Aiming to understand the ‘Best practices that are changing the commercial office landscape across the country’, AFC Furniture Solutions associated with Commercial Design magazine of ITP Media India to floor the “The Future of Workspaces in India” forum. About 300 architects, projects heads, consultants and facility managers from across NCR gathered at the Shangri-La Hotel, New Delhi on 14th February 2020, for an evening full of knowledge-sharing and networking.
Rashmi Naicker, Editor at ITP Media India, opened the forum by welcoming the delegates, speakers and guests. To set the tone for the event, Naicker invited TEDx speaker, Psychologist and Happiness Consultant- Dr. Kanan Khatau, for her special address on ‘Building spaces that are emotionally safe’. Khatau, in her engaging session, delivered facts about mental health and productivity of employees derived from the Global Workplace Analytics report, and suggested preventive measures and practices that can directly help organisations build better office environments. “The only resources that last forever are the ones we renew- both externally and internally. Hence, we recommend Plan ‘Be’ which encourages people to be emotionally fit, digitally independent and energetic, resulting in better human connect, better expression and better focus.” Khatau highlighted “Leaders need to stand up, break the stigma among them and create spaces that are not only designed well, but operated well.”
Next, Naicker introduced and invited the keynote speaker of the event- Manish Bahl. Manish leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work in Asia Pacific. A respected speaker and thinker, Manish has guided many Fortune 500 companies into the Future of Work with his thought-provoking research and advisory skills. He helps ensure that the unit’s original research and analysis jibes with emerging business-technology trends and dynamics in Asia, and collaborates with a wide range of leading thinkers to understand how the future of business will look.
In order to become more agile, mobile and future ready, companies have to adopt technological advancements, suggests Manish. He said, “The future of workplace will be based on how quickly companies can turn intelligent machines and workers into collaborative ‘colleagues’ in order to reach new performance thresholds. In such a dynamic environment, adaptability holds the key to the future. Workplaces that are ready to adapt the dynamic environment, would embrace the future successfully.”
Manish believes that future jobs will require a combination of human and technological capabilities, as will the educational systems preparing the future workforce for these roles. “Companies are increasingly placing a premium on job applicants who demonstrate skills such as flexibility, self-motivation, empathy, resilience, creativity and communication capabilities, as they know ‘humanness’ will become a competitive advantage when working with intelligent systems.” he points out.
To initiate the dialogue for the panel discussion, Naicker invited the moderator- Ar Vivek Gupta from Arvind Vivek & Associates- and the speakers- Shaon Sengupta, Director, Edifice Consultants; Sumit Arora, Senior Director, Head – National Operations, Consulting, CBRE India; Bharat Tagra, Senior Associate Director, Project Management at Colliers International India; and Vistasp Bhagwagar, Principal Architect, AVA Architects- on to the stage.
Starting with the notion ‘The future is today’, Gupta asked Arora to spell his idea of evolving offices and how they should be located in a city. Arora rightly said, “There is a recent realisation among corporates that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to office spaces. Apart from location, quality of space and availability of talent drives majority of the decisions today. Flexible workspaces and co-working spaces not only offer convenience, but also aid organisations to hit the sustainability mark.”
Bhagwagar agreed and added, “Transport nodes like the metro stations are becoming more and more important because connectivity has become a major challenge.” Sengupta put across her point saying, “In most cities, urban development is concentrated in only certain junctions. I believe, to spread the development evenly, the government authorities should provide necessary infrastructural setup evenly throughout the urban vicinity.”
Tagra shared his bit from a Colliers study which states that occupiers should adopt a flex and core occupancy model that allows firms to commit to fixed real estate space for their core operations whilst keeping flexibility to alter their real estate portfolio depending on their operational requirement. “Flexibility, collaboration, workspace efficiency, employee retention, and cost effectiveness should continue to be the key focus areas of CRE leaders.” he says.
Gupta was keen to know about the design aspects of a futuristic office space. Sengupta shared, “Spaces need to be designed in a human-centric manner. Not only is continuous evolution important, we should also concentrate on creating spaces that adapt to the changing work scenarios and societal cultures.”
Bhagwagar raised a strong point saying, “I think wellness and wellbeing aspects of the employees are gaining prominence each passing day. The culture is evolving from ‘working from home’ to ‘homing from work’, and that is why workplaces are turning more homely and lively. The office of the future, apart from workstations, will integrate collaborative living rooms with varied seating options, silent zones, breakout spaces etc into one agile shell.”
The panelists were felicitated at the end of the panel discussion by Manoj Tomar, Founder- AFC System. He then took the spotlight to deliver the partner presentation in which he highlighted the journey of the company, its Make in India initiative, its green manufacturing process, its nano tech plant setup and scalability aspects of the products.
While talking about its portfolio, he proudly shared, “AFC has best designers and project managers for monitoring of execution and installation with high precision quality and workmanship. In all our products offerings viz, workstations, seating, benching and conferencing systems, right from product design stage due care is taken in selection of raw materials and processes considering long term ecological sustainability which creates lowest environmental impact.”
Naicker proposed the vote of thanks and opened the night for networking cocktails and dinner.