'Fed Up' With Remote Work, Employers Want Plush Spaces To Help Force The Issue, Office Boosters Say

Construction delays are often a source of frustration for office landlords and occupiers, but one tenant at the under-construction 830 Brickell tower in Miami’s financial district has turned it into an opportunity.

Juliana Fernández, founder of the design firm AEI Spaces, said one of her clients has used the delays in the trophy building's construction to adjust its plans for the space as the future of work continues to shake out. 

“At 830 Brickell, the delay in construction has been wonderful for us because we’ve designed the project three times because they keep changing their minds on what their employees need and what they want,” Fernández said at Bisnow’s South Florida Office Summit last week.

The push to get employees back to the office is the driving force behind office leasing in South Florida. Companies are investing heavily in creating attractive spaces that will make their workers want to commute, and landlords are responding by expanding the focus of amenities to offer tenants solutions that reach outside of the workday.

“Getting people back to the office is literally the biggest issue right now,” Brian Gale, vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield, said at the event. “We talk to CEOs all the time on tours, and they are so fed up trying to get employees back, but the only way to counteract it is to be able to have an office space for them where they want to come back.”

While Miami has among the highest office attendance in the country, the number of employees showing up to work still lags significantly behind pre-pandemic levels. Visits to Miami office buildings were down 26.5% compared to 2019 in August and only 1% higher than in 2022, according to the most recent data available from the research firm Placer.ai. 

Two panelists at the event, held last week at 701 Brickell, said an economic slowdown could ultimately be what drives a shift in the balance of power between workers and employees. 

“A little recession may not be the worst thing for weeding out a couple years of a generation to really focus on what the workplace used to be and how it can evolve in the future,” said Jordan Rathlev, senior vice president at New York-based Related Cos.  

Attempts at mandating attendance haven’t been enough to bring office spaces close to full again, leading many employers to upgrade space to attract workers — shrinking their overall footprints but investing in top-quality facilities, fixtures and amenities — while also threatening repercussions if employees fail to appear. 

“I toured the other day with a CEO and he's like, ‘I literally have about 15% of my people back in the office, so I'm going to downsize from 50K SF to 10K SF, and I'm going to go in the nicest space that I could find and I'm going to lure them back,’” Gale said. 

Related Cos. is responding to the shifting demands by developing what it calls the lifestyle office, a class of space that aims squarely at top companies that are more likely to be able to pull their employees away from their home offices.

The lifestyle office combines design — column-free interiors to promote collaboration, using high-quality art to enhance shared areas and activating outdoor spaces with everything from conference rooms to pickleball courts — with programming like yoga classes and concerts for tenants, Related Cos. Senior Vice President Jordan Bargas said.

It is a strategy on display in downtown West Palm Beach, where Related is continuing a massive redevelopment of The Square, a mixed-use center formerly known as CityPlace that was first developed in 2000. 

The redevelopment of the 82-acre complex included the development of the fully leased, 20-story 360 Rosemary office building in 2021 and the construction of the 25-story 515 Fern office nearby. Related announced plans in March to replace an AMC Theatres location at 545 Hibiscus St. with another 430K SF of office space across two towers in The Square. 

“That lifestyle office gets over 50% premium in terms of rent and is about half the vacancy rate of the rest of the Class-A market,” Bargas said. “The best, highest-quality tenants want the best office space. They’re going to demand that their employees come into the office, and if they’re going to do that, they need to be in the best office space.”  

To maintain a competitive edge in South Florida, Related is reaching beyond the office building and into the personal lives of tenants in a bid to differentiate its properties. 

The developer plans to expand its tenant app, Related 360, beyond New York and into South Florida by the end of the year. The app provides “a concierge level service” that can help the employees of tenants at its properties relocate to the market, get their children into area schools or secure tickets to concerts. 

“One of the biggest [issues] we hear from a lot of executives in Palm Beach County is that they can’t get on the golf course, and so we’re building three golf courses,” Bargas said. “We want to answer the question and make it a very seamless transition, whether you're moving between one of our buildings or you’re new to the market. We can provide whatever you and the tenant or employee base needs.”

Some employers, realizing that hybrid work structures are unlikely to fully disappear, were redesigning their office space to prioritize collaboration and socialization with the understanding that individualized “focus work” would be done outside of the office, said Steven Burgos, director of design for interiors at the design firm HOK.

Office walls and cubicles are disappearing and private offices are being democratized, Fernández said. Instead of seniority dictating whether an employee has their own office, companies are turning four walls and a door into an amenity that workers can reserve.

Companies need to prioritize creating offices that help build relationships and go beyond the space itself to offer events and experiences that workers will fear missing out on if they don't make the daily commute, she said. 

“We're really designing hotels within offices or vice versa,” Fernández said. “It's really a place for collaboration, for coming together, for meeting your future spouse, and people that are not coming to the office are going to miss out on that, and hopefully FOMO will bring them in.”