SpaceOS Blog

Phygital is a marketing term coined to describe the physical environment augmented with a digital layer. We are starting to see this in many verticals from retail and travel to banking and real estate. But how can adding a digital layer to the built world improve talent attraction & employee engagement while optimizing your floorplan and reducing your real estate footprint?

Technology should be intuitive. It should increase performance, efficiency, and productivity. The year 2020 has clearly articulated that all companies, if they haven’t already, need to be focused on one thing: becoming a technology company in some way.

If I had £1 for every time I’ve observed a toddler or young child playing expertly with their parents smartphone or tablet at the table of a not-so-fine dining establishment, I’d have enough to buy at least two pints of London’s finest craft beer. Admittedly, it isn’t that much, but it’s at least several orders of magnitude more when compared to the relatively analog world that most of my generation, the Millennials, grew up in.

When I search for “The Future of Work”, Google retrieves 3 million organic results, and pages of PPC Google Ads. That is an unfathomable number of articles, information, and opinions based on the current state-of-affairs or an attempt to look into a crystal ball.

In a survey conducted by Gensler of over 2,300 US knowledge workers in 2020, only 12% of people want to continue to work from home after the pandemic subsides. COVID-19 has shifted the way people think and feel about the workplace. Today’s tools have untethered us from our desks and allowed us to literally work from anywhere. Most offices have evolved from the “cubicle farms” and have incorporated a human-centric element to office design. To many, the office is a place of inspiration, socialization, and collaboration. The role of the workplace should be a launchpad to build community, foster creativity, and create bonds among peers.

Before 2020, the future of office real estate looked set to move steadily, if not leisurely, towards a more flexible, distributed model, one that would empower employees to determine their own work/life balance. But then the pandemic landed like a proverbial punch in the face, and now even the most cautious of occupiers are seeing their carefully laid real estate plans accelerate faster than the Millennium Falcon jumping to warp speed. Below, we look at five key reasons why occupiers might relocate in the wake of Coronavirus, and some of the considerations to bear in mind.

If “you’re on mute” is the quote of the year, an empty office desk should be its image. For the last 100 years the life of the cities was defined by the daily ebb and flow of humans in and out of office buildings. Not in 2020.