Hello everyone, joining from Singapore.
I spent twenty-five years in enterprise technology, at American and European companies, deploying the collaboration and meeting room systems that facilities teams operate every day. My customers were FM, AV and IT teams. I sat in hundreds of workplace projects across Asia Pacific and global markets, usually at the point where the real estate decision, the technology decision, and the workforce decision collided.
Here is the pattern I kept watching. The fit-out was designed. The rooms were built. The technology was installed. Then people were expected to use it all, and utilisation told a different story. The workspace was measured after the decisions, never before them.
I now run Strategic Pathways, an advisory practice, and I built the Intelligent Workplace operating model to correct that sequence. It rests on the 4W Workplace Framework: Workforce, Workflow, Workspace, WorkTech. The four dimensions are designed together, in that order, so that the workspace is shaped by how people work instead of the other way around. A workspace nobody uses is real estate.
What I plan to contribute here: regular posts on hybrid utilisation, meeting equity, the physical and digital environment as one system, and the governance FM leaders need as AI-enabled systems enter the building. Structural arguments, no products named. FM already runs the most measurable dimension of the workplace; my interest is connecting that data to the workforce and technology decisions made upstream of it.
A question to open, and I would genuinely value your answers: in your organisation, when a major workplace technology or AI decision is made, where is FM in the sequence? Shaping the decision, consulted on it, or handed the outcome?
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Marc Remond
Founder
Strategic Pathways Pte Ltd
Singapore
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