As the hybrid work environment along with hub and spoke model have gained popularity, companies have discovered that their employees’ productivity have remained unchanged or in many cases, increased. This paradigm shift had led many multinational companies to rethink traditional way of workspaces. Workspaces now are built around collaboration with option of multiple office locations which allow employees to work from the location that is easier for them to commute. This shift has resulted in an accelerating demand for flexible workspaces.
Ever since companies have incorporated flexible workspaces to their portfolio, they’ve accustomed to spaces designed for flexibility & collaboration and floor plans that can be customized to meet their unique needs and visions which is changing and evolving over the period of time. This has driven the demand for flexible workspaces which has exceeded by huge margin over the few years. A recent report by JLL India confirms that demand for co-working spaces is growing very fast across India. The report shows a two-fold increase in demand for co-working spaces in the last fiscal year. During this period, demand for flex space increased to 90,200 desks and over 7 million sq. ft across seven major cities in India.
Flexible workspace industry is poised to advance to new heights in 2023. These transformations will be propelled by significant changes in India’s commercial real estate sector, and the emergence of new human centric workplace trends.
Workplace design based on Functionality
In 2023, flexible workspaces will continue to adapt to companies’ requirements. The design of the space will become even more functional to meet the varied requirements of different departments and companies across industry verticals. More co-working spaces will have areas where teams can work in solitude or collaborate, as their roles demand. The already robust collaborative prowess of co-workings spaces will be further enhanced to meet the functional needs of teams that require huddle rooms, collab areas and formal meeting rooms.
Co-working spaces are built from the ground up to be resilient, agile, and adaptable. Hence, these spaces will continuously reshape and reimagine themselves to keep the workforce at their productive peak. As companies change how they operate and evolve over the period of time, co-working spaces will give flexibility to adapt in lockstep with such changes.
Also, flexible workspaces will have to continually adapt to the beliefs and attitudes of not only GenZ but the Millennials as well. Also, the current workforce prefers to work in innovatively designed offices which in additional to being highly functional, is well designed, ergonomic, has multiple amenities and good social infrastructure as well.
Tech driven design
With the influx of different industries adapting flexible workspace into their real estate holdings, the industry has been quick to accelerate its tech infrastructure to support the needs of the current workforce. In 2023 more flexible workspaces will adopt AI and censor-based technology within their common areas to derive data on the frequency of usage of different spaces and amenities. This allows the real time data driven planning which helps better designing of workspaces.
Agile Floor Plans
The appeal of the flexible workspace industry is for organisations to be able to adapt their workspace strategy as per changing needs with reduced impact on their CAPEX. The coming year will ideally see flexible workspace players leveraging this further and making their floor plans even more agile and adaptable. This means the ability to alter how a space is used within a quick turnaround time with least cost impact. We will ideally see new methods and technology being used to achieve this. Giving large corporates the ability to revamp the same space so it can be used productively according to the needs of different teams and functionalities.
When workspaces are designed to be agile, collaborative and flexible – the workforce can easily shift to new modes of working. In 2023, organisations may help their employees thrive in multiple work modes by integrating a few distinct workspace design models. With additional workspace options that let employees perform multiple tasks without having to change locations or commute, people are likely to spend more time in office.