Culture, Cost, or Compliance - Choose Your Boss Wisely

More thoughts from Amsterdam.

This time I popped into a session hosted by Sally Marshall, joined by Alistair Nisbet from World Courier and Steve Wright from GSK. Titled 'Beyond the Blueprint: Evolving Corporate Real Estate in a Shifting Economic Landscape' I came away completely obsessing with......org charts.

Let me explain.

Midway through the discussion, the conversation looked at in-sourcing vs. outsourcing, and a few different team models were shared. There was a function-driven model built around global delivery. A model based on site type, with different approaches for data centres versus retail spaces. Then there were regional models, and business unit models. The usual suspects. But what struck me was the rationale behind the structures. Not workplace strategy. Not experience design. But finance.

Because in most cases, the way the team was structured was based on how the organisation measured its performance. If your business runs a regional P&L, then costs have to be allocated regionally, so naturally, you structure your teams that way. If you’re a house of brands, like Unilever or P&G, you might align by brand to support cleaner P&L ownership. It makes perfect sense from a financial point of view.

But those financial structures have huge implications for workplace experience.

They influence your ability to scale services, to create consistency, to drive efficiencies, and to offer fair, coherent experiences across the organisation. If every region is left to do its own thing, they’ll likely end up with different vendors, different contracts, different expectations. If one brand offers free coffee and another doesn’t, even though you’re technically the same company, how do you build a cohesive culture? And yet the underlying reason is often buried deep in the financial plumbing of the organisation, in decisions made by people a million miles away from the day-to-day of workplace.

And dare I say it… people who probably aren’t too concerned about the warm, fuzzy stuff. Because it’s hard to put an ROI on culture, experience, or how people feel at work.

But the bit that was really screaming out to me? The dotted line.

In one of the models, there it was: a dotted line connecting the CRE function to other “central services” like Finance and HR. It was Kate Smith from CBRE who picked up on it first and asked the question out loud: was that a reporting line or something else?

The response was that it represented who CRE needed to work with to deliver their model, not who they reported to. But Kate was right to push on it, and she made an important observation. There’s a growing trend of CRE teams sitting under HR.

It’s something I’ve been quietly obsessed with for a while now.

Back when BIFM was transitioning into IWFM, something I was heavily involved in, I started running a very unscientific experiment at every conference I attended. Whenever a speaker opened up for questions, I’d be first to ask: who do you report into? Then I’d compare that to what they’d just spent the last 20 minutes talking about.

And the pattern was crystal clear.

The speakers who focused on square footage, ROI, capex, opex, and cost pressures (all the hard, quantitative stuff) reported into Finance. The ones who talked about experience, culture, productivity, and wellbeing? HR. And those reporting into Procurement? They rarely spoke about outcomes at all. Their focus was typically on process, compliance, and cost reduction, year on year, over and over.

The point is, reporting lines matter. They shape priorities. They influence the language we use, the metrics we chase, and ultimately, the way workplace is valued inside an organisation.

Because that’s the real tell, isn’t it? You can learn an awful lot about a CRE, workplace, or FM team - even what they’re called - just by finding out who they report to.

I remember being invited to speak to a global tech firm that was trying to break into the workplace services space. They’d gathered their sales leads together and asked me to talk about industry trends. But the bit that seemed to land hardest was also the simplest piece of advice I gave them.

I told them, before anything else, ask the client who they report into.

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If it’s Finance, then lead with ROI, cost reduction, capex, opex — the classic business case metrics.
If it’s HR, shift gears. Talk about experience, productivity, wellbeing, culture.

Same service, different lens.

It sounds obvious, but it highlights a really important point. Not all “workplace” teams are the same. The structure shapes the strategy. And if you’re not paying attention to that, you’re going to miss what really matters to the people you’re trying to serve — or sell to.

For my money, if you needed to place workplace somewhere, HR is the better fit. Unless you really want to be bold, then think about the idea of a Chief Workplace Officer.

I first saw the concept mentioned in the Stoddart Review (December 2016), a cross-industry initiative by BIFM that argued workplace and real estate should be understood as performance levers, not just cost centres. Shortly after, Simone Fenton-Jarvis emerged as one of the earliest - if not the first - people to hold that sort of role. Someone explicitly tasked with bringing together functions like HR, IT, and FM/CRE under a single roof. Over the years, I’ve seen the title pop up here and there, though usually in smaller organisations, or with only a partial remit. The full trifecta — HR, Facilities, and IT — still seems rare, especially in large corporates.

But here’s the point: where you locate “workplace thinking” on the org chart has profound impacts. It shapes how the role is managed, what gets measured, and what gets prioritised. Because if your workplace team sits under Finance, you’ll be framed in terms of square footage, cost, and assets. If you sit under HR, you’re more likely to be judged on wellbeing, experience, or retention.

So think wisely before you make that org chart decision. The ripple effects from that move? They’re endless.

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