, and expectations. Working collaboratively, these generations create value and success for their organizations. Yet, their preferences, allegiances, and portability across jobs and roles diverge significantly.
As much as multigenerational workers desire workplace flexibility and personalization, that flexibility is driven or limited by the availability of tools and technology. The speed of corresponding workplace evolution will be driven by the level of organizational commitment to change.
The responsible workplace, with its various dimensions, is emerging as the next major driver of change for organizations. Corporate responsibility now goes much farther than it did in the past, when it mostly comprised well-intentioned initiatives to further the corporate culture. Part II lays out the case for change and uncovers a mandate for organizations to invest financial, human, and social capital to effect fundamental change.
We define four macro responsibility imperatives: health and wellness, environment and sustainability, diversity/equity/inclusion, and resilience. Members of today’s workforce are driving as they seek to blend working from the home, from the office, and from anywhere. They care about societal causes, including glaring problems of social and racial injustice, income inequality, and environmental sustainability. They want the workplace to support a distinct culture and opportunities for collaboration, creativity, and community, and they’re relying on their employers to build such a space. The challenge, of course, is to address the divergent needs and preferences of workers themselves. We examine four worker profiles whose divergent needs are a source of challenge and opportunity.
In Part III, we explore the experiential workplace. Experience indeed is everything – in personal lives and in lives at work. Individuals are motivated to come to work to find social
