Co-working trend changing SA's office landscape

摘要

Paragon Interface, an interior architectural company that has designed some of the largest and most iconic corporate headquarters of recent times in South Africa, including the new Discovery head office and Sasol Place that are both located in Sandton, is seeing a growing move towards adopting this international trend locally. What the co-working trend implies for large corporates, in particular, is that, instead of maintaining and staffing a fully-fledged office building, they can now simply ramp up or down as new projects roll in or existing ones are completed. The key driver here is to cut real-estate costs, especially given the constrained global economic outlook and increasingly tight margins. The major benefit of this trend for employees is that it supports what is termed 'agile' working, which is the logical next step of the open-plan office revolution. While traditional open-plan offices still tie workers to individual desks and offer little in the way of shared services or collaborative working, 'agile' workspaces allow employees to work where and how they want to, with the full support and functionality required to do so.