13 Workplace Trends to Watch in 2013

1. Let’s get engaged.  To stem the tide of job hopping that is expected as the economy recovers, business leaders will drive higher levels of employee engagement by re-focusing on generating useful, challenging work that can be performed in a reasonable amount of time for which teams and individuals will be rewarded with fair compensation.
2. Performance matters. Corporate Real Estate leaders will continue to look for ways to support the high performance of the organization while ensuring that the company’s money is used wisely and natural resources are used responsibly. 
3. It’s all about the experience. Workplace leaders will focus more attention on improving the employee experience by providing enhanced, healthy food service options and other on-site amenities and events that draw people together when they choose to go “to the office.” 
4. Be expressive.  More money will be invested in refreshing the expression of the company’s  brand and culture in the physical setting.
5. To your health!  Employers will pay more attention to wellness issues – creating smoke-free campuses, giving people more access to natural light, providing worksurfaces that accommodate stand-up work, getting people moving when on-site or off-site (biking, running, walking, etc.).
6. The cloud’s silver lining. Workplace planning teams will work more closely with their Information Technology colleagues to help employees embrace cloud computing and let go of storing ideas on paper (and all those file cabinets).
7. Unfilled jobs are more important than empty chairs. Corporate Real Estate leaders will strengthen relationships with Human Resources, especially Recruiting, to understand how location, design, and use of workplaces can help overcome hurdles to filling critical hard-to-fill jobs.
8. There’s no place like home.  Bringing customer service center jobs back to our shores will continue and, when possible, these jobs will be performed by networks of geographically distributed agents working from home.
9. Living with partners.  Larger companies will encourage start-ups to co-habitate with them by providing free space in incubator workplaces.
10. Urban outfitting.  As corporate real estate leaders are optimizing the portfolio, they will be sure to keep or add smaller, higher quality, shared workplaces in urban centers to attract talented recent college graduates.
11. Diversity drives innovation.  Workplaces will be designed to offer people a broad range of sensory qualities where individuals and teams can choose the place that best suits the work or their temperament at a particular time.
12. Going the distance.  Being able to lead, manage, and collaborate with people we can not see every day  (and may never meet in person) will finally be considered business as usual and improved distance collaboration technology tools will be integrated into more workplaces.
13. Don’t give up.  We will stop asking mobile workers to “give up” their individual workspaces and shift toward group-assigned space allocation where teams decide how the space will be used on a daily basis.