And install showers and porta-potties in the parking garage.
/s
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It’s few months old now, but this story covered a bunch of the conversion issues.
The story was about a group that’s actively searching for good candidiates for converting to housing. It covers a bunch of the issues that make something a poor candidate too.
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I agree with everyone here about the challenges of converting office and commercial property into residential spaces. From what I can tell, it’s a matter of spending money.
What I don’t buy is the corporations fighting work from home and the cities helping them when they are saying it’s a billion-dollar problem to have employees work from home and yet the million-dollar problem of converting the space is somehow
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… I thought stock options were the same as scrip? /sarcasm
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I think scrip is more useful. You can at least use it in the company store.
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Do they only have a single office location that everyone works at?
Assuming they have more than one, do all the teams only work at a single location?
Once you have two (or more) office locations and teams that work accross multiple office locations, congratulations you’ve got remote workers!
Which just means, either you’re bringing people back to the office for no good reason at all or you’re really bad at managing those distributed teams already.
If you’re bad at it, now would be a really good time to get better at it. Since without the ability to manage teams across multiple office locations you’ve set a maximum growth size for the company.
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Another option is to renegotiate the lease. With commercial real estate tanking the tenant holds a lot more bargaining power.
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That’s not going to be a motivator.
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In the US, it’s finance and accounting that freak out first about this, sometimes followed by security.
For the first, I assume this has to do with how the income taxes work. In my company, the solution to this was to create three types of workers. Those in the office less than 35 days a year, 35 days or more, and all the time. Presumably, those in the first catagory are all taxed based on their remote location while the second two are taxed based on the office location. At my wife’s job, they mandated 2 days a pay period in the office. Which would put them over that 35 day value. Those are her least productive days.
For the second, the security team tends to only care if you’re located someplace they don’t want exposure to.
Ideally, fixing the accounting systems and dealing with those implications is the correct response. Artificially restricting your business to avoid doing that is a competitive disadvantage.
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This is called hot desking, and everyone hates it. It’s the sort of dystopian “good idea” that only a CEO could love. It’s the white collar version of sharing bunks with other shift workers in a dormitory. You get to find out just how messy other people are.
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Then you also have the sanitary issues with shared peripherals, or people who need to bring their own (which creates its own set of challenges).
Us tech people can be very picky about our input devices either for ergonomic reasons or just personal preference. I know I’m very particular about my peripherals, and I feel icky using a keyboard or mouse someone else has had their grubby paws on before me.
I also like “my stuff”, and having a workspace that’s mine. Having to hot desk in some anonymous shared workspace using shared community hardware sounds like hell to me.
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Or the fun feeling of seeing the previous user get up, hacking and sniffing, without cleaning the mouse and keyboard after they’re done. I’m sure its just allergies.
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The person working in France is sketchy. If they live there for nore than 183days they are required to pay tax in France. I’m guessing that person will coming home or getting a new job.
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Especially the chair. All of us depend on a very specific chair set up a very particular way to fend off crippling RSI, so the notion of sharing that with someone else is monstrous.
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Oh, this was all the rage a while ago, well before the pandemic.
I vaguely remember reading something in a trade magazine about one company that implemented it. I think they made high-end hearing aids, and a sizable part of the workforce were travelling around as salespersons, service technicians and instructors at least a couple of days on any given week. So the idea seemed to make sense. They reduced floor space, and everybody got a personal movable storage container for stuff kept at the office and personal belongings. On office days the routine was to get one’s container from storage, look for a free desk, plug in the laptop, work happily and productive, and then wheel the container back into storage at the end of the day. Pretty straightforward.
The thing that made this stuck in my mind was that they actually evaluated their hot desking policy after a year or so.
They found that their employees spent, on average and accumulated, about two weeks per year on wheeling their containers around looking for a free desk.
I guess one way to look at this is, to paraphrase George Michael, if you’re gonna do it, do it right.
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Yes I know. The open office and hot desking were invented in 1994 by Gaetano Pesce for his client, ad agency Chiat/Day.
It was a disaster. All the employees immediately took over the conference rooms so they could have a distraction free and consistent environment. That led to an arms race of people coming in earlier and earlier to claim a seat in the conference rooms.
Then, somehow, every office designer after that took exactly the wrong lesson from the Chiat/Day disaster.
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I read this and thought “Interesting - I don’t actually hate it”. Then I read
You get to find out just how messy other people are.
Ah. My tolerance for mess is strangely high for an adult. TIL I’m part of the problem with hot-desking. Sorry, everyone.
The reason I actually like hot-desking is my particular edge case: I’ve mostly worked from home since years before the pandemic. I like having an office I can drop into “every sometimes” for the social side and some catch-up that’s hard to do remotely. And I like being able to do this with more than one office site. Hot-desking is immensely practical for me. That doesn’t mean I’ve confused it for something everyone loves.
Also:
Dammit. That’s my earworm for the day, then.
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In other words, you like hot-desking because you don’t do it the vast majority of the time. That’s the difference between enjoying skiing and living on an ice floe.
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Exactly. Which is the “edge case”.
I didn’t stress that most people don’t have the circumstances that make it useful and appealing, and I probably should’ve. I was aiming for that with “That doesn’t mean I’ve confused it for something everyone loves”, but I missed.
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Unfortunately it is literally impossible in most cases at the moment because of windows. Modern office buildings have huge floor plates. 50,000 sq ft is not uncommon. It’s impossible to make that into apartments because 90% of the floor space has no window access. You’d wind up with five 10,000 sq ft apartments that would house half a dozen rich people, at best. To make it into normal apartments, 90% of the apartments would have to have no windows.
The sad fact is that in all the cases where it’s easy to do this (ie, much older buildings with smaller footprints) it’s been done. That’s all the aforementioned hipster lofts.
There’s another candidate I recently learned about that is ripe for conversion though, and that’s malls. Malls all occupy huge chunks of land in desirable areas, and they have the advantage of being super easy to demolish. So, apparently many cities now are changing their zoning to allow these conversions and it’s working really well everywhere that they’re trying it. Once developers are given the green light to rezone a dead mall, they gleefully tear it down and build apartment blocks. Win win!
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