In order to support the bay area Workplace community, Summit has put together a summary of the most relevant Workplace related items for construction and workplace professionals. This week’s digest will focus on:
Supply Chain Management
Bay Area Sublease Market
How Tenants Are Adapting Space While Employees Are WFH
Feel free to respond to this letter to ask questions or request more information on any of these topics.
Supply Chains And The Pandemic
At this point we've all experienced the great toilet paper shortage of 2020, but the ripple (pun intended) effects of Covid-19 on the supply chain across the globe will reach much further. As Cushman and Wakefield note in this article, the increase in the use of hand sanitizer and soap alone has increased the lead time of the pumps for these dispensers to 6 months. Knock down effects such as this should be expected in a variety of fields. For this reason planning ahead and having a strategy for procurement has become more crucial than ever.
The Bay Area Sublease Market
The prolonged fight against covid-19 in the United States is forcing more companies to go remote longer. This has decreased the overall leasing activity at a time when a glut of second generation tech space is coming into the sublease market. As companies reconsider their footprints you can expect this to continue.
This is an opportunity for teams who are ready to begin their space search and plan for future construction. However, timing and planning is important and as this report by HelloOffice points out, the model many companies use to plan their portfolio is changing alongside the needs of their employees.
How Tenants Are Adapting Spaces While Employees Are WFH
One of the opportunities that the pandemic provides us is the chance to both catch up on deferred maintenance and also for teams who are prepared to make updates to their offices while employees are still WFH.
Spaces have moved further and further to the extremes of the open space plan. However, as companies prepare for employees to return they'll need to consider updates to any office designed pre-covid. The time to make those updates is when employees are still OOO to avoid further disruption.
Webinars We're Looking Forward To This Week...
We're watching MMoser's webinar "Do Offices Still Matter." You can see it here and let us know what you think!
Additionally, Team Summit Is Focusing Time On…
Book Club: "Lovecraft Country" Author Matt Ruff makes visceral the terrors of life in Jim Crow America and its lingering effects in this brilliant and wondrous work of the imagination that melds historical fiction, pulp noir, and Lovecraftian horror and fantasy.
We're drinking the refreshing "Let Me Some Rhubarb" cocktail, but feel free to pick your own from this great list of mocktails.