Kapil Agarwal currently works with Bharti Airtel’s SCM Team leading the Real Estate portfolio for Transactions, Project Management, Design Management and Procurement and supporting the team for all real estate needs with 18+ years of his exposure, during which he worked on various projects as an Architect, Project Manager, Contractor, Procurement Manager and Program Manager.
“Workplace design, as we all know is drastically changing over the years as the needs of the customer and their ways of working is changing dramatically.” says Agarwal. “I remember walking into my Dad’s office in the early 90’s over the weekends only to be able to use a computer where the entire office was primarily different departments on different floors with hard walls and every desk lined up with piles of file-works waiting to hear themselves and when the time came for action, you would have to shrug off a pile of dust from them.”
“Today, the ideologies that are centred around workplace design would comprise of:
- Fulfilment of Customer Needs – Functional and Space requirements.
2. Technology enablement
3. Look and Feel + Aesthetics
4. Sustainable Materials and Construction Processes
5. And last but not the least ensuring the social needs of the user in creating spaces for Recreation, Collaboration and ensuring the need for employees to work and relax in the same spaces.”
“Project teams need to devise methods to compute requirements and take into consideration the diverse needs of the users in its program beforehand, thereby ensuring the right real estate investment.”
Kapil Agarwal, Head of Real Estate, Bharti Airtel.
- What are the strategies implemented by the team to adapt to the dynamically changing needs of the workforce?
The dynamically “rapidly” changing needs of the workforce revolves around various strategies:
Pre-Construction Stage
- Devising methods to compute and Area programme incorporating the diverse needs of the users beforehand and also ensuring the right Real Estate investment.
- Creating a virtual walkthrough of the spaces, which helps in discussion with other stakeholders and right sizing their needs.
Construction Stage
- Allowing a thorough change management programme, to account for any deviations in the changing needs of the workforce.
- To allow for cost and schedule overruns, in case such changes affect the overall project.
Post-Construction Stage
- Post completion of the projects, ensuring a user feedback is taken up in 90 and 180 days of project completion to account for any concerns, issues being faced by the user and the feedback is taken up to make those changes in the subsequent projects.
- What are the 2 biggest challenges that the industry is grappling with?
- Timeline/ Schedule – with 20+ odd stakeholders involved in every project, this is by far the most important challenge which can be equally converted into a strength if taken care of well by the Program/ Project Manager taking accountability to deliver the projects.
- Enabling use of Mechanization – India’s construction industry has always been a slow starter in adoption of technology and this really needs to pick up in all phases of planning and execution of projects. As much as we can ensure that the entire project plan gets automated at the click of a button as well as following assembly works on site which will ensure faster completion and solve our long standing problem of delivering quality on projects too.
- Given the accelerated pace of transformation, what emerging technologies are the industry working with?
Occupancy Management – Every real estate professional needs to right size their portfolio requirements to ensure value of the costly real estate we spend our money on. Usage of Cafeteria – Workdesk – Parking – Lockers are common headaches for every GRE head and today sensors and Data analytics are helping us visualize and right size this to optimum usage and ensure min. user inconvenience.
Use of Virtual Project Management Tools – Ensuring construction progress captured in VR Cameras, using aerial photography to monitor large infra projects and combined with Artificial Intelligence they provide a perfect modelled approach to Project monitoring which is now available on Cloud based Project Management Tools giving all stakeholders complete update along with task management for all stakeholders to be engaged and provide decision making faster.
- How are companies working towards balancing sustainability with safety in the post-pandemic era? What are some of the new systems and processes in place to adhere to green practices?
Post Pandemic era, we have realized the importance of giving back to the environment. ESG has taken centre stage for every team and the same is being enabled through variety of ways:
- Disposal in Environment – Safe disposal in the environment for Plastics, E-waste, Bio-waste, Construction and Demolition wastes, Battery and other Hazardous wastes etc.
- Ensuring installation of Sewage Treatment Plants and usage of water in Flushing and Gardening.
- Reduction of GHG emissions and ensuring a zero carbon emission plan is in-place for the company’s operations and also compliance to the current pollution norms for every facility.
- Recycle and Reuse – usage of materials with higher recycled content and reuse is a new trend.
- Reduce consumption of Fuel, Water and Energy consumption by various means.
- Usage of renewable energy in form of Solar Power.
- Ensuring Ground Water recharge is done on every real estate asset of the companies.
- Plantation Drives to ensure company’s are doing the right thing to restore the depleting green cover of the environment.
- Lastly, educating all employees on the green practices for a joint effort to promote sustainability and green practices.
- What elements from workplace design do you see being replaced or disappearing entirely?
Well, there are many elements which are in process of disappearing and some already done in many workplaces:
o Cabins for CEO’s and senior Officials.
o False Ceilings will soon be of yesterday as more and more offices are now adapting open ceiling with “open arms”.
o Plethora of Cablings required for Data & Telephones, Unnecessary number of Raw and UPS Power requirements.
o Usage of Desktops in workplaces are being outdated.
o The need of Pedestals on every Workstation is slowly diminishing.
o Designing for floor loading.
o Heavy Compactors for every Office will not be required due to digital advancement.
o Heavy Loading for Batteries and UPS with modular UPS and lighter batteries.