The future has meant different things to Lucinda Pullinger at different points in her career. Working as a human resources manager in energy group Shell’s commodities trading business in the mid-2000s, the future was “this afternoon – and if you talked to a trader about next week, he’d tell you where to go”, she says. A few years later, she moved to a division focused on biofuels and alternative energies. There, “the future was 2050”.
And now? As the new UK managing director of the Instant Group, Pullinger’s definition of the future lies somewhere between those two experiences at Shell. The business advises companies on revamping their offices, with a focus on finding them flexible workspace rather than leaving them locked into leases that stretch out for years ahead of them. As the debate over how the pandemic will change the workplace and working practices continues, predicting the future of flex is arguably a hotter topic than at any point in the Instant Group’s near two-decade history.
“The key thing to organisations will be to maintain an ability to be flexible,” says Pullinger of lessons learnt by companies during the Covid crisis. “I don’t think there is going to be an answer in September or January that says ‘this is going to be it for the foreseeable future’.
“Flexibility can enable resilience and make sure that your workplace strategy can support your organisational priorities, rather than digging your heels in now and saying, ‘this how it’s going to be forever’. I think our clients are accepting that there is an element of test, learn and evolve.”
New language
Pullinger started her career in the HR graduate scheme with Andersen Consulting – now Accenture – in the late 1990s. From there she spent a decade with Shell in various HR roles before deciding to find a new challenge that would combine her people talents with her love of sport. In 2014 she joined the Rugby Football Union – rugby’s governing body – as HR director. It was while working there that she met Tim Rodber, the Instant Group’s UK chief executive and a former England rugby player.
Entering the office sector with a move to join Rodber a few years later may not have seemed a natural step, Pullinger says, but it appealed all the same.
“What drew me to [the Instant Group] was a couple of things,” she says of her decision to join the group in 2018. “I knew Tim as a leader who understands the importance of talent and the people side of the business. And I wanted to get back into a fast-moving, commercial, growing business. I hadn’t worked in a private equity environment before [the business is backed by London-based Bowmark Capital] with that kind of speedy decision making, autonomy and pace.”
Having joined as global head of HR, Pullinger will now oversee the UK business. She takes the UK MD role from John Duckworth, who held it from 2018 until earlier this year. Duckworth is now executive director for the group’s EMEA-wide operations (the group has offices in Germany and France, as well as the US, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Sydney).
In just the two and half years in which Pullinger has worked at the company, she has seen its role change in clients’ work. “The language when I got here was around ‘we deliver this square footage for this number of desks’,” she says. “It was quite a property transactional focus. And now we’re saying, ‘we’re helping this client do this and it’s actually supporting their business objectives’.”
It’s that human lens to the office – what do people want, how are we going to get the best out of them, how are we going to make them productive?
Those clients include industry-leading names such as Prudential and Amex, both of which the group has helped to rethink their office footprints. So what are the most forward-thinking clients saying about their post-pandemic real estate strategies? For Pullinger it comes down to thinking about property in combination with three other important factors.
“The first one is the human angle, which is the reason that Tim’s put me in this job,” she says. “There’s a massive employee angle, and the power is with the user now. It’s that human lens to the office – what do people want, how are we going to get the best out of them, how are we going to make them productive?
“Then you’ve got digital and tech – how is the digital agenda and technology helping to enable hybrid working or to make the environment more efficient and productive? And the last one is sustainability.”
The companies with the most successful approach to revamping their workplaces are those that have committed to pulling together all these factors into one discussion right at the top of the business, Pullinger says.
“It’s difficult to rethink workspace and to say ‘we’re fundamentally going to look at this differently, it’s on the board agenda for the first time ever, but we’re just not going to worry about sustainability. We’re going to deal with that on a different day’,” she adds. “It’s all so interconnected. The companies that are looking at those four elements together, I think, are the ones where it’s really exciting.”
From centre to suburbs
With economies reopening as the Covid-19 vaccine roll-out leads to restrictions being lifted, demand is picking up in the flex workspace market.
The Instant Group’s own data suggests that demand rose by more than a third year-on-year for the first half of 2021. That was driven by small and medium-sized businesses. And, although London has seen a rebound, the company says suburban offices have seen greater demand, outperforming city centres for the first time in more than a decade. And in areas including Milton Keynes, Luton, Bromley and Edgbaston, the per-desk cost of flexible space rose between 2020 and 2021, compared with falls in most major cities. That has long been expected given that the enforced homeworking during the pandemic will have encouraged many people to look for a way of working that avoids commuting into a city centre every day.
“Some people have worked at home for so long – they don’t want to stay home,” Pullinger says. “They want to work somewhere local, so need somewhere on their high street. Then you’ve got bigger corporates that are going to have this kind of hub and spoke model. [We found that] six out of nine of the big cities are seeing a decline in flex workspace. But [there is greater demand] if you look at areas like Bromley in London, Edgbaston in Birmingham, areas slightly outside of the main city centres.”
Business is picking up for the group post-pandemic, with June marking its best-ever monthly financial performance in June and a pipeline that already suggests a 75% growth in turnover in the 2022 financial year.
Shaking the status quo
As the flex office space evolves, Pullinger is relishing the chance to help lead a business keen to shake up the status quo. “In a pretty traditional industry, we’re starting to think about things differently and bring innovation,” she says.
And companies are now thinking the same way, she adds – that it’s a huge opportunity for the business to grow further.
“If we have been talking for 20 years about agility and flexibility and we are passionate about sustainability and passionate and invested in the people side of things, for us the opportunity is massive,” she says.
“I was speaking the other day to someone who is on four or five huge company boards. He had never once seen office space on a board agenda – now it’s on every single one. It’s on that agenda more than ever before and the complexity that these organisations are facing is greater than ever before… in everything that we’ve wanted to do and talk about, the businesses are coming towards us.”
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