🏙️Luxury Offices With Gyms? Newsletter #200 Giveaway
(3 minute read) West Palm Beach might finally get workers back in office with luxury offices and a plethora of amenities.
They Want You Back In Office
And they’ll do just about anything to get you back into a cubicle, even if it means buying a waterfront property and building in the nicest amenities to keep you there year-round.
Newsletter Summary:
Related Companies’ West Palm Beach, FL properties are sprucing up offices into “luxury offices,” making working in person more attractive
Will this work? Only if companies decide to implement “flextime.”
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Luxury Office Gyms
I spoke with a real estate expert last week who was very high on the idea of "luxury office buildings," a development that Related Companies seems to be pioneering down in West Palm Beach, FL.
These buildings, which are part of a bigger movement of "Wall Street Headed South," per The New York Post, are set to be equipped "with indoor and outdoor activations that promote a year-round lifestyle for office tenants."
10 and 15 CityPlace, for example, are just a few of the real estate behemoth's model properties, encouraging office life with a lavish touch.
I mean, who WOULDN’T want to work there?
Okay, I get it. Even the most social people probably can’t get fully on board with returning to an office, no matter how nice it is.
But I sometimes wonder if the deep-pocketed developers' catering to the workers this much means the workers have finally won the fight.
The debate still isn't quite settled over whether workers are more or less productive from home versus in the office.
Different industries have different data points to dispute.
Still, regardless of the outcomes, employers seem very gung-ho about getting their workers back to their cubicles or, in this case, their luxury squares.
I've long been a proponent of more workplaces having built-in gyms.
It seems nearly criminal for desk jobbers to be relegated to a chair and 10x10 space for eight hours.
The Related Companies initiative seems to involve Increased access to co-working space, flexible office hours, and amenities like gyms to spice up work life.
Considering that Related is the parent company of luxury gym chain Equinox, we might expect that the quality of these office fitness spaces would be up to par with the luxuriousness that Equinox provides.
Could this get workers to come back into the office?
The Flexibility Issue
I think the better question is: Do luxury offices make the world healthier?
This is a loaded question.
Many desk workers are chronically sedentary, suffering from back pain and aches from six to eight sedentary hours a day.
So ultimately, amenity-clustered offices will have to address two things:
How flexible can they be with rent? (Related is charging upwards of $90/sqft for rent to potential tenants)
How flexible will employers in the luxury offices be with work time?
Analysis shows that the modern worker still values some degree of flexibility, whether that's a hybrid schedule, flexible work hours, or a tailored employee wellness program.
While in-office amenities could drive people to be more active during their workday, employees may also need to demand their "wellness time" more adamantly instead of trading a lunch hour for a gym hour or vice versa.
To strike the perfect balance of people staying active and healthy and productive in their workplace, companies should follow Dell Technologies' "flextime" model, where employees are encouraged to set their own schedules, log their 40 hours per week on their own time, and collaborate through channels like Slack to ensure adherence.
Surprisingly, Dell's implementation of flextime was a pre-pandemic move that proved successful almost a decade later.
It's tough to say that this could work for every industry, but a flextime model would almost certainly allow for more wellness activities and a better work-life balance in the short term.