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HR managers should stop worrying about office space being empty some of the time and pay a lot more attention to a far more important metric: "the happiness and wellness" of their workforce, according to a leader at EY.

EY's Asia Pacific director of real estate, Dr Paul Luciani, who manages more than 500,000 metres of space housing EY staff in 26 countries, told this week's Spaceful Workplace Summit in Sydney that the concept of "the office" is a hangover from the industrial revolution.

Traditional offices were built to bring thousands of people together to enable them to do assigned tasks, he said. But as industries evolved and automated, there was less need for thousands of people to be sitting under one roof.

"The workplace isn't bricks and mortar anymore. The individual is the new workplace", Luciani said, and the office is a secondary consideration...