With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1515520
31 B C B U S I N E S S . C A M A R C H 2 0 24 B e n t all C e n t r e W e ll n e s s S t u d i o : R y a n B r o d a (a wildly out-of-date name that doesn't at all reflect the company's current 21st- century adventures in office design), staff are busy helping employers reimagine their workspaces and come up with con- sistent policies (for everyone, managers included) on working from home vs. in the office. Employers are pushing to get their staff back to the workplace, in part to help build up the kind of team trust that simply doesn't thrive on Zoom. So how to get them there? "We're looking at how to give people choice and control," says Mike Meyer, vice-president of sales at Heritage, whose teams have put different kinds of office design on display at a pop-up space downtown to show off the possibilities. Giving choice means coming up with a variety of office environments with dif- ferent levels of privacy, of loud versus quiet, of dark versus light, of group ver- sus individual places to work. It turns out people are willing to come to the office more often if they have a dedicated desk. If that is financially or physically impos- sible, having some certainty—a locker, a booking system—can help replace that. In spite of those efforts, the map of office work is going to change overall in the region. At the massive Real Estate Strategy & Leasing conference in Vancou- ver last fall, there was a lot of talk about the uncertainty of the office market and the likelihood of changes. CBRE Limited chair Paul Morassutti said "the office sector is the most vulnerable" of all the types of property out there. "Many lend- ers are avoiding office altogether." So far, Vancouver has not seen any- thing like the dire collapses of office value that a few American cities have. It has one of the highest return-to-work rates in the country and its downtown vacancy rate, at not quite 12 percent, is the second-lowest on the continent after Toronto. The region's overall vacancy rate, 9.6 percent, is also relatively spar- kling. It hasn't seen anything yet like what happened in Los Angeles recently, where an office building sold for 52 per- cent less than it had been bought for five years earlier. Two notable towers in Van- "THE OFFICE SECTOR IS GOING TO LEARN A LOT FROM WHAT HAPPENED IN RETAIL. WE FEEL LIKE IT'S A PERMANENT CHANGE. IT'S NOW A PIECE OF RUNNING AN OFFICE BUILDING AND MAKING AN ENVIRONMENT THAT IS BETTER FOR EVERYONE." –Chuck We, Hudson Pacific's executive vice-president in Vancouver IN THE ZONE Companies like Hudson Pacific are investing in spaces to support employee wellbeing