PurposeThe importance of adaptability in office buildings has increased during the past years, mostly due to factors like rapid change, both in private and public organisations, new and innovative work place design and growing environmental concerns about building redundancy.Design/methodology/approachThe research design of the study presented here is a comparative case study, where recently built office buildings by 11. Norwegian real estate developers are assessed with regard to 16 different adaptability measures.FindingsThe study shows that office buildings built by owner‐occupiers are more adaptable than office buildings built by the group who develop property for renting and management, and considerably more than the office buildings built by the group who develop property for sale to investors. A short‐term perspective on property investment, i.e. that of the group who develop property for sale to investors, does not favour adaptability concerns. A long‐term perspective as well as a use‐value perspective on property investment, i.e. that of the owner‐occupier stakeholder group, on the other hand, do favour adaptability in office buildings.Research limitations/implicationsWhether this research can help making buildings more adaptable, depends on whether the real estate customers, i.e. the users, they who pay for using the office building, understand the value of adaptability and are willing to pay the extra cost of adaptability. The building professions, including the real estate developers, claim that they know how to make office buildings adaptable.Originality/valueThe value of this paper may lie in demonstrating that this knowledge is not used in practice.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine what organisational and management practices used in connection with open space flexible offices create business value. It seeks to identify what consequences this may have for successful real estate practices. Design/methodology/approach – This paper utilises an inductive case study approach. The international telecom company Telenor has implemented open space flexible offices from top to bottom amongst their 35,000 employees. The case description and analysis is based on secondary data, user evaluations and 20 interviews with middle- and top-level managers across levels and functional departments. Findings – The case of Telenor reveals that leadership and organizing issues are important, together with work modes and communication technology, for a productive use of work place design. The paper highlights specifically how the open, transparent, flexible office solution creates business value when used with centralised and standardised organisational management systems and a participative, informal leadership culture. Research limitations/implications – The study is based on one case, so the findings need to be tested across a representative sample of companies. Practical implications – Managers need to take both organisational and management issues into consideration when implementing new office space design. This challenges also the existing real estate strategies to include the organisational and management issues in their planning. Originality/value – The originality and value of the paper lies in the analysis and findings of the Telenor case introducing organizational and management perspectives to real estate issues.

Leading organisations expect that all business processes, including facilities management (FM), achieve world‐class standards. This paper presents the results of an international, collaborative investigation, on behalf of a UK‐based blue chip company and a member of the Facilities Management Foundation, to identify organisations that are recognised as exemplars of world‐class FM (WCFM) and to understand the processes that underpin world‐class performance. Much FM practice remains cost focused, rooted in operations and concerned primarily with maintaining the steady‐state position of an organisation. In contrast, most authors propose that facilities should be strategically planned, aligned to business needs and demonstrate contribution to achieving explicit business objectives. They argue for a common language and for conditions that ensure that facilities add value to the business. Very little is known about how these conditions are created in different organisational contexts. The paper describes a heuristic study of three cases, selected as exemplars of WCFM, focusing on the underlying processes. Project partners in Australia, Norway and the UK conducted the case studies to a common brief. The paper presents the framework that was created to enable comparison of FM processes in the case studies and a matrix of business drivers and FM outputs that was adapted for the project. The investigation identifies three FM roles ‐ as translator, processor and demonstrator. Facilities management identifies business needs and translates strategy into workplaces, owns the processes of providing those workplaces and demonstrates their impact on organisational outcomes. The paper develops a WCFM framework to provide a management tool for considering and relating FM projects at different levels in an organisation. The study highlights the importance of reframing FM projects as business projects, and concludes that participation at senior management, business unit and individual levels in the organisation is an important factor in obtaining value. The study also highlights the need for effective change management processes continually to adapt the workplace to changing business needs, and shows how FM provides value through sustaining the organisation through business cycles.

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