Shared workspace for public sector workers – What we learned from this project

To reduce CO₂ emissions, the SVB set out to investigate whether it would be possible, safe and desirable to make some of our office space available for use by employees working for other public sector organisations. 

One way to reduce CO₂ emissions is to enable people to work at locations closer to their homes than their usual place of work. Or for them to use more sustainable means of transport. Making shared working space available reduces the total amount of office space required by the participating organisations.

As the real estate strategy first has to be clarified, the pilot has not yet been implemented. We have therefore decided to end this development project. However, restarting it in the future remains an option.

We set out to work with the Chamber of Commerce, which is not a central government body. The Chamber of Commerce has many office premises across the country and was interested in employees’ reasons for wanting to use such locations. We also worked with the Central Government Real Estate Agency (RVB). This agency is a logical partner, both for exchanging knowledge (the agency already operates various central government office hubs) and for establishing where office space is needed and how it can best be provided.

• We learned that the potential demand must be sufficiently high. In other words, no surplus locations. The SVB offices in Utrecht, Leiden and possibly also Nijmegen are of interest to the central government. However, the SVB does not have any spare capacity at these locations. The investigation of these locations was based on how easy they are to reach by bicycle, public transport and car.
• The employees interested in these locations are those whose work involves people from outside their own organisation and so who are used to working with different organisations at various locations. As well as being able to hold meetings at a location, they want to be able to work there individually. In informal discussions, only a few employees said they were interested in using such workspaces as an alternative to working from home.
• Security and access can be arranged through manual checking of identity documents , for example, and network access can be provided via Govroam (various other organisations are already using this) or otherwise via a hotspot.
• The financial models have not yet been investigated. The plan was to lower the bar to participating by conducting an initial pilot not requiring any investments.