Input to the FM/CREM research agenda

Despite the possibility to work anyplace anywhere, the office and its work-spaces remain an important resource to influence organizational performance and fight in the war on new talents. Therefore, it is good to notice that the issue of how to manage the workplace is discussed in more board rooms than ever before. However, to be able to decide on how to allocate costs in order to achieve optimal benefits, full insight in relationships between physical work environment input variables and organizational/employee outcome aspects is crucial, and off course leaving the question open whether full insight can be reached on a certain moment in time. As a good insight is often lacking, many office design business cases and the decisions that follow from those, are still made under great uncertainty and mainly based on gut feeling instead of the best available knowledge (evidence). Several common struggles of corporate real estate (CRE) and facility managers (FM) appear to remain unchanged over the past decades. This triggered the authors of this paper to try and identify which topics are currently the most important struggles in practice , and how future research could provide insight into these topics? This article describes several activities organized by the authors to answer this question. The results provide input for a future FM/CREM research agenda