What do corporate occupiers want from their workspace? The answer will depend on the occupier, its staff, the industry it operates in and its objectives. But to get an idea of one occupier’s needs Savills spoke to Caroline Lawson, below, Director of Corporate Real Estate at Johnson & Johnson (J&J), the world’s largest and broadest healthcare company.

Founded in 1886, J&J now has more than 130,000 employees across the world who are blending heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity with the aim to keep people well at every age and stage of life.

Caroline has been at J&J since November 2015 and is based in Leiden, Netherlands. She has over 20 years of experience in corporate real estate with a solid knowledge of the financial services and healthcare industries; covering security, resilience, risk, procurement and facility management across multiple countries and legal entities.

Throughout EMEA what would you consider to be your most challenging markets?

The breadth and diversity of the region is definitely a challenge. J&J has operations in 51 countries and each country has its own degrees of complexity.

Each cluster of markets has idiosyncrasies and a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t apply. An in-depth knowledge is key to creating individual real estate strategies to meet the local market’s ability to sustain the business’s needs.

The Near East and Maghreb regions are currently the most challenging due to the opaque nature of the markets. An understanding of local cultures is vital and there is also the language barrier as leases can be in dual languages but rarely English. 

What factors make delivering real estate solutions in your industry sector unique?

The healthcare industry requires a mix of space which makes each solution unique. We have offices, labs, manufacturing, innovation centres and distribution sites. Each individual space might also have further sub categories, such as bio, tech and digital labs.

The challenge is to create innovative and unique solutions that combine all of these into one location and to bring together pharma, medical devices and the consumer businesses into a single space.

J&J has also launched ‘J-Labs’ that provide shared laboratory space for start-ups and scientific collaboration; the London and Beerse Innovation Centres are good examples of this.

How would you rate your industry sector in terms of being a driver of workplace innovation and are there any developing workplace trends that point the way forward?

J&J cannot be referred to as innovators in workplace thinking, but we are following suit and driving hard on workplace innovation and space efficiency. We’ve learned from the early adaptors of workplace innovation and have developed an elaborate, bespoke J&J workplace strategy.

We need to provide variety and flexibility of space across the portfolio and workplace strategy and design guidelines reflect this thinking. Offices no longer have assigned workstations and we aim to make full use of the space available by providing breakout areas, focus rooms and collaboration space.

We interview the teams who will be using the space to find out their needs and carry out test fits following brainstorming sessions and a pre-occupancy employee survey. We also carry out post-occupancy feedback that helps us to evaluate outcomes and improve our processes and designs.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

When I started at J&J four years ago, after 10 years at RBS, I found quite quickly that I needed a better understanding of financial business case modelling and cash flows, and the impact that real estate has on the business P&L.

I’m still positively surprised at how passionate people are about property and how much they engage with everything regarding it.

Caroline Lawson, Director of Corporate Real Estate at Johnson & Johnson

Further information

Contact Savills Occupier Services