On March 17, Miguel Angel Orellana, founder and CEO of Bookker, participated in the webinar "New ways of working, how does the labor market face the challenge," organized by IE Real Estate Club.
Covid has accelerated the trends in workplaces, revolutionizing, in a short time, our way to work and we relate to this environment. With this premise, our CEO shared a screen with Carmina Ganyet, corporate general manager of Colonial, and Anna Gener, CEO Barcelona of Savills, to analyze the phenomenon from their respective experiences and guide some keys for the future.
The event, moderated by Alfredo Diaz-Araque, is divided into three main pillars:
- How people are returning to the office
- New ways of working as a consequence of Covid-19
- What the future holds
The return to the office is taking place unevenly in companies. In most cases, they are opting for mixed and more flexible models. Particularly for SMEs, according to Gener, there has been a lot of freeing up of space.
Even so, offices will not disappear. If models such as hot-desking were already on the table, Covid has been the laboratory that put them into practice. "The implementation of solutions for workspaces has become a general need. We are looking for new approaches that offer security at the turn," says Miguel Angel.
Bookker was born in the pre-pandemic era with the aim of offering solutions and tools for management and efficiency in workspaces. With Covid, the demand has increased exponentially due to the lack of knowledge on how to implement these changes.
"There are as many models as there are companies"
In this uncertain situation, it is necessary to consider whether internal operations allow a future projection by keeping only the remote or whether they will opt for a hybrid model.
Whatever the case, the new corporate culture stresses the importance of involving employees during the process. "Technology is an enabler of change. The employee is the center", explains Miguel Ángel. The focus should always be on the people who will assimilate these transformations.
Incentivizing them, making the transition to a new attractive and simple scenario, will help companies succeed and increase their productivity and efficiency.
All data is measurable
When managing people, the most interesting thing is to measure everything in order to make reasoned decisions.
Understand that office management, in the current situation, is all-encompassing: from the car park to the canteen. Everything is a source of interest.
They were not taken into account before, but now every detail has to be redesigned. In flexible models, allocated parking spaces don’t make sense: What do we do with them? How do we distribute them? Who uses them, and when?
Regarding data usage, Miguel Ángel assures that management platforms "must have usability criteria and be highly integrated with the entire internal workflow of the companies”. It is about integrating all these separate ecosystems, creating a measurable user experience with the possibility of improvement.
Who will lead the future of work?
"We startups are ahead of the race", Miguel Ángel recognises. Startups all over the word favour a brainstorming system, and they can implement changes very quickly. In the current context, together with technology companies, we have been the ones who have adapted best.
As the CEO reflects, understanding change and integrating it is keys to success and leadership in the labor market. "For medium-sized companies, adopting new models is easier. On the other hand, large companies have to incorporate a process that they have not internalized yet. For the second, it is a more complex process because they have to figure out how it fits and implement it." For these cases, it is essential to adopt flexible payments such as PAY GO, so they can evolve as the situation evolves.
Adapting business to the new reality can’t wait. Joining the new models and staying one step ahead will make a difference and significantly improve people's quality of life.
