New offices, same employees: the Mobility Manager in corporate real-estate decisions

A conversation with Mirko Franzoi, Mobility Manager at Nexi and NTT Data and Project Director at MIC-HUB.

Interview by Paolo Barbato with Mirko Franzoi.

A relocation is one of the few moments in which a company redesigns, in a single move, the daily habits of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people.

The decision to sign a new real-estate contract almost always passes through Real Estate, Facilities and the CFO. The population that will have to commute every day to reach that new office, in most cases, is not represented at the table.

The Mobility Manager (MM) is the only figure in the company who has the data, tools and skills to measure what will actually happen the day after the move. Travel times, distribution of employees’ residences, accessibility by local public transport (TPL), per-capita CO2 emissions linked to commuting: these are the ingredients of an impact analysis that, if carried out upstream, changes the real-estate conversation.

Mirko Franzoi is Project Director at MIC-HUB, a Milan-based transport planning company founded in 2010. For Nexi and NTT Data he holds the role of corporate Mobility Manager and has overseen one of the most prominent relocations of recent years in the Milanese context: the transfer of Nexi to the new headquarters in City Life. We talked about it on the occasion of his speech at the Winter School “Travel Demand Management” of the University of Milan-Bicocca.

A real-estate decision is a mobility decision

PB: Mirko, you and I know well that in most Italian companies the Home-Work Travel Plan (PSCL) is experienced as a compliance task to close before the deadline, archived the day after submission to the Municipality. How do you try to break this habit when you arrive at a new client?

MF: The PSCL is the starting point, not the finish line. The company collects data on employee mobility, turns it into a regulatory report, and stops there. That is exactly where the most interesting part of the work is lost. Data serves three purposes, in increasing order of importance: reading and interpreting to measure success and critical issues, monitoring over time because you cannot improve what you do not measure, and finally guiding the company toward informed decisions. Relocation is exactly one of those moments in which informed decisions make the difference.

PB: In concrete terms, what changes when the MM is involved before the signing of a new lease?

MF: It changes the way the location is evaluated. Real Estate looks at rent, square footage, generic infrastructural accessibility. The MM looks at where employees live, how long they take today to get to work, how long they will take with the new office, what the predictable modal split will be, and what emissions impact will result. These are measurable variables, not opinions.

For Nexi we also assessed the accessibility of the offices using the PTAL (Public Transport Accessibility Level, the index adopted by Transport for London to measure the quality of public transport in each cell of territory). The two historical Milan offices, Corso Sempione (1,100 employees) and via Gonin (1,400 employees), present different accessibility levels. The new CityLife office, where about 2,500 people will converge, sits at values comparable to the most accessible areas. It is not a real-estate marketing figure: it is information that translates into travel times, into the choice of mode of transport and, consequently, into emissions.

Rome: a kilometre and a half is enough to change everything

PB: You also analysed a relocation in Rome. There the story is the opposite.

MF: In Rome we followed a relocation in which the office moved from 0.5 km to 2.1 km from Termini Station. It seems like little, but for a population that uses rail public transport to commute from outside the city, those kilometres are the difference between “I get off the train and in ten minutes I’m at the office” and “I get off the train, I walk or take another mode, and it takes me twenty-five”.

The numbers confirm it. The average travel time for those using TPL goes from 57 to 65 minutes (+14%). For those using the car, from 33 to 41 minutes (+24%), because the new area is less served by access roads. The same for motorbikes: from 27 to 33 minutes (+22%).

PB: And the effects on behaviour?

MF: 35% of employees declared that, in light of the relocation, they would change their mode of transport. The most relevant figure concerns the direction of the change: the simulation produces a +8% of private car users. It is a clear indication of how much the location of the office directly conditions modal split: with the same corporate population, it is the accessibility context that drives mobility choices.

In the absence of targeted interventions, relocation can therefore shift the balance toward less sustainable modes. An effect that diverges from the typical objectives of the PSCL, and that makes even more evident the need to accompany the move with adequate measures.

These numbers, produced before the signing, are the tool to reopen the conversation. Not to stop the relocation, because the real-estate criteria remain legitimate. But to insert into the post-move plan the mitigation measures that are needed: modal integration at the entrance of the new office, subsidised TPL passes, support for carpooling for those coming from peripheral catchment areas, smart working calibrated on the worst-accessibility areas.

Same company, same city, two mobilities

PB: Going back to Milan, the comparison between Sempione and Gonin for Nexi is particularly telling. Same company, same employee population by profile, two different positions. What do the data say?

MF: They tell us that location, on its own, shifts the modal split by tens of percentage points. Sempione has 39% TPL and 17% multimodal, against 31% and 9% at Gonin. The private car share at Gonin is 47%, at Sempione 21%. Overall, Sempione shows a higher incidence (27%) of sustainable modes. With the same corporate policy, it is therefore the territorial context of accessibility and infrastructure that determines significant differences in mobility behaviour.

The effect translates directly into emissions. Per-capita emissions linked to commuting are 717 kg CO2 per year at Gonin and 417 kg CO2 per year at Sempione. The difference, -41%, derives from two factors: the share of cars (55% at Gonin against 27% at Sempione) and the average length of trips (30 km at Gonin against 25 km at Sempione).

PB: For the new City Life office you produced an impact forecast. How is it built?

MF: You start from the data we already have: who the employees are, where they live, how they move today. You apply the accessibility model of the new office, you estimate the expected modal shift, calibrated on the patterns observed in the most accessible offices. You calculate the resulting emissions impact.

Our estimate for Nexi at City Life is a 20% reduction in emissions linked to home-work commuting, equal to 283 tonnes of CO2 saved each year. The target is not an act of faith: it is a projection built starting from the behaviours observed in the various existing offices, and represents a balance point between contexts with different accessibility levels.

After the signing, the work begins

PB: Pre-relocation analysis is only half the work. The other half is understanding whether the forecasts came true.

MF: Exactly. For the Milan offices of Nexi we have been monitoring the modal split since 2021. Over the years the share of sustainable modes has grown unevenly: Sempione +15%, Gonin +10%, Livraghi +11%. Without a time series, any conclusion about what is working is an opinion.

It also applies to expensive choices. In another project we monitored a corporate shuttle service: 16 runs a day, €24 per run, €97,000 a year. The first six months of operation showed that 21% of runs departed with zero passengers and 44% with fewer than two. It is a figure that, once read, forces you to redesign the service. After the reorganisation we dropped to 8% of empty runs and 18% below two passengers. Without the monitoring, that service would have stayed in place as it was, burning budget that could have been better spent.

PB: One last point: corporate data alone often risks being self-referential.

MF: It is very important to always compare them with the reference context. For Nexi, employees who live and work inside Milan use the car for 30% of their trips. The 2024 Milan PUMS (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan) average, on the same type of trip, is 29%. We are aligned. But on TPL use Nexi is at -8% compared to the city average. This is a clear point of work, on which we plan to improve also through the relocation.

On exchange flows (residents outside Milan who come to work in the city) Nexi is instead at +6% on TPL compared to the PUMS. It means that people coming from outside use more public transport than the average: probably because the current offices are in positions that facilitate arrival by train.

Without the PUMS benchmark, I would be forced to say “we are improving” or “we are not improving”. With the benchmark I can say where we are above the city average, where we are below, and which levers to act on.

Mirko Franzoi’s experience brings into focus a principle that we would like to see more often in corporate mobility plans: relocation is a mobility decision as much as a real-estate decision. The average employee spends more time at the company than in any other place, and commuting is the frame that makes that time sustainable or unsustainable, on the economic, environmental and personal level.

The idea that the Mobility Manager should be involved downstream of the signing, perhaps to “communicate the change” to employees, is the minimalist version of a figure who instead has the tools to model the impact. PTAL, accessibility isochrones, estimated modal split, projected per-capita emissions: all data that can be produced before choosing the office, not after. The Nexi case shows what it means to do the work well (City Life is a choice that improves the mobility of the corporate population and cuts 283 tonnes of CO2 per year).

The cultural leap, for many companies, is to admit that the balance sheet of a relocation does not close at the rent. It closes on the kilometres travelled, on the minutes lost, on the modes of transport that change and on the emissions that result. The PSCL, if used as a planning tool and not as a compliance task, is the natural home of this balance sheet.

When the Mobility Manager is involved upstream of a real-estate choice, the office stops being just a cost variable. It becomes a variable of sustainability and employee well-being, with verifiable numbers to support it. It is the level at which this work deserves to be brought.