10 office management mistakes that cost millions

The ten mistakes that cost the most

1. Superficial verification of costs under the lease

Almost every tenant checks rent and indexation. The problem starts in opex: what the landlord may recharge to tenants under the lease and what is its own capital investment. Maciej points out that even a single digit after the decimal point in an exchange rate or indexation figure, multiplied by twelve months and by every tenant in the building, is real money. It is also easy to justify a questionable cost as “common area refurbishment”.

What to do: ask questions and request documents even without being certain an error occurred, because the lease usually grants that right. Every few years commission a service charge audit based on benchmarks from comparable buildings. With a portfolio, start by comparing your own locations against each other.

2. Missed option deadlines in the lease

An extension or early exit option not exercised on time is a measurable loss. Maciej describes a tenant that moved into a building in three phases and could have consolidated its expiry dates at no cost with a simple letter. It now has three dates, and the earliest of them dictates when renegotiation must start - at an unfavourable point in the market cycle. The root cause is usually turnover: one team negotiates the lease, and several years later someone else looks after the options.

What to do: put the date the decision process must start in the calendar, not the lease expiry date, and name someone accountable for deadlines. A well-structured spreadsheet is enough, as long as someone maintains it consistently.

3. Choosing a supplier on price alone

Without an agreed SLA there is nothing to compare. The parameters to set upfront are maximum response time, resolution time, service frequency, acceptable complaint levels, service availability and the consequences of missing those thresholds. Only then can you answer whether a price is high or low. There is also a hidden cost almost nobody counts: the team time spent managing a supplier that fails to deliver quality, plus the frustration of being locked into a two or three year contract.

What to do: define your own requirements before the RFP, ask bidders to propose an SLA and compare how ambitious they are. Invite the finalists to your office, walk the space with them and watch what questions they ask. The person your team will deal with day to day should be in that meeting.

4. Fragmented services and no total cost of ownership calculation

Every supplier is a separate unit to manage: more emails, more invoices, more contacts. Offices grow while the service model stays as it was, carried over from a smaller floor or a previous address. Filip raises the objection he hears most often: outsourcing and consolidation sound expensive. Maciej does not dispute that they are nominally more expensive, because an integrating partner adds a margin. He points out, though, that the calculation is almost never done honestly - project costs rarely include the salaries of your own team or the time the project consumed.

What to do: calculate total cost of ownership including in-house payroll and the risk of absence in a small team. The question is not “cheaper or more expensive” but “what do we get in return”: a controlled service level and the ability to open new locations quickly can be worth the premium. Where consolidation makes sense, use the wider offering of a supplier you trust instead of hiring another subcontractor for one-off tasks.

5. Badly built contracts and no knowledge of the scope

A contract that fitted three years ago may be inadequate today. Agreements signed during and just after the pandemic deserve particular attention: if more people are coming back to the office and the scope adjustment mechanisms never triggered, employees will simply see an office that is not clean. It also happens that a service guaranteed in the contract twice a year gets added to the invoice, because both sides forgot about it.

What to do: do not sign service contracts for ten years, and revisit them on a cycle. Know the scope and check invoices against it. When the responsible person changes, make sure they are properly onboarded into the contract. Filip adds his own method: all contracts in one repository with an AI assistant connected to it that remembers dates and entitlements, on a company account assigned to a department rather than a person.

6. A reactive approach to the technical side of the office

A building is like a car: serviced regularly it keeps running, neglected it eventually breaks down - usually at the worst possible moment, for instance when the air conditioning fails in the middle of summer. The cost of emergency repair comes back to tenants as a service cost anyway, so a neglected building is the tenant's cost, not the owner's.

What to do: ask the landlord how often it services installations and equipment, and keep watching. On your own side, identify the critical zones. Server room cooling is a completely different risk category from the coffee machine, although - as Maciej notes - coffee is a highly emotional topic and worth an SLA of its own, such as a replacement machine within 24 hours.

7. Ignoring energy and utility losses

The starting point is the metering setup and access to data on your own consumption. Without measurement there is no management, and the data should arrive automatically, in an agreed format and timeframe. Some parameters, such as air conditioning settings, are configured at building BMS level, so this requires cooperation with the landlord and knowing what can actually be changed.

What to do: work through pilots. Introduce a change on one floor, communicate it to employees, measure the effect and only then justify a larger spend. Afterwards, check whether the saving actually shows up on the landlord's invoice. Even small investments, such as occupancy sensors for lighting, pay back with a year of lease left. Leverage depends on how much space you occupy, but the things under your own control are worth doing at any scale.

8. No data on how the office actually works

There is a belief that little can be measured in workplace. Maciej argues the opposite and cites one of his favourite indicators: how much coffee the organisation drinks, at what times and on which days of the week. It does not explain everything, but it says a great deal about an office. Even the fundamental question of why people do not come to an office that cost millions can be broken down into data. There is one condition: the data must be correct, because bad data leads to bad decisions.

What to do: look for cheap data sources and trends instead of waiting for a large system. Implement tools so that they are part of the process and cannot be bypassed with a spreadsheet kept on the side.

9. An inconsistent set of tools

Data spread across five tools is data the team uses reluctantly, because the admin takes longer than the process itself. On top of that come licences the company pays for without matching usage: according to the SaaS Management Index, 36% of the 40 million licences analysed go unused. Filip adds that workplace is not a one-off office design exercise but continuous analysis of needs - an office designed in 2020 answered entirely different needs from today's.

What to do: stop and design a coherent tool architecture, simple enough that nobody works around it. Before buying another system, check whether your current supplier already has a module nobody asked about. Include building and supplier platforms in that picture.

10. No feedback or change management mechanisms

Transforming an office is a continuous process, not a one-off project. Maciej describes a company of around a thousand people where eighteen months passed between the workplace analysis and the move. A thousand people still moved in, but more than three hundred had a different profile by then - developers. The organisation had become a technology business, and the office was not prepared for that group's different needs, including heavier use of its amenities.

What to do: build a regular mechanism for collecting observations and feedback, and pair it with data when making the investment case. Justified feedback from the organisation plus numbers proving the investment stacks up is, in Maciej's words, the game changer in managing office change.

Transcript

Transcript of the conversation, edited for readability: we removed repetitions, asides and editing marks while keeping the content and the order of what was said.

Filip Sarzyński: Office costs are not just rent. The real game starts after the lease is signed: service charges, service contracts, option deadlines, data on how the office actually works. And when you are responsible not for one office but for a dozen or more, every such mistake multiplies by the number of locations and runs into millions. Today I am discussing this with Maciej Banaszak, who has run office operations for global corporations. We will go through the ten mistakes that cost the most and work out what to do about them. Hi, Maciek. I will not hide the fact that you prepared today's conversation, because you are the one who listed these ten key problems. First point: cost control and lease management.

Maciej Banaszak: This is the first category I would like to start with. Sometimes it seems obvious, and I think most tenants handle it quite well. But the details, and exactly how we go about it, matter a great deal and can translate into significant costs if we overlook certain things. The absolutely fundamental thing is a really thorough verification of all lease-related costs. Most companies cope with rent and indexation. But once we get into the more opex-type costs and refurbishment costs, that is where the fun begins. I remember that ten or fifteen years ago my team and I kept a somewhat unofficial tally, and it showed that more than 90% of errors were in the landlords' favour. That has changed a little today, because back then there was more manual work, and human error was the standard explanation whenever we reported an irregularity. But our statistics showed that some of them were, shall we say, intentional.

Maciej Banaszak: Today most of this happens in a system, which does not mean there is no room for error. Sometimes a single digit after the decimal point in a currency conversion rate or in indexation matters. We had cases where some digit after the decimal point, a two and a nine, worked in the landlord's favour. At first glance it did not significantly affect the amount. But if we multiply it by twelve months and by all the tenants in the building, and nobody notices, then as a result of such a human error the landlord can receive a lot more money. Being meticulous about the basics still matters enormously. Harder, but also crucial, is verifying which costs the landlord may, under the lease, put into opex and recharge to tenants, and which should be investments it finances itself. There is a lot of room for manoeuvre here, because it is relatively easy to slip something in and justify it as a general refurbishment of the common areas. My advice is this: it is worth challenging, even if we are not one hundred per cent sure that something went wrong. It is always worth asking the question and requesting documents - as a rule, the lease allows us to. It may turn out that everything is in order. But applying that kind of healthy pressure and showing the landlord that we are watching closely makes a difference.

Filip Sarzyński: About fifteen years ago one of the largest landlords was putting its management board's plane tickets into service charges. We are talking about a very large company that made a very big mistake - although I am not sure whether to call it a mistake. Another thing: in lease negotiations I have noticed that we very rarely focus on the cost of service charges. Practically all our focus goes on rent. When we say we would like to talk about service charges, the landlord tells us there is nothing to negotiate, because it does not make money on them. It is true that it should not make money on them, but it is still worth checking whether it manages them efficiently. We have to remember that, at the end of the day, it is not paying with its own money, but with the tenants' money.

Maciej Banaszak: That is absolutely true. Especially in the current situation, when the market in many larger cities is firmly on the landlord's side and landlords hold a strong bargaining chip, because relatively few offices are available, especially in the centre. Add to that the fact that they know they will pass all the costs on to the tenant anyway, and the tenant must pay them under the lease, and there is no clear incentive to optimise those costs or to invest in the building in a way that lowers them. We are mainly talking about energy and utility costs, and tenants can see them rising very sharply. What can be done about it? Apply pressure and show landlords that it matters. The good news is that today simple, perhaps imperfect benchmarks are much easier to produce using artificial intelligence: how much we pay for energy, how much water we use. You can extract fairly reliable data this way. You have to be careful when you use it as an argument, but it is worth applying pressure. It is also worth watching how the landlord services the installations and whether it really looks after the building. If the building is neglected, those costs will have to be borne anyway and will certainly be passed on to tenants.

Filip Sarzyński: So there is one conclusion: we have to keep pushing landlords to manage our money efficiently. But above all we need to know whether they manage it efficiently or not. How do we do that? The simplest way is a service charge audit.

Maciej Banaszak: Especially if the audit is done properly and based on benchmarks, so that you can compare data from other buildings of a similar size. It shows areas of inefficiency in an analytical way. Sometimes they are justified, because an older building will be more energy-intensive than a newer one, but it is worth keeping control of this and checking whether there are any items that stand out dramatically. I have come across cases where something very energy-intensive was built in the building for one of the tenants, or a retail unit on the ground floor turned out to be connected to the general meter and was consuming a great deal of energy charged to everyone. It was not obvious to spot, but in an audit, compared with other buildings or with buildings in the same portfolio, it shows up immediately. If we have more than one property, we can simply start by comparing one with another. That alone is a basis for going to the landlord and asking for documents, explanations and meter data.

Filip Sarzyński: I encourage everyone to use service charge audits if we want to sleep soundly. I do not understand why tenants do not exercise their right to check whether service charges are calculated correctly. It is our right, and we should check where our money goes. Without going into a full audit, you can also look at reports. A quick plug: you can use OfficeList Pulse, the analytics tool we use ourselves and on which we base our reports. In it you can check any location for service charges, rents and vacancy, and compare it with the nearest buildings, the region or the location. On that basis alone we can tell whether we are paying too much. And if we suspect we are, it is best to commission a proper audit from someone who does this professionally.

Maciej Banaszak: I agree, and I would add that I have used such audits many times. If we have a lease that has not been audited for a few years, where we only carried out general cost checks without going into detail, the savings from an audit usually cover its cost comfortably. There is no guarantee, of course, but in the long run such an audit simply pays off and earns its return as an investment. As a rule, leases, and also the Civil Code, allow us to verify certain things retrospectively.

Filip Sarzyński: Let us move on to the second point: missing critical option deadlines in leases.

Maciej Banaszak: It surprises me that this is still not done meticulously enough. If we miss an extension option we need to exercise, or a break option, the financial consequences can be substantial. But even simpler things that seem less critical at first glance are a problem. I have an example I came across relatively recently: a key tenant moved into a building in three sizeable phases, spread over more than a year. Each space was leased for the same period, so the tenant could have consolidated those dates free of charge. All it took was a simple letter to the landlord. They did not do it, and there are two consequences. First, they have three lease end dates, which is simply impractical. Second, the earliest date now determines when they have to start thinking about an extension and when to negotiate - and it falls at the worst point in the market. That could not have been fully foreseen, but just handling three dates and the logistics around them creates major inefficiencies.

Maciej Banaszak: Why does this happen? In my opinion, usually for very simple reasons. The lease is negotiated by a team, often with the support of a partner who negotiates very good terms. Then a long time passes before those options come into play. The team changes, a different person who was not close to the negotiations becomes responsible, and the whole thing gets blurred. I think there is a lot to be done here, despite the good and simple tools available. A well-used Excel spreadsheet and basic office tools are a sufficient solution, provided they are set up properly and used meticulously.

Filip Sarzyński: It is not enough to have the lease expiry date in your calendar. You need the date the decision process starts, early enough. Let me share a real-life story: a friend of mine, the CFO of a large IT company, called me and said they had finished refurbishing their office. They had invested two million and realised that their lease expired in three months. He asked what they could do about it. Unfortunately, all I could say was: next time, write down not only when the lease ends, but also when you should start negotiating. Where is the problem? The landlord knows you have invested PLN 2 million, so when you sit down at the table with it, your negotiating position is very weak. You have to record these dates and have a person responsible for making sure all the deadlines in the calendar are right.

Filip Sarzyński: Point three: choosing suppliers on price alone.

Maciej Banaszak: That is right, this is the second category. In our space we usually have various services from various providers, and that can be a sizeable share of our operating costs. The first thing to get clear is to know your own expectations and needs well. A law firm that needs a very high-quality, always spotless, fairly exclusive space will have different needs from a service centre, and different again from an office aimed at developers. On that basis you need to name those parameters, so that providers know them and can tailor their service and standards to them. If we do not do that, we should not be surprised that the provider delivers what it believes it has been contracted for. If there are ambiguities in the contract, very few suppliers - and to be honest, none - will step out of line and do more than they think is in the contract.

Filip Sarzyński: In other words, the so-called SLA, Service Level Agreement: an agreed, measurable level of service delivery. That is the most important thing to define. Examples of parameters: maximum response time, resolution time, service frequency, acceptable complaint levels, service availability, consequences of missing the parameters. We need to have these things set upfront to be able to compare like with like. If we do not, then strictly speaking we cannot say whether we are paying too little or too much.

Maciej Banaszak: That is right, and let me say straight away: it is not easy, especially the first time. Most really solid companies can advise on this, but you have to take it with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes to the parameters they propose themselves - if we rely on them one hundred per cent, they will propose thresholds they know they can meet. It is worth tightening them a little. If our team lacks the expertise, we can ask for an SLA proposal in the request for proposal, and the responses alone give us comparative material: we can see how ambitiously each supplier approaches the subject. A lot of free information on how to run this kind of procurement process can be obtained from experts. But it is worth starting not by copying what the internet suggests, but by answering the basic question: what do we need.

Maciej Banaszak: There is also a hidden cost that in most cases is not taken into account: how much of our team's time managing a given supplier will cost. Managing poor quality can be very time-consuming, and our team is a cost too. If they have to manage a provider that constantly delivers problems, it takes up time and distracts them from tasks where they could do something more valuable. This, at least, is easy to measure, for example by the number of tickets raised with the supplier. It is worth working with suppliers where things go through a system, because then we have the full history and can quantify how much time it costs us. Frustration is harder to quantify, and it can be considerable, especially when we know we have signed a two or three year contract and after six months it turns out the supplier is very difficult to manage. It is worth bearing this in mind when structuring the contract: make sure SLA results are reported in a way we can easily verify, and that there are simple escalation paths. Otherwise we will pay a hidden cost in the form of our team's time.

Filip Sarzyński: Do you have a way of choosing the right supplier?

Maciej Banaszak: I will say two things. The first is to ask neighbours and industry contacts - office management is a relatively small world, so it is always worth asking around your network. If we lack the capacity or the expertise in the team, there are very professional advisors who specialise purely in supporting this kind of procurement process. It is a bit like audits: hiring an advisor who sets up the process, helps with the SLA and checks the bids is an investment that pays off in the long run. We also get an extra pair of hands, because office management teams are usually stretched to the limit day to day, and a process like this is a considerable burden if you want to do it properly. But there is one basic rule that costs very little: you absolutely must walk around your office with the final bidders. Watch what questions they ask and what they pay attention to, and ask them open questions about their observations and challenges. That tells you a great deal. It is worth insisting that the person we will work with day to day takes part, because a great deal depends on the coordinator or key account manager. These are services performed by people - there are more and more cleaning robots, but ultimately people manage them, and it is really worth getting to know them. The assessment is always somewhat subjective and you have to be careful about that, but in my view it is a necessary step.

Filip Sarzyński: To sum up: SLA, reports, and if you do not want to overpay, it is best to go to an advisor who already has vetted companies - that cost will probably pay for itself anyway. Moving on: fragmented services.

Maciej Banaszak: I could combine this with the next two topics: fragmented services, badly structured contracts and not knowing the scope are, in a sense, a lack of a strategic approach to the model we want to build. We often fail to notice the moment when we need to stop and say: our office has grown, we started with one floor and added another. Something that worked in a smaller space or in the previous office, and moved with us, is no longer adequate. Every provider is a unit that has to be managed. If for every component we have a supplier doing a small slice, that means more points of contact, more emails, more invoices - a very complicated organism. There are highly integrated models on the market, where one main supplier contracts all the additional services. It is a long-term partnership arrangement, most often in large portfolios and at a large, often international scale. A good model, but not for everyone. In between there are major opportunities for consolidation. If we have a cleaning company we trust, it usually has a lot more to offer than what we have contracted day to day - we do not need to look for additional suppliers for cleaning after an event, washing furniture or a flooded floor. It is worth looking for such opportunities and building contracts with a fixed component well designed around the SLA and well-described additional components. Fewer providers and fewer contacts translate into team efficiency. But then we have to control the scope carefully: know exactly what is in scope and what is charged extra.

Filip Sarzyński: Let me cut in, because I can imagine people who will disagree with you. If we are talking about consolidating partners, that sounds expensive. My first reaction was that it is a minus, not a plus: if I outsource everything, I will probably pay much more than if I kept it in-house. That may be the case, but it does not have to be. There is such a thing as total cost of ownership, and that is what we have to compare: a consolidated or outsourced service against how it looks in-house. I will say one thing I have noticed many times: when I look at projects and their costs, the people responsible for a project do not include the cost of staff in it, and certainly not their own salary, and they do not calculate how much time the project cost. If a CFO looks at it, they have to compare all the in-house costs with the costs of what would happen if it were outsourced.

Maciej Banaszak: It is true that total cost of ownership is very rarely looked at including the payroll of the in-house team, and it should be looked at from a business perspective, because that is the whole cumulative cost. A company that manages other suppliers charges a mark-up for it, so technically it is more expensive than if we broke the services up and managed them ourselves. But the basic question is: do we have the time and expertise to do it? Can we sustain it always and everywhere? A service provider, to a greater or lesser extent, will always have a bench of people who can step in for those who are absent. In our case, especially in a small team, when one person drops out there is suddenly a big gap and a heavy workload. These things can be quantified, and then it turns out that yes, it comes out more expensive, but not much more expensive. The question is what we get in return: a defined service level that we can control, and a certain stability that we lack internally. I worked in an extremely outsourced organisation - a huge global company where more than thirty thousand people worked in the office management function globally, with just over two hundred people in the in-house team. From the service providers' perspective it was a fairly expensive model. But with the organisation growing dynamically, it was much easier to replicate than trying to hire a competent team in every new location we opened. There was a clearly defined need: only in this way, by paying a certain premium, were we able to open new offices quickly with a competent team. We could not have done it on our own.

Filip Sarzyński: To make the point: total cost of ownership has to be measured. The second thing is functionality, not just cost. You have to think about what the goal is. If the goal is managing and opening new sites, it may be better to outsource it, even though it will be more expensive, than to build it in-house.

Maciej Banaszak: Exactly. And it is very important to keep the scope we have in our contracts under ongoing control and to apply it meticulously. It happens, especially over time, that our needs change - for example when the growth of the property portfolio slows down - and that is when it is time to look at the model again. It can also happen that the contract guarantees a service that does not take place every day but should happen once every six months. We do not remember it and count on the supplier to remember. I have had cases where the provider, even with good intentions, forgot that it was in the contract and charged it as an extra on the invoice. It is good to know your contracts, use them well and control costs - because that is where the hidden extra costs and losses lie, not in whether the model is expensive or cheap.

Filip Sarzyński: Point five: badly structured contracts and not knowing the scope of services.

Maciej Banaszak: A contract may have been tailored three years ago to the conditions we had then, and today, if we continue with it, it may be inadequate. Our needs change. I would be particularly careful about contracts signed during and just after the COVID period. If we have more and more people in the office, the parameters change: more people means more cleaning. If we do not have mechanisms that adjust for this, employees' perception will be that the office is not clean. The basic mechanism is not to sign a service contract for ten years. That forces you to come back to it every so often, review it, perhaps renegotiate it, perhaps look for a competitive offer. It is worth doing, because if we look back, over the last ten years employees' needs, which translate into specific services, have changed a great deal. You really have to know that scope well and verify what you are getting on the invoices. I would add a factor we mentioned at the beginning, namely turnover in the team. In administration or office management teams there is always a certain level of turnover, and when a new person takes over a new service, you have to make sure they get properly up to speed on the contract and are able to control the scope.

Filip Sarzyński: I have my own way of dealing with this, which I have implemented in my company: artificial intelligence. I cannot keep track of all the contracts we have or remember all the rights and obligations attached to them. I have them in one place, with an AI assistant connected that has access to that folder and remembers all the dates and my entitlements. If I have a problem with the office or with charges, I can ask it and get an answer straight away. It also solves the problem you mentioned: since the problem is turnover among the people responsible for processes, you can connect the assistant to an address such as administration@company-domain, so that it is assigned not to a specific person but to a department. It works very well. You just have to remember that we are talking about company accounts, not uploading documents to a private account, because we do not know what happens to that data. On company accounts, the models do not train on our data.

Filip Sarzyński: Point six: a reactive approach to managing the technical aspects of the office.

Maciej Banaszak: We have touched on this already, because a lot depends on our situation as a tenant. It is worth keeping an eye on the landlord in operational matters too: whether it services equipment and installations regularly. A building is like a car - it does not drive down the street, but some principles work in a similar way. If we service it regularly and replace parts that wear out, it runs, better or worse, but it runs. If we neglect it, at some point it will break down, and then it costs us much more. We will not be towing the building, but as a rule it means the problem is already visible to our business: part of the space cannot function properly, the air conditioning fails in the middle of summer, because paradoxically that is exactly when it will happen, when we need those installations most. Not to mention catastrophic situations such as a flooded floor. To a large extent, the source of these problems is that equipment and installations were not properly looked after. It is worth asking about this and checking how often the landlord does it, because we will pay for the lack of maintenance anyway - an emergency repair, on a much larger scale than routine servicing, will end up with tenants as service costs.

Filip Sarzyński: You also need to define the risks. Do we have to service all the equipment? From a business owner's perspective, if I heard that the office manager wanted to service all equipment once a week, I would be horrified at the cost. You have to choose the critical zones that should be serviced, because they carry the risk of major losses. An example is server room cooling: if the air conditioning fails and we have a problem with the servers, that will translate into very large financial losses. The situation is different with the coffee machine - some people will be unhappy for a while, but repairing or even replacing the coffee machine is a relatively small cost compared with a server room failure.

Maciej Banaszak: Absolutely. If we have critical operations in the portfolio that have to keep running, it varies a lot. This kind of thinking originally started in financial institutions, which had trading floors running around the clock. But today streaming companies or companies providing online services operate non-stop across all time zones, so in many cases the criticality of infrastructure has increased. If anything depends on a particular piece of equipment, it is the top priority and has to be looked after so that nothing happens that we do not control. Coffee is a separate conversation. I have learnt over time that coffee is a very emotional element that should not be ignored - it is a bottomless topic where two or three people usually have three different opinions. Operationally it is easier, because the world has moved towards consolidation: especially in larger offices, the standard is becoming a contract with a partner who handles the whole coffee question - supplies the machines, services them, delivers the coffee and can give advice. If we have a lot of coffee drinkers in the organisation, we can secure an SLA under which the company will provide a replacement machine within twenty-four hours until the main one is repaired. It is not at all more expensive if we take into account how much time we would otherwise have to spend, even just on ordering coffee. Then there is no need to approach the risks quite so scientifically: we know that we have to look after the server room ourselves, and for coffee we have a reliable partner and one phone call or one email does the job.

Filip Sarzyński: Point seven, somewhat related to the server room, because it consumes a great deal of energy: ignoring energy and utility losses.

Maciej Banaszak: Everything depends on the arrangement we have with the landlord. What is certainly important, and still does not always happen as it should, is where we start: what the metering setup is, whether we have separate meters, whether we have data on our own energy consumption and whether we can effectively monitor the impact of any change we make to our operations. That is the foundation, because to manage something effectively we need a simple way to measure it. Nowadays this should be automated, delivering ready-made data in a defined structure and at a defined time. Once we have that covered, it is worth looking at how we use the office and how our operations affect utility consumption. Again, this requires good cooperation with the building, because some parameters, for example for air conditioning, are set at BMS level. Understanding what the system is, putting pressure on the landlord and establishing how those parameters can be changed is very important. It is worth learning this and investing time in it, because then we can move on to the pilot method: we install something and try to change a habit. Working with one organisation at the moment, we are testing such solutions for meeting room use. We isolate part of the space, introduce a change, communicate it to employees, put up stickers reminding them of it, and see whether we can see a response in the data.

Maciej Banaszak: This is how you can approach a situation where you are not sure whether installing something will produce a measurable result - for example aerators, the tap attachments that limit water consumption. Let us do it on one floor, not on another, and, provided we can obtain water consumption data at floor level, see the effect. It is a very good approach to justifying an investment. We can run a pilot within the existing budget, but to justify a larger spend we have to say: if we install this on every tap and on every floor, this is the water saving and this is the reduction in the landlord's bills we expect. And we come back to where we started: afterwards it is worth verifying whether we really see that movement in the utilities line, because it may turn out that something is wrong at building level and there will be no real effect. We cannot ignore these costs today - we all know how energy prices have risen, and it really is a significant cost item.

Filip Sarzyński: A lot depends on your negotiating position. You represent a huge corporation. If someone does not have a large office, it may even be cheaper not to start a measurement project like this. We have to remember that it is the landlord who signs contracts with energy suppliers, so smaller tenants do not have much influence here. You are looking at it from the perspective of an occupier that takes most or all of a building - a landlord really has to take such a tenant seriously, and such a tenant should push for the landlord to adapt to its needs and to consider its interests too.

Maciej Banaszak: Of course, things on the boundary between landlord and tenant depend on how much leverage we have, and the smaller the space, the less leverage. That does not mean it is not worth looking at the things we control, because costs are always relative. If investment is needed, the effect may be limited. But the pilots I ran were usually on a micro scale, in a small space, and even there we demonstrated that it paid off. Sometimes these are really small things: lighting management systems, installing sensors, which costs little - the installation work costs more than the components. If we know we are staying in the building for another year, small investments of this kind also pay back, so it is worth looking for them. It is worth choosing energy-efficient equipment and investing in things that are durable and easy to maintain.

Filip Sarzyński: Point eight: no workplace data. Although you have already said a bit about this, because it is connected both with sensors and with the fact that workplace as a whole is an endless topic for you.

Maciej Banaszak: It is an endless topic, and I am a big advocate of looking for these opportunities. You can link it straight away to the next point, an inconsistent set of technology tools, because data is very closely tied to tools. Not every organisation has the expertise to build its own tools on low-code or no-code solutions, and without traditional development skills that is somewhat risky. But the availability of tools has really moved forward, and you can build good metrics and a good dataset at a really low cost, even with the help of external applications. There is a belief that in workplace there are many things that cannot be measured: people's behaviour, the organisation's needs regarding the office, how the office functions. The fundamental question mark is why people do not come to this great office we have put so many millions into. I believe a great deal can be measured. One of my favourite data points is how much coffee an organisation drinks, at what times and on which days of the week. It will not explain everything, but it can tell you a great deal. It is worth looking for data that shows trends in how the office functions, what it needs and what it lacks. Acquiring these technologies is not as difficult today as it was in the past.

Maciej Banaszak: There are, however, a few “buts”. The first is the basic principle that data has to be looked after: wrong data will lead to wrong conclusions and wrong decisions. If we opt for tools, they have to be implemented so that they are part of the process and cannot be bypassed, because there will always be the temptation to set up yet another spreadsheet somewhere on the side. That leads to a situation where we have an inconsistent set of tools and scattered data - everything in different places. If the team has to use five different tools, it does so reluctantly, because it feels the processes take longer. It is worth looking for additional options: if we already have a tool for one process, check whether its supplier has not developed additional functionality. Systems used in larger corporations, for example for ticket management, often have modules that are very helpful in managing workplace and that most users never even ask about. This is connected with services, because we also have service providers and a building that will increasingly say: please submit requests through our platform. It is worth stopping for a moment, looking at this and creating an architecture or basic logic: we create a coherent set of tools and we will use it. It is simple enough that nobody will complain, and it will produce good data for workplace decisions.

Filip Sarzyński: You have to think about what your company needs. This year the SaaS Management Index analysed forty million licences, and its research found that thirty-six per cent of licences go unused. In other words, nobody uses almost forty per cent of the tools the company pays for. Very often companies do not understand that workplace is not just about designing an office so that it works well. Workplace is a continuous analysis of the office's needs. An office designed in 2020, six years ago, was well designed - it is just that the needs were completely different then. The pandemic turned the whole working model around by one hundred and eighty degrees, so those offices have to change. Workplace is not a service performed once every five years when an office is designed, but a continuous service.

Maciej Banaszak: And that brings us to the tenth point on my list, because it is related: building tools and processes that make it possible to collect observations and feedback regularly, to know how the environment is changing and how employees' needs are changing, and to be able to manage that change continuously. Transformation, especially when we look at the lease term, is a continuous process. It is not the case that we make a change once and are set for the next few years. Let me give a concrete example: very often, especially on larger projects, so much time passes between the workplace analysis, the office design and the move-in that the office is inadequate for the needs on the day it opens. I know a company of around a thousand people, a financial institution, where the whole process from the early analysis to move-in took about eighteen months. The profiles of those thousand people were mainly support roles: analysis, accounting and the like. A fairly process-driven organisation. And what happened - something that now happens very often as a result of AI - is that a thousand people still moved into the office, but more than three hundred had a drastically different profile, because they were developers. More than 30% of the organisation had become a genuine technology company.

Maciej Banaszak: And we come back to one of the recurring themes, namely coffee. The office had been designed in such a way that there was no room for solid, well-functioning machines making really good coffee. With developers it may be partly a cultural thing, but these people generally need a lot of coffee and drink quite a lot of it. They work at a different intensity, and the office has to provide them with different services from people who work in a more steady, process-driven way. The office was physically not prepared for this on the day it opened. It very quickly became clear that this was a problem, so they had to be ready fast. The point is that awareness of workplace has to go hand in hand with awareness that we have to keep investing in the office, that changes will be more frequent than in the past and that we have to manage that change well. But to introduce it and justify additional investment, we need data. It is a combination of two things. The first is justified feedback from the organisation showing that this is genuinely needed, not a whim or a nice-to-have - that the organisation needs it and says so loudly. The second is data confirming that it will stack up operationally and that it is an investment from which we can expect a return. This combination of feedback mechanisms with good data from good technology is a game changer. It is what will allow us to manage workplace change on an ongoing basis, and there will be more of that change than just at every move.

Filip Sarzyński: We have reached the end. We covered a lot of points, so we could not go into great detail, but I hope we will go deeper in future conversations. Thanks again, Maciek.

Questions and answers

Can office service charges be negotiated?

Landlords usually answer that there is nothing to negotiate because they do not profit from service charges. It is true that they should not profit from them, but they are spending tenants' money, so checking whether they manage it efficiently is in the tenant's interest. The lease normally grants the right to inspect documents and settlements, and a benchmark-based audit reveals items that stand out against comparable buildings.

When should lease renewal negotiations start?

Early enough to have a genuine alternative. The calendar should hold the date the decision process starts, not the lease expiry date. A company that invests in a fit-out first and only then remembers the lease is ending sits down with no leverage, because the landlord knows about that investment.

What belongs in an SLA for an office services supplier?

Maximum response time, resolution time, service frequency, acceptable complaint levels, service availability and the consequences of missing those parameters. Without them there is no way to compare bids or to say whether a price is high or low.

Is consolidating office service suppliers more expensive than managing them yourself?

Nominally yes, because an integrating partner adds a margin. The calculation should be made on a total cost of ownership basis, including the time and salaries of the in-house team and the risk of absence in a small team. The gap then usually narrows, and in return the tenant gets a controlled service level and the ability to open new locations quickly.