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Cat Johnson – Coworking Marketing Maven
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
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Andrea Pirrotti-Dranchak – Competitive Advantage
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
Jeremy Fennema – Tech Innovation Alchemist
Compass Offices recently conducted a large-scale survey to examine and understand workplace habits and practices in the APAC region.
The survey, Compass Index: Employee Insights and The Key to Success in APAC, aimed to answer the question: where do people place the most value on the workspace environment?
Closeness to Transportation Hubs
Where is your workspace located? Any transportation hubs within walking distance? If the answer is no, you might want to relocate (and no, we’re not exaggerating).
Compass Offices’ survey found that in Australia, about 50% of workers said that the ideal perk of a workplace is being located near a transportation hub.
Australians aren’t alone in valuing easy access to transportation. In mainland China, workers were split around 35% between rating nearness to transportation hubs as their number one perk vs nearness to games or a gym. In Hong Kong, about 60% of those surveyed ranked being near transportation options as a favorite perk.
Location, location, location (really)
In Japan, 65% of workers find closeness to transportation hubs as one of the most important aspects of a workspace. In Singapore, convenient access to transportation is also high on the list, being the most important workplace perk for 60% of workers.
Though the Philippines didn’t put proximity to transportation as the number one workplace perk, they did rank it as their second favorite.
Out of all the countries studied and surveyed, Vietnam was the only one that didn’t list nearness to transportation hubs as a top workplace perk. Instead, they ranked access to mentorship and communal areas as their favorite aspects of a workspace.
“The one theme emerging from these survey findings is the importance of mobility. Data from nearly every country–with the sole exception of Vietnam–shows that the most important workplace perk for today’s employee in Asia is access to transportation hubs. This means that businesses will need to consider the crucial importance of location when it comes to plans for scaling.” Or in the case of flexible workspace operators, when it comes to finding the right place to open a new workspace center.
In a world where ride-sharing is quickly taking over car-owning, easy access to public transportation options is not longer a luxury, but a necessity for workers across the world; and workspace operators should cater to this need.
“As we move into an increasingly modernised setting for business, employees are placing more emphasis on flexibility, transportation–and as indicated from the survey results–access to good places to eat, quality coffee, and communal space and hot desks.”
Ray Lindenberg said it in a recent article, market needs and preferences are our masters; and in Asia-Pacific it has been made clear that the market is asking for easy and convenient access to transportation. The only question that remains is whether you are catering to that need or not.
