ProspeKtive

The health crisis we are going through highlights certain desires of the French. The confinements have revealed urban ills and territorial actors are wondering about the conditions of life in the city and the end of metropolization. One question is emerging: the well-being of city dwellers. What do we mean by well-being? How can we define it? How can we identify the territorial components of well-being?

After eliminating individual offices, a number of large users are once again discovering spaces that resemble... individual offices in their work environments. The ESSEC Workplace Management Chair's My Post-Containment Office III survey (of 1,868 people, April 2021), in fact, indicates that 63% of respondents would prefer to work in a closed office, either individual or shared. So, what about the individual office?

It is not an incantation. It is not a mantra. It is a necessity. Diversity is one of the new values infusing the real estate industry. Beyond the "diversity and inclusion" indexes and the marketing effects that cleverly dress up annual reports, this necessity is very high on the list of priority concerns of today's and tomorrow's managers. Why is this? For three reasons: performance, creativity and innovation.

Remote appeared in the 1950s with the work of Norbert Wiener on cybernetics. In the 1970s, the term "telework" was coined by Jack Nilles to refer to work carried out partly at a distance from the office. It is then a question of substituting means of telecommunications for transport.

After waging war on the individual office, several users engaged in the transformation of their work environments have reintroduced spaces that can look like… individual offices. At the same time, the "My office of tomorrow" survey regularly reminds us that for the younger generations (or at least the students of the Grandes Ecoles program at Essec) the individual office is always desirable: 27% of them 2013, 38% in 2020.

Text written by Kardham, from an interview with Alexandre Coulondre Doctor in socio-economics, associate researcher at LATTS, Founder of DIT Conseil (Data, Real Estate, Territories).