The analysis takes into account the results from 2019 achieved by companies in various sectors such as software development, advertising agencies, IT consulting, engineering and technical consulting, business support services, accounting and financial audit, architecture or real estate agencies.
The analyzed companies, whose revenues are mainly generated from work performed in office spaces, achieved in 2019 a total turnover of EUR8 billion, with about 112,000 employees and an average productivity of EUR70,000 per employee. The occupancy cost of the office spaces for these companies, consisting of rent, service and utilities tax, was estimated at EUR255 million per year, the equivalent of about EUR190/employee/month.
In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic companies implemented procedures for working from home for most employees, reducing the physical occupancy of offices to 35%-40%. Given that the new working model has brought a number of challenges but also benefits, most companies are currently analyzing how they will operate on the medium and long term, while carefully monitoring the evolution of productivity and reconsider occupancy costs.
“The analyzed data shows the restriction of working from the office, imposed by social distancing rules, can be harmful, endangering employee productivity, social needs or the necessity for diversity, to learn and achieve new things. Employees who worked from home adapted to the current context and sought to perform in an exceptional situation, perceiving it in most cases as temporary. In a scenario where remote work would be widely adopted on the medium and long term, we believe that the productivity indicator would definitely be put up to a test, and a decrease of only 5% would practically completely cancel the reduction of cots generated by limiting office work spaces,” said Madalina Cojocaru, Partner, Office Agency, Cushman & Wakefield Echinox.
Part of the occupancy costs of office spaces were transferred during this period to employees, who may have had to pay higher utility bills and invest in office furniture or more spacious homes to be able to work from home.
Bucharest has a modern stock of office spaces for lease of over 2.9 million square meters, where about 260,000 employees worked before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, with a quarter of the employees in the Capital. The owners of these spaces have an annual turnover of about EUR600 million from the lease and administration of these spaces. In addition to the services companies included in the analysis, these office spaces are occupied by banks, insurance companies or law firms, as well as the management and support teams of companies in the energy, industry, pharma or retail sectors.