White Paper highlighting JANSON’s workplace transformation and modernization business
NORTHERN VA, March 29, 2023 —THE WORKPLACE CHALLENGE
As societies evolve, new technologies develop, and demographics shift, businesses and government have to rethink the way they organize their workspaces to maximize the capabilities of their employees. That is a given. The challenge today is coping with the speed at which the workforce is changing. If organizations don’t adapt quickly enough, employee recruitment and retention suffer, morale declines, and productivity drops.
This is even more of a challenge for organizations like the military. The mission of the military is national security and their hierarchical structure reflects the way that mission has been organized over decades.
But that paradigm is changing, just as business in general is changing. As the United States moves from a manufacturing and manpower-based economy to one that is service-based and technology- driven, many organizations are evolving to more flexible and information-driven ones. The question is whether their office space, facilities and campuses have kept pace.
Let’s take the Army for example. The largest branch of the U.S. military owns and operates more than half a million structures, the majority of which require renovation and modernization, according to Defense News, December 1, 2022. The majority of these buildings were constructed during the Industrial Era of four or more decades ago.
In the midst of this transformation, the pandemic of 2020-2022 has had a dramatic impact on the behavior of the American workforce. In 2021, during the second year of the pandemic, over 47 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs, reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This mass exit from the workforce has been referred to as the Great Resignation.
According to research by the Gartner Group published in 2023, each departing employee costs an organization $18,591, on average. About half of the U.S. full-time workforce, roughly 60 million workers, says that their current job “can be done remotely working from home, at least part of the time,” according to a 2022 Gallup poll.
The Department of Defense (DoD) is by far the country’s largest employer, with almost three million dependents including active-duty military personnel, reserve forces, and up to 700,000 civilian staff. It faces the same issues as the private sector to find and retain new recruits to ensure the nation’s defense. The Army notes that “installation conditions and services are a factor in this competition,” in its 2020 report, Army Installations Strategy.
