Flexible workspace operators as third spaces between office and home

Francisco Vazquez Medem is the Founder and President of 3G Office, a major architecture firm based in Madrid, operating in close to 50 countries, including Spain, Portugal and most of the Latin American countries. 3G Office designs corporate offices for big companies like Google, Orange or KPMG. In the last couple of years, coworking and flex workplace has grown so much that it now represents 30% of the activity in their portfolio. Flexible workspace operators will be used as third spaces between head-offices and home-offices. Learn more about Francisco Vazquez vision.

Main takeaways

The highlights from our conversation with Francisco Vazquez are summarised below:

• Covid-19 will accelerate a wave of transformation never seen so far in the workplace industry, explains Francisco Vazquez.
• Technology has allowed to work as an activity and not as a place.
• For Francisco, “Covid-19 is great” as it has pushed change in many companies: “It has torn down all the cultural barriers”
• In the long term, even in conservative models, we are talking about only 40-50% occupancy at any time in corporate headquarters. And those 40-50% will go to the office for different reasons and tasks than in the past.
• 2020 is going to be the time of reflection within companies to define the model of flex working for the future. This will effect immediately their space needs and strategy. This will positively affect flex operators as third space between office and home.
• We are looking at a decentralisation of our lives and corporate headquarters.
• Technology is widely available; the important part is the cultural transformation: “We have just finished 3 offices for Google and the technology used is similar to a good coworking spaces. It’s more about how you integrate technology and the human factor. In this respect Covid-19 has helped a lot”.

Watch the full video conversation with Francisco Vazquez below.