Ivanhoé Cambridge’s ‘Do You Miss the Office?’ Podcast Back With 2nd Episode | UrbanToronto
Throughout the last year of global turmoil brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, most people who were commuting to offices previously have since been working remotely as a means to limit the spread of the virus. As a result, most offices are currently staffed by small crews, while businesses face continued overhead costs for the currently under-utilized space. While working environments that fostered a spirit of collaboration and community now feel like a distant memory, many people are seeing the silver lining of remote working, free of their daily commutes while being able to spend more time with loved ones.
With all the changes to our work environments since early 2020, real estate investment titan Ivanhoé Cambridge is asking the question “Do you miss the office?” in a new podcast series that launched earlier this month.
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After a first episode which introduced the podcast series’ main themes, the second instalment—arriving on March 31—focuses on the innovation shaping future workplaces, and how these visions respond to the current challenges we all face. Host Annie Bergeron, Design Director and Principal at workplace design firm Gensler, frames the approximately half-hour discussion, asking “what can the technology and life sciences sector teach us about the office of the future?,” before introducing a panel of guests who answer the series’ titular question “Do you miss the office?”
Among the guests featured this week, Jennifer Magnolfi, founder of Programmable Habitats—a research and development consultancy specializing in high-tech future work environments—responds to the opening question with a bit of a curveball, introducing specialized office environments into the discussion. “I do miss the office as many people do, but for me, the type of fieldwork that I do allows me to be in environments where I can observe high-tech lead users work in contexts that are highly technical and that can’t be replicated at home our outside specialized technology settings,” says Magnolfi.
BioMed Realty, an investment in the health sciences office sector from Ivanhoé Cambridge and Blackstone, image courtesy of Ivanhoé Cambridge
Based in New York, Kenneth Caplan, Global Co-Head of Blackstone Real Estate—one of the largest real estate platforms in the world—is more familiar with a traditional office environment, “I’m in the office now, and like everyone went through a period of time working from home, but when we started coming back to the office at Blackstone in the middle of last year, [we noticed that] when you’re back with your colleagues, you really feel it.” Along with echoing what many of us are missing in terms of camaraderie, Caplan touches on productivity and other benefits that the return to the office has provided, stating “the office was designed for a focused work environment, while your home was adapted to it over the past year, and is not an optimal work environment. Creating that optimal environment is key, and technology has certainly helped with that.”
Blackstone has emerged with a leading portfolio of life sciences-related real estate assets such as laboratory buildings, a sector of the market that has been under a renewed spotlight during the push to develop and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine, with Caplan underlining “the importance of a building in providing the infrastructure for a business to advance their work.” With assets heavily based in research hubs located in cities like Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Diego, California, Caplan estimates that “about half of our tenants are working on some type of COVID-related research whether therapeutics, diagnostics, or vaccines,” with infrastructure serving a critical role as “you can’t do lab work from your kitchen.”
The biggest debate about future office spaces is technology, with current events and technological innovations coming together to inform the workplace of the future. This is most prevalent in the life sciences sectors, where tenants require more of their spaces than standard office environments, and certainly far more than can be found at home. Jennifer Magnolfi states that “I see innovation from both design and user requirements. What’s happening around these clusters of life sciences, biotech, pharma, and other similar businesses, is very much reminiscent of what happened during the early stages of development of the Silicon Valley area,” another era when tech-reliant industries were driving demand for specialized workplaces. “Just like in tech 30-40 years ago, the conditions and requirements end-users expected for the performance of a building included higher design standards than the average office space of that time,” continues Magnolfi. “You have a convergence into the world of tech, because ‘mission critical’ environments are required for such industries. I would venture to say that in the next few years, we’ll be seeing a standardization of these types of design principles into other kinds of real estate assets.”
Returning from the previous podcast is Sylvain Fortier, Chief Investment and Innovation Officer at Ivanhoé Cambridge, who speaks of the company’s changing outlook in terms of how office assets have traditionally been viewed from the top down. “Historically, we’ve been focusing on the tenant—as in the company that hires employees—and not enough on that end-user. And now it’s hitting us,” says Fortier. “We need to figure out ‘what is at the office’ and we’re going to have to focus on helping our tenants determine how to attract and retain talent, and refocus on how they want to work. A lot of companies are taking this time as an opportunity to ask ‘what are we missing, and will it change the way we should work?’.
There is plenty more discussed in the podcast’s second episode, airing on Apple Podcasts as of tomorrow, Wednesday, March 31st.
Over the course of the podcast’s run until mid-May, the podcasts will feature discussions with more industry-leading architects and designers, tech giants like Microsoft, data scientists, researchers, journalists, and more, to get to the bottom of how these leaders view the future of the office. The series premiered March 18th. Following the second episode on March 31st, additional episodes will be released on April 15th, April 29th, and May 15th.
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