It's important to understand that there are different reasons for the deceleration of employment growth. Right now, it's really a lack of appropriate candidates, not necessarily a result of slowing demand for business. That's what it makes it so different: the fact that the competition for skills will only get more challenging.

From an HR standpoint, there are a lot of different levers that occupiers can pull. But from a real estate standpoint, there are two clear ways that they can respond to this. Number one, locate where the talent is. Whether you're a large tech firm, a financial services firm looking for skilled tech workers or a financial services firm looking for financial employees, there will be a lot of different markets around the US that can help you satisfy that need. Number two, and perhaps more importantly, create an environment that's going to rival your competition and can showcase your brand, your culture and your values.

Whitley Collins: In the past 18 months, we've had more companies considering major relocations for talent than we saw in the 20 years before that. For the longest time, the talent would go to Seattle to work for Boeing or Amazon. Now, these companies are being proactive; it's really a part of their strategies. In fact, you could argue that labor is the first conversation we're having, followed by the workplace. It's now all about the talent: attracting it, retaining it, making it as productive as possible. The old days of “just build it and we'll attract the talent” are gone. We've had companies flat-out relocate their headquarters after 20 or 30 years because they felt that the existing and future population of talent just wasn't there.

GlobeSt.com: How does occupiers' view of their real estate strategy reflect their overall strategy for attracting and retaining talent?

Collins: We're now into into our third or fourth generation of workplace, and now we're focused on what is the best way for people to work. Thirty years ago, IBM did a gigantic deal into downtown L.A., and over the next two years as they built out that space, they created the laptop and all of a sudden the worker could be anywhere. They sublet all of that space; it was a defining moment in terms of creating the new work environment.

IBM came back recently and said “we need to get our employees back into the space.” We react to wanting the employees to have as much flexibility as possible, because the talent is looking for companies that provide all of these great options—but it's hard to build a culture if everybody is out and about, and they're not in the office.

Whelan: It is about talent, it is about the workplace, but cost efficiency never leaves the table. They're still answering to the C-suite. Eight or 10 years ago, it was all about cost efficiency: getting rid of much space as possible, doing more with less. Now, it's still about doing more with less, but in a cost-neutral to cost-plus mentality, to make sure they're using the capital that they have available to them efficiently. They're taking it away from the things that don't make sense, and they're reinvesting it into the things that are going to drive the creation of a work environment: workplace design, technology, experiences, instead of just focusing on owing the least amount of rent every month.

GlobeSt.com: It sounds as though even as they're offering employees options such as working remotely, employers are seeking to take back some control.

Collins: The gap between what landlords want and what tenants want has been widening for 20 years. Landlords want credit tenants with long-term leases because that helps them to finance their properties. Tenants increasingly can't look out even two years, let alone the 10 or 15 years that landlords want on leases. This is a moment in time where occupiers are saying, “wait a minute, I've got options. Let me try different kinds of space and different kinds of leases.” The concern for landlords is that financing for office buildings has always been around long-term leases. What's happening now is for the financial markets to see that the occupier is not playing ball with the long-term model of this business. We have to look at it differently.

GlobeSt.com: We're hearing a lot about an “agility mandate” in terms of occupiers' real estate strategy. What are some of the effects that the move toward portfolio agility has had on real estate decisions?

Whelan: “Agility” is not a new buzzword. It's been a concept in corporations since the advent of technology, and has always been associated with technology. But increasingly, corporations are understanding that agility has a place in every aspect of their organization. It means being able to rise and respond to the needs of the business as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It's definitely a new concept in real estate, and there are early movers. And those early movers are creating some very cool things in their portfolios. They're doing it because there are things today that have never existed in this space before. The rulebook is being written on all of this right now, and the early movers are the ones that are ultimately going to get huge advantages from it.