Whether a manufacturing giant or a tech leader, office occupiers want two main things: flexibility and responsiveness. 

That was the message from two of the Netherlands' biggest office tenants at Bisnow’s Dutch Office Revival event, held last week at Union Investment’s The Pulse building in Amsterdam.

“It's flexibility,” said AkzoNobel Director of Real Estate Roland Huitink, whose firm has 1,000 locations globally, 150 of which are offices. “In the last 10 years, we've decided three times to rent for more than five years, and three times that was the wrong decision.”

The coronavirus changed the volume of space that companies need, and that legacy of remote working is now firmly entrenched.

“There was no other place to work from, so [the office] was the default, and it has moved to a destination,” Booking.com Director of Real Estate Workplace and Services Marnix Mali told the audience. 

Both companies have trimmed their office space in the past five years, and Booking is utilising coworking space more frequently for its smaller offices, Mali said.

But offices still fill a vital role for both companies, boosting productivity and fostering culture, and both have invested heavily in flagship HQ projects. 

At hospitality tech company Booking, that is a 72,000-square-meter central Amsterdam campus, opened in 2023, which consolidated staff from more than a dozen locations across the city under one roof for the first time. 

At paint and coatings multinational AkzoNobel, it is a 15,000-square-meter Zuidas HQ in which it has invested significantly to upgrade in recent years, and into which it has consolidated workers from other cities — Mali and Huitink agreed that Amsterdam is a magnet for attracting young and talented workers.

The companies have different attitudes around implementing technology to measure how staff are utilising workspace. 

Booking’s HQ is full of sensors monitoring which areas are being utilised and when, providing insights into how space can best be configured to give staff what they want. 

There are some tricky balances to be struck within that, Mali explained.

People aren’t as attached to having their own desk as they once were, he said, and they ask for more meeting rooms and quiet spaces. But often, they will leave their stuff in those shared areas when they are working elsewhere. That creates the need to nudge employees toward not camping out somewhere they aren’t actually working. 

AkzoNobel is more lo-fi, Huitink explained. Before Covid, he would sometimes ask a security guard to walk through an office and count how many desks were being utilised. Now, the company uses badge-swipe data to see how many people come in on given days, but it doesn’t monitor which parts of the building they are utilising. 

Booking’s HQ features other uses as well as the offices populated by more than 6,500 staff. A ground-floor restaurant is run by A Beautiful Mess, a company that provides workplace skills to people with refugee backgrounds, and space is also dedicated to providing tech skills for people in the wider local community. 

That gives staff pride in their workplace and means it is still vibrant when they leave for the evening, Mali said. 

On the thorny question of what office amenities companies will pay for, the two companies again differed. Booking is happy to pay more for buildings with good amenities, as long as its staff value and utilise them, Mali said. 

For a manufacturing company, cost is slightly more important, Huitink said. That being said, its strategy is to have higher-quality offices than its competitors to attract better-quality staff. 

One of the key challenges for companies in the coming years is how artificial intelligence will change their workspace needs. Mali said AI is already making Booking staff significantly more efficient, but the company is in the dark about how it will change how much space it requires and how that space will be configured. 

Look out, though, for new kinds of work environments being requested. 

“For example, some people say that you will come to whisper spaces where everyone is talking to their computer instead of typing,” Mali said. “We don't see that yet, but it is coming, or something is coming. We don't know yet what and how, but it will definitely change.”

As for that age-old question of what tenants want from their landlords? The simple answer is communication. 

“We love to complain about landlords who rent you a building, and as soon as you sign the deal, they never call back,” Huitink said. “But I do see differences around the world, and I think the important one is at least listen to your client, have the discussion, be open, and be there when it's really needed.”