BCBusiness

20 B C B U S I N E S S . C A O C T O B E R 2 0 24 Nicola's Mount Pleasant offices ranging from a small California tech company to a luggage manufacturer to a luxury light- ing store, there are many other new attempts of embracing the new work world, with no clear winner. "I've been doing this for 27 years and the trend right now is that this is the first time there is no trend," says Colin Scarlett, vice-chair at Colliers International Canada. One small subset of employ- ers, often very small business- es whose work products exist in the ether, is perfectly fine with letting their workers take on the $20-to-$40-per-square- foot cost of creating and main- taining an office space. Those "work wherever" companies have no central workplace, or barely one, while their (often young) employees are scat- tered around the region, work- ing at their kitchen tables or in shoehorned bedroom offices. At the far other end are the big companies (and the federal government) simply demand- ing some level of physical presence, like it or not, in the big old office. As a February Colliers Canada survey found, managers in general favour in- person work or hybrid work at a significantly higher rate than their employees. "Managers are twice as likely as employ- ees to prefer a fully in-office work environment," the survey found. "Consistent with our past surveys, 62 percent of companies surveyed will oper- ate under a hybrid model of work, with 34 percent of com- panies saying their workforce will be fully in-office and four percent fully remote." (And, I just have to point out, this whole work-from- home-or-not thing is appli- cable mainly to a highly select, magazine-reading, probably- latte-drinking group of employ- ees. A February U.S. Bureau of Labor survey showed that 77 percent of all employees do no teleworking at all. You know, those people who can't admin- ister an IV, serve you a burger, unload a container from Shen- zhen, clean your hotel room or teeth, replace your hip, weld a robotic joint or repair your car via Zoom. The WFH debate is also not a thing in Asia, where When Roz McQueen recently decided to re-design the office space her company had available for lease in the Mount Pleasant neighbour- hood of Vancouver, she went looking for a different kind of feel. More like, well, home. A big kitchen and island. Banquette seating. An area for entertaining—something like a hospitality zone. She still imag- ined some desk-type pieces of furniture and the usual office basics. But with extras. "We're really taking a page out of the residential play- book," says McQueen, the head of leasing for Vancouver-based Nicola Wealth Real Estate. That kind of approach—and level of investment—is part of the company's new strategy of de- veloping "turnkey" offices for fledgling companies that have grown beyond work/share spaces but don't yet have the capacity (time, expertise, clout to negotiate with contractors) to tackle a big design-build- find-the-furniture empty space themselves. Nicola's "we'll do all that for you" strategy is just one of the experiments going on in the office-space world, as the Great Pandemic Work Rethink continues to tumble through its evolutionary stages. Besides the turnkey idea, which has attracted tenants to NO WORKPLACE LIKE HOME As the work-from-home debate rages on, some employers are getting creative L A N D V A L U E S by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a long-time Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation. WOOD YOU WORK HERE? Renderings of an upcoming project by Nicola Wealth Real Estate show a focus on natural surroundings

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