What we think we need in leased premises often varies from our actual future needs Posted 2010, 08 June Traditional thinking in business is being turned on its head day in day out as technology allows us to work from anywhere anytime. These new dynamics mean that every day, new jobs are invented that we have never heard of before. To say the world is changing fast is a complete understatement. When it comes to what we think we need in our work places, whether they are office spaces, industrial spaces, retail or warehouses, what we think we need may not line up at all with what we really need for the future. The sort of jobs our employees have today will have completely changed within the time period of your average property lease, particularly when it comes to where they need to work from. My point is that we need to be rigorous and scientific in analysing our future needs and not be swayed by our current needs, or even worse, being swayed by marketing hype. Parallel Directions has a detailed survey that fully investigates businesses to assess their property needs. I recently met with a client who set out to give me a set of what he believed to be clear directives about what he believed his business needed for premises. Rather than take his brief at face value, I recommended he complete our questionnaire before we got onto making any decisions about the sort of property the business required. It provided great insight about what his business really needed for future work spaces. It turned out that his own early assessment had been a little subjective, and not a fully objective assessment of needs. We need to test our assumptions and be open to working with others with specialist expertise in the brave new world of change. If you think your business would benefit from this type of thinking, give Peter Scott a call on (09) 550-8500.
