FOCUS INTERVIEW
PLANNING
PROVISION
Raj Krishnamurthy, CEO at Freespace discusses
the trends driving the boom in hybrid working, how
employee preferences and needs are shaping
the future, and why dynamic capacity
planning holds the key to the way
we manage workspaces
COVID-19 has changed our lives dramatically.
Two years on from the enforcement of
national lockdowns, we’re only now beginning
to better understand some of the social and
behavioural changes that the virus has instilled
for the long term, with pre- and post-pandemic
norms varying wildly.
Take the workplace, for example. Where the
o ice was previously viewed as the central hub
of all working activities, underpinned by strict
9-to-5 cultures and the demand for permanent
occupancy, the need for social distancing to protect
lives demonstrated to employers and employees
alike that home working is both possible and, in
several ways, preferable.
It’s safe to say that the pandemic has had a
massive impact on commercial real estate.
While COVID-19 induced turbulence has shaken
the sector in the past two years, continually testing
its resilience, recent figures suggest that there is
still plenty of life in the o ice yet.
According to the Freespace Index, a metric
published by Freespace that tracks o ice
occupancy, the number of o ices open in both the
UK and London in March 2022 reached figures not
seen since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
Stipulating that any o ice with occupancy of more
than 10 per cent can be considered to be active, its
findings reveal 93 per cent of o ices in the UK were
open on Tuesday 8 March, with 88 per cent open
across London.
Driven by 140,000 sensors dedicated to measuring
building occupancy and environmental conditions
globally, data from the Index also shows that
average o ice occupancy was 39 per cent in the UK
and 40 per cent in London, reaching levels not seen
since Autumn 2021.
“The discrepancy between openness and
40 JUNE 2022