The Future of Work Survey 2024

CRE executives have hard decisions to make, with short-term and long-term priorities often pulling in different directions. For instance, supporting business growth and innovation is important. But so is delivering efficiencies, or even cost-cutting. Similarily, continuously-changing working patterns present another tricky challenge, with employees spending more time in the office than two years ago, right-sizing will be a core priority. But it’s not yet clear what the right size will be.

Business leaders believe the areas where CRE can add the most value include the following: supporting business growth (41%), driving organizational efficiency (38%) and reducing operating costs (37%). Yet, environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives also remain key to the roadmap that many CRE leaders are expected to develop in the future.

Beyond the general trend, there is some variance across regions and industries. Organizations in the Americas region are more likely to expect CRE to support business growth, innovation and efficiency. Companies in Asia Pacific are more focused on digitization. There is a greater expectation on delivering sustainability through the CRE function in EMEA – as the only region with environmental impact as a top-five priority.

Concerns about a shortage of relevant internal skills and talent are higher than in the 2022 survey, reflecting an increasingly complex CRE environment. This is a challenge highlighted by 40% of respondents today. Shortcomings in data and technology are the most urgent priority. To thrive in a volatile environment, CRE teams need to adopt the right enabling technologies and to acquire the skills to use them. What’s more, CRE leaders believe that 70% of their activities will be at least partially supported by AI by 2030. And a quarter of the CRE function could be mostly automated. But while 87% of respondents consider that AI could help to solve major CRE challenges, the skills are not there yet. 63% of decision makers see technology and AI adoption as critical for enhancing the value that CRE delivers in the future.

• Evolve from operational implementation to becoming a change catalyst.
  Bring smart and innovative approaches to bear on business challenges and develop influencing skills to have a voice in key strategic business discussions and decisions.
• Strengthen relationships with the C-suite, business leaders and functional partners.
  Advocate workplace innovation across enterprise leadership including the C-suite by leveraging data to deliver the meaningful metrics senior leaders and the wider business need for critical decision-making and investments.
• Combine internal upskilling with external strategic partnerships to become future-fit.
  Perform a skills audit on your team, train and recruit where necessary. Build strategic partnerships to improve your performance across the entire real estate value chain.
• Embark on the AI journey.
  Adopt a ‘test & learn’ mindset, map the CRE activities that can be carried out by AI and develop strategies to develop the needed AI-enablement training programs and manage the associated risks.

The CRE function now has an opportunity to become a valued, trusted partner to business leaders, embracing technology to become an agent of transformation that enables smart, data-based decision making that sustains a high-performance workplace.

A ‘future fit’ CRE team should focus on core, high value-add tasks internally, while automation, robotics and AI begin to take on routine and repetitive tasks and outsourcing partners are brought in for specialist tasks and individual projects.