The modern office (design) serves a different function as twenty years ago. Not only does it reflect current social values but it also has evolved to accompany organizational changes and support New Ways of Working. This so-called activity-based office concept is set to increase productivity through the stimulation of interaction and communication while retaining employee satisfaction and reducing the accommodation costs. Although some research has gone into understanding the former, there is still a need for sound data on the relationship between office design and productivity. For this reason, an evaluative study on the effectiveness of activity-based office concepts was carried out to gain more insight in their use. The research methods consisted of a wide research of relevant literature on workplace design, both from environmental psychological and economical perspective, coupled with the collection and analysis of empirical data. The latter is based on both an observation and a survey of 182 end users from four different service organizations in the Netherlands, using questionnaires. The findings from these case studies underline some known benefits and disadvantages of activity-based office concepts. They provide insight in the importance of several physical, social and mental aspects of the office environment in employee choice behavior. The data from this research may be used by Corporate Real Estate Management (CREM) to support future decision making on accommodation policy.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand how corporate real estate (CRE) can add value to corporate branding and how corporate branding strategies for CRE can be determined.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a theoretical background for corporate branding and real estate and links these two concepts through interviews with 19 CRE managers of service providers.FindingsAnalysis of the relationship between CRE and the corporate brand brings forward two links: CRE influences the perception of the corporate brand directly and indirectly (via employee behaviour). Corporate identity and its six characteristics (structure, strategy, culture, communication, behaviour and design) formed a useful tool to determine the proper branding strategy for an organization. Especially, “design” and “communication” define the way CRE should communicate the corporate brand. Two location issues are seen as the most important CRE aspects to support branding strategies.Research limitations/implicationsThe field research is explorative, so it only studies a small sample of four types of service providers: real estate brokers, architects, lawyers and multinationals.Practical implicationsUnderstanding the key factors of CRE that orchestrate the direct and the indirect influence on the corporate brand provides guidelines for CREM for designing CRE that supports a successful corporate brand.Originality/valueResearch done so far on corporate branding highlights the importance of CRE for corporate branding, but does not explicitly discuss the importance of (all) different CRE aspects.

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The changing role of urban planning in the Netherlands from regulatory to public-private development planning implies the need to gain insight into multistakeholder decision making in a spatial planning context. In this paper we show the importance of unravelling influence structures that affect individual stakeholder decisions. For this purpose we looked at the Dutch retail planning context, where recently the responsibility for planning decisions has been deputed to local governments and peripheral retail planning restrictions have been relaxed. As a result, at present, local governments, realestate developers, and retail firms jointly decide on the location of new retail facilities. It is assumed that each stakeholder's attitude towards peripheral retail planning is influenced by the preference structures of other stakeholders and may reflect their professional background. We focus on adaptive behaviour, the phenomenon that a decision maker adjusts his or her preferences towards specific preferences of other stakeholders in order to move to consensus. We provide a method for measuring this adaptive behaviour, based on existing random utility choice modelling techniques. To assess preferences of stakeholders for peripheral retail planning options as well as their adaptive behaviour, three groups of stakeholders (real-estate developers, retail organizations, and local governments) were invited to take part in a web-based conjoint choice experiment. It was found that all stakeholders show rather conservative behaviour regarding peripheral retail development, especially with respect to fashion. Adaptive behaviour appeared to be cooperative and significant: stakeholders tend to (temporarily) increase preferences for alternative plans preferred by the other stakeholders. Developers appeared to be the most adaptive in their decision behaviour. Taking into consideration adaptive behaviour may help to improve existing multistakeholder decision models.