Feedback and COVID-19
Following our regular socially distanced discussion in recent months, I asked associate Ken Pratt to summarise some of our thinking and observations in a short thought leaderships piece.
These are strange times for all of us. But, for architecture, engineering and construction, there are particular challenges, particularly for firms specialised in workspace, hospitality or civic projects. Or, indeed, those specialising in traditionally communal edifices, from art institutions and hospitals to universities and large retail projects.
In a world shaped by our current COVID-19 reality, it’s surreal to think that all of those things driving workspace concepts—community, convenient, co-working—barely six months ago are now a cause for anxiety.
As with our responses to the pandemic itself, it’s not that easy to sift through verifiable fact, fake news and paranoid rumour and reach a confident conclusion. Just as we have all become a little more hardened in our support or criticism for what we believe are noble policies and implementation efforts or, conversely, too-little-too-late failures on the parts of governments and authorities, so too have opinions polarised. There is little clarity about what we can and should trust.
Social media venting aside, we have become a little more like old-fashioned journalists who actually care about source credibility, even if never revealed. We may have heard rumblings about started-but-not-completed office projects in the City of London; about developers already undertaking viability studies for a change of use on projects still being built. Given that massive companies—including Siemens and Facebook—have made sweeping announcements about shifting to home working for the majority of their employees on a long-term basis, it seems a new reality has already arrived.
Even if we discount companies at the forefront of the wave championing working from home on an apparently permanent basis on an unprecedented scale, many of us now work for companies, or have friends who do, that have internally communicated that they have no intention of returning to their traditional office-centric work patterns for the rest of 2020 at the very least.
Others still are in positions, or know people who are, where employers have implemented consultations with a view to massively extending their workforces’ time spent working remotely. The implicit thinking, stated or otherwise, is that they are also considering reducing the size of their expensive central urban office spaces.
Much as we individually enjoy weighing up the pros and cons of working from home, that’s really not the focus here. If, as some predict, the transition to home working is going to be rapid and expansive, it has obvious implications for developers specialising in office and work spaces and, in a knock-on chain, the architecture, engineering and construction industries serving them, whether for use-change or new-build projects.
In traditional economic terms, price should drop proportional to demand. The financial modelling on which many property developments, CRE in particular, were originally based will require a rapid rethink, somewhere between alarmist hyperbole and realism. That's almost certainly already in process in some quarters.
Perhaps the threat in urban centres most heavily hit by COVID-19—Wuhan, Madrid, Milan, London or NYC, among others—impacts mostly directly on the co-working space sector. None of these urban hubs share a common public health policy. Whatever laudable job the WHO has done so far, it has hardly been immune to disagreements, hijacking and contradictory opinions of national and local authorities around the world. How we work in close proximity to each other from now on does not have established rules.
The co-working space phenomenon that burst onto the commercial property scene a decade ago has since seen traditional commercial property management companies eager to grab a slice of the action. Now it’s facing it’s first real challenge since becoming “the future of work”. Yes, we could look to its risk in financial models for growth already widely discussed before the pandemic hit, but that’s not really the topic of the day any longer.
So what is?
Well, it’s worth referring back to the cliché of the glass being half-empty or half-full. And maybe even acknowledging that there now might be something in between.
Right now, the traditional half-empty voices are less than satisfied. The prophecies of economic meltdown and those predicting apocalyptic futures for urban hubs, least of all their work space projects in development, are hard to refute. Yes, they could be right. But, on the other hand, some of us remember waiting around for all-out nuclear war, comets to decimate the earth or for the Millennium Bug to reduce us to neanderthals—while far more people partied under the fireworks—and it was all a bit of an anticlimax.
The glass-half-full crowd is clearly where we should be looking in order to plot a path to the future. The fantastic thing about architects, engineers and those strategically leading in construction is that the future is always a place that can be better. Collectively, they share a vision of better buildings, better spaces, better places and better lives.
Thinking back to last year’s Crossing Boundaries event we organised, in the light of COVID-19, what’s to say that the concept of “smarter buildings”as elaborated by panellist Sabine Hogenhout doesn’t already have a new application?
If the sensor technology already applied to capture data and regulate the use of energy in a building could have a seamless transition to examining the number of people within a space, perhaps even droplet cloud density, wouldn’t that mean that we could take lessons learned from the path towards greener buildings and rapidly adapt them to our new emerging realities? Aren’t they ultimately part of the same problems of globalisation? Couldn’t the same technology be used to create a better monitoring and improvement of services by those actually managing the day-to-day use of these spaces acquire new uses?
Yes, that’s a lot of (big) questions. But our experience shows that architects, engineers and construction experts almost can’t help themselves. Historically, they have met the urgent requirements for buildings and spaces in their contemporaneous ages. And that, at least, is something in which we can have faith.
In between, there is actually something else. We can talk about “half-empty” and “half-full”, using the familiar metaphor. But in reality, there is reality.
Right now, studios and firms—whether their projects are unfinished or complete and operating an “after care” approach— ignore the concerns of the end clients at their own peril. Regardless of whether you’ve built a sleek forty-storey office tower in Bangkok, undertaken the conversion of a warehouse into Hackney Wick’s most recent hipster co-working space or are in the process of breaking ground on a new project in Rotterdam, your clients now live in a time of deep uncertainty.
We believe right now is one of the most important times to use independent client feedback. Throughout this pandemic crisis, those who have experienced its benefits during easier times in maintaining and gaining business have amplified their commitment to learning what clients really think, feel and believe at the most senior levels of their organisations. Now more than ever, understanding your clients’ needs is vital to how you plan a collaborative an effective way forward, together.
One of the few ways you can separate speculation and rumours from redefined corporate strategy during these uncertain times is to communicate with the people in charge; those who will shape what happens.
The effectiveness of our models shows your clients find it easier to speak confidentially to an independent agent than someone proffering a business card bearing your company’s corporate logo. And we’re finding that being that conduit of unmediated opinion and information is proving more useful now than ever before.
As some of you already know, we do it best, from long before the pandemic hit.
