9 SEPTEMBER 2023how well the organization is performing. However, as staffing challenges continue to mount, process standardization will be essential to indoctrinating personnel who may either be less experienced, transitioning from other industries, or both. To continue the music analogy, real estate transformation might require that the industry recruit classically trained musicians to play in the jazz band. Process standardization provides a baseline for not only understanding how the business works today, but defining how it should work tomorrow. Classically trained musicians could assist in creating tomorrow's model.Once tomorrow's model of service delivery is defined, the challenge becomes defining the attributes of that future workforce. Through a combination of workforce development (e.g. training, certification, coaching, etc.) and recruitment, evolving today's employees into that future centric team begins with setting well defined expectations. In many cases, workforce transformation could involve recruitment of talent from outside industries. Today's team may be highly transactional, project focused, work in silos, lacking in diversity, and technologically challenged while the future team may need to possess skills that are more strategic, program centric, client relations oriented, require greater business acumen and data analytic skills, while including perspectives that better reflect the market being served. There's no time like the present to begin setting the expectations for that future oriented team.Digital transformation is a force multiplier which offers significant opportunities to introduce more impactful performance improvements. Leveraging technology to provide tracking, monitoring, and automated control functions will free critical staffing resources to perform higher order functions that mandate human intervention. Since digital applications and systems enable greater visibility into operations, asset utilization, sustainability, and business performance, this enhanced knowledge will further enable more agile and timely business decisions. Individual contributors make critical business decisions on a daily if not hourly basis. Armed with a greater understanding of the cost implications of their decisions, the entire real estate team can be empowered to make value based decisions. The resulting data and analytics can be used to craft reports and dashboards that inform executive leaders on key performance indicators.Value based decisions are also critical to the effectiveness of a comprehensive strategic sourcing program. Comprehensive facilities acquisitions strategies can balance myriad corporate imperatives ranging from requirements related to capital acquisitions, operations, technological innovation, and real estate to environmental and socio-economic objectives like supplier diversity. A real estate team capable of leveraging increasingly scarce capital, spend to fulfill a spectrum of strategic corporate initiatives can yield enhanced reputational value for the enterprise within both industry and the community. Strategic partnerships and vendor relationships are increasingly foundational to the organization's success as organizations seek opportunities to improve performance and create value.Transformational change is, however, not achievable without an underlying culture that promotes collaboration, innovation, risk taking, psychological safety, diversity of thought, and empowerment of both the team and individual. Organizational culture should be aligned with company vision, values, and guiding principles and created with intentionality. As individual contributors, supervisors, and managers become more vested in the vision, in the best environments, they become co-equal partners with directors and executive leaders. Accumulatively, the team becomes greater than the sum of its collective parts. And as the team achieves heightened levels of performance excellence, the pessimism which may have previously permeated the organization when dealing with headwinds is replaced by optimism.Winston Churchill often stated that, "the pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." When real estate teams begin to take on the attributes of optimism, there are suddenly no bad days. There are only opportunities to excel. As that mindset begins to permeate the team, transformation suddenly becomes reality. HIGH PERFORMING REAL ESTATE TEAMS BENEFIT FROM STRONG GOVERNANCE AND ARE FUELED BY WELL THOUGHT, WELL PLANNED INITIATIVES THAT ARE CAPTURED IN AUTHORITATIVE CAPITAL PROGRAMS EXECUTED WITH DISCIPLINE
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