NASHVILLE—Tired of hearing how Millennials want social spaces and foosball tables in their work environments? Tough. It's only just begun. And right behind them are the Gamer Generation, expecting, one might suppose, Grand Theft Auto in the break room.

But the changing shape of office, whatever the driver, was front and center here last week at SIOR's Fall World Conference, where Colliers International's Craig Robinson led a discussion hard-charging into the new shape of the office.

In all, the foosball tables and nap rooms, whether those are trappings of a new age or “toys and fads,” as Robinson labeled them, are signs of a market less “focused on the cost of real estate and more focused on value.”

And value means talent, and as Corporate Portfolio Analytics' Martha O'Hara pointed out, corporate users are becoming mobile to find that talent. “You've got to go fishing where the fish are,” she said. Manhattan is a perfect example. Once dominated by the Downtown financial center, the ground zero for talent has now shifted a few quarters of a mile north, to Midtown South and the Big Apple's version of Silicon Valley.

As an aside, O'Hara also noted that corporate users are leaning more to national service providers and one contract in order to find those markets and deal simply with the same brand in each market. Watch out, boutiques.

But not all 30-somethings can afford a deluxe apartment in the sky, and so the migration to secondary cities. “They still prefer the CBD,” said O'Hara, but they can't buy a house or afford a condo in Manhattan, so they pack off to Salt Lake City or Fort Collins.

The trend isn't so much about Millennials specifically, even if that is how we tend to label the trend, but it's really about how people are working today, O'Hara said. “The mantra is less space, but better space.” And the trend is toward polling the user groups within the organization to see how they work best. “It's all about flexibility,” especially since we have more tech tools to enable that flexibility. “The quality of life improves if you can work from home one day out of the week.”

Whatever the drivers of change, you ignore them at your own risk. Even the nature of the conference reflected that. “How much of this session did we discuss vacancy rates or rental rates?” asked Robinson at the end of the session. The answer was, by the way, not at all. Office market sessions at World Conferences are undergoing changes as well. It's a sign of the times.