Sustainability has to be “economically viable”, says Maisey
Office sustainability for its own sake is not a course that should be followed. That's according to Mark Maisey, property manager at E.On, which is building new BREEAM ‘excellent’ offices in the centre of Nottingham.
Maisey, speaking at an Insider breakfast event, said: “Sustainability has to be economically viable. We could’ve gone further and introduced even more environmentally-friendly systems into the building, but the payback would’ve been so far down the road that it would have proved to have been economically unviable.
"Sometimes, sustainability isn’t the be all and end all when you’re choosing or designing new offices.”
Maisey added: “We understood what we wanted from our new offices. We had the advantage of understanding where we wanted to be, how many people we wanted in the building and what sort of new building it was going to be.”
At the same event, Gareth Brown, senior environmental manager at fit-out specialist Overbury, said that sustainability is a balancing act.
He thought that changing working practices such as hot desking and agile working could help and hinder the creation a more sustainable working place.
Brown said: “On one side you have to look at the costs of an individual working from home. On the other hand, agile working means that a person can work from a computer anywhere, and that can make a difference to a company.
“This sort of flexibility can be a great advantage; it means less office space is needed as there are obviously not as many people sat at desks. Therefore you will have cost savings on the running of the office. As to whether there are any sustainability benefits – that’s a difficult one.”
Maisey agreed, and said that one size doesn’t fit all. He added: “For some companies this works, as there staff are happy to work away from the office. However, if you take a group of accountants, for example, then they can seem perfectly happy sitting at a bunch of desks all day. It’s all about getting the most bang for your buck at the end of the day.
“What a company needs to do when considering agile working is look at the individual parts of the business and then decide whether that path is right for them. If you have a contact centre, then of course you’re going to need everyone sat in a room all day.
“When it comes to sustainability, we’ve always thought about helping people get to and from work in a different way every day. We’ve also tried to enable a change in the behaviour of our staff, so they behave in a more sustainable way.”
