Restructuring a Team at Jones Lang Lasalle - Case Study Example

JLL Name of Student Institution affiliation JLL Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) like any other company in the globe, is increasing its demand for smart growth and demand for maximum productivity- a deviation from the focus on cost control that is accompanied by 36 months of turbulence in the operating environment of the corporates. The influences that are coming from the outside environment, the globe, are changing the way corporate real estate operates (JLL & Melbourne, 200). The leaders in the corporate real estate are now being forced to diversify their teams and be real business partners. The challenges that corporate real estate organizations are facing (JLL included), are forcing them to restructure themselves so that they can operate in complex environments more effectively. The organizations are highly turning to vendor partnership as a way of empowering themselves to attain greater corporate value. Also, the workplace is now an opportunity to attract and retain talents with an aim of improving sustainability and productivity. As a result, this paper is about the future direction, challenges and opportunities that JLL senior managers are facing in their quest to deliver performance, and will focus on six social trends that will shape the future of JLL and the industry in the pacific Asia (Miller et al., 2006). First, according to 2011 global corporate real estate survey, it was found out that crisis gives birth to opportunities. JLL is facing many challenges which include high demands on productivity, right sizing and balancing of dual forces of growth, progressing towards partnerships, and reshaping its structure and skills. Consequently, to meet the high productivity demands, the JLL should be relevant, resourceful, and supportive to allow the managers to enhance productivity and efficiency in the company. Likewise, the organization should be exposed to complex targets like dealing with the right sizing and pressure f growth to balance the forces of growth (JLL, 2006). Besides, the teams in the organization should be focused to move in the direction of the sophisticated model so that the progress towards partnership turns to be a success. Moreover, the JLL managers should reshape the structure of the organization because tougher operational environments are breeding new talents, hence the managers should rethink skills and team strictures. There are five key factors to the success of JLL. First the organization needs to develop a long term plan for the evolution of the teams and that which facilitates and supports a vast business growth. Secondly, the managers should ensure that they focus on the real estate strategies that are known to be highly efficient and drive them to improved productivity, and align the organization with the highest business goals. Thirdly, the managers should accept and embrace the fact that partners and leverage service providers will give them the ability to tackle twin right sizing pressure and increase the production capacity of the company, while pursuing selective growth. Fourth, the managers should focus on the restructure of the teams to push for the strategic agenda and to respond to the rising scrutiny of the senior leaders in the business. Lastly, the managers should ensure that they focus on talents because it is through talent that the organization function will be suited to manage and engage the high expectations of the C-suite (RICS & JLL, 2011). The second social factor that JLL managers should ensure to enhance the performance of the company is the attraction and the inspiration of the coming generation of talents. To be successful on this aspect, the managers should apply the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to see productivity increase in the workplace. With the continual globalization of business, employees entering the market place have unique expectations and working styles. The technological advancements are making it difficult to anticipatethe future, and are helping in the cost reduction despite inducing pressure, support employees balance and work-life, improvesustainability, and are trying to do away with the traditional office (JLL & SSE Renewable, 2012). Besides, the talent risk is big due to a high rate of aging populations in developed nations, increasing demand for workers with unique and rare combination of knowledge and technical skills, and even levels of skills in the emerging markets. JLL faces a specific risk because of the speedy growth in the region and the high completion of the upcoming talents coming with the Asian companies in the foreign markets. As a result, as the JLL managers are striving to embrace the real estate models of the next-generation, it is vital that they understand the new workplace features and its impacts on how employees work to give what the organization requires to succeed. Hence the mangers should support the basic needs to enabling creativity, motivation, and innovation (JLL et al., 2004). The basic needs van only be attained through the pyramid approach, a motivational needs developed by Abraham Maslow. The managers can embrace the four-level pyramid from bottom to top to analyze the needs. Psychological, safety, attraction or sense of belonging, and self-actualization are the key needs for workers which the JLL managers should ensure that are met in the workplace. However, most organizations only focus on the bottom factors and ted to ignore the top factors. Consequently, JLL managers should focus too on the top factors to see the organization thrive in the desired direction. This can only be achieved through providing the right tools and environment that creates a productive workplace. Also, the managers should be anthropologist to have a deep understanding of the worker’s voice and the variations that are present in different groups. Moreover, the manager should understand the influence of workplace on location and vice versa, while focusing on matching jobs with workers. Lastly, the senior leadership should be engaged since the achievements in a workplace program rely on the ability of C-suite to push these concepts in the organization (JLL, 2003). The third factor is brace for impact which shows how skill and behavioral changes for the managers are derived from the global lease accounting changes. More than 70 % of managers are unaware of the changes required of them, hence not prepared and ready for the changes. As a result, the managers are supposed to be prepared for the impact changes through three different areas. First, the managers need to acquire basic accounting knowledge since the understanding articulating of the accounting knowledge is predicted to be the biggest challenges the managers will face in the future. Also, the managers should consider centralization since the prediction shows that centralization will be a big obstacle to the centralization trend. Lastly, the managers should manage the portfolio strategically since it is through this that they will be in a position to anticipate the future business needs and have an insight on the real cost of flexibility. Therefore, following the proposed changes, the JLL managers will be required to at least add efforts towards strategic planning like stock price and covenants; viability of leasing versus buying; and real cost of flexibilities. Also, because there is no certainty on how planning process will be complex unless the final standards are presented, executives should reconsider rethink their present planning process and ensure that they are truly strategic and robust because a big success depends only if they are done in the desired right manner (JLL &Estates Gazette Limited, 2004). The fourth aspect is that the managers should ensure that the organization goes green to improve its productivity. At the moment, employee productivity focuses on the corporate sustainability programs and health, with many organizations promising an extra pay for a green leased space. A global survey on the executives who are responsible for the portfolios of real estate shows that managers value sustainability. Many executives are currently shifting to green building which helps their organizations sustainable while they as well protect the environment in which they operate. Sustainability is the backbone of employee’s ell-being, employee’s heath, and productivity of any organization. As a result, the JLL managers should embrace sustainability and go green because it is through these that they will be in a position to go green, ensure the health, safety, and well-being of their workers so as to ensure that they drive the company towards the required direction (Gulati, 2009). The fifth social factor that JLL managers need to embrace is the partnership with other organizations in the pacific Asia to enable them deal with the dual forces of business growth and cost control. JLL presents the twin forces to its managers hence lowering the occupancy expenses while making the JLL portfolio to very responsive to the dynamic working environment. Because the traditional approach of portfolio management focuses on the tactical execution, it cannot be used to meet opposing goals. As a result, managers need to embrace strategic relationship management with capital planning, business units; portfolio strategy and management which are the elements valued most by the C-suite (Dixon et al., 2000). The Asia pacific region possess many challenges to JLL because of the geographical scale and the mixture of frontier, emerging, and mature markets which make the managers find it difficult to form partnerships which work successfully. However, there are six different models cutting across from the traditional to the modern specialized models which are unique to the corporate real estate and used by the service based industries. For many organizations, partnership is a journey-line which; and depending on their complexity, maturity, geographic footprint and culture, organizations freely move back and forth in the spectrum. Whereas there are many characteristics through which the models can be analyzed and compared, there are five key aspects which determine the depth of partnership. These factors are: the alignment degree of the vendor and the client organization; degree of leverage gained by the client organization; levels of trust; value creation; and levels of the strategic engagement. Just like any other models, the models are subject to strengths and weaknesses. As the partnerships mature, the managers should opt for partnerships and alliances which require less supervision and less technical oversight (Campana et al., 2012). The sixth social aspect that JLL managers have to put into consideration is the radical up-skilling of the executives in the corporate real estate executives. The role of the executive has turned out to be dynamic and uncertain. As a result, the C-suite has turned out to be of more diverse and higher expectations that involve converting the corporate real estate managers to multi-skilled professionals. As a consequence, the managers will have to adopt the new ways of working because of the high expectations and the complex operating environment. The fact that the operating environment ids highly changing, the direct influence that corporate real estate managers have, should not be ignored by the future managers (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2002). The current managers are faced with challenges like diversity; rapid technological change that causes uncertainty in the future of the organizations; recruiting and retaining new talents who will embrace the dynamic and globalization nature of the business; sustainability and green building technology to conserve the environment; sophisticated technologies; and workplace agenda and sustainability are driving managers to change their working ways in order to drive the company to the success and performance needed by the stale holders. The environment possesses the biggest challenge to the JLL managers because of the complexity and max in the markets. Therefore, managers need to respond well to the environmental change and needs and pay attention to the language their leaders use in order to ensure that JLL is outstanding in performing and maintaining its position in the industry if not improving (Chikolwa, 2008). Lastly, the seventh and one of the most critical social factors that JLL managers can ensure the company outshines its competitors in the industry is through design which involves reshaping the corporate real estate function for greater impacts. The biggest challenge to corporate real estate managers are subjected to is the support of exclusively complex aspects of corporate initiatives. These initiatives include sustainability, global expansion and contraction, speed-to-market, winning the talent war and enhancing the efficiency of operations. With the challenges posed to them, it is the mandate of the managers to engineeran optimal team structure that consists of all the aspects necessary for the desired performance. Other that improved performance, a correctly engineered team structure lowers the operation cost and improves the alignment of the business. The managers are also required to adapt the skills used by their teams to meet the changing demands and requirements. The value addition to an organization is alluring and it can only be achieved through different methods (Chikolwa& CUT, 2008). The first method moving towards the strategic future under the influence of the growing realization among the corporate real estate leaders, dynamic microeconomic conditions, and continued globalization of businesses. The evolution is subject to many ways together with many business influencers and change leaders. The evolution to be successful needs fundamental assessment of skills, roles, and structures of the teams. Secondly, managers need to choose the right model where by business alignment is core because without it the structure cannot be effective. Besides the business alignment, the size and skill of the team needed are determined by the target and objectives of the leadership, portfolio complexity in terms type of property ownership, the components of the main business, the number and input of stakeholders in the decisions of the organization, the mandate to outsource and remit a partner, and the level of management of the partners (Tsolacos, 2002). There are four models which JLL managers should employ to ensure success through design. First is the functional model which promotes autonomy, and based on the function of real estate and involves reporting to the global leader. The geographical model on the other hand permits the global leaders to communicate and liaise with the local business and the service providers on the ground. The process model in its capacity is responsible for structure of the teams in the company and the transformational processes that match the activities of a real estate life cycle. The managers therefore are answerable to the top leadership. Besides, the market/customer model ensures that the relationship managers are assigned the business units and are answerable to the organizational leaders. It is the mandate of the business leader to manage tactical and strategic services (Chikolwa B. &Chikolwa C., 2008). To sum up, restructuring a team is a complex and challenging process that JLL managers are subjected to. However, the benefits that come with it are cannot be underestimated or its potential is overlooked. The JLL managers need to choose the correct structure size, personnel, time, and the working environment of the team. It is only through satisfaction of workers where the managers can record an improved performance and remain competitive in the industry. Also the managers should recruit and nature talents who have a combination of unique skills which can drive the organization t the desired direction despite the dynamic nature of the business environment. By so doing, JLL will be a vehicle of excellent performance in the industry. References Campana, L., Kalsi, S., & Williams, D. (2012). Understanding Private Real Estate. London: PEI Media Ltd. Chikolwa, B. C., & Chikolwa, Bwembya C. (2008). Development and structuring of commercial mortgage-backed securities in Australia. Curtin University of Technology, Curtin Business School, School of Economics and Finance. Chikolwa, B. C., & Curtin University of Technology. (2008). Development and structuring of commercial mortgage-backed securities in Australia. Chikolwa, Bwembya C. (2008). Development and structuring of commercial mortgage-backed securities in Australia. Curtin University of Technology, Curtin Business School, School of Economics and Finance. Dixon, T. J., Jones Lang LaSalle Educational Trust., & College of Estate Management (Reading, England). (2000). Occupational futures?: Real estate refinancing and restructuring. Whiteknights, Reading: College of Estate Management. 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Sacramento Municipal Utility District, California Institute for Energy Efficiency, California Energy Commission. Public Interest Research Program (US). (2002). Early evaluation of a second generation information monitoring and diagnostic system. Berkeley, Calif: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Miller, N. G., Weinstein, M., Appraisal Institute (U.S.), National Association of Industrial and Office Properties., CoStar Group., CCIM Institute., & Pension Real Estate Association. (2006). Commercial real estate career education and resource guide. North Palm Beach, Fl: The Hoyt Institute of Real Estate. Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors., & Jones Lang LaSalle (Firm). (2011). Real estate and construction professionals in India by 2020: A demand and supply assessment of specialized skill-sets in built environment. London: Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Tsolacos, S. (February 01, 2002). The information content of the yield curve for predicting property performance. 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