The Future of Work Survey 2024

JLL’s biennial Global Future of Work survey has been exploring the evolving world of work since 2011 and is recognized as a leading industry publication on the emerging CRE trends. This year, we draw on the experience of over 2,300 CRE decision-makers and the perspectives of JLL experts, highlighting the key areas of focus and strategies CRE leaders should be prioritizing over the next 12-24 months and beyond. Future of Work 2024 is part of JLL’s Future Vision program, a scenario-led exploration of the future of Real Estate. 

The 2024 Future of Work program will investigate these factors in a series of articles, beginning here with a look at the implications of shifting work patterns and their effects on workplace expectations. We will examine what this means for CRE leaders and their teams and how they should respond to meet the evolving needs of their organizations and staff.

• A desire to increase and rebalance organizational headcount, in an attempt to recruit the right talent and skills to be future-ready;
  
• A strong focus on organizational efficiency that requires smarter long-term investment decisions;
  
• Competing visions of ‘how work should be done’ to achieve the best performance – often coexisting within the same organization;
  
• An attempt from ‘Office advocates’ to promote equal work practices among their workforce and to design more inclusive workplaces;
  
• The recognition that flexibility in workstyles is the best way to strengthen organizational performance among ‘Hybrid adopters’;
  
• Finally, an opportunity for CRE teams to contribute to the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) discussion, by defining a compelling and evolutionary office model for their organization.
  

Organizational headcount growth

‘Hybrid adopters’ and ‘Office advocates’

Business expectations

How to deliver change

Even though there is often a gap between what employers expect and what is happening in reality, CRE leaders must assess whether the return to more office time will continue and what this means for office utilization. They also need to consider how space design can support the coexistence of different workstyles within their organization. For example, planning for full-time attendance for populations of engineers, while tech support teams might work in a hybrid manner. Despite this complex and evolving landscape, it’s clear that the office is central to work: 85% of organizations have a policy of at least three days of office attendance per week. And 43% expect the number of days in the office to increase by 2030, though this may still be within a hybrid work strategy for many organizations.

The hybrid adopter and office advocate styles actually reflect a wide spectrum of visions and might even coexist within the same organization - depending on job requirements. Organization type and location are also influencing factors. The survey shows that ‘Hybrid adopters’ are more likely to be large organizations of 10,000+ employees and based in EMEA, where hybrid workstyles are now considered a key component of the Employee Value Proposition. Hybrid also appeals to certain types of organization, such as those in e-commerce, energy & renewables, technology and life sciences. Notably, these are all new economy, knowledge-based industries where staff attraction and retention are crucial to success in high-growth sectors.

On the other hand, ‘Office advocates’ are more likely to be small to medium sized companies with 1,000-9,999 employees and to be based in APAC or the Americas. Interestingly, they are largely in industries which are either customer-facing or have a large proportion of non-office staff working onsite, such as healthcare, retail and manufacturing. Their preference suggests these organizations do not want disparity in work practices – management at home and workers on the shop floor - and are using office-based working to build solidarity across the whole workforce.

Strikingly, differences in workstyles translate into distinct and complementary approaches to the workplace. Perhaps as a consequence of the need to make the five-day-a-week workplace inclusive, Office advocates are making a concerted effort to address diverse workplace needs: from accessibility and generational requirements, to culture and neurodiversity specificities, 1 in 2 Office advocates consider themselves as highly efficient in addressing a wide spectrum of needs, while only 1 in 3 feels so among Hybrid adopters. They are also more likely to pay a premium to occupy buildings with leading health and wellbeing credentials, demonstrating higher readiness to invest in the provision of high workplace experience standards. Once again, those nuances in the approach can apply within the same company and CRE teams need to orchestrate them smartly and subtly.

As a result of their growth projections and office attendance policies, more than half of respondents expect their total footprint to increase over the next five years. In parallel, more than 60% expect to see increased utilization of their office space and they are ready to explore a wide range of possibilities in order to achieve this.

While 39% of organizations could envisage introducing different pay and benefits to employees who attend the office regularly versus those who work completely remotely, 37% could consider providing a network of additional workspaces closer to where their people live. On the other side of the spectrum, one-third said they could envisage going completely remote by 2030 with no office space at all, relying instead on virtual spaces and team building events.

This is another signal that organizations are not yet clear on the best approach and that many options are still being considered. CRE decision-makers must therefore assess how best to support their own organization’s chosen workplace strategy and build an evolutionary office program, able to deal with a complex and shifting environment.

The 2024 Future of Work survey underscores the evolving nature of work patterns and the consequential expectations placed on CRE. Organizations are actively seeking support from CRE to address their dynamic short and long-term requirements, while also grappling with the simultaneous and possibly contradictory need for both efficiency and growth.

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