Financial impact of alternative workplace strategies Available to Purchase

Alternative workplace strategies cost money to implement. There are benefits to these strategies which, up to a point, justify the investment. After that point, however, more aggressive strategies must be justified through offsetting reductions in facilities costs. At the extreme, organisations can actually implement alternative workplace strategies expressly for the purpose of reducing facilities costs and achieving overall infrastructure cost savings in the process. The US General Services Administration developed the Cost per Person Model in 1999 to help customers measure cost according to a more inclusive workplace definition. The spreadsheet tool was designed to track the overall cost per person of providing facilities, information technology and telecommunications services. The model recognises that alternative work environments are part of the overall cost equation. Also, the Cost per Person Model was designed as a tool for assessing the financial impacts of various alternative workplace strategies. In practice, the costs of aggressive alternative workplace strategies can be offset by reduced facilities costs. This paper summarises the professional use of the model over the first four years of its existence, including several actual case applications. The paper also discusses features of the redesigned version of the model introduced in 2003. Finally, the author suggests that organisations can determine optimal levels of alternative workplace strategy applications, and that additional research and case studies using the Cost per Person Model can help form the basis for an understanding of how today’s organisations provide workplace services in a knowledge‐based work environment.