Post Covid, demand for office usage continues to be uncertain. Some ways that businesses, government organisations, education institutions and charities can use flexibility to hedge uncertainty are as follows:

Install flexible wall partitions, so meetings rooms become variable in their capacity.

Exploit demand for shorter term tenancy leases, including one year leases and one day lets.

Design a series of working zones where staff and visitors can pick and mix on any given visit to the office where they want to work. Such zones may include; meeting rooms for teamwork, quiet workstations for solitary work, informal seating areas for informal conversations, open plan café spaces for talking and eating together, semi-enclosed meeting pods that enable hybrid working with online colleagues.

Encourage contract managers to meet at their supplier premises, freeing up demand in their own offices for inhouse meetings.

Host celebration events offsite to free up office space for other activities.

Move systems to the Cloud – cloud-based systems encourage work-anywhere activity, whether system training sessions, operations tasks or project testing activity.

Simon