The office spaces that were previously one of the most desirable real estate investment lines for institutional investors in the main cities of the world and particularly in Mexico have seen a significant break that the pandemic has finished applying, but that has already been showing its slowdown in those cities marked by oversupply.

Corporate buildings not only reflected the importance of working life but were also a status symbol for companies seeking to place their names on the top floors of buildings, which made them part of the iconic skyline of cities.

Legal firms, accountants, banks, insurance companies, technology companies could be portrayed on the facades of buildings on the main avenues such as Reforma and Santa Fe in Mexico City, or Boulevard Diáz Ordaz, Avenida Constitución and Avenida Lázaro Cárdenas in Monterrey.

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When 2020 arrived, companies analyzed their needs in detail and rationalized the use of resources such as work spaces, which opened the discussion on how they would maintain the productivity of their operations while safeguarding the health of their workers.

These scenarios, which initially forced remote work, were making way for hybrid models in adaptations that used the previous office spaces, which could now be either smaller or adapted differently from what was previously known.

Experience has shown us that working from home or home office models, although they favor one part of the workers, generated significant stress for another by having to combine the school and work activities of several members of the family group in the same home.

For this reason, the possibility of analyzing the demands of the company based on the positions and the activities that each employee performs in an organization was scrutinized to achieve an efficient model of productivity in those cases that the positions allowed.

Organizations where the work was carried out physically from the work sites, for example in the case of production processes, proactively applied returns by groups applying all the sanitary measures recommended by the authorities.

Of interest: Querétaro, option before the decentralization of offices

And to the question of why offices would still be necessary, multiple answers arose, the main one having to do with our human and gregarious nature where the office provides a more enriching experience that supports the work of creativity, coordination and contact.

The advantages of having spaces that maintain adequate ergonomic support and are well designed to provide emotional and psychological protection are another element in favor of working from our offices when compared to the counterpart from home.

Various companies dedicated to furniture design share the opinion that offices allow the incorporation of innovation, corporate culture, resilience, creativity, digital transformation and spaces conducive to privacy and concentration that most of the time cannot be successfully replicated from our homes.

Perhaps the pandemic opened up the possibilities for the work of the future to continue to focus on hybrid and flexible-use schemes, which save costs for companies and open up multiple development opportunities for workers.