When asset management firm Ninety One was preparing to move to its new City of London headquarters at 55 Gresham Street, EC2, its management team scheduled a meeting every week to discuss the relocation and the new home.
Notably, those meetings included staff from across the company – including its customer-facing, front-of-house team.
For Carl Truman, Ninety One’s front-of-house manager, the decision speaks volumes about how seriously the company took getting the new office right. But the involvement of the very people who spend their days guiding visitors and staff alike through a building is something he sees happening far too little in real estate.
“It’s very rare,” says Truman, a one-time cabin crew member for Emirates who moved into real estate facilities management, and has also headed up front of house for the Bank of London and the Middle East. “It takes time and it takes money and it takes coordination.”
But as Truman – and others – note, it ultimately pays for itself.
Unheard voices
The topic was thrown into the spotlight in EG’s latest series of Future Leaders presentations by Rosie Oulton, senior associate at Nuveen Real Estate.
Oulton took to the stage with a picture of Harry Potter’s “room” under the stairs behind her, followed by a shot of a typical office facilities space – a broom cupboard. Too often, Oulton said, offices are designed with little thought given to how that space is used by the staff who truly make the space work. Instead, those individuals inherit a cramped broom cupboard for the facilities team or “a crammed, uncomfortable reception desk”.
“It’s not surprising that we do that,” Oulton told the audience. “This is an industry that builds buildings for profit, not for people.
“When you train as a chartered surveyor, one of the first things you learn about is valuation. What you learn is that value comes from revenue. When I’m looking after an office building, the value comes from the occupier, who gives me the rent.”
But that focus on value and revenue is only one way of judging a building’s success. Listen to the people within it, and their stories reveal others. Oulton recalls her years as a newly qualified surveyor working on a new office development. Talking with a woman on the front desk while waiting for a prospective tenant to arrive, Oulton learnt the reception space was too cold for the staff working there and felt unsafe at night. Could that have been avoided by having different conversations as the scheme was developed?
“When we decide to create a new building, the developers, the landlords, the professional teams invite certain, selected voices into the room, and those people are allowed to express their opinion on what the building should be. That forms the design brief,” Oulton said. “Rarely do you invite someone into the room who could represent the voices of the people who will actually make the building work for you.
“What happens is the building’s finished, you get the keys, and then you hand it over to that person – your facilities manager, your property manager, your ops manager.”
Those people should be involved earlier, Oulton said. But it isn’t as simple as getting them in the room before the design brief is set out – not when the industry is so “rigidly” stuck in its ways.
When Oulton moved to become an asset manager, she suggested in a kick-off meeting for a new development that the facilities manager should be in the room. “I was humiliated when everybody around the table said no,” she says. “[They said] ‘It’s too early’, ‘It’s not that kind of meeting’, and one voice even said, ‘Too many cooks’.”
But Oulton pushed back and the facilities manager joined, with ideas “that will make our building great”.
Before the doors open
Ninety One’s Truman wishes more developers, asset managers and occupiers thought this way. But a lack of a common language too often keeps parties apart, he says.
“That’s where the softness of a building’s design is missing in the early stages [when] it’s all architects, builders,” he adds.
What’s the risk of not hearing the voice of Truman and colleagues sooner? The customer experience is dented, Truman fears. Developers and architects “run the risk of making this customer journey one that is not ideal,” he says. “They run the risk of it becoming fussy.”
Bugbears include glass doors that can be pulled without releasing the magnet, which he has seen shatter an entire door; lack of investment in air conditioning – not an issue in the new Ninety One office, he is quick to add; and poorly positioned fire and security doors.
“For companies building new projects, the key thing is bringing the [front of house] people in from the start,” he says. “Recruit them when the building pylons are going in the floor, because they will get to know, for example, where a desk is going and how it was built there and they’ll feel a sense of ownership with it… Front of house staff are often recruited when the doors open. [Having them in earlier] means confidence in your product.”
Not only that, but spotting potential problems before they become insurmountable will save money in the long run – even if bringing facilities staff into the design process means money and time spent upfront.
“Why are you not bringing the front of house team in? Why are you not engaging them early so that they can see where things are and how things are being built, when the place is starting to come right and they put the fittings and furniture in?” Truman asks.
“Before a spade goes into the ground, let them walk into a virtual reality building so that they can follow the guest’s journey… Companies that are not thinking about this need to ask themselves why.”
To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews
