Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Are the changes we’re seeing to the workplace cyclical, or are we seeing something completely new?
• How can landlords best serve and attract tenants in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the future of work?
• The power has shifted to the people—a smart landlord will start to work with their tenants to create flexibility.
• What should a company do if they have their hands tied with a long-term lease and very little demand for space?
• It may still be too early to be making significant decisions about shedding excess office space.
• How do you manage space with varying compliance rates, inconsistent office use, and day-to-day fluctuations?
• There are patterns to be found—for example, someone’s distance from work correlates with how compliant they are with coming into the office.
• Can the physical workspace compete with the digital workspace?
• Where do you focus to get the best out of employees – what the individuals want, or what is best for the team?
• Coworking has at least one advantage over offices—they provide a space to learn, connect, and network with people you otherwise would not have met.
• At what point does it become more economical to move to a coworking space?

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn – Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix
• Steve Todd on LinkedIn – Global Head of Workplace at Nasdaq
• Open Sourced Workplace – Community for business owners and workplace professionals to share information, knowledge, insights, and experiences to maximize workplace productivity and employee experience.
• IWG – Global leader in hybrid working
• Liquidspace – Hybrid workspace solutions provider

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

This week, help me welcome my special guest, Steve Todd from NASDAQ. Steve is also the founder of Open Sourced Workplace, a community for business owners and workplace professionals seeking to share knowledge, insights, and experience about work.

Welcome, Steve! I’m very excited to have you on our podcast this week! Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Steve

First, many thanks for having me on, Sandra. I appreciate the invitation and the opportunity to chat with you. My name’s Steve Todd, I’m Global Head of Workplace at Nasdaq. By way of background, I grew up in Belfast, in Northern Ireland. I spent some time in the UK before moving to the US. My background is all finance, and I moved to Nasdaq in 2011, so a little over 11 years ago, as a CFO responsible for basically managing various businesses.

I got an appetite for real estate though, because that’s one of the areas we looked at and managed, and in 2015 I got the opportunity to move into real estate. In 2016 I led a workplace strategy project within the organization that changed my whole perspective, my trajectory, and where I wanted to spend my time and energy. Listening and hearing and responding to employees’ needs was something that just drew me in. I know many people in our industry feel the same way. The ability to help people and serve other people is what really dragged me into this workplace space, and really understanding what is it that employees need to be their best. Why is it that on day 1 they go into an organization and have all this energy, and yet over time, most of the time that energy gets eroded? How do we reinvigorate that? That’s where my passion grew for workplace.

I also manage the leasing aspect of Nasdaq, so I’m responsible for the portfolio. What that means is connecting the portfolio to the workplace design and data, and really understanding the businesses that operate in each office. What do the people there actually do fundamentally, what are their tasks? And how do you then design for those tasks, for people to be successful? Knitting all those together is the bit that I really love. So that’s a bit about me!

Outside of work I love soccer, I’m a big Manchester United fan for my sins, who’re doing really badly at the moment, but that’s just how it goes! I love cycling, running, and travelling, and I’m sure we’ll touch a little bit on that through the conversation.

Sandra

Great! So, you’ve been with Nasdaq for a long time. Were you there when we had the market crash back in 2008, 2009?

Steve

I was not, I started in 2011. At that time, I was working for the Associated Press, that’s when the whole media industry went through a really rough time.

Sandra

But still, even being in this industry and having a focus on real estate for 11 years, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of changes. Would you say that it’s cyclical, or are we seeing something now that we’ve never seen before?

Steve

That’s a question I ask myself, and it’s a great question. I talk to my peers and I speak to my brokers—brokers are forever optimists, unless they’re selling. If you’re selling, it’s a terrible market. But I do find it is very cyclical.

I also look at this as a pendulum. There are times when the landlords have the power and there are times when the tenants have the power. At this moment in time, the tenants have the power. That said, that’s diminished power. I think it’s almost at the point where both parties are kind of suffering. Unless you’re buying real estate, only then do you have the ability to drive good deals at the moment. The challenge is, who knows what the real estate needs are for organizations at this time, given how we look at the future of work, how people are going to return to the office. So, there are challenges on both sides.

I almost think it’s a partnership at the moment. It’s about working with your landlords to really understand what the need are for both sides, so it is an equitable arrangement. I have a lot of friends who operate and run real estate companies and we often talk about these things and these times and actually how both parties benefit whenever we’re mutually looking after each other and striving for the same things. People don’t have short memories and we have to ensure what we do is collectively the right thing.

Sandra

I would agree with that. I’ve seen something a little different as well in some conversations with people in our industry around how we think of the customer. So, if you think of the landlord, obviously the tenant is their customer. But the one piece that I think has never really been truly considered is the people in all of this. You’re either the owner/operator of a building, or you’re the tenant/occupier of a building. But the tenant/occupier has very little power, when there’s no demand. And the demand comes from the customer, which is ultimately the employee.

I think that’s something that we haven’t seen before, where the power is shifted completely over to the people. Companies are mandating people to come back to the office 2, 3 days a week, but people have different plans. They’re not complying with these demands, these mandates. And therefore, what is the tenant to do? What is the landlord to do? You can’t really control what people are ultimately going to do, and we’ve seen that with the attempted mandates and how people are actually responding. Has that been the same experience for you?

Steve

Yes, I wanted to touch on that because that’s a really important insight you’ve shared. What I’ve learned from the smart landlords is, one: they’re working with their tenants. Two: they’re putting improved infrastructure into their buildings. And by infrastructure, I don’t mean air quality, I mean amenities into their buildings. They’re taking that excess space and creating flexible space for their tenants. What they’re trying to do is almost create a package that’s more than just a building you’re renting from a landlord. You’re actually looking at a holistic approach to what is, to your point, useful for employees. That provides their tenants flexibility so if things don’t quite work out the way they planned, maybe there’s excess space or there’s not enough, there is that flexibility within the buildings. I think that’s what the really smart landlords are doing at the moment.

Sandra

I’ve heard that as well. That raises an interesting angle to the discussions that are at play these days—when we think about these attempts of landlords to try to work with the tenants to create flexibility, who’s paying for the furniture, fixturing and equipment in those scenarios? The tenant or landlord?

Steve

Another interesting question. At Nasdaq, we like to be the ones that own the relationship with whatever we’re buying. That’s how we like to operate. That’s the way we run, that’s the way our own internal processes are run, and that’s the way we do it. That said, I know other companies that are putting that on the landlord at the moment. Again, smart landlords are actually creating these suites that are already purpose-built so if tenants need to move quickly, the suites are already built out. We’ve been in a position to be able to benefit from that from a couple of our landlords, and it’s a really low-cost way to transition to a new space. This is where the landlord’s investing in their space, creating these flexible units so that if a tenant wants to move in for a longer- or shorter-term lease than is available to them, they can. But as I said, from a Nasdaq perspective, we like to own the relationship, be it with a construction company, be it with a furniture manufacturer: we own that relationship.

Sandra

Let’s say you’re in a situation where you’re creating these types of spaces—is Nasdaq also looking to share some of those spaces? If you’re creating efficiencies by reducing the amount of space or consolidating the space for the employees, is there a portion of your portfolio that you’re opening up to other organizations to use? Or is it still exclusively Nasdaq space?

Steve

There will be areas that we may partition off and sublease to third parties, but they wouldn’t have access to Nasdaq space. Given the type of company we are, with SEC guidelines etc. etc., there are certain things that we have to protect. And therefore, we wouldn’t allow other companies to come in and work in our space with our employees due to those regulations.

Sandra

I see. My next other question, because I get asked this question a lot, is: because of your CFO background, what would you suggest a company do with a long term lease you’re committed to, and there’s very little demand for space, but your hands are tied because you can’t get out of the lease. What should they do in that situation?

Steve

It’s a good question! It’s a tough question. And ultimately, it comes down to what your landlord’s position is. There are many landlords out there, and it all depends on when you signed your lease. If you signed a lease in San Francisco a couple years ago, you’re really going to struggle to find a landlord who’s prepared to work with you. It’s going to be a tough time to sublease space in San Francisco given what the current rates are. I think it is going to be really tough to offload space, unless you have created a workplace that is almost best in class. And when I say best in class, I mean: a potential subtenant looks at this space and knows they can simply move in immediately and work. That’s going to be attractive.

If you’ve got a space that you’ve built out ten years ago, and you’re still under the conditions of a longer-term lease, it’s going to be a challenge. I know because I’ve taken advantage of those situations as well where we’ve looked at a space, it’s been beautifully built out, it looks like a Nasdaq space, and we’ve subleased it, and the appeal of that is all I have to do is run in my technical infrastructure, connect the servers, and we’re good to go. That’s what’s attractive and those are going to be the types of subleases that people are prepared to pay for. Other ones, where I have to invest in space, there’s not a lot of appetite.

There’s going to be real estate that is going to come to the market and whether that comes to the market in 6 months or 12 months, I do believe there’s going to be an avalanche of space in the sublease market, and I think it’s going to be in larger cities. It’ll be a tough time ahead.

Sandra

I have the same feeling, it’s interesting because it almost feels like we’re in limbo right now. And to some extent, it also feels like companies are hopeful, maybe, or they believe that something is going to change and that there is going to be this return to the office. The date keeps getting pushed—it started out before Christmas or last year, every 3 or 6 months, something would happen and we’d push the date out another few weeks or months. And here we are now, it’s almost June, and we’re still doing that. We can’t say that the pandemic is over, we’ve just adapted and have learned to live with it, and all the implications that are still part of day-to-day living.

But the data is showing very clearly, although even if it’s just for the last 3 months where there was some expectation for return, that we were going to see greater numbers. And we’re not seeing that. In our world, we obviously are inside organizations, we’re tracking occupancy, utilization, dwell time, churn, at the seat level, we can observe badging data, we look at booking data, so even if we’re not looking at people physically in the office, what is the intent? We rarely see organizations that are exceeding 30%. That seems to be the norm, and that has been the case since January. There’s been a couple of dips here and there, but generally speaking, it’s around that mark.

I think the key is, there certainly was an uptake between February and March till now. There’s been a significant increase. But considering we’re at maybe 5 or 10% before January and the fact that we’re still at 30, 35% in comparison to where we were before, there’s still a ways to go.

There’s this feeling that when you talk to people that they’re hesitant about giving up space because what if people do come back? What if things change? What if we have a need for space? Then getting space is going to be more difficult because things might change. So, you just kind of hold and deal with the situation. But I just find it really fascinating that there’s this hesitation on making a change.

Some say, and I agree, that it’s too early to make significant decisions. It’s more of a learning opportunity to look at your data, explore what your people want, all of that, and really understand where or how space will fit into your organization and how you want space to fit into organization. But you have to balance that with what we were saying, about how it’s no longer about what the leadership wants. People are behaving in a completely different way than what leadership wants.

I think all of those factors play into the role of space, going forward. Even as we talk about repurposing of space, I’ve heard this comment many times. Even just this morning I posted something on LinkedIn about this need to repurpose space to meet new demand. Well, what’s the demand? It’s quantifying what is that demand for space.

Steve

And if we take your last question, we take what you’ve just said and bring those two together—it’s a really interesting dynamic that people have to solve for. First, I don’t know why people are surprised there’s only 30%—when whoever was supposed to be in the office 5 days a week, we were averaging 60, 65%. So cut that in half, that means there’s compliance consistent with where we were before. So what do you do with that, if you’ve got this long-term lease and this is what you’re looking for, or there’s an opportunity where you have a lease renewal coming up? And to your point, organizations are a little scared to cut their real estate in this off-chance that people do come back later.

Obviously the approach is difficult, and many landlords are not taking the opportunity to take short term contractions or terminations or early terminations, because there isn’t a market to take up that space. Where you have renewals, this is where you can build in optionality. Optionality with whether it’s a short-term renewal, whether it’s the ability to build in contraction rights within a lease renewal to take advantage of the current market rates. There are many ways to take advantage of that that gives leadership assurances that actually, we’re building for the upside but also protecting ourselves from the downside.

That’s where I think leadership would like to be in a sense, if they’re not ready to make a commitment one way or the other. When you were talking about data, that’s absolutely what I’m seeing. What I’m mostly seeing as well, as I’m sure you are, is the fluctuations day-to-day. Lack of consistency is what really makes it a challenge to manage and plan ahead.

What I’ve seen also within the organization and across the globe is different compliance under different structures in different cultures. A real example is, our biggest office is in Sweden and the Swedes are fantastic at following instructions. They will challenge, push back, and they will debate to the end, why something is the way it is. And then everyone agrees, and everyone follows. So there, we have teams coming in 2 days a week, and if you look over the course of each week, it’s consistent, the compliance. And really, what we’re seeing is, there’s 80% utilization of that population is coming to the office for the 2 days, 4 days a week.

Other locations where perhaps there isn’t the same compliance, different cultures, where basically nothing’s said—I’m talking about us British folks and how we like to be. We listen, nod our heads, say, “sounds good”, and then we don’t go, we don’t comply, and we see that basically utilization goes up and down. That’s a headache for leadership, and it’s a headache for my peers who are trying to manage these things. How do you plan for this when there are these huge fluctuations?

And we’re looking at the economy at the moment, at how much real estate costs for organizations. As we start to move into the economy, we start to think about what do the next 12, 18, 24 months look like in this economy? We have this huge asset that costs a lot of money, a lot of cash is being drained, and actually, what’s the ROI on that asset for the organization? How do we free up that cash flow, or how do we free up that asset to fund other things so that business doesn’t get hurt from investment in innovation and development. How does leadership manage those things as well? I think that’s something we have to think about too.

Sandra

That’s really interesting, I think the inconsistent behaviour is definitely the new problem, we’re certainly seeing it in our data since the onset of the pandemic. The false starts—people start to come back, it starts to look positive, you’re expecting it to continue to climb and then it tanks and then you say oh, why did that happen? And then it starts again, and it tanks again. You get a sort of zig zag pattern in your data.

I think from a planning perspective, the traditional mindset of how you look at the data has to change. I was talking to someone on my team this morning about the occupancy metric. Everybody loves the occupancy metric, it tells you so many different things depending on what source you’re using. If you’re using badging data for example, it gives you an idea roughly of how many people are in your building or on your floor, if you have floor-level badging. If you’re using booking data, again, you’re getting intentional data. It doesn’t mean that people are actually in the office, but at least you get a sense of roughly how many people you’re expecting to come in. if you’re looking at sensor data or people-counter data of some kind, depending on what you’re measuring, it could be how many bums in seats? You can get right down to that level. Occupancy data, from a percentage point of view or a count point of view, is more of a traditional way of looking at things.

Then you move towards organizations mandating a certain number of days in, well, guess what? Your occupancy data can be converted into what is your actual number of days of use of space? Again, whether it’s at the building level or at the space level, or even what the sharing ratio might be, based on how your space is performing today.

But there are other things as well, in the sense of other metrics. Before we pressed record, we were talking about understanding people. For example, there’s commute. When you just look at the data within the 4 walls of your office, you can only go so far. And what we found at Relogix is the value of blending these various data sources together to try to understand the correlation between someone’s commute and how often they use office space.

That suddenly opens up a whole new door because you start to see patterns. Inasmuch as people say well, you don’t want to create personas based on age or tenure or job functions, which is true, but when you look at it at a more general level, you definitely see patterns. Where people live, for example, is a prime example. If you live close to the office, you tend to use the office more than if you live in the suburbs. You don’t come in as often. That’s common across all organizations when you look at their data that way. Especially now, with the impact of COVID. That was true before, but it’s become even more visible now, across most organizations. And so, it’s really interesting when you start to look at these complimentary data sources and the bridge between corporate real estate planning and workforce planning. Because workforce planning is very much part of all of that.

Are you and your team seeing that at Nasdaq as well? How much do you work with your people analytics or HR team?

Steve

Not as much as I’d love to. And that’s not because they’re not open to it. They certainly are. It’s more of bringing the two systems together to be able to talk to each other. I love where you’re going in that thread, because the other question that goes through my head based on what you just said about workforce planning and commute to the office is: I’d be curious to know, how does that commute time transfer into turnover within the organization? So an individual who makes a decision to move out of the city where they’re actually able to go and be at the office, how does that impact their actual longevity at the organization? How does that impact their growth within the organization? How does it impact the connections they have within the organization?

I don’t know if you have the ability to pull all of this data, to understand it at the moment, it’d be fascinating to hear more if you do. Because I think these are really important things that organizations want to understand. But I also think employees, individuals, should know this. I know we talked a lot before when I lived in a city, I was in the office 5 days a week. The thought of working from home was a no way. I moved to a 90-minute commute and going into the office 5 days a week was a no way. That’d be too much! For my own self, my own energy levels, my own performance, I just couldn’t do it. So, these are different things I think we’re going to learn in time. I’m not in a position to be able to calculate that at the moment, but it’s absolutely something I’m fascinated by.

And really, if you’re able to take all that and you’re able to bring in salesforce data, how does it impact sales? How does it impact the amount of calls people make? There is this view that if all the salespeople are together in a room, they actually make more calls—is that anecdotal or is it real evidence? I know BCD (Business Development Bank of Canada) did a study on call centers and they found that whenever people were given their breaks together, team performance went up.  On their breaks, they all talked about their last call, so they’re all learning from each other. It’s a fascinating study. I’m curious, from a sales perspective, if the same thing happens. I don’t know if you have access to any of that information or insight on that.

Sandra

Not Salesforce, but I have personally done projects in the past to correlate people analytics type data. And again, you’re sort of at the mercy of what HR is willing to share with you, because there’s highly confidential information. But the thinking was always along the same lines, there were theories for example that people whose managers were located in the same geographic area were more productive than the people whose managers were located elsewhere. Well guess what, that’s not really true. These theories start to evolve because it’s what people think or believe, but when you actually look at the data and try to support that you say ok, we know what the annual review score is, we know where the manager is located because you can pull that from HRIS, and you have occupancy data that tells you whether the manager and the person are in the office at the same time, you can piece those together and very quickly start to prove that well, no, that’s not really true.

It kind of changes the whole approach to how you think about space and how you think about the need for space, more particularly, when you start to understand the team environment, but you understand the attributes of people that are really at the heart of the team.

We hear the same thing for example around collaboration. You’ve probably heard it time and time again, the value of collaboration and face-to-face and all of that. And when you look at generational differences, it’s not even so much the generational differences but just the technology that’s evolving. We have tech now at our disposal, does it matter that you and I are talking this way or in a room talking together? We’re still getting value from it. So why discount one over the other just because it’s something different from what our predecessors were used to, and that was the only way that they actually worked?

Steve

It’s fascinating, there are two things to pull out of that. One is, I often ask myself: can the physical workplace compete with the digital workplace? And I can’t find an answer where the physical workplace can. The digital workplace can easily evolve, we can easily migrate from one system to another system, we all have our preferences, we can all change how it works for us. And I struggle to see how the physical workplace deals with that. In terms of human interaction, of course, there are many benefits to people being in person, but it’s something that goes through my head.

Then the first part of what you were saying is from an individual perspective. I think we’re all selfishly looking at what we want, but work is a team sport. We’re part of a team, and our responsibility as an individual is to contribute to that team so the team can meet the goals for the organization. And that’s something that’s been very forefront of my mind as I think about other things like how our teams perform, how I’m performing, how I want to work in the future, and how other people want to work in the future. I think that’s something that needs to be talked about and thought about.

The best solution that I’ve heard so far is teams coming up with their agreements of how they’re going to work in the future. It’s a little bit like a LinkedIn post I posted yesterday about the where, the when, and also then come back with the how and the why. What is the goal for the team? Steve wants to work this way, somebody else wants to work that way, but what’s best for the team? How does the team perform better and how do we do all that? It’s a collective. Everyone has the ability to contribute what they want, what their desire is, and then everyone compromises. When I say compromise, it’s what fits best for everybody so everyone buys into what that looks like. And I think there is an individual bias and an individual selfishness at the moment, and I think that’s something that over time will be ironed out as more and more organizations move to think about these team dynamics and team operational mandates, or manuals, however you want to name them.

Sandra

It’s interesting, the team thing is something that I’m not completely sold on to be honest. The reason why is because I’ve worked in companies that were global in nature, where the team was dispersed, so you didn’t really have a choice, and the teams were equally effective, but then also working in a city where the entire team was located locally.

You also then hear conversations within the organization around the disparity and inequity within the teams themselves in terms of some being allowed to operate in a way that worked best for them, which often included people working remotely because they had no choice, versus teams where the manager was completely okay with whatever the individuals decided, and everybody was in agreement. And then you had the manager who basically was leading the charge for their team and saying, I think that the best thing for our team is for people to all be onsite Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. And then they would walk away, and you would hear the grumblings of people saying, we don’t have the flexibility to work remotely or however we choose to like other people in the organization.

I think the key is like you said, determining as a team what your objectives are. And thinking about my previous management experiences, you inherit a team that has people with different skillsets, maybe they acquire roles and responsibilities that they’re not keen on, and it’s about understanding what they do like about their job. And what do they dislike about their job? Then it’s about aligning to what they particularly like, because that’s how you get the best performance out of that person.

I see the flexibility aspect as being exactly the same. If I’m the type of person who feels most productive when I’m working independently at home, I’m still contributing to the team because that’s expected of me. And obviously that’s one of my critical success factors, but as an individual, this is how I perform best versus someone else who says, I want to be in the office. Well, that’s cool, you have a space to go to the office, but understanding that we’re going to be communicating virtually if we need to communicate for that hour over the course of the day when we need to work together. I think that’s how you maximize productivity amongst people,  by really understanding how people actually operate at their best and allowing people to do that, so that the company can actually delegate.

It’s interesting, throughout this whole pandemic, you’ve seen it as much as I have about how much more productive companies were. Many reported their best earnings ever, when everybody’s working from home. Granted there are probably other factors, I’m sure there were things like people being worried about the future of their job. There was a period where things were very unstable, so you kind of put in more because you were worried about making sure that you still had a job coming out of the pandemic.

I think there’s something to be said about the independence factor. How do you determine how to fill your schedule understanding that you still have a role in terms of contributing to the greater team or the organization as a whole? And there’s a certain level of accountability that comes with that. You can’t mandate to someone to be accountable, you’re either accountable or you’re not.

Steve

Yes, and I think it’s a case where most people know what’s expected of them. At an organization like Nasdaq, we all know what we’re supposed to do. And we know what needs to get done and how that gets done. Yes, an individual can contribute to that but I think the team dynamic is what’s important in delivering that. And yes, I can absolutely do my heads-down work sitting at home by myself and do that wherever I want to do it, absolutely. However, there are times when the team needs come together so you need to be able to know when the team’s going to be available. I think there needs to be core times when the team all know when they are available.

It’s reflective of the culture of the team. It isn’t always a best fit for everybody, but I think part of the manager’s responsibility is to create that safe environment where people can say what they really want without fear of repercussions or pointing fingers. Because what’s the point of agreeing to something if everyone’s not able to speak openly? That’s not really an agreement. But I do feel that the team dynamic is going to be a key factor that needs to be discussed.

And then of course, how does that team dynamic play into the larger team? If you take what we do within real estate or workplace teams, the employee is the key driver of what the needs are at the office. So then how do you do what you need to do, but also have the insight and the ability to see what other people need? How do we observe employees who’ve been into the office, how they’re working, where they’re working? How do we collect that information to better provide those services to those that need it?

That goes back to that other point you were making before: we need to repurpose the office into something, we don’t know what that is yet but I’m sure with the data you’re looking at, you can see how space is being used, what type of space is being used, and therefore you’re able to see what would be beneficial to the wider group.

I had a conversation the other day with another company who’s created an “office in a box”, they called it. Basically they’re creating a large conference room that’s been built into an office so teams can go in there and work for a couple days at a time. It’s got breakout space, a conference room, individual spaces, but the purpose of it is to allow a team to come together and sit in a room together to see each other to be with each other. And I just love that concept.

Sandra

Yes, the whole “on-demand” concept. We talked about the inconsistency of behaviours, how difficult it is for planning—and people who are in the coworking space say, well, the solution is coworking because that enables flexible space when you need it, the “space on demand” idea. What are your thoughts in that regard?

Steve

I’m fascinated by the whole coworking space. I really am. One of the things that I want to do as I travel is to go and see different coworking spaces. It’s easy for me sitting in a corporate headquarters to basically tell my executive team, yes, this coworking company’s really good, or that one’s really good. They have the ability to serve our needs in these different locations. But actually, what I’m finding is when I go into different locations and I observe, I work in these spaces: there are different levels, there are different standards, and there are different companies that are ready for enterprise. There are many that are not. And that’s ok. Because they perhaps don’t want the enterprise client.

I’m fascinated by the space. I think the company that’s best positioned to take advantage of this is IWG, simply because of their reach. They have the ability to do so. I’m also fascinated to see what Mark does with LiquidSpace and how he rolls that out as a company. Mark, I have great time for. But I want to go and work in these spaces. I really want to understand what it is and why some are better than the others.

To give you some anecdotal observations, coworking space in large cities is really good. It’s so good! The amenities, the look, the feel, everything about it is really good. In the suburbs where people live, not so good. It’s just not there to fit their needs. It basically is a box where somebody goes in and sits and is just surrounded and you’ve got your own individual space. There are very few that offer teams to come together. But they’re not energizing. They’re not exciting. And the IWG thing that you have to pay for your coffee, buy a coffee from a vending machine, just blows my mind. I just don’t understand it. But anyway. A personal thing for me.

Everywhere I go, I’m just fascinated by how different they are, and I really trying to understand who their client is. When you’re in a space and you talk to the managers, they’ll tell you who their client is, and you start to see why this looks the way it does. As a workplace practitioner responsible for a large organization, you get to know what the look and feel of a Nasdaq office is, what the standards are, what are the important attributes. We’ve measured these and our productivity factors and have taken that and looked at that through a coworking lens. There are many facets of it that jive and there are many facets that don’t.

But at the same time, you have to take a step back and go, well, what is the purpose of this space? Because in a corporate environment, you’re building this specifically for your corporate needs, your clientele. A coworking location is sometimes for a completely different need. I’ve been to ones that are very tech focused, ones that are very legal focused, they look different, they feel different, but they serve a very different purpose and I’m fascinated by this. Love to hear what your insights are, given what you’ve said.

Sandra

I agree with the comment that you made about how in cities, coworking spaces are great, they’re fully outfitted, easily accessible, they have a lot going for them. In comparison, the ones that are in the suburbs are nowhere near the level that they could be to attract users that do live in the suburbs. I actually have one within walking distance of my home. I keep saying to my husband, I should walk over there one day. It’s actually in the woods. There’s a campfire area outside, and it’s really cool space, but every time I look at the pictures of it, there’s nobody there. So why would I actually go and go work there? But if you’re a nature lover, it’s ok, maybe it’s a place to be. I live in the midst of nature so there’s nothing that drives me there, I can just go in my backyard and experience that.

The thing about coworking that’s fascinating for me is the fact that these locations that are in the city, and it kind of begs the question: you don’t want to do the 90-minute commute to the office, so why would you do the 90-minute commute to a coworking space? That’s the question that everybody is asking. As a company, if I have invested in an office, why would I now move my staff over into a coworking space, other than to address the inconsistency and the flexibility requirements that are now emerging? So that’s the thinking that I have around the value of coworking.

But the other question too is, and this is relevant given your financial background, at what point does cost matter? Right now, location is more just trying to figure out what the preference is. And I don’t think it’s as big of a deal when people are working from home, because it minimizes the cost. It doesn’t cost the company for people to work from home, other than the cost of a laptop, maybe a chair, a desk. But what happens when now, suddenly, people are starting to explore alternative places to work? Coworking spaces, the hotels, the cafes, the restaurants, where employees say well, I don’t necessarily have to go to the office, I can go to these other spaces, and now suddenly I’m incurring a cost which I’m going to expense back to the company because it’s on work time. When does that start to matter in an organization?

Steve

Cost always matters, and you know that! But there are so many questions in what you just said because I’ve done a lot of that analysis. Evaluating renewing a lease or providing people with the ability to utilize a coworking space full-time or on an ad hoc basis. And the analysis and conclusions I came to was if you’re simply renewing your lease, it’s cheaper to renew your lease than to move your team to a coworking location, because the coworking location has to build into their cost the capital expenditure that they had to build out the space, and their own lease. So in that situation, every time, it is cheaper to renew.

If you are relocating and you’re putting capital investment into a corporate office, at that moment, it becomes more economical to move to a coworking space. And that’s just what the numbers have told me. What I will say though is, what a coworking provider sees as an enterprise ready solution often isn’t what the enterprise feels is corporate office standards. And there usually is a variance in that. When it comes to understanding the cost-benefit analysis of having an office people are not going into, how do we then actually evaluate moving people to a working location or giving them access to it? Those are real questions that we’re having and we’re discussing today with businesses.

I don’t know what the answer is, and time will tell whether it’s to give them an IWG membership, a global access pass, and monitor that and if we think there’s enough utilization or enough demand then we can look at getting something more permanent. There are other businesses that decide to exit their corporate office. They say, let’s come together, be it monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, for a longer period of time where we will all come together, we’ll create an experience, we’ll come and work for a couple of days, we’ll do other things, we’ll go for a meal, and have it basically be about that human connection. And I think that flexibility, there’s a huge opportunity for coworking.

I think coworking, if they do it correctly, could be the game changer, or it can help organizations in this situation. At the same time though, landlords—this goes back to the smart landlords at the beginning—are creating these spaces. If you’re in a building and a landlord’s created this space and you’re able to move in there with very little capital investment, you’re still not having to exit a building that employees are used to going to. And if you’re able to contract some of the space and lower your costs somewhat, then I think that’s a really attractive appeal for the moment. And you think about the perspective of coworking from when the pandemic first hit, everyone thought this was going to be the end, where actually I think now it could actually be the game changer.

Sandra

I worked in a coworking space for three and a half years. I had founded my own HR tech start-up a few years ago, so I would go down to WeWork and some of the other boutique-style coworking spaces, and what I found fascinating, coming out of the corporate world and working in an office with the same people every day, was the people that you bump into. What you learn from people just through the storytelling experiences of their background.

So, to me, it relates the real value of coworking, as well as the reasons why people leave organizations. Mostly it’s because there’s no learning opportunity or no room for growth. If you had an opportunity where you could work somewhere where you could rub shoulders with someone who works at a company that you admire, and use that opportunity to learn about how they got into their role, or what was their career experience like, that would be extremely valuable to people.

It’s not just about producing, innovating, producing, being on that hamster wheel. It’s about expanding how you think about work, the future, your career, your role in this society, and in this world. And how you can improve yourself to be the person that you want to be and hopefully make the world better as part of it. That’s really where I see the difference. In an office, you don’t get that same kind of experience.

Steve

I’m so glad you said that, because it’s something I completely forgot about. When you were talking, I was flashed back to a specific coworking location in Ft Lauderdale called General Provision. The community manager is the best community manager I’ve ever met. She walked me through the space, introduced me to everybody who was there, and sparked conversations between people who had no connection. That’s what her job was, and she was loving it. And she was so good at it!

To your point, the amount of people I met that day was astounding. What she was also telling me is because she does all that work, everybody in that coworking space all work for each other. They all provide services to each other, and that’s the beauty of it, when that community really comes together. But that’s probably been the one out of a few who really have managed it that way. And they’re really intentional about what the purpose of that coworking space is. As I look at it from an enterprise using that space, there are so many reasons why I would say no, but from a community and connectedness point of view, that’d be the best place I’ve actually visited.

Sandra

Awesome. Well, we’re almost at time. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your podcast?

Steve

Thank you, I didn’t even mention it in my intro, I’m slipping! So openSourcedWorkplace.com. It’s something that grew out of my workplace passion. When I got into workplace in 2015 and 2016, it was so hard to find information and knowledge and to pick up my own skills. What I wanted to do with opensourcedworkplace.com was to create an opportunity for people to come and find that. I’m creating content all around that, to build that up over a period of time.

And I do the podcast. I haven’t published an episode in a long time, I was doing them during the pandemic, and they were great because things were changing so fast. And they were just short 10-, 20-minute episodes. It was really useful for me to learn, connect with people, and also provide people the opportunity to give opinions as to what was going on. It will be coming back, as I continue my journey into what the “work from anywhere” culture is, how do you do work from anywhere, those are the sort of things I’m looking to explore now and develop and create content around that.

Sandra

That’s great. Well, Steve, thanks for your time, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Any final comments?

Steve

What I will say is I’m fascinated by what’s going to happen. I have no idea what’s going to happen, and I think what we all have to do is keep an open mind and not close ourselves off to biases. We have to hear alternative views. There’s no right answer, no two companies are the same, no two teams are the same. We have to ask open questions, and we have to be open to hearing different answers. And that’s why it’s so important to listen to podcasts like yours, and others who are producing content, to get different voices, hear different opinions, hear from different people who are operating in different organizations, and again, keep that open mind. Because there are so many different ways that we can all be successful. I just encourage people to keep an open mind.

Sandra

Thank you again, Steve, it’s been a pleasure.

Steve

Thank you, take care.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Is hybrid work really a “new way of working?”
• Take care in choosing the right words to define your organization’s ways of working—branding matters!
• There used to be a perception by managers that if employees were in the office, they were productive. How has this changed?
• “High performance” for an employee is not just about output—it’s about a holistic list of factors.
• Is it really possible to measure productivity?
• What is the new skillset that successful hybrid managers require, now that everyone is in a different place?
• Hybrid work and multi-tasking may even help employees to stay engaged and productive throughout the day
• Having the right collaboration tech, but also teaching employees how to use it properly, is key for hybrid work
• How does mentorship, learning, and innovation happen in a hybrid environment when people aren’t in the same space?
• Is hybrid actually detrimental to your career?
• Hybrid work has shown to be a positive factor in retention and job satisfaction for mothers, women, and those who are differently-abled
• Now that hybrid is becoming more of a norm, the power has shifted to employees who don’t want to put up with mandated and controlled in-office days
• How are demographic changes affecting employee retention?

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Dan Barham on LinkedIn
• Harvard Business Review – Who is Driving the Great Resignation?

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

This week I’m talking with a friend and ex-work colleague of mine, Dan Barham. With his years of experience in space planning, facilities management, portfolio optimization and guiding massive projects that include one of Canada’s first enterprise hybrid work programs, Dan has cemented his position as a Canadian thought leader in workplace strategy, scaled to organizations of all sectors and sizes. Dan is currently the Director of Workplace Strategy at Lemay. His passion for evolving workplace programs is focused on unlocking a company’s value across multiple fronts, from office footprints to the development of employee experiences that not only attract talent, but retain it as well.

Dan and I actually go back a couple of years, since worked together here in Toronto at Telus. Dan, welcome! Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dan

Hi Sandra! I’m very happy to be here. I am a workplace strategist now at Lemay Architecture and Design, and people often ask, how do you become a strategist? My history is, as I like to put it, a collection of random jobs that ended up all rolling up to give a good information set. So, as you know, we worked together at Telus in the past, but I’ve basically done everything from college lecturing to serving tables to facilities management to portfolio assessment. And on our topic for today, I’ve done a lot of discussion and a lot of work around hybrid work over the last 10 years. Which, of course, thanks to the pandemic, suddenly became a very useful skillset to have.

Sandra

Thinking about hybrid work and the time that I came into Telus, the company had already transitioned into hybrid several years before that when you were already there. Can you tell us a little bit about what that whole project and experience was like?

Dan

It was interesting because I started off with hybrid as a real estate intern. I had gone to Concordia University’s Urban Planning program, and in their fourth year, part of what you do is a planning internship. A lot of my colleagues in school wanted to work with municipalities, not-for-profits, it was all about the various urbanist, academic things college students are into, about making cities better. I decided I didn’t want to go that route, I wanted something different, but I wasn’t quite sure what. I was an agent at that point in the call center, and that’s the point where my boss at the time said, why don’t you intern for the real estate team at Telus? I kind of went, corporate real estate? That’s cool! So I did.

Telus, being a big communications company, a national multi-region company, had a lot of footprint, a lot of acquired companies, and a pile of space that they knew wasn’t being used. A lot of times real estate teams have a knowledge, sort of, of what’s going on—you know how busy your spaces are, but even now, the tools are still developing. I’m sure you could give a lot of examples of that. But back then, there were no tools that existed for quantifying what was going on. There just wasn’t the maturity around that.

So I was commissioned to basically create an occupancy study for Telus in the city of Montreal, to answer the question, what is happening in our space? It wasn’t just, is it full, is it empty? I basically built a matrix that said, is someone on their phone, is someone using their desk, are they in a meeting? There were about six different options for each work point. And then I spent about six weeks going to all of the offices, five times a day, walking through with my binder and taking notes on what’s happening in the space.

What was fascinating at that pre-hybrid point was, I uncovered that more than half of their space, half of the desks and workspaces in particular in the portfolio in the city of Montreal were empty at any given time. So, I took this study to the real estate leadership and rolled it all up in that nice academic way, and said, here’s what’s going on in your space. At least half of your workstations are empty at any given time, and the majority of what your team is doing is typically more collaborative and on the phone. And you have people who are fulltime employees who aren’t here. They’re working somewhere, as you know, but they’re not working in your office very often. So that ultimately formed the genesis, or the kernel, of what then became known as the Workstyles Program.

Sandra

Interesting. The experience that I’ve had was very similar. I started doing workplace strategy consulting in 2006 or 2007, around the time the stock market crashed. The whole “workstyles” concept started to emerge as well, where there were a lot of companies that all of a sudden had all of this excess space that they didn’t know what to do with, as a result of people losing their jobs. They realized they needed to figure out how to deal with all this extra space—to look at leases coming due, and a lot of issues similar to what we’re seeing now with the pandemic pushing people out of the office. It’s the same question of, now we’ve got all this extra real estate so how do we deal with this? One of the things that had emerged back then was this whole concept of desk-sharing, which is this whole workstyles concept of figuring out how people are using the space and then you have gearing ratio, as we often refer to it, so we can say a certain number of seats are used 20% of the time and therefore it has a gearing ratio of X, and another grouping of desks has a usage of 100% so obviously those seat are assigned. It’s that distribution of different types of spaces.

It’s interesting what you say about hybrid—you and I have spoken in the past, and we both know that hybrid is not new. This idea of “new ways of working” is not really new ways of working. People have been talking about it for 20+ years. It’s been referred to in different ways in the past, I know off the bat, obviously there’s flex, AWE, AWS…

Dan

If you go way back, it’s teleworking. “Liberated” is a new term. We called it mobile work for a long time at Telus, that was what we settled on for the pre-COVID term. It was funny though, I don’t know if you recall this moment in the pandemic, where mobile work was the term, and then suddenly mobile work was a “bad” term, and then it was hybrid, and now, who even knows if hybrid is the right term.

I find that funny too, because in one respect, people are arguing definitions of things they haven’t even defined, but on the other hand, it’s also important from a brand point of view when talking to your staff. Those names matter. We struggled for a long time, too, at Telus. One of our classifications was, are you an “at-home” worker? And we would have team members that would refuse to classify themselves as that. It didn’t matter that that was their behaviour, but they didn’t like the perception that they were an at-home worker. This speaks to what’s also going on with perception right now in the pandemic. So, we had to re-term that as “remote” or something else, because people just wouldn’t adopt the term.

To your point about “workstyles”—what most people don’t realise is that “workstyles” is Telus’ trademark term for their actual program. Of course, Workstyles the program is trademarked, but “work style”, as in “what is your work style”, is non-trademarked, and that’s become part of the vernacular. It’s been around so long, and that’s what you and I worked on. We’ve been doing hybrid so long that it’s not new.

I remember when we were the weirdos at a CoreNet conference or a training seminar. I remember once being in a leadership in corporate real estate seminar, and of course the instructor says, “what do you do if Bob shows up 10 minutes after work starts with his coffee in hand and he’s late! What do you do about that?” Everyone was talking about discipline, and I said, well, in our organization, if Bob’s doing his job, we don’t care. Why is attendance the metric? Why is Bob being there at 9 AM important if Bob is selling well?

You already saw this with certain organizations and in the past. If you were a high-performing salesperson and bringing in revenue, you could kind of get away with whatever, and the rules didn’t apply the same way. It’s interesting to ask ourselves, with hybrid now, is it that same kind of perspective? If you’re getting your work done, you’re delivering, does it matter what time you show up and where you are?

Sandra

I think what you say about high performance is true. There’s been a lot of conversation over the last 2 years about productivity.  But I always ask, ok, how did you measure productivity before the pandemic?

I remember when I was consulting, there was always a concern about productivity, and there’s this assumption that because people were physically in the office that they were more productive. About a year or so after I joined Telus, I remember this thing started to go around, this comparison of people in the office vs people not in the office, managers in the office vs managers not in the office, and this perception that if you were not in the office, you were more productive. That perception has pretty well maintained across most organisations and therefore, there’s this constant battle between “in is better”, “no, out is better”. And when you look at what’s transpired in the past few years and all the things that have been written about how much more productive people have been, or companies have been as a whole, there’s something to be said about productivity.

But it all comes back to the question, how do you actually measure productivity? It’s a very personal thing. High performance is not just about being in a place that supports how you work. It’s everything. It’s your mental state, it’s what’s going on at home, it’s a whole bunch of different factors that come into play. If all those things line up, that enables you to be productive. So, you can then do your work effectively versus having to deal with commuting, which sets you off a wrong path because you got your day off on the wrong foot.

Dan

You come in and spend the first half hour complaining about your commute! That’s quite fascinating.

I think, honestly, let’s be real (and maybe some business process people would disagree with me), but no one truly knows how to measure productivity. This is what I love about strategy: on one hand, you’ve got hard math and metrics that you can apply to certain things, but on the other hand, there’s an element of psychology and human behaviour. So it’s kind of funny to me that even at Telus, there was this whole idea that, “No, our staff need to be in the office with certain managers”. That was an idea that crept back in after launch, because at launch, the company was very clear: we’re doing this, get with the program. If you’re not going to get with the program, go find a new job. And I recall that there was a significant cohort, even at that time, of management staff who were against it. It’s like my dad, when computers showed up in the government. He was out of there. I don’t want to figure this out, I’m done.

At Telus you had that same thing, people were saying, I don’t know how to manage. We’re seeing so many leaders struggle with this right now. Honestly, in some respects it’s where a lot of organisations should focus on training leaders on how to do this. A lot of managers don’t know how to measure and make sure people are productive, because their measures have always been, “is Bob at his desk on time and does his work look good”? The work looking good is still important, but “desk on time” doesn’t really matter.

What’s fascinated me in my own journey of hybrid is realizing that some of my most productive and engaged times weren’t what you would think. I remember once you and I were in the same 6-hour workshop one day, facilitated by the Excellence Team. We were on the phone for 6 hours talking through a bunch of processes with the rest of the team. Conventional wisdom would say, Dan should be sitting at his desk paying attention. But I actually spent that entire workshop in my cabin, laying laminate floor while I was on the phone.

There’s research that supports this—I paid attention to the workshop the whole time. Laying laminate floor is a repetitive, boring task, it doesn’t take any mindset, so I was highly engaged and paid attention. Whereas if I’d have been sitting at my computer—what do you do in those workshops? You start checking your email, you start multitasking, you start doing other things, you stop paying attention. Unfortunately, I can’t give the reference right now, but there’s documented evidence that folding laundry, for example, if you’re on a call, or doing another simple task at the same time actually will dial you in more because it keeps you from getting distracted.

That’s what I find fascinating about productivity and hybrid work. Conventional wisdom, from when it was the only option, was that you have to be at your desk. But everyone’s run into that person who’s at the office all the time and doesn’t seem to get anything done. There’s even that gif or meme of the person sitting at their desk, resizing boxes, clickety clacking, moving things around, deleting things, and to a manager sitting across the room looking out of their office, she looks productive. She looks like she’s busy but she’s actually getting nothing done. I think that’s the really fascinating aspect of measuring productivity. Take the example of what happened at Telus—they implemented hybrid work, and the profitability of that company over the last decade speaks for itself. I lived through three different stock splits in the 10 years I was there during hybrid. And similarly, we look at the market data of what’s happened to countries during the pandemic, and profits are up everywhere. So by that measure, hybrid has worked, right?

But we also know, certain aspects aren’t great in a hybrid environment. Rather, companies don’t have the collaboration tools to make them great. I don’t think collaboration tech is always going to be a replacement for seeing someone in person every so often, and getting to know people. I’m a hybrid work evangelist who’s a big believer in still getting together every so often. But if you look at the stock reports of organizations everywhere, how can you say it’s not productive, not been good?

What was also fascinating was the tech company example. They found that their coders produced code faster and better, but problems started to occur when it came time to integrate the code together. I think that’s similar to what we’ve seen with hybrid work. If I need to knock out a report or do something focused by myself at home, it’s a no-brainer. I’m not distracted, and I don’t have to listen to Jane talk about how her dog got sick for 45 minutes and figure out how to get away from that. You don’t have to deal with those politics.

But in terms of being able to sit down and figure out how to put something together, hybrid sucks for that. Because it’s all formal meetings. You can’t really just sit and tease something out and have a free-wheeling discussion, because everyone feels like, I’m working from home, I need to be productive, so we can’t just sit around for an hour and chat. It’s that white space concept that’s actually just as important, because that’s how you innovate and come up with things.

Sandra

That’s a good point. It’s something that a lot of people struggle with. At our company now, Relogix, we use Slack. And we still use email obviously, and Teams, Skype, you name it. And my immediate team that reports to me, we use huddles. It’s 5-minute conversations, I’m available all the time if they want to have a quick conversation or have a question about something. It’s almost like you’re working shoulder-to-shoulder in the office.

The learning for me is the availability. If somebody has an issue, they’re working at home by themselves, they don’t have the resources to go and ask a question, so you need to be available as a manager. It’s funny, just recently I was thinking, in the office, people would have looked at that as being disruptive. If I’m going to tap you on the shoulder and bother you and you can’t get your work doe—it’s one of the reasons why you stay at home, so you can get work done. But that whole idea of serendipitous conversation, that whole thing that allows you to keep the communication going, to keep people together, to feel like you’re part of a larger team, part of a community, is really about making yourself available and feeling empowered to be able to reach out to virtually anyone in the organization.

Before, that would have been frowned upon, because you didn’t go into certain parts of the building, because you just didn’t. Now, it’s virtual so you could ask anybody a question and they can answer whenever. So, if you need something immediately, you go to your direct manager much like before, or you just work with other team members. That’s been a huge difference, at least from my experience, because prior to joining Relogix, it was typically email, Communicator, or whatever tools you were using. Nobody used cameras. We used to do virtual calls, but you were on the phone listening, and there wasn’t that element of it. That, I find, is not as good obviously as being in person, but it’s definitely better than just listening to someone. It’s nice to have that personal aspect of it, of being able to see someone.

Dan

It’s so funny that you say that though, because on the one hand you’re right—I’m the guy even now, in my new firm, if I have a question, I get up and I walk over to our regional director and I say, explain this to me. I’m new on the consulting side, I used to be on the client side. I think it’s interesting that you say that an organization has to have the appropriate collaboration tools in place, and I think importantly, has to set some norms and help their team understand how to use them. We’ve all seen multiple collab tools come and go and never be implemented properly, like e-rooms and things that may be great at the time but were never staff didn’t know how to use them so they didn’t get used. So, on the one hand I think you’re right, it is so much easier to reach out to somebody to say, hey, five minute ping. I like to say, “not urgent, but when you get a second let me know”. It’s sort of that asynchronous work, or it could be a live conversation if they’re available. You send a ping out and you get your answer back, because it’s not a big effort to go find somebody, now that there’s more of that digital know-how.

But on the other hand, I think what doesn’t work, or what folks are really struggling with, is knowing who the right person to ping is. We used to talk about institutional knowledge. Half of being at an enterprise organisation is just knowing, over time, if I need to find out something about this, I go talk to this person. If I need that, I go talk to that person. But if you’re a new employee, how does that work? Because generally speaking, most corporate directories don’t give any of that intel. You’re totally right—with the right norms, people are much more accessible, for not being in the same place. But on the other hand, as a new employee, how does an organisation facilitate that happening without having to sacrifice hybrid work?

Sandra

Our company has hired a lot of people during the pandemic from all over the place, a couple in the US, a couple of people in other parts of Canada, who never step foot in the office. So, first day on, it’s 100% virtual onboarding. What we do is we have a buddy system where you stay with the person, obviously not a live connection for the entire 8 days, but checking in, asking how it’s going, showing training videos, you’re open and available to questions. We have an intro where somebody comes on and we have a Teams call where everybody pops in for 5, 10 minutes to give a quick introduction. They tell a bit about themselves and learn about the new employee. So at least you can put a face to a name.

Now obviously, we’re a small company, so having 50 people on a screen is not as big of a deal. Imagine doing that with 40,000 people—probably not as effective, right? But I think again, we’re talking about the manager’s role and how you navigate or help your employees navigate that. Mentorship and learning are things that we’re hearing are going to be challenging in this new hybrid environment. That was something I always found effective, when you have a manager who can direct you to the right person, based on whatever it is you’re trying to do or problem you’re trying to solve. Whereas before, the manager was just asking, is that person sitting at their desk and is therefore productive? It’s about being able to help people in a slightly different way.

Dan

I’ve been starting to realize, because of my career trajectory, having worked mostly in hybrid environments, I don’t actually know a different way very well. I graduated from school, I went overseas, I did a little time in contact centers when I came back in a traditional management style, where you had to be on queue, you were measured.

But realistically speaking, do you need to have a face-to-face conversation with your manager? Or could you do exactly what we’re doing? None of my best leaders ever lived in the same city as me. Early career it was a manager named Cheryl Pardon based out of Burnaby—we probably saw each other face-to-face a grand total of four times in the entire four years that I worked for her. Our boss at Telus, Mary, it was the same thing—all the time I worked with her, we probably only got together in person a grand total of 10 times. So, the template that I follow from some of the good managers is: reaching out to the staff and pro-actively checking in, making sure that they know you’re there. This is not rocket science.

I think the other aspect that I find so funny is, is hybrid detrimental to your career? I could be an edge case, but I went from contact center agent to director in 10 years in a hybrid environment. I don’t think it’s bad. But then again, you do need to have leaders and that’s where I started to template myself as I became a manager of teams. I was having regular check-ins where you’re not just talking about work, you’re saying, how are you doing? How can I proactively support your career?

Again, I guess there are different views on how you do this as a leader, but I also was very specific in saying, my job as your leader is to support you and build a culture where you feel supported. It’s not just about are you getting all the work things done. It was also about making sure that I understand what was going on in their lives: oh, you have a thing that just blew up? Let me help you. I could say, ok, life’s happened, and with hybrid, you can go take care of that. Maybe you’re working from some other location, but I’m also checking in to make sure that you’re feeling supported and connected and connecting you to the right people.

We’ve all heard that COVID has just exposed all the problems, exposed all the bad management techniques. But on the other hand, I think COVID and hybrid work really encourages you, with the right support from an organization. Remote work requires you to be more deliberate, more engaged, to be better at it, and can actually lead to better management and leadership in my opinion.

Sandra

I wanted to share a couple things about your edge-case experience, the fact that you’ve worked hybrid most of your career—I have actually worked both as an employee, as a manager, prior to this whole idea of working flex for several years. I started working in 1988 in corporate, and it was 100% in-office. There was no such thing back then of flexible work. But then I became a mom and flexibility came to be to my advantage. You hear a lot of people saying now—or maybe it’s propaganda because there’s some other agenda of trying to get people back—that there’s a proximity bias, especially for women, in the sense that you can’t advance if you’re working from home.

I think that’s hogwash. I’ve done it! Maybe if you’re waiting for the employer that you’re working for to give it to you, and that doesn’t happen, fine. So, you move on. There’s plenty of other employers that will support that kind of work. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to take a pay cut or that you’re mandated to go to the office a certain number of days. You basically can find a work setting that fits into your way of living that makes you a more productive, more successful person, that then just increases your value overall. That’s what I find, as you go from job to job, and people look at your habits and what you’ve accomplished, and you did all that without being in an office? Yeah, it’s not that big of a deal!

Dan

100%, and I think that’s a big shift too. I honestly believe to a certain extent, that belief that you have to have the facetime to get recognized and to excel in your career, that’s a bias from the old way. As a future member of this cohort, as an older white man, the way you impress me is by coming in, doing that traditional thing, being front and center, occupying the conversation, all of these things. But the reality is, to your point, and we both saw this at Telus, that when it becomes about your deliverables, in order for hybrid to work, it’s deliverable space performance.

That’s the big magic for most knowledge worker roles: are you getting the work done and is it quality work? That’s what everything boils down to, because you’re not in the office, kissing my behind. You’re just delivering based on your output. Which, in a capitalist society, we should love that it’s all about outputs! But again, it’s that old school mindset versus a new way of looking at work.

We saw this at the phone company, too, that hybrid work and remote work actually kept a lot of mothers around. We scored very high on the work life balance report, which basically checks to see, is our company hospitable to minorities, to women, and to mothers. The ability to do hybrid work always came back and kept getting pointed to. If my kid gets sick for a week, I don’t have to take a week of vacation, I can be in the house. Because half the time they’re sick in bed sleeping and I just need to go support them, I don’t need to be there all the time, but I need to be next to them to make sure they’re ok and to not have to spend $10,000 on childcare at the time. That equation of frankly choosing between, to a certain extent, childcare and being present at home, becomes a different equation because you can be home, so you don’t have to pay for those things. And that means you don’t have to necessarily leave the workforce.

Another thing I found fascinating in some of the reports was people around people with disabilities, like a vision impairment. For example, there was a story from someone who worked at a finance company, and she was nearsighted. She was talking about how hybrid actually was an equalizer for her because in the office, everyone saw her desk with her oversized screen and her having to get really close. So every day, her team members were reminded that she was differently abled, because the physical manifestation was sitting right on her desk. As a result, she was often treated differently. She could feel it in her interactions, feel it in her work assignments, etc.

Then the pandemic hits, she takes all that stuff home, and all her team members see is her on screen. They don’t see the oversized screen, they don’t see the fact that she’s a little bit closer to it. She noticed that people started forgetting that she was differently abled. Then, as a result, there were more opportunities coming her way, because her boss over time just, for lack of a better word, forgot and treated her like everyone else. So that’s where I think it’s fascinating that sometimes hybrid is actually the opposite, because people are tribal. People in groups are jerks, sometimes. And you can feed off of what happens in front of you, but when you don’t see it, suddenly it becomes about: does this person do good work? And if they do, I want to keep using them.

Sandra

I think those are excellent points from a diversity and inclusion point of view, and giving people access to good, challenging opportunities. Everybody benefits. But there’s also the dark side to that as well. I haven’t experienced it myself, I don’t know anybody personally, but I’ve read articles where the opposite of that happens. There’s bullying and all kinds of stuff that happens because, again, how do you manage a virtual environment? I think that’s something that in due time, will be addressed and managed. We’ve kind of all been thrown at this at the same time and we’ve got to sink or swim, figure it out. And you would hope that it’s a very small percentage of people that are doing that.

Dan

Something I want to amend to that is the question, did that problematic behaviour actually not occur pre-hybrid? Did it not occur in the office? Online bullying is obviously still an issue, but one of the things I always look at when people want to critique or list the benefits of hybrid in the office is: did it occur in the office before? And if it occurred in the office before, it’s not a hybrid problem, it’s a management and organizational problem. Hybrid doesn’t matter.

The other thing we haven’t talked about yet is how hybrid and then COVID and employment demand has unlocked and moved the power to the employee. If you’re in a crappy work environment, you’re looking for a new one that’s better. We have that flexibility. So, I would argue that even if everyone went back to the office right now, you would still need to fix those cultural problems that for years, have been sort of left to linger because everyone was just grateful to have a job.

Whereas now, we knew that up until recently, people were saying, make my office more like tech. It was the gold standard. Now it’s coming out that in these most high-end, most glorious offices, they’re uncovering toxic culture and so many culture issues. Tech also has the highest resignation rate right now. I think it was the Harvard Business Review that raised a study that said their resignation rate is higher than health care right now. Health care! The job that is the most brutal job to be having in COVID. So, suddenly, to me that also calls into question, was it really such a glorious office with the beer and ping pong?

Yes, I think staff like those things, everyone likes the stuff that you can get in these new amenity-based offices, but ultimately now, we’re starting to realize that you can’t just buy off culture with a ping pong table and free beer. You’ve actually got to do the work, because this whole industry that did it for years but unfortunately has let a lot of misogyny and toxic culture go on, because it was only about whether your outputs were good or not. It’s suddenly blowing up in a lot of their faces.

Sandra

I think the other part to that is the trade-off. We definitely see it in the tech industry for sure. I was reading an article on the weekend that was talking about how before, the trade off was, we’re going to give you all of these amenities, but in the end you’re going to have to take a pay cut. That only goes so far. Once the novelty wears off, you’re off to the next thing.

The other part also is just the brand affinity. Lots of people wanted to work for these big branded companies, so they could say hey, I got a job with company XYS, look at me! And then you get in there and it’s not at all like what you thought it would be. That’s probably why there was a lot of churn before. The pandemic has certainly highlighted this.

We’ve all seen the articles about Facebook and Apple and Google, companies that have made huge investments in their real estate, trying to bring people back in. And people aren’t having it. You can mandate all you want.

I was talking to my husband on the weekend about control. Isn’t it interesting how companies approach the whole idea of work as, they’re going to mandate that you come in 3 or 4 days a week, and their expectation is that to work here, you have to abide by this. But really, the person who’s in control is the employee, because they’ll just say, I don’t need your job, I can go find a job somewhere else that’s better suited to me. So, who really is in control here? There’s this perception that it’s the company sets the rules and policy, and for you to work here, you need to follow these. Well, that might have applied before, when everybody was expected to work in the office and it was only a small percentage that allowed people flexibility. Now you’ve completely turned it on its head, so good luck trying to mandate to bring people back into the office, because there are a lot of other companies that don’t expect that of me.

Dan

Frankly, it’s the perfect storm of that flip. 100%, Sandra. You’ve hit on something really specific. Sometimes when I talk to folks about hybrid, there’s a denial. There’s a whole level of denial as to whether this will work, whether it’s temporary, whatever else. Pre-COVID, if COVID hadn’t hit, we already knew there was going to be a looming retirement boom. Baby boomers were going to retire, there were already going to be some demographic aspects that were going to shift demand for labour and talent. I remember even three or four years ago hearing, just wait a few more years and suddenly you’ll be at the top of the cohort and there’ll be a lot more demand.

But then layer in with this COVID, and let’s be blunt—people have died, so there are fewer workers in the pool. COVID has also created this scenario where up until last week, a lot of people’s investments did really well, a lot of people were in excellent financial situations. I talked about my dad leaving the government when computers showed up. So now, all these people who were already a few years from retirement, their investments are doing well, suddenly the whole way they work is changing and a whole bunch of people are saying, I’m out of here, I’m cashing out, I don’t need to stay. That’s created even more of a gap in terms of roles.

So, suddenly now, you have all these jobs. I think the last report I read a couple weeks ago is that there are 1 million empty jobs in Canada right now. A million! So, combine that with the pandemic giving everyone this existential crisis, asking themselves, do I like what I’m doing? Do I like where it is? Now, suddenly, hybrid’s saying, ok, maybe you don’t like where you are, but you could work for anyone because everyone’s offering hybrid.

We saw this in our former organization. Because we were the only organization out of a few that offered hybrid, we had an average tenure rate of 13.5 years. Unheard of, for it to be that long! Now, I think even our old organization is seeing that, suddenly you can go work anywhere hybrid. It’s not a differentiator anymore so. Again, how do you attract and retain when you have a workforce that is highly mobile and portable? Because I could work for basically anybody, almost in the world, that offers hybrid.

Sandra

That’s very, very true, even in the two and a half years that I’ve been working at Relogix, I’ve had a couple of opportunities from the US that landed in my lap that would have never been an option if it hadn’t been for hybrid and companies being open to hiring people in other places. So, it certainly opens doors, it changes your perspective on employability and what happens if things change. Maybe I’m not as worried as I maybe would have been beforehand.

It’s fascinating times, and a really, really great conversation, we could probably go on for another hour!

Dan

I want to say, Sandra, thank you very much for having me on your podcast. It’s always great to chat with you, just in general, because there are so many good topics. But thank you for having me today.

Sandra

You’re welcome! Thanks, Dan.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Space planning has slipped out of the realm of human capabilities—we need to turn to technologies to successfully occupy our workplaces.
• Old data collection methodologies are just that—old. We need dynamic, day-to-day, real-time data in our new working world.
• With only a partial return to office, is there going to be enough raw data to provide actionable insights?
• Do we even accurately remember what being in the office was like? We were as productive as we remember ourselves being, and how do we re-appraise that now?
• The arguments for a return to office are lacking an evidence base—we need a period of objective data gathering to deal with this disagreement in our sector.
• At what point will an organization reach “critical mass”, at which they’ll no longer need to intervene in the return-to-work process? What does a workspace need to be like to attract employees naturally, without compulsion?
• What is the value that people derive from being in the same physical space, and importantly, who decides on that value? The individual, or the organization?
• We need to focus more on inter-team interaction, including mentorship and learning, co-operation, and strengthening existing relationships. Can an enterprise social media be the solution to this?
• Before the pandemic, we continually added amenities and services to our workspaces to make them attractive. Post-pandemic, the way forward involves integrating with local, urban services instead.
• We may need to re-think our ideas of when and where we’re most productive—maybe we should switch to In Office notifications?
• Balance is ultimately the key—between hybrid and office working, working alone and working with others—to thriving in the workplace and as an organization.

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Neil Usher on LinkedIn
• GoSpace AI – AI-powered seat reservation platform

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

Sandra

This week I’d like to welcome Neil Usher to our podcast. Neil, welcome! Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

Neil

Thanks for the invitation! I’m delighted to be here. I’m Neil Usher, I’m the Chief Workplace and Change Strategist at GoSpace AI, which is a unique AI-driven dynamic reservation system, you’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more of it in the coming months. I’ve been in what can be described as corporate real estate for around 30 years. In fact, almost exactly 30 years, mainly looking after large corporate and occupier portfolios in various parts of the world.

Sandra

Excellent. So, you and I have interacted on LinkedIn a couple of times but never actually had the pleasure of meeting in person. But you seem to be very drawn to technology in the workplace. What do you think the role of technology will be in the workplace in the coming months and the coming years?

Neil

My last qualification was a Masters in IT but that was in 1991, so I think I worked out that it probably took me about 27 years to get a job in tech. It’s probably not a surprise that I’m quite enthusiastic about it now. I think what’s been really interesting the last two years in the pandemic period is that matching supply and demand, which is a task that most corporate real estate or particularly workplace teams have to master, has slipped out of the reach of human capability. We’re now very much in the complications of time and variable attendance and hybrid working, very much in a period where we need technology to help us, to match that supply and demand. We need technology to understand what’s going on but to make sure that our colleagues are able to access the space they need with the people they need to work with, when they need it. Then that can continue into the future, and we can look at our space requirements based on all of the data and the insight we gather from that. So, we’re in a period now—and are likely to stay in this period—where space planners beavering away in the back room creating allocation scenarios are just not going to keep pace anymore. It needs to draw on dynamic technology in order to successfully occupy our workspaces.

Sandra

So, we know that a lot of companies right now are kind of stuck, because obviously you can’t rely on old data, with people being out of the office for the last 2 years and a bit. Prior to the pandemic, a lot of companies were using existing data like security badging data, other data sources that they might have had access to, and then we had this dry period for 2 years where there really hasn’t been too much activity in the office. Added to that, there’s discussion around what the return to office is potentially going to look like. How do you envision hybrid playing itself out in the workplace?

Neil

It is interesting, that the data collection methodologies we used to use (utilization studies, satisfaction surveys, interviews put into reports and strategy recommendations) aren’t really suitable for the hybrid world we’re in. We need a much more dynamic day-to-day real time flow of data in order to draw some insight and understanding. So, we’ve probably got a bit of a crisis on our hands in terms of what sort of data and therefore what sort of evidence we’re gathering in the field of workplace strategy going forward. And I think we still have to work that out.

The difficulty for us is, how much are we going to learn when people are only going back to the workplace at variable times and certainly not at the scale we’re used to seeing? Someone I was working with recently said the only way to do this is to get everybody back for 3 months, 5 days a week full time. He said this because when we were in the workplace full time, we weren’t gathering that evidence because we didn’t think we needed it, because that was the normal way of things. We’ve actually been gathering a lot of evidence over the last couple of years on the power and the benefit related to productivity of working from home, or not working in an office. So it’s all out of balance in that sense.

As we move ahead, how do we re-appraise what being in the office was actually like? It’s difficult for us because we’re reliant on this memory, and we’ve had quite a seismic event that sat between our experience of a couple years ago and today. Consequently, we’ve got to find a way of building that evidence and that experience in order to be able to make a more informed judgement going forward. It’s quite possible that we might have to have targeted periods of being back into an office, even if that means we reject it, but to be able to do it on a more objective basis, to be able to actually reappraise what was good, what wasn’t good, what worked, what didn’t. Because actually, all of the campaigners for more of a wholesale return to the office are still reliant on anecdotal evidence and emotional responses, but there isn’t an evidence base to support that. That’s why we get into these difficult arguments. We need a period of objective data gathering and evidence to deal with this disagreement in our sector and industry generally to be able to move forward from here.

Sandra

That’s interesting. I, too, came from a workplace strategy background, I’ve been doing it for 25 or so years. I did all the number crunching and helping companies transition to a flexible way of working from way back in the 90s. Early 2000s was probably when I felt it started to pick up a little bit more momentum.

But it’s funny, observing what has transpired in the last 2 years, the way employees are reacting to return-to-office mandates for more of that structured plan where it’s a set number of days per week. I often wonder if the whole data collection process, and the need we had for it to drive design, is a thing of the past. It often feels to me like it’s too late, because the data we’ll collect from here on in will be very small scale, in terms of the number of people who are coming in to the office. You’re not going to get that critical mass like you would have prior to the pandemic, to give you the big picture from a design perspective. That’s how it feels to me.

Do you see that as well, or do you think that it will be just a matter of time before we get back to some level of normalcy, where we’ll need to invest in technology to help companies understand how people work? Because that feels very 2020 to me, or 2019.

Neil

I think it’s varying wildly across the globe. We think that everybody’s hybrid working and everything has changed. But if we look at certain industries and sectors and parts of the world, there has been very much a return to the way of working that preceded COVID. We’ve got to be careful sometimes to look through the lens of our own industries or our own locations to broad geographical regions. There is a huge global disparity in the way that we’re approaching the office and approaching being in an office. It could well be that the useful thing to do would be to go and learn from some of these locations where a different route is being taken. We need to cast down a little bit wider than as far as we can see, and make sure that we’re taking much more of a global perspective in all this.

I think the sources of evidence and data are out there, but echoing what I said earlier, I do think with only a partial return to office, I’m not sure we’re actually learning much until as you suggest, that critical mass starts to build and people see the benefit of being in that space and will return without instruction. We have to remember as well that hybrid is a very broad umbrella for a number of different strategies, and it ranges from complete freedom of choice to come and go as you please right through to the worst aspects of it, which is this enforced quota. You’re going to come in on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. That could still be regarded as hybrid if you are still effectively working in two places. I think understanding that whole range of hybrid is incredibly important. There’s a need for a whole reappraisal of the sort of data we’re gathering, how we’re gathering it, and the conclusions that we’re drawing from and formulating some kind of strategy.

Sandra

Interesting. What do you think about the use of what I recently started to call “micro-data”? One of the things that we see, for example, in using sensors is you don’t really need the critical mass per se to start to see new trends emerge. You can start to see behaviours from a relatively small number of people. So, of the people that are coming back to the office, you can quickly start to see what spaces they’re gravitating towards. And obviously that’s going to be impacted by policies—so for example, if you’re only allowed to be in a meeting room at 50% capacity, or certain spaces might be off limits or whatever the case may be, then obviously traffic is going to be directed based on those policies. But do you think that there’s value in using things like sensors and that kind of tech to help companies to at least start to trend the data in the return-to-office process?

Neil

I think the use of technology broadly is going to be important in that sense, whether it’s specifically sensors or other means of collecting data. You mentioned gate data, which is something that I think our sector has ignored for quite a long time. There’s a ready source of data without any investment, from the access control turnstiles, that tells us how many people are in that space. This actually became quite important during COVID, because it was very important to set limits to that and to realize when a limit was approaching or being exceeded.

As I said earlier, I think we’re getting beyond the ability of human beings to calibrate what’s needed in respect of the dynamism we’re seeing now and the way that space is being occupied. That includes the observation, that includes its actual day to day use as well. Because this working environment now is in general terms far more dynamic than it used to be. And that’s the sort of thing that I don’t think anybody sees declining in any way. In fact, I think we’re starting to really believe that that dynamism is only going to be increased.

And that has to do with time. Time is what really complicates this. It’s very easy to plan the right people to the right space. That’s what space planning used to be about. It was about filling seats and making sure that even if it was neighborhoods or agile workplaces and fairly loose associations of people to space, now that we’ve introduced the variability of time in the whole equation, it becomes beyond the means of human beings to calculate that.

Sandra

I completely agree with that. It’s interesting, I’ve been thinking about the role of space planning and design in the traditional sense—what exactly those functions did. And thinking about how it seems there’s been a transition right now that’s happening, leaning more towards workplace experience. But it still very much feels like the experience is limited to a white box. It’s still about the office. What are your thoughts about how the workplace might evolve because of those dynamics, because of that flexibility, and all of the different ways in which people will work, and how that will extend beyond the traditional office?

Neil

I think we have to be careful in this debate about thinking and assuming that people being together will naturally be in the office. First and foremost, what we’re looking to understand is the value that people derive from being physically together in the same space. Then, the challenge for those of us in the business of creating and providing offices, is to make sure that that becomes the place of choice. That that becomes the place with the right amenities, services, and is in the right location and gives us the ability to be together and to achieve what we need to. So first and foremost, the argument is about the value of people being together. That’s where we don’t have much more than an emotive response to that, and our data and our evidence is rather based on this innate feeling as social beings that we ought to spend some (and there’s a big question mark over how much of that constitutes some) of our time physically in the same space together. Whether that’s people from our own team, people from other teams, from the same organization, or people outside of the organization.

Then the office really has to stack up against all the other options. Is it easier or better or more enjoyable to meet in a café or a pub or a hotel lobby, or is the office actually outstripping all of those other options, because of the features, amenities, and services it offers? And actually, I think going forward, it’s meshing what the office can provide with what that whole urban infrastructure can provide too.

A trend in the last 20 years leading up to the pandemic was to continually add more amenities and more services. Our instinctive response to creating a better workplace experience was just to continually add more stuff. It’s always been an accumulation. It’s much harder to take features away from anything we create than it is to add new ones, so we just keep adding new ones.

You could argue that with utilization levels only just nudging above 50% for the decade before the pandemic, that actually, there was no marginal gain from continually adding more stuff. You could argue it was actually counterproductive—it was an environmental risk, it was a drain on the organization’s resources, and to a degree for people occupying this space, it was just confusing. Features kept arriving. How do we make sense of all of this? With most of what we have available to us (think about work tools like your standard office suite of software on your computer), we use a tiny fraction of their capability.

I think one of the really interesting things here is looking at some of our workplaces and working out, what percentage of this whole facility do people actually use? And has this whole process of thinking that a better employee experience means adding more and more, has it actually delivered no marginal gain and has it actually forced people away from the office? One of the things we could argue is that for 10 years before the pandemic, it wasn’t really working. And we’re still now talking about adding more, more services, more amenities, more work settings. Is that actually the right thing to do at all?

I think it’s time to pause and say, maybe what we need to do is integrate the workplace far more with the urban community where a lot of these services and amenities are already provided, and probably start stripping the workplace down. Actually making sure that what’s provided in the workplace is targeted, specific, and what we do, we do it extremely well. We should narrow the range of what the workplace offers instead of continually increasing it.

Sandra

A lot of truth to what you’re saying, and I completely agree. The point that you made about the value of being together—you hear dialogue every day about incentivizing people to come back to the office, how it’s going to be about having great amenities and services, anything you can add to the experience to try to get people to come back, but really, it begs the question, who ultimately is it that decides on the value of being together?

I think that it ultimately comes down to the individual. If I’m going to wake up today and make a decision about whether I’m going to go into the office today, it’s got to have a value that’s meaningful to me. There’s a lot of discussion around the fact of the value also having to be meaningful to the team. Because obviously we’re not all operating in a bubble, so there has to be the team benefit as well.

I recently had a conversation with someone around the fact that businesses (or at least it feels like) want to still have a significant amount of control over how people work. How people come together, collaborate, all of that. I’ve been working from home for large organizations for a number of years, working with national companies here in Canada where the team is scattered throughout the country or even, when I was working at CBRE, across the world. And there is no overarching hand reaching in saying ok, this is how you’re going to collaborate, and you’re going to come to the office and you’re going to do this and that. I sat back and looked at how the team actually functioned – it actually worked really well. People just figured it out.

It’s mindboggling to me that companies’ HR and Facilities are trying to basically put structure around something that I think doesn’t really need structure. When we look at the future of work and flexibility and all that entails—it doesn’t need structure. It needs the flexibility for people to make the decision on their own. It’s almost like you’re using that old way of thinking about the workplace and trying to now bring that into this virtual world or this flexible world— that doesn’t really work. It feels like there’s a bit of a fear of letting go, that something horrible is going to happen if people suddenly start making decisions on their own. Are you seeing the same thing? What are your thoughts?

Neil

I do think it’s down to personal decision. I’ve had two years to sit and think about how I work, it’s not a surprise that we’ve become personally focused in this time. And I don’t think we’ve ever really had a difficulty working with our own team. Most teams have been very responsibly self-organized and have known when to get together and how to do that in the last couple of years.

However, I think once you start to get outside of the area of our own team, that’s where we start to get into interesting territory. What’s the cumulative effect of all of our personal decisions on when where and how to work, on the way that the rest of the organization hangs together and also how we relate to those people outside the organization? Working with a number of clients, I see a very strong focus on the team, and when they’ve been allowed to be together physically in the same space, they’ve taken those opportunities.

What hasn’t been happening is that inter-team interaction—when teams work with other teams. Not just individuals within their own team. And this isn’t about people making new connections necessarily, because in a way, social technologies can introduce new connections. But actually, the missing piece is the layer between those two, which is where teams need to be, whether it’s digitally or physically, co-located and working closely together. That takes us beyond the realm of individual preference. When we used to look at the way teams were organized in an office space, we used to think about adjacencies. We thought about the benefit of people being in close physical proximity, we were aware of what the Allen Curve told us—it was very instructive in terms of physical distance being a barrier. But what we’re actually finding with random occupation of space, and people just going into a physical space when they decided to do that, is that a lot of that inter-team working and those inter-team relationships are not happening.

So how do we resolve that? Do we resolve it through a lot more messaging and self-organizing and people actually taking those initiatives? One of the things that I think has been fascinating in this period is the extra amount of administration we’ve all been subject to, to make sure that these sorts of interactions happen. Or can we use the technology to make sure that these inter-team relationships have an opportunity to thrive? That is how organizations really work. It’s not just individuals in their own teams. We’ve become insular. It’s about how those teams interact together. These are relationships that already exist. These are relationships that need developing and nurturing, rather than new relationships.

So, I think we’ve got several strata to think about. And it’s not just all about us. It’s about everyone else in our organization and how we interact with those people. When we were brought into an organization, it was on the basis that we were missing pieces of a jigsaw. I think we have to re-understand what that jigsaw is all about.

Sandra

Thinking about what you were saying about adjacencies and going through that process to understand who worked with who pre-pandemic and thinking about space planning and how you figure out the teams, especially if you had business units and departments—you have companies that are moving away from that. They’re looking at it more from a neighborhood perspective with drop-in centers where you don’t have boundaries per se of team areas. There are companies that are experimenting with that. I’ve had a few conversations in the past around what would make you want to go back to the office, and the responses were, it’s not so much a random decision, it’s much more orchestrated. I need to coordinate who I’m going to meet with or who’s at the office, because that might be a value to me to be there.

I think the piece that’s been an eye-opener has been the ability to make connections with people. So rather than, as you’re saying, throwing stuff in the office, how do you make it known to people who is actually in the office? Obviously visibility is still something that’s important to some people. But there’s also the consideration about learning and mentoring and all of these different things that go beyond your typical team. You work with your team every day, but then you might have an interest in working in a different department or working on a different team, or maybe there’s a project that’s going on that’s of interest to you, or you want to learn from different people.

How do you bring that kind of information forward so that you have visibility on that? I think that even in an in-person workplace environment, that’s always been somewhat hidden. People didn’t really share that information, you basically were in your own little siloed team. People talked about working together, but it always came back to, you work within your own nucleus of your team, and it was rare for you to really stretch out into other areas of the organization.

With this way of working, there’s higher value for organizations to share that kind of information more openly. So, sharing projects that the organization is working on, who’s leading them, different things that are happening within the organization where you might get natural gravitation from people towards certain things because of their interests. I think that’s where innovation and creativity and greater engagement will happen, because people might have other interests and learning experiences and opportunities that they might want to engage with. In the virtual world we tend to be stuck working on our projects and doing our initiatives, and it’s very hard to then tap into other projects and things that might be happening, unless you’re aware of them. There’s a need for increasing awareness, and how do you create that, when you’ve got some people in the office and some that are not there?

Neil

That’s where a really effective and effectively-used enterprise social networks come to the fore. They’re not just a chat forum. Most of the time you think of an enterprise social network as just being a messaging service, but actually the information stored within them, around peoples careers, interests, experience, other ongoing activities, can be vitally used. I would like to think in the last couple of years particularly with people being more distributed, that they are more prevalent in organizations than they had been before. But all of those tools need to be invested in by each one of the employees of an organization and they need to buy into that and understand what they’re likely to get out of it, in order for it to be successful. Otherwise, there’s an imbalance where some use it actively and others don’t. So, it’s something that people do have to commit to, across the breadth of an organization to get the most out of it.

Back to one of the points you made about the attendance in the office—we still have this idea that when we exercise that choice to go to the office, that somehow, when the doors open, what we’re going to see is what we saw before the pandemic. Everyone’s going to show up for our benefit. Everyone will be there that we want to see. There’s going to be this huge vibrant lively space that is going to make our commute and time and money all worthwhile. But there might actually be a sort of shock and horror, going through the doors to find that less than a fifth of the people in the organization are there and there are huge tracts of empty space…there’s so little background noise that you can hear every single conversation going on. And you think, I made the effort today to come in to this space and there’s no one here, so why should I bother coming in tomorrow?

So, the idea of critical mass is quite interesting. In physical terms, it means, we keep adding enough material until we have a sustained chain reaction. It basically means we don’t have to intervene anymore. Pre-pandemic, organizations were intervening. They were creating offices and expecting everyone, for most of their time, to be there. Although utilization levels were in generally about 50%, there was far greater dynamism of coming and going. There was every chance, if you were in for most of the week, that you would see most people in an organization, even if fleetingly, you could potentially interact with them and there was energy and life in that space.

What I’m fascinated about is in each organization, what is the point at which they might reach critical mass, as in, they don’t have to intervene anymore and there is enough presence and traction and enough going on in an office to make people, when exercising their personal choice, decide to go in to the office. That’s a challenge our industry hasn’t really faced before. We might have done it in isolated organizations and locations, and there’s always going to be exceptions. But this idea of critical mass is an interesting one for our industry to play with a little. It would conclude that there was enough going on in the office that we, when making our decisions, were happy to exercise that choice to go in, because there was enough going on to make it worthwhile and justifiable. No compulsion, no one’s telling us to go in, and no one’s set out the benefits. There was no list of all the reasons I should go into the office. We just sort of instinctively know it’s good for us. Whether it’s a whole day or part day, whether we use a desk or meeting room, it’s about the actual being there and it’s about the value we’re determining personally from being physically in the same space as other people.

The question for our industry is, will we ever reach that critical mass? Will it require intervention on the part of organizations where they continually add the material, meaning human beings, and continually instruct people to be there? Or do we think we can create workspaces and understand what’s happened and create enough critical mass in our workplaces? I think if we can do that, then that’s a very different situation than the decades that led up to the pandemic.

Sandra

On the point of critical mass, is it relative to the place, or is it critical mass in terms of how we work? Is it about feeling comfortable with whatever this new definition of work is going to be, therefore it’s hands off? Because we’ve heard reports in the last two years of how companies’ productivity levels have gone up, people feel way more productive working from home if they’ve had some flexibility. We’ve also heard the office side of that, where people who don’t have the space at home still rely on some kind of office space in order to remain productive. So obviously, there’s that flex for people to decide what environment they need to be productive, and that obviously we should continue to support that. But it begs the question again, it feels like (because we’re in corporate real estate) the whole critical mass discussion, the whole return-to-office discussion, is very place-centric, versus taking a step back and thinking about the whole concept of work, especially when you have other options that, before the pandemic, were not a consideration.

So, thinking about workplaces and workplace design and companies that establish their brand and their physical place, there was the coolness factor. If you worked for a company that was a great brand, you walked into the space and you felt a sense of pride, of belonging to an organization when you walk in the door. Some other organizations that don’t have that have other things going for them—you walk in and it’s not a showstopper, but there’s something there that has made you want to work for that company.

I’ve also been thinking about the transition we’re going through right now with the Great Resignation, with people changing jobs and reflecting on their lifestyles, reflecting on what they want for themselves and what work means to them. This begs the question again, what is that attraction to work? Is it going back to the way it was? Is it something new and different and having more control over it, as an individual to say this is what works for me, and then trying to find an organization that fits the way you want to work? Is it a blend of those two things? That’s the thing that I think is really fascinating about this time. Everyone is so different in terms of their needs, and while there is definitely a requirement for people to work together, because that’s what being a company is all about, the dynamics of how people work together is interesting.

I personally think that a lot of that was taken for granted. There was a workplace, you got a job, the expectation was you went to the workplace to work, and nobody really cared. It was just the way it was done. And suddenly you’ve got the pandemic thrown at you and the workplace is gone, and it’s sink or swim. It’s interesting to see how the physical place is going to fit into the future of work because of all the things we talked about. So how do you incentivise people, what is the value of people coming back, what is the purpose of the place vs the purpose of people coming together regardless of where that actually happens.

Neil

I think we can sort of unpack that a little. You were talking about productivity—I think we’ve pretty much cracked productivity in the last couple of years. We’ve learned a lot about it at a subjective level—you said “feel” productive. That’s whether I think I’m being productive. I had a list of things to do, and I’ve ticked every one of them off. And I’m ready for tomorrow. Cause realistically, we spend half our time doing stuff and the other half of that time changing stuff. Because everything that we do today that enables us to be productive was yesterday’s innovation. Someone came up with a process or a technology or a tool or a way of working, that was all done to enable us to be productive today. Organizations have miraculously learned to start measuring their own productivity in the last couple of years, because we’ve got much better measures of productivity at an objective level. Not just “feeling’ productive, but the organization is producing more, or doing more of what it does.

So, then we start to think about the use of the physical space. A lot of the reason that we become or feel more productive is that we’re not commuting, we haven’t got all those interruptions, the usual things that we’ve explored ad infinitum in the last couple of years. But a couple of things happened recently that were useful that help with this. One was a client of mine who said, I just can’t fit a day’s work into a day in the office anymore. A great statement, but actually the response I had to him was, could you ever do that, really? Perhaps what I was saying was that we could never quite be productive enough, and a lot of our frustration about being in the office all day every day is we have things to do, and because of the people we bumped into and all the requests and things that have gotten in the way, somehow we ended up doing half of the things we set out to do and we came home with another half as many again to do tomorrow.

So we were constantly feeling like we were catching up, we were never in a position to get on top of it. Hence people working at home on a Friday which became quite a thing, because they could finally take a breath and catch up and they could be super productive on a Friday, and get through the stuff they didn’t get done during the week. So that pattern was pretty well established. We spend four days getting ourselves behind and then a day catching up.

So, we actually had the clues to how this was going to pan out during the pandemic, well before the pandemic. It wasn’t a big surprise—hey, we can be more productive at home. Thankfully we’ve got technologies like Teams and Zoom to help in that respect, but we kind of already knew that. So now, when we think about physical space as opposed to just working in our own personal or digital space, I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s this idea that instead of putting on our Out of Office when we’re not going to be there, we actually put on our In Office. Because when we’re in the office, we’re not going to be as productive. Don’t expect I’m going to respond to the emails because I’m busy being with other people.

We’ve actually flipped that completely. What we’re actually saying now is, don’t expect a response if I’m here with other people because we’re doing the sort of stuff that I can’t do when I’m at home. Actually, our In Office days are not likely to be productive in the sense of ticking things off a list. Doing jobs. Doing things that need to be done. They’re going to be important discussions and they’re going to be unimportant discussions but they might sow the seeds of something in the future, we just don’t know that at the time. It’s an investment not just in the present but in the future. Because potentially this is where some of these innovations will come from.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re not going to innovate when we’re not in the office, because I think that’s true as well. We’re just saying there’s going to be a lower level of productivity when we’re in that physical space, but we’re going to be getting something else out of it that we don’t get when we’re busy being productive working out of the office. So, the balance is absolutely vital. But as I say, we kind of had the clues to that balance well before COVID. There are a number of organizations who are far more mature in that sense, far more used to that balance, and they didn’t let people save it all up for Friday. I’m convinced that’s why Friday working at home became such a thing, because we weren’t as efficient as we wanted to be during the week and we needed some time to regather ourselves effectively.

All we’re saying now is we’re just moving that dial a little bit, and giving ourselves a bit more time, so that we’re not saving it all up, because if something happened on Friday, we’d start the following week at a real disadvantage if we’re not careful. And we don’t want to spend all weekend catching up either. It’s supposed to be getting some sleep and having some fun.

So realistically, what we’re back to again is balance, in all of these things. It’s balancing face time with time alone, it’s balancing being physically present with people with spending time away from people. All of those things are just as important. Back to what we were saying earlier, if we just leave it up to our own personal preference and not thinking about those concentric circles and relationships and other people within our organization, and we’re just purely relying on our own personal choices, are some of those relationships going to be developed? Are some of those new relationships going to be discovered? Or over time, will all of that erode? We’ll still be exercising that personal preference but in a much smaller sphere. I’ve maintained for a long time that workplace in just about every respect is about balance. I don’t see that being any different now, in the sense of balancing all those aspects of our working lives—it’s absolutely vital.

Sandra

Neil, this has been fantastic. Thank you very much for your time today, I really appreciate the discussion. I learned a lot! Thank you again for your time.

Neil

Thank you for the invitation, and really enjoyed the discussion! Hope we can carry on.

Sandra

Wonderful, thank you!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Breaking down silos in corporate real estate
• The CRE industry and optimizing real estate
• Using technology to gather CRE data and using other data sources to inform decisions
• Solving the space supply issue – how do you decide how much you need?
• Can big companies manage their own flex space?
• How to transition away from leases and into flexibility
• Set and forget it, long term leases
• Getting utilization out of unused spaces
• The next 10 years in real estate
• Amenities and enticing people back to the workplace
• Is remote work creating community silos?
• Landlord responsibility to create engaging spaces
• Can technology solve the problems landlords and building owners are facing?
• Why are companies struggling to choose: remote-first, return-to-office mandates, or wait-and-see

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• David Cairns on LinkedIn
• Article: What is the cure to the workplace pandemic? by David Cairns

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

Dave Cairns started his career at CBRE in 2012, after being a professional poker player where he was ranked as one of the top 100 online tournament players in the world for a time. Since then, Dave has become a thought leader within the commercial real estate industry, with global recognition. He is an avid content creator on LinkedIn, who is highly respected by his peers, and has received over 1 million views in 2020 alone.

Working alongside his team, Dave focuses on working with high growth companies in the tech sector, Space-as-a-Service Operators, and with financial services firms on a local, national, and global level. Dave also leads a partnership with Deloitte on their Technology Fast 50 program, advising many of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies on their real estate requirements. He is also the co-founder of CBRE Forward, a platform designed to showcase the fastest growing tech companies in Canada.

Welcome Dave, I’m really happy to have you join me today on the Let’s Get Real Podcast. Before we begin, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dave

Sure! I’m Dave Cairns, I’m an office leasing agent from downtown Toronto. Although, I recently relocated, so ironically I’m a remote worker now. Someone who helps companies rent offices big and small, nationwide, throughout the world, I’ve decided that it’s best for my family and for me personally to move out East. So that’s me in a nutshell right now in the moment.

Prior to getting involved in real estate, I was a professional poker player for probably 5 years, and then casually before that throughout high school. It’s interesting to be in the real estate industry and now draw on my experience as a poker player, because what I’ve realized is that I lived in this digital-first and asynchronous world prior to getting into the real estate industry. And I kind of shut that part of myself off for probably 7, 8 years before the pandemic hit. Then as the pandemic has hit, I decided that rather than cold calling customers about office space, something that they couldn’t probably give two shits about for a lot of different reasons, why don’t I publicly journal my thoughts and see how they evolve? So, that’s actually what I’ve been doing, aside from obviously my day job in helping companies continue to deal with their real state requirements.

But I’ve become very active and vocal on social media, talking about the future of work, the future of real estate, things like that. I think I make some peoples’ veins pop out of their foreheads and I think other people are very much supporting my message, so it’s been an interesting experience.

Sandra

I’m curious, how did you go from playing poker to wanting to be in real estate?

Dave

Truthfully, I was very lost at the point of leaving the poker world. I left poker as a result of this event that took place called Black Friday, which as a day where the United States government indicted the two largest online poker websites for tax evasion, money laundering, and wire fraud, and other charges. I was already becoming disenchanted with the lifestyle, probably more so than the game itself. So, I took that as a sign from the universe that perhaps this big event in the poker world was time for me to pay attention and move on.

So that’s what I did, but I was treading water for at least 12 months–I took a sales job at a bucket shop company with several of my friends from high school and university. That didn’t pan out very well, in part because I started to blow the whistle on some things that were going on at the company, not unlike what I’m doing on social media today. Thankfully CBRE supports me in what I say.

But I left that job and was just floundering around, and I was fortunate to have some friends and family in the real estate industry, and they expressed to me that they thought that the brokerage side of the business might be well suited to my background and experience and personality, given that it’s 100% commission. I had good interpersonal skills and that kind of thing, so I honestly took a bit of a leap of faith.

I feel very fortunate that I was able to land at CBRE, which, even with connections to CBRE, is difficult to do. But I couldn’t be happier to have built my career at that company. I think it’s the best platform and it’s been able to allow me to spread my wings. Having the voice that I have with the brand of CBRE behind me, it’s certainly not hurting me.

Sandra

I concur with what you’re saying with respect to having the support of the company behind you. It’s great that you do have CBRE support. You are obviously very active on social media, and that’s how you and I connected. But you are very vocal about your thoughts and your ideas, you do have a voice, you have an opinion. And truth be told, I was inspired by you, by just watching what you were doing and how you took a position, you were very strong in your beliefs. I was always more the observer, or the consumer of social media, just kind of listening to what other people were saying and not really participating–but always feeling that I, too, had thoughts and opinions about certain things, and it’s like, why not? What’s holding me back from putting it forward?

It’s interesting because prior to joining Relogix, I worked for large companies, and it wasn’t really something that the company promoted or wanted you to do. They didn’t want you to be on social media, you always had the social media policies that you had to deal with. You had to be very cognizant of the image that you were portraying as an ambassador of that particular company.

I don’t know now if it’s just because the switch has moved over into real estate, which is now exploded and everybody’s curious about what to do, what not to do, how to think about real estate, how not to think about real estate, that there’s a lot more conversation in that regard. But I’m still seeing that there’s a lot more select people who are much more vocal than what could be, where you’re really getting different angles from different people from all walks of life, with respect to the companies in which they actually work.

I often think, how cool would it be if actual employees in different companies, not necessarily in a real estate position, could speak very freely about their experiences and about the office and certain things that they like or dislike? How much more real would the conversation actually be about the direction that the workplace should take? Yes, there are surveys, everybody’s surveying everybody. And that sort of gives you a gauge, but really hearing it from an employee’s perspective is really valuable. That’s why I go to Reddit because there you get the unabridged version.

Dave

Well, I will say, you are definitely one of the most insightful people that I follow, so I’m really glad that I was able to inspire you in some small way. You speak with such strong data behind what you say. And I’ll admit, the first time you came into the conversations I was having, you made my veins pop out of my forehead a little bit, because you were saying things that I didn’t understand.

I bring this up because I think there are a lot of little silos within the commercial real estate industry. Despite the fact that a company such as CBRE has every single platform service under the sun, there’s not nearly enough cross-pollination that’s actually happening inside of organizations of a big size. I’m not trying to single CBRE out, I’m just saying it’s a by-product of large organizations. And what I want to say to any brokers or anyone in the service side of the industry who might be listening to this podcast is that there’s nothing more important than listening to people such as yourself who are not directly in the brokerage world. Because we are not in a position to be doing back of the napkin stuff anymore with customers. And what scares me actually, is that customers often want to do back of the napkin stuff themselves. They don’t really want to dive into the details too much. But we have a responsibility, especially in light of this revolution that’s taking place, and a lot of continued acknowledgements around the dreadful stuff going on with climate change–we have a responsibility. So I’m just doing my best to listen to people like you as much as I can and try to learn things that I don’t understand.

Sandra

Well, thank you for that. I think it’s true, we hear often even in our world questions about the need for data, the need for technology, and is it really necessary because there’s info out there that’s good enough. And I think there’s definitely truth to that. Just this morning I was in a discussion on a post I made about the need for technology to give you that very granular level of detail and someone asked the question, why do you even need that? Because you can use high level metrics to get a sense of how space is being used, and yes that’s true, but it really depends on what your ultimate objective is. And that’s really where understanding what kind of data fits the bill is really important in terms of being able to drive the outcomes that ultimately the customer, which is the tenant in this case, wants.

I actually worked at CBRE for a number of years, in the workplace strategy consulting arm. I didn’t work directly with brokers, but for example, you’d be working on a deal that’s potentially going to close and then the workplace strategy element comes in that says ok, there’s a million square feet but maybe you don’t need that much space. Then you get into a conflict.

Dave

You’re messing up my fee, Sandra, get out of the way! I’m trying to make money here!

Sandra

Exactly! To basically offer that service within the same organization sometimes creates a conflict of interest. Now that was before the pandemic, and I think now that probably has changed. I don’t know how what you’re seeing on your side, but because tenants are now coming to organizations like yours to help them figure out how much space they actually need, is that industry positioned to do that for companies?

Dave

We are positioned to do it, I think we need to just actually do it. What I think is going to be very productive is the fact that companies have shone a light inside of their own cultures and workplaces to a far greater degree than they ever did in the last decade. As a result, they’re being more prudent with who they actually choose as partners and service providers. They’re asking more questions, they’re looking for people that have a beginners’ mindset to the problem. I think that sophisticated customers that need brokerage services are more concerned with people who are willing to ask questions and not necessarily even know the answer, than they are with those who really want to dictate terms to them and tell them what the answers are.

Because the truth of the matter is, there’s no meaningful data at this point whatsoever, and in that regard, in general, whether it’s the commercial real estate industry or otherwise, I think we need to pay attention to matching more intuitive people with more data-oriented people. I think that combination can present such an amazing possibility for customers.

So, I’m way more on the intuitive side. I used to be a poker player and we used to use software that would literally track granular levels of information around peoples’ behaviours in the context of the game. And it would really help inform making decisions. But the problem with relying solely on that approach is you become a bit of a robot, and you say goodbye to that X-factor that is being a human being. And there’s a saying in this poker movie, Rounders, in short, “sometimes it just comes down to feel, what’s in your guts”. And I think we’re at a moment right now where we need to actually pay attention to that feeling and what’s in our guts and talk about it.

We don’t have the data, but we need to talk about it. I hear a lot of people in my industry say things like, I’ll believe in hybrid working when the data shows that people can be productive and engaged in a hybrid capacity. Until then, I don’t give a shit. I think that’s, in the best way, kicking the can down the road, and in a more unproductive way, they’re actually just looking for the status quo to prevail because it serves their status, their financial compensation structure, and so on. And herein lies the biggest problem that the commercial real estate sector has. We have compensation structures and even worse that prevent us from wanting to change.

Sandra

It’s interesting what you say about the fact that there isn’t data, because there’s been some discussion about that this past week. I actually posted a poll to ask people why companies are stuck. The number one response is: there’s no data. And I question that, because being obviously on the technology side of real estate, or CRE tech, and being able to provision things like sensors and say hey, you can put sensors in and get a sense of how people are using space–sometimes I think, well is that really necessary? If people aren’t coming into the office, which we saw when the pandemic started and the whole business basically was put on hold, why is anybody going to put sensors in?

But the reality is that there are other data sources that exist within an organization, even though you’re not back 100%. There has been movement for the last 6 months, 9 months, people have been returning to the office to some degree. It’s similar to the argument you made about poker, where you focus on the behaviour. It’s not so much focused on say, what’s our occupancy, it’s at 20, 30% but we don’t know if it’s going to get to 50 or 60–it’s digging into that 20 to 30% that are coming back to the office and trying to understand who is that user. Bringing in information about what’s their job function, what teams do they belong to, when they’re coming in, what are they doing? Are they meeting? Are they coming in to work because maybe they don’t have space at home?

It helps with understanding commuting patterns too. I’m thinking about workplace initiatives where you think, we have a certain percent of people that live within a 20km radius, and if you now overlay that to your badging data, you can get a sense of the people who come in to the office 4 days a week maybe live 10km or 5km away from the office, vs the person who comes in once every 2 weeks, lives 50 or 60km away. You start to the understand the supply and demand need much more deeply, based on not just the behaviours, but the attributes that relate to the users of that space. You can start to think, if this is true for our entire organization, how do we start to re-think how we provision space to people? And where should that space actually be?

Dave

The thing that I’ve been talking about since 2019 is that there’s a mismatch on the supply side. The supply just doesn’t offer an asset that can be purchased in short, medium and long, all under one roof. It’s starting to change, cool landlords like Ivanhoé Cambridge, led by innovative people like Jonathan Pierce who’s a friend of mine, are partnering up with the likes of WeWork, to be able to actually, in an intentional way, and as a lease up and retention strategy, involve them at the asset level, and see how they can provision to have spaces that are either fully communal or can be rented, like a private suite for a company that’s a series A start-up. Instead of going out to the traditional market and leasing let’s say 10,000 square feet, they could take 5,000 dedicated and then benefit from using conference space, meeting space, event space, hotdesking, through the coworking that’s available in the building.

Herein lies the problem. Pre-pandemic I was working on a deal where a big tech company RFP’d a flex-based operator prior to even going to a landlord to discuss growth in Toronto. And the reason they did that is they needed more space, but they only really had visibility on about 15,000 square feet of space that they knew they needed definitively. Over and above that amount, they were forecasting what they thought they needed. They finally said to themselves, this is crazy, we go out there and lease 80,000 square feet, 65,000 of it sits dormant, and we might even actually build it before anybody comes. And it doesn’t make any sense. So they were starting to try and solve some of their own flexibility issues by bringing in a third party operator.

And when I was bearing witness to this as the service provider, I’m saying to myself, how much longer are these big customers going to manage all of their own flexibility and service issues themselves? They’re starting to truly become self-aware, because nobody was doing anything like that 10 years ago. Or for another 10 years–are they going to lease 80,000 square feet from a landlord because they think they might need it? There’s a 0% chance, there’s no way.

Then you add layers to this thing–there’s the growth of marketplaces like LiquidSpace or UPFLEX or Upsuite, there’s a whole host of them that are just blowing up. You fast forward that tape another 5 to 10 years, these kinds of groups are not even just trying to supply space like Expedia, they’re trying to become consultants, and effectively almost compete with brokers on some bases to be able to help customers understand utilization of their space and inform future strategy. This thing’s getting completely turned on its head. Despite the fact that most landlords’ portfolios are 95% leased right now, and the average lease term in their portfolio is 9.5 years, it’s a very easy way for them to just shut their eyes and ears off. And then add to it Amazon or Facebook taking more space, and basically this is their excuse to just never do anything. Because the sky is blue and everything is fine. It’s not, the sky is grey. There will be darkness before the spring–before the new beginning of going to work, there’s going to be some really stormy clouds. And I don’t think those stormy clouds have really even reared their head yet.

Sandra

It’s interesting what you’ve just described, because I think there’s definitely a lot more movement in the flex space, maybe because we’re paying attention to it more now, but I think just generally there is a lot more interest and movement in that area.

I think the burning question for most companies who are currently in space that they’re leasing, is, what do they do? You have these options that are available to you that provide flexibility, so that you’re not committed to something longer-term. But let’s say the average lease is 10 years and you’re 3 or 5 or 6 years into it and you still have 4 years to go, is there an option, or is there an out, something in the works on the brokerage side, or from a landlord’s side, to help transition to something more flexible? How far away is something like that where you’re not tied into it for the next 5 years, 10 years and too bad?

Dave

Well, you hear a lot of consultants provide good insights to customers and say, you should band together within the building and put more pressure on the owner to take some of the space that you have, pool it together and turn it into common space that you’ll contribute a portion of the revenue towards but not entirely like you are right now, and deal with major poor utilisation issues.

The problem is, landlords are completely unmotivated to do this, and it’s for a variety of reasons. One is that their customer is not really their customer. Their customers are lenders, are LPs, are brokers. These are the people that they care more about interactions with and have ongoing active relationships with, more so than those that they sign a lease with. They care greatly about that customer when that customer is on the street looking for space and they wine and dine them during that phase, but as soon as the 10-year lease is signed, it’s set it and forget it. So that’s a mindset problem that is starting to shift. But it’s still really an epidemic of its own.

Then there are structural issues. And the structural issues are how the industry values its properties and how it’s seeking lending, and those kinds of things. That’s all structured on long-term leases with credible, financially strong tenants. That’s the issue that fundamentally needs to shift in order for landlords to be able to more freely shift the supply. Because I think customers are going to get creative and try to find ways to solve for these problems that you bring up that are very real problems. But I think they’re going to come up short in a lot of capacities.

And also, we have to remember, they have their own businesses to run. In a lot of cases, it’s going to be easier for a customer to just write off the poor utilization, or write off the lease and just wait till it expires and deal with it then. And that’s an unfortunate reality.

What I’d be doing if I was a landlord is I would be calling every single tenant in my building and portfolio, I’d be trying to get a real sense of whether they were likely to renew that lease or not and if they were not, I’d be proactively trying to figure out large blocks of space that I could get control of and turn it into this full stack commercial real estate product, where, from the minute you walk into the door, you have activated amenities, activated meeting space, activated everything. Because that’s the other issue–that landlords go and design these amenities but they’re not in the hotel business, for a simple analogy. So these spaces are not activated properly, nobody uses them, and they basically become operating expense write offs. They’re contributing to something that they don’t use.

And then later on, what blows my mind about the traditional leasing model is, you get companies coming in, building up these Taj Mahals, and then the lease expires, and it gets torn down because it’s not universally applicable. We look to every other area of our world, and there are sharing economies that are exploding everywhere.

I think you need to follow the younger companies to see where the trendline is headed. Younger companies are willing to give up personalization and even privacy for more flexibility and more service. Imagine the world we’re going to live in when Gen Zs are running companies. For these people, everything is in their pocket. Everything is on this device. They’re going to be like, 10-year lease? What? Sorry, that doesn’t work for me. I’ll just take no office, we’ll rent an Airbnb, we’ll figure something out. Young companies will get so much more creative with how they congregate.

I think the next 10 years are going to be highly transformative. But real estate is really frustrating, in the sense that it takes so long for anything meaningful to happen. But I would ascertain that if you were to compare the last 50 years to the next 10, I strongly believe it will look very different.

Sandra

I agree with you there. You were talking about amenities–and this is something that I often grapple with–do you believe that there is anything that a tenant or even a landlord for that matter, can do to entice people to want to come back to a building?

Dave

It’s kind of funny, almost laughable when you really think about it. The answer is yes, but I’ll make fun of it and poke fun first. I made a post last week where I said, there’s no office amenity more valuable than the choice to go there or not. That is the most profound amenity that a knowledge worker can actually have. I believe that, I don’t know if you believe it?

Sandra

Absolutely, I totally agree.

Dave

Ok, so if we believe that, then all of these fancy amenities are far less relevant than that. Again, I’ll draw on my poker background. It really didn’t matter how quality the space was that we chose to actually physically interact in. What mattered was that the right brains were in the room doing something that needed to be done in person. It’s really that simple. And we had the appropriate technology and if the technology wasn’t working, then we had a problem. So, I would actually argue that technology is the fundamental, most important thing for those interactions. Then other than that, it’s the right people being in the room and wanting to be there together. So yes, I think the hotelification of the office is a real thing, and it is coming, and it’s going to happen. But it is not even close to as relevant as the right people being in the room and having the choice to be there or not.

Sandra

I agree, I’ve been thinking recently about what the difference is between an amenity provided by a hotel vs a company or an office that’s providing a similar experience, a similar amenity. And really the difference is that the hotel’s business is based on the service. You need a hotel if you’re travelling away from home, and they obviously have competition with the Airbnbs of the world, but it’s a completely different experience. You make that decision; do I want a hotel experience or do I want an Airbnb experience?

But what I think is interesting about amenities, is it is laughable, but I look at it a little bit differently. When I go into an organization and I start asking questions about their corporate objectives, I look at their annual report if they’re a public company, look at talent attraction and retention, sustainability, community-building, these things that virtually every company has in their annual report. Then I look at the services and the amenities that often the tenants will build. Years ago, having a gym in the office wasn’t something that most companies offered. A few did, but a lot of companies frowned upon using it during office hours. They wanted you to use it before work, at lunch, or after work, in which case, what’s the point of the amenity?

So, when that became more mainstream, then I started to look at it from the standpoint of, ok, you care about sustainability–bear with me here–if you care about sustainability, you have an office that’s located in downtown Toronto that you’re forcing everybody to drive into the city to work in. And in the case where a company does offer flexibility–which is forward looking now, because I’ve worked at a company where you did have that option–but they offered the amenities to try to entice people to come into the office.

But if you care about my health, or you care about sustainability, then give me an allowance that I can use to join a gym in my community that’s 5 minutes away, so I’m not coming down to the office just to use the gym that you’re offering me. It’s going to cost you probably the same amount of money, or even less, because most people don’t take advantage of these programs. Companies will have budget allowances, but usually it’s less than 20 or 30% of people who actually use the money to participate in these programs. But it’s a win-win. You can still be flexible, and you can still care about my health, but you’re giving me the choice, versus putting everything in a building and making the building the center of everything. So that’s where I’ve always struggled, is to say yes, you can put hotel-like amenities, cafés and lounges and restaurants and the like, but to your point, it’s not about the beautification of the place, it’s the brains that are coming together, to do what they need to do.

Dave

100%. I think that the reason why you would probably see that some WeWorks are more occupied than traditional offices right now, taking aside for a moment the fact that the financial contribution is more flexible, is really because there is a brand that stands for something that those that go there believe in. I think that’s a key piece. If you’re going to be hotelifying the office, it has to stand for something. And I think that increasingly what we’ll see is that rather than buildings being a complete random selection of tenants that are there for no reason other than that the location matches the location that they’d like to be in, you may see these buildings start to look more homogenous, in that the people that are in there stand for the same things.

Dror Poleg talked about this sort of thing at length, notably how remote work could create community silos that are not very diverse. And perhaps we really are moving into that kind of a world, and again, I’m too naïve to be able to really comment on the implications of it all. But I think that’s really key. Right now, landlords don’t really have consumer-facing brands. Nobody can tell you who owns a building–no employee of 145 King St can tell you that QuadReal is the owner of the building. They have no idea, and they don’t care. And they don’t care because there’s no reason to care. So that’s definitely got to change.

But additionally, when I go back to my poker example, what I think structurally needs to happen (and this is more at the organizational level and it will influence real estate by it happening) is that when we play poker, we had all of the infrastructure in place that we needed to do the thing that we wanted to do, which was play the game. We had the software that we could play the game on. And then we had things like Skype and messaging forums, where we could communicate with each other either synchronously or asynchronously, to learn the game and build community. So it was very much a digital-first kind of approach to the way things were done. What actually happened was that there were no mandates of any kind, it was just that the infrastructure was there to use, and it was very grassroots how the collaborations happened and who with.

I’m very much a believer that this is, organizationally speaking, the direction that companies need to move in. If they move in that direction, it’s not really going to matter so much if they have all this sexy stuff in their space. Sure, it’d be great if they could have it, but more importantly, it will be a structure that gets the right people in the room for the right reasons at the right time. And then you adjust your real estate strategy around that.

Sandra

It’s funny that you mention Dror, because I was going to say the same thing. I know in one of the early sessions of the Real Innovation Academy course, which I think you took as well, there was a question around, if you could have an opportunity to meet with anybody that you wanted to, dead or alive, who would it be? And it was geared still around the office setting. It was fascinating actually, the answers that you got that had nothing to do with people in the organization. It was artists or people that were inspired by musicians or people from any walk of life.

And what was interesting for me was that I experienced the WeWork environment when I left corporate and did my own start-up several years ago and didn’t have an office, so I was a nomad for a couple of years. I opted to go in and work in these co-working spaces, and the first thing that jumped out at me was, how different the communication and the ability to connect with like-minded people from different companies was. This was not what the experience was in the corporate world. I think about how much more valuable that was from a learning perspective. So, when I think about WeWork its the success, depending on how you define success, I think about this whole concept of building community. In the early days I remember they would bring guest speakers in and try to bring people in with different interests so that you could rub shoulders with people from companies that maybe you wanted to learn a little bit more about. And I think often about how valuable would that be for people that are in the corporate space. For years, companies have been very particular about not cross-pollinating with other companies, because–

Dave

Competitiveness, security, whatever.

Sandra

Exactly. But the learning aspect and how you innovate and how you grow and ideas that you generate, have to involve conversations and experiences outside of the organization. And so, I think that kind of experience is extremely valuable for companies to be able to move forward.

Dave

And imagine instead of it being WeWork directly, at least the landlord had a stake in the game, right? And the issue again comes back to a couple things. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, I was talking a lot about how the onus can’t just rest anymore on all of these companies to deliver a great experience for their employees. And the prevailing sentiment from the landlord community at the time, and I expect in many regards is still the prevailing sentiment, is that that’s not our job. Our job is to find a great piece of dirt, erect or buy a building, deliver the four walls, and then the rest is your responsibility. And that’s a mindset problem, but part of it is again tied to the financial compensation structure. And the level of effort and lack of understanding. When you think of these community spaces that you’ve just described, it’s a landlord’s worst nightmare. It’s short-term purchasing behaviours, high levels of activation, and having to deliver active service. You have to actually be more like a hotel concierge than you are an asset manager, and this is literally their worst nightmare.

And herein lies the problem–this is what’s needed. This is what is desired, this is what’s going to keep these buildings full. Someone made a comment on one of my posts the other day that said, putting a rock-climbing gym in a 10,000 square meter facility in Saskatoon is not going to fill the building. And they’re dead right, it’s not going to fill the building. But community and real human connection might. Right? So, it’s less about the spatial design and more about the programming.

Sandra

On a completely different tangent, do you think technology can solve the challenges that are being faced by landlords and building owners? Just being able to get a better understanding of what’s actually taking place in the building, so understanding the behaviours, understanding who the users are? You said at the beginning, their interest hasn’t really necessarily been the tenant, other than when they’re looking for space, but now if you’re trying to stay alive, for lack of a better word, you need to kind of have a sense of what’s happening in your building. And so do you think technology could solve for that, to alert landlords on what’s taking place at a level where they can be more proactive with how they’re dealing with and how they’re going to interact with their tenants that maybe they didn’t have before?

Dave

In a very short answer I would say yes, but it’s very important to not romanticize it either. The companies want a couple things. They want to be able to flex their space up and down, inside of the building that they’re in, or in a building that’s close by. And they’re not naïve to the fact that this is a physical product, so it can’t be as nimble as a technology software service that they’ve purchased–they get that. But what they’ll say is that it really is solely my problem. Like, if my needs change, I’ve got to sublease the space which is really inconvenient, involves me taking the reins on dealing with that transaction, dealing with everything related to relocating myself, and it’s going to take time and I’m going to lose money. So if the landlord actually had an asset that was basically better set up to allow people to go up and down up and down up and down, and that building space is better universally workable, interconnected and well thought out–not like, our flex space is sort of an afterthought that we’ll deal with at the end once we get 90% of the space leased traditionally, and hopefully we get it all leased traditionally so we don’t have to worry about it!–if they can get rid of that and actually deliver what customers want, I think they’ll be surprised in a good way that they can command premiums for that real estate, and it’ll just change hands. The vacancy will not be as profound as they think it will be. So that’s one big problem that they care about.

Then the other one is actually new market entries. They would love it if their landlord could go on the road with them. And to me the only way that can happen is if the landlord has an operating platform within their suite of services that they can actually transact outside of their own footprint. That’s the only way that will happen. So those are the main issues that companies are trying to deal with. And beyond that, yes, you’ve got to design the right kinds of spaces, but we’re talking about this a third time–it’s just a sexy factor. It’s not nearly as important as the right brains being in there and wanting to be there. And it’s pretty basic, the kind of stuff you need to make that happen.

Sandra

We’re seeing every day posts by all kinds of organizations, some that are taking the bull by the horns and making decisions on being remote-first, others are mandating the return to office, and some are just not doing anything at all right now, they’re just waiting to see what’s going to happen. Why do you think this is the case?

Dave

If I were to generalize, I think it has a lot to do with the amount of time that the organization has been in business. And even really what they do and how that came to be in the first place. Take a company like Dropbox. They’re on the leading edge and they’re a cloud software company. Of course, they’re not going to romanticize where their work happens, right? They’re willing to look at this problem with a completely beginners’ mindset. Then you’ve got Salesforce, they’re one of the most inclusive large employers in the world, and they’re willing to say things like, we’ll put everything before where work happens. What and why and how come before where. What a great statement. That to me, suggests that they trust their people, that they recognize that no one location is a silver bullet, and they’re going to do whatever they need to do to make their people productive. And if 25% of them never want to go in to the office again they’ll facilitate that. If 60% of them want to go in there on a very fluid basis, they’ll facilitate that.

Then on the flip side, you’ve got what I’ll call legacy companies, and I’m calling them that because they’ve been around for a long time, but there is also a correlation to their relevancy in the market. And they’ve been led typically by white males who are used to ruling from their castles. So, when you combine all of those forces together, it’s not surprising that you’ll hear those types of folks say, we need to get people back to work. It’s like, dude, we’ve been working! Your definition of work is not what work is. Work’s not a place, culture’s not a place. But they don’t see it this way. And for some, it’s an easy slip, because you know it’s natural to say, “I’m going to work”. We’ve all been saying that for decades. And we did, we went to work. But we’ve now realized work’s not a place. And this is what the smartest organizations understand and they’re building a workplace strategy around that.

Sandra

I completely concur with what you’re saying. Well, this has been great, thank you very much for your time today and for your insights. Any final comments?

Dave

No, you let me drop the mic with that last one, so I’m good!

Sandra

Ok, great! Thanks Dave!

Dave

Thank you!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Exodus from urban cities and impact on the future of work
• The concept of tele-travel
• Transportation optimizes at zero
• The future of urban cities with commute aversion gaining ground
• If there’s no commute, do employers have the option to reduce pay?
• Globalization of the workforce

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Mitch Turck on LinkedIn
• Listen to Mitch’s Podcast: Telekinetic Ep. 1 Transportation Avoidance
• Article: Subsidies and Sprawl

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

Mitch Turck is a self-proclaimed Outsider-in-Residence, producing thought leadership and change advocacy to address the conversions of industries, ideas, and opportunities. He conducts social experiments in virtual work, and in 2017, conceived legislation to make telecommuting a civil right.

Sandra

Welcome, Mitch, glad to finally have you on as a guest! Before we get started, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself?

Mitch

Thank you, Sandra, my pleasure to be on! I really need to work on figuring out how to introduce myself, so I’ll keep it brief at the expense of informing anyone on anything useful. I tend to work in sectors where change management is appealing, or at least at the time, and in this case, it’s anything around remote work, virtual productivity, and telecommuting. I’d been spending time in that space pre-pandemic, and it’s very much come to a head now, and so I’m still spending quite a bit of time in that space. I’m mostly just pontificating and yelling at executives as to how they should do things, which is a great job! And that’s about it.

Sandra

That’s great! I was listening to your podcast “Telekinetic” earlier this morning, and I was looking at how you describe the podcast. I loved what you said—there’s a trip being made by knowledge that used to be made by people. We’re here for it. And I thought, that’s a really cool way of summarizing what you do. We’re used to the whole idea of “transportation”, how we commute, and people going places, and that was really what the world of work was all about. And now it’s a mindful trip, versus a physical trip, which I thought is very appropriate for the discussion that we’re about to have.

So, you and I met on LinkedIn earlier this year, and we’ve shared our points of view on a number of different topics. The first one, as I said, was more along the lines of transportation and commuting, back at the very beginning of when the pandemic started. There was a lot of discussion around the exodus from urban cities and the impact that was going to have on the future of work. So why don’t we start there—maybe give us your thoughts on what you’re seeing and hearing from different people that you’re interacting with in that regard?

Mitch

As far as the future of work, this is one of the things I just ranted about this morning! I think ironically, knowledge work, or white-collar work, work that used to be though to be done in the office, is not that interesting or challenging, or even less so challenging of a problem to consider in the space of virtualization and augmentation and hybridization. Especially when compared to sectors where physical presence actually has a lot of utility, like healthcare, education (although decreasingly so), construction, retail, manufacturing, things of that nature. So in that sense, it’s not surprising, but it’s actually kind of interesting that we have so much emphasis on, what is the new office going to be, or what is the hybrid environment going to be?

To me, if there was one big pile of money we were working from, I would absolutely not recommend that we put our investment dollars into how the office will look. If you can teach a student or heal a patient or build a structure in a hybrid or augmented or virtualized environment, then you can certainly hold a budget meeting. So, in that sense, I think it’s kind of funny that we’re spending so much time thinking about how the future of work is going to look, when we’re looking at the knowledge worker. Because we could all just be remote and that would be fine, whether the work is slightly better or worse when produced that way.

Sandra

That’s interesting, I agree 100%. There’s a lot of focus on the physical space, the design, what needs to be changed.  And there’s a lot of focus and effort and emphasis being put on this question of, how can you entice people to come back into the workplace. I’ve voiced my opinions over time that there really isn’t anything that you can do to entice someone to want to come back to the physical space. There are obviously different reasons why people might want to go into a space, but I doubt that it’s because of the way a space is designed. You get that “wow” factor when you walk into a space and it’s really cool, but that wears off really quickly. If the culture is not there, or the mindset, the values, and those types of things which are much more sticky, then you could have the most beautiful office and it’s not going to guarantee anything.

So, one of the reasons that I’ve heard time and time again for this whole focus on office redesign is the fact that with so many people leaving these urban centers, that there’s going to be a collapse. There are a lot of businesses and support that’s required when people work in these centralized urban locations. So, with people now dispersing into suburbia, going into other cities or bedroom communities where it’s less expensive to live but people are still commuting, is this why there’s this push to reinvent the office, but still in the downtown core? What do you think is the reason for this focus on redesigning the space?

Mitch

Certainly, peoples’ vested interests, I would assume, are what drive a lot of that. And obviously, just generally the conservation bias of thinking, these buildings were here for this purpose. It’s going to take a lot of movement in peoples’ minds to understand why or whether those constructs should change. And you would know this better than I, I think, around commercial real estate and the interest and incentives there. The way we have habitually prioritized commerce as the “hub” of the urban core, and as the primary factor in how we design our cities, we’re now reluctantly realizing is a bit non-sensical when you’re not operating a silver mine, or something to that effect.

So, there’s the hot take is that people are leaving the city because people have preferences (of course, taking anything that’s happened during the pandemic with a large grain of salt). Obviously some folks would prefer to have a big house and a big yard, and we can get into all the subsidies and incentives that allow them to think that’s possible when it’s not really sustainable—but regardless of that, you don’t need a crystal ball to see what a city looks like when it’s not all about the four or five very large skyscrapers that everyone commutes to and leaves at the end of the day.

I was van-lifing pre-pandemic for a year. We spent a month in each of the cities in America that we really liked. With one exception, those cities were all places where you can count on one hand the number of large commercial buildings in those cities. We’re talking Asheville NC, Boulder CO, Bozeman MT, Santa Barbara CA, St Petersburg FL, and a few others. There’s basically no commercial presence as far as skyscrapers are concerned, or the commuting patterns and infrastructure to support that in those cities. So, before we even get into speculating what will happen, that would be my challenge to folks—where does everyone go to get married? To go on vacation? To have a good time and spend their dollars? They don’t go to Detroit. They go to the cities I mentioned. So, what does that tell you about the death grip that the large corporate structure has on the sustainability and resiliency and economic viability of a city?

Sandra

That’s really interesting, because even from a general living perspective, even just thinking about downtown Toronto, there are tonnes of buildings, as in most major urban city centres, and then there’s condos everywhere. It’s almost to the point where, at least in my opinion, it’s ruined the experience of downtown, because it’s just skyscraper on skyscraper. The access to the waterfront is somewhat limited, the traffic is terrible, and all of that stuff. Where does the fun begin? On weekends you roam around, and the traffic is all heading northbound into cottage country or the countryside, and whether it’s spring, summer, winter, or fall, it’s very rarely the other way. During the week, absolutely, because you have to commute downtown to work, because that’s where most of the jobs are located. But for rest and relaxation, people avoid the downtown core where the offices are to be in places that can be free of the typical work mindset.

So, along that line, then, how are you seeing the future of urban centers? Do you think that the exodus will remain? Do you think people will go back once the pandemic is somewhat behind us?

Mitch

Admittedly, it’s not something I’ve tracked early, but as far as what I’ve seen, people have already come back and populations have increased in a lot of these cities where people thought this exodus was happening. But as someone who’s spent a lot of time in transportation and sustainability as far as designing cities, I would say there’s nothing to say for the value of a large skyscraper that houses people less than a third of the time.

And then of course, as you were speaking to, there’s building everything else out like roads and parking garages. It’s easy to forget that wherever there’s a road or a parking spot, there’s a place where nothing else can really exist. Not to pick on Detroit, but they’re a good example of this. I don’t want to misquote the stat, but it’s somewhere between 35 and 40% of Detroit’s urban core is just land for cars to drive on, which means obviously they’re going somewhere else. The more of that you put into that space, the more you have to spread out wherever the actual destinations are. So, in that sense, I think it’s very easy to make a city more viable, more enticing, more liveable, by simply taking that opportunity to say, we don’t actually need people to come in to work anymore, they can work from wherever. Should this parking lot then be a park? Should this road instead be a popup trucks for food, and parklets, and should this street be for biking, rather than parking? Should the commercial office building be residential, which would resolve a tonne of issues around housing affordability? Should we have mixed used in there, or retail? Should we have community welfare in there? Which obviously is super important and tends to not get a lot of prioritization.

To go back to your point to making it enticing for people to go to the office—how do you make it enticing for people to do anything? It’s not really about making a fancy-looking place. That’s cute, and it’s nice to some extent, but make it liveable. And for a lot of folks, making something liveable is answering the question, where can I send my kids while I have to do this other thing? It’s kind of ironic, we saw during the pandemic just how much we subsidize and incentivize building a world that lets kids be away from their parents safely. Whether it’s the kids going to school or parents having to go to work, just being able to separate families in a safe way is vital and we don’t put a lot of emphasis on that. In a lot of ways we half-assed it by saying, ok, you can go to the office, and that’ll give you some space away from your kids to be an adult and let your brain function normally.

Sandra

It’s a day out of the house—I need my space, I don’t want to work at home because I can go to the office and be away from my significant other or children or whomever and have peace of mind.

Mitch

Listen, it’s fair! In one podcast episode I had with Carlos Pardo, who’s a great mind in mobility, he was referencing a study about soccer moms and how the moms need the soccer because it’s a way to get out of the house so they don’t have a certain feeling of accountability to be doing something to make the house more efficient or the like. If they’re out with the kids and the kids are doing something, they can just relax. So, the idea is, soccer moms need soccer to travel to because it’s how you get your kids away from you and don’t have an obligation. The counter point would be, we could certainly make a better society and better world around us in which we don’t require some strange jumping through hoops to create the escapism that’s required for someone’s mind to get back to center.

Sandra

That’s really interesting. You’ve mentioned Carlos Pardo at NUMO—in that podcast, you talked about the concept of teletravel. Can you tell us a little bit more about what teletravel is?

Mitch

Sure, so everyone knows what it is without knowing, but telecommuting is a subset of teletravel. It’s the idea that you can commute the ideas or the information or whatever is needed to solve a task or solve a need, through the web, most likely. But in any sense, whether it’s a phone or something like that, do it without actually moving your body or moving vehicles or moving anything that is physical infrastructure, beyond obviously the behemoth infrastructure for telecommunications.

All of these things are called their own thing—telehealth, tele-education, tele-anything, that’s all just teletravel. It’s an easier way to think of it. And arguably, the most important reason to think of it that way is that we’ve been inefficiently pursuing these innovations in their own sectors. So telehealth, even though it has a huge impact on how we decide to build our cities and how we travel within them, and to what degree we need to travel, the travel part is not a huge consideration outside of the actual doctor’s office and what that entails for them—there was never really collaboration between people who were advocating for telecommuting or working in innovations around telecommuting, and people who were working around innovations of telehealth, tele-education—they were all kind of their own sectors. But when you bring that all back to a broader view, we’re really talking about the primary mode of transportation being telco. Being on telco highways, rather than being on actual highways. And that means a lot for how you plan and prioritize your city and how you budget for investments.

Sandra

When you talk about teletravel, the first thing that comes to mind, and I’m sure it does for our listeners too, is the question of personal contact. Being in proximity of other people. Not necessarily just the meeting of the minds, but the actual physical proximity and how there’s benefits to that. So when we think about teletravel, telework, everything tele, where you’re basically still communicating, still sharing ideas, still doing what you do, when you’re physically in proximity of someone, do you think there’s any impact on healthy living, when the world goes in that direction?

Mitch

For sure, I think we can all say that we haven’t cracked the nut that is physical interaction with an app or a subscription-as-a-service yet. Maybe we never will. And that’s probably fine. But my two points on that that I would counter with are, first of all (and this kind of pulls back the veil on my main motivations for advocating for teletravel) if you care about the sustainability of the world and specifically around climate change, but even if you don’t care about climate change, if you can at least acknowledge that we have a lot of crumbling infrastructure in the developed world that we need to take it easy on and maintain and repair, then the more you can make trips optional, the better. And that’s not to say you can’t do it, but the pandemic is a great example. You do want to be able to do the task without having to use the infrastructure, if you can. And if everyone says, it’s cool, you can go ahead and use the infrastructure, then go ahead and do it. But if you have a pandemic, or sewer lines burst, or any other thing happens, going back to the idea that transportation optimizes at zero, the less you have to rely on external factors to be able to achieve the task, the better.

Now, as far as the actual health and wellness goes, I think there’s a conservation bias to think, if we don’t all go in the office and see each other, we’ll just be at home doing nothing. Well, you could do that, if that was your choice. But what actually happens if you’re not all in the office is that you’re all in places where you could just be somewhere else. For example, I did this experiment where we went around the country and saw all of our friends and family, and I saw more people while I was teleworking (pre-pandemic) who mean something to me, rather than people who were picked by my corporation to work with me, than most people have seen in a decade of their life. So that would be my priority counterpoint. You have such greater ability to spend time with your neighbor, to go to your local café, or store, to spend time with family, to actually build relationships with people based on mutual interest or pursuits, rather than building relationships with people who you have no choice but to build relationships with, and whose interactions are all couched in making something more profitable or building a thing.

Sandra

That’s pretty much my thinking as well. There’s a lot of discussion around, do you need the office to build community? And a lot of companies have “building community” as one of their values. Having worked from home for such a long time, it’s true, the fact that I don’t have to commute, the efficiencies that I gain as a result of that, gives me the opportunity to volunteer in my community or get to know my neighbors, or go and shop locally and support my community where I live. To me, that has way more value than getting in a car and driving for an hour and sitting in traffic. So, when you think of just the general benefit of that, I think from a healthy living perspective, and how you feel connected to community, I think that makes for a much more progressive society.

People can still feel like they belong, whereas in the office world, we push this feeling of belonging which supposedly you’re meant to believe can only happen if you’re actually in the office or if you go to work. And there is obviously value in connections that you make in the workplace, but as you say, being able to use the technology to stay in contact with people and even more importantly, to have the choice—that it’s not a must, it’s not something that you have to do every day because if you don’t, you’re not productive, you can’t be collaborative, you can’t be innovative, and all this garbage that we hear. As individuals, just like we all learn differently, we also work differently, and we have different preferences. Having that ability to say hey, I need a day to go and meet up with people at work is invaluable. Sometimes you just need a day out. I don’t want to work from home today, so I’ll go downtown and meet up with some people and coordinate that. And that kind of refreshes your mind a little and you feel recharged. So I think there’s definitely efficiencies as a result of not having to commute.

I don’t remember if it was in a podcast episode or a discussion a while ago, but another thing that’s interesting is the question of, if there’s an exodus from the downtown core and people are moving further and further away, there are neighborhoods that don’t have the infrastructure. They have very little transportation infrastructure, there’s no Wi-Fi, and things like that. So again, thinking about work from home, or work from anywhere, and how do you create inclusive communities? Rather than invest in re-designing your office space, divest of the office space, and think about how you as a company can invest in communities. You could sponsor communities, allow a certain amount of money to build infrastructure or to fund something that will help build the community, and then your brand becomes part of that community, because company XYZ donated a certain amount of money or paid for a certain service or feature.

I think there are tonnes of opportunities to rethink urban planning and the whole fact that people can’t afford to live in the major metro areas, which is why a lot of people have moved out into less expensive neighborhoods. They’re all saying that the one thing that they don’t miss is the commute, so obviously the pandemic has afforded that to all of us, you can work from home if you have the connections and whatever it is to be able to do that through technology, and so being in a position where you’re now going to potentially be expected to go back is going to be really hard for people. And I don’t think people are going to want that.

Mitch

I certainly don’t! It’s been a while since I’ve been in any kind of office myself, but to your point, obviously people are going to want the choice. There’s always an appeal of time away from your home, whether that’s because there are people in it, or because you want to see other people, or just get out of your home. And in a practical sense, you don’t need an office to achieve that. One of the best folks I ever worked for, Adam Paulisick, routinely gave us the nod to use our corporate cards to gather up as a group when we needed to. We all worked remotely for the most part but many of us were based in New York. So probably once or twice a week we might gather for happy hour or a coffee, and that expense paled in comparison to what it would cost to have an office space in New York. And it was much more engaging because people showed up where and when they wanted to show up and the environment was such that it was actually much more collaborative and not so much disruptive, which is always the other half of the interaction equation that no one wants to consider. So, there’s a lot to be said for that.

What’s going to be interesting is whether and to what degree we start having some accountability around the things that we have subsidized and incentivized as a society. The reality is, as a society, when we like something or think something is necessary, we do what we can to get more of it or to mitigate the sense of guilt or expense involved in it. That’s just naturally how we are. So, something like commuting, and the traditional office building, these are bastions of inefficiency and waste, and they have been huge priorities for a long time.

Maybe people don’t necessarily realise this, but transportation planners don’t really design roads for everyone to use. And they don’t even design them for general day-to-day use, on a workday. They design them for peak capacity for commuting. What happens when you realize that you’ve been wasting money on this—or more so that it is a waste of investment to continue to support this model of peak travel? You’re bringing a tonne of people in to one space and then moving a tonne of people out.

What happens? Will cities say, we’re not going to incentivize this anymore, we’re not going to subsidize this? When it comes to location-based jobs, governments often incentivize corporations to come and bring jobs. Newark, New Jersey, paid I think $7B to get Amazon HQ2, which was more than the cost of Amazon’s actual project to develop HQ2, just so they could have those jobs in Newark. They didn’t actually win the bid of course. There’s a really good organization called Good Jobs First that tracks a lot of these subsidies. But in a lot of these cases, especially the bigger deals, you’re talking about 6 figures per job that taxpayers are paying in incentives to bring a job locally to a place.

If we start looking at that more critically, we could say, why are we spending money to bring jobs here when anyone could just be here with their job—then we could start thinking about how we could re-prioritize those investments. And there’s a lot to be said for all the expenses that go into how we build and operate our cities today that are really structured around commuting to an office, being in an office, having an office be empty when it’s not office-time. And you would know a lot more about this than I would, as far as the actual inefficiencies of the buildings. But it’s ripe for disruption, and not in a corny start-up way, but in a really substantial line-item and budget consideration way from a taxpayer standpoint and investment standpoint.

Sandra

You raised a lot of really good points. The first thing that came to mind is, do you ever really solve for it? The example that you gave of Amazon HQ2 or corporate headquarters coming into a city center, and suddenly you’re adding an extra 1000, 2000, 3000 jobs—the infrastructure obviously has to be able to support that. You’re constantly seeing the expansion of roads where you go from four to five to six lanes every couple of years. And it seems like craziness—are you ever really going to achieve an optimal state where you’ve arrived? Instead there’s this constant push of jobs and headquarters and the like, and always into the downtown core.

That brings me to kind of the next point about sustainability. I often think about, understanding that there’s this decline, potentially, in urban city centers, you’ve got these thousands of buildings sitting there half empty, some of which might not have anybody in them at all, and you’ve got people that have now moved into the surrounding neighborhoods, and who don’t want to do the commute. There’s a lot of conversation around coworking spaces, and I’ve heard in the earlier parts of last year about using B- or C-class buildings, more industrial type locations that are ground-level so that you don’t have to deal with elevators, and this revamping of these spaces so that you have still offices, but they’re not towers. Now they’re just expansive one-level offices. When you go into suburbia, some of the examples you gave of some of the cities you mentioned that don’t have office towers, they probably have more retail, maybe a couple of head offices or whatever, but more small scale. But—you certainly don’t want construction to be starting in these suburban cities in order to accommodate people to work in an office in the neighborhoods where they live. Because that seems contra to me, with respect to sustainability. You’ve got these buildings that are going to sit downtown empty, now you’re going to be building new locations in the suburbs. Again, it’s that concept of “work happens in a building”, vs “work happening anywhere”.

Mitch

Hopefully we make good decisions around how we spend our dollars and make our policies, but it’s going to be interesting. I think that’s really going to have a large say in it. We already have a tonne of space, even though people might say otherwise. We have bars that are not functioning until 5 PM, restaurants that aren’t functioning until 5 PM. We have parks, and if we don’t have enough parks there should be more. If there are civil services like libraries and things of that nature that aren’t well equipped, then they should be. All of these things do or can exist, to house people who would like to ad hoc collaborate and co-work. And I think that’s easy enough to achieve without having to build entire structures.

It’s not only concerning to think that we’re going to specifically build structures for co-working or invest dollars in that. That, again, is the least compelling case to me, as far as teletravel is concerned. Communicating the ideas of knowledge work and the problems of knowledge work, and white-collar work, is so easily absorbed by what you could solve in almost any other sector. But I really do hope that we will be able to push the commercial building owners and real estate investors to move towards mixed-use and residential. It solves so many of those problems, like the affordability of transportation and access to hospitals and universities and libraries and other civil services. Police and fire and things of that nature, they don’t scale well when you build out a huge suburban sprawl environment. It’s much easier for those to operate in an urban core. Verticalization is great, as long as we make good use of that space. But if the space is only being used 1/3 of the time for work purposes, and in many of those other occasions when it’s not, it’s still eating up emissions as far as HVAC and lighting, and things of that nature, then that’s going to be obviously suboptimal, is maybe the nicest way to say it.

So, that would be my big push—I don’t think we need to worry so much about what happens when people get into their ex-urb environments or their suburban town centers and things of that nature, so much as, what do we do with these large buildings that just have a tonne of access, and naturally function really well as a center for life and society. That would be my main concern.

Sandra

I vote for vertical farming! That’s been my thing. Instead of using all the land up when you go out of the city, turn to vertical farming, because it’s pretty central, and there’s a good way to make use of all those empty buildings.

So, given the fact that the future of urban cities with commute aversion is gaining ground, there’s been a lot of talk about how employees are saving money, and that’s giving employers the option to potentially reduce peoples’ pay. What are your thoughts about that?

Mitch

First off, I continue to be surprised at the level of adoption and engagement that people have with the notion of telecommuting permanently, given that so many of them have only learned it through working from confinement, which is not actual telecommuting. And so in that sense, my point is, if they do get to a point where they realize, things have opened up, and it’s actually really great to walk around my neighborhood and I have access to things—there’s even more savings to be had by reducing your car ownership or usage, and then that builds itself into well, now we should be spending fewer tax dollars on widening highways, to your point. There’s a lot more savings to be had which is worth noting.

To that end, should you be paying someone less because they’re saving money? I guess that all comes down to who’s saying it and for what reason. But I think the unpopular opinion is that we should be aiming to have everything cost less, and not to have everyone be more wealthy. It’s not possible for everyone to be wealthy, that’s not a thing. But it is possible for things to cost as little as possible so that everyone can sustain. And to that end, I think the problem that we’ve seen around the pay issue is the lack of transparency and willingness to interact in a more fair, contractual basis between employer and employee. The employer obviously, for a very long time, had the upper hand. That is still the case, even though thankfully there’s a huge push from the labour side. But I think we need to get to the point first where people have a better understanding of where the costs are being saved, who benefits from that, why the employer pays you one way vs another, and what the value is of that, or whether that maybe is archaic and should be reconsidered.

Certainly, as someone who conceived legislation to make telecommuting a civil right, I can certainly empathise with the notion that someone would argue, I’m doing the same exact job in Tulsa, OK that I was doing in San Francisco. My argument would be, the amount of money that was bumped up to make me a San Francisco employee is not relevant. But then the follow-up to that would be, that money saved by making me a Tulsa employee instead of a San Francisco employee, where does that go? That, to me, is going to be the big issue. If Google or Facebook can save a tonne of money by shifting their talent pools to lower pay bands and pay differentials, then does that result in lower costs of their products? Those are bad examples because they’re both free, but that’s an interesting point in and of itself. But think anything else where you actually pay for the service or product. Is that cost being lowered? Because that is where we should be going, in my opinion. The efficiencies gained from these kinds of innovations should go back into the lower cost of the product or service being produced. And both naturally and justifiably, peoples’ concerns are that the money will just go into the pockets of the investors and executives.

In any case, founded or unfounded, you’re not putting yourself in a good position as a business leader, if you haven’t been transparent about that before. You’re kind of at fault regardless of what you plan to do with that money, if you haven’t been upfront from the beginning about what the organization does when it realizes a cost efficiency by hiring people from a different place. What does it do with that money? The transparency and willingness to have conversations and to collaborate and compromise is really the important thing to me that transcends any discussion about whether someone should be paid less or more.

Sandra

There’s a lot of really thought-provoking ideas there. Obviously if you’re in the same city, it’s one discussion. But if you start talking about moving to a different state or even to a different country, when you think about it purely from the standpoint of the job that you do, the skillset you have, and the capabilities to do the job, should there be a difference in pay?

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is Canadian but lives abroad in India. We were talking about whether this applies on an international scale. For example, years ago when contact centers and IT went overseas because labour was less expensive, the services we’ve received from these companies haven’t really changed because the costs are still up there.

So does the reducing of pay equalize based on cost of living where you are? Obviously the cost of living in other parts of the world is very different from in North America. If you’re paying someone 50,000 USD in North America, that same amount of money in some other parts of the world goes a lot further. There’s always the argument that, for lack of a better term, the employer is going to be up in your business, figuring out how you’re going to spend that money relative to the cost of living. But there’s also the affordability part, as you say. If I’m skilled, and I am competing against someone with the same skillset, why should the pay be different? That causes concern, because now we have the true globalization of the workforce—if pay is equal regardless of where you go, what is that going to mean longer term?

Mitch

I’ve been talking about this with folks, and saying repeatedly that I think a lot of the folks who are campaigning for equal work for equal pay from the stand point of geography, are maybe at risk of shooting themselves in the foot. There seems to be an assumption—and I get it—that if a company is willing to pay a San Francisco wage, then that is what they’re willing to pay for the labour, and anything less is discriminatory. I see that angle.

The reality is not that. The reality is usually that when you’re structuring compensation packages and plans at your company, you have a base level of what you’re willing to pay for what you think the value of the job is worth, and then there’s a pay differential that’s usually a bump, if you do want to hire in San Francisco. The reality is, if you’re a US-only employer, you probably have for a software developer a 90K base value that you put on that job. And if you’re willing to hire someone from San Francisco for 140K, that’s a bonus that you’re paying on them.

So to your point, if your argument is “this job can be done anywhere, it doesn’t matter if I’m in San Francisco or Tulsa”, then not only are you making the case that the job can also be done in India, but you’re bringing up, what is the value of the job? The value of the job is whatever the market demand is, so if that wage is a global median, or India’s median wage or something like that, that’s going to be far, far lower than wherever you want to move in America and command a salary. So, what are you actually achieving, if you’re trying to pursue this whole construct?

To your friend’s point, I think it’s a really interesting problem from a macro perspective. I don’t know if you discussed this, but I’d assume she probably has some opinions on what happens when someone can work in India and make 150K USD. That is going beyond financial security. That is getting to a point of having a lot of pull in this community, and that is problematic. Maybe you do good things with it. Maybe you don’t.

But you can see that even on smaller scales, if you move from San Francisco to Tulsa. For example, you’re used to paying $60 or thereabouts for a haircut. That’s 2 haircuts, easily, if not 3, in Tulsa. So, what is the right thing to do, from that standpoint? Is it right for you to pay $60 to the barber, because you’re saying, “this is the value of the haircut I used to get”? This sounds odd to do if you’re moving to Tulsa, and also goes against your idea of why you would want to be moving there in the first place. But also, are you even doing something good for the local community there, if this barber is seeing people come in and spend $60 on a haircut, does he increase his prices and then make it unaffordable for the rest of the community? There’s a lot of macroeconomics to be discussed here and I am by no means even approaching an expert on it, but at the very least, I consider it enough to realize that—you’re not really fighting for equality, on the grand scale, when you’re talking about equal work for equal pay. You’re talking about something for yourself. And I think there’s a lot to be considered there before we go gung-ho on that.

Sandra

The other part that’s interesting about this is thinking about the fact that labour is the number one cost for most corporations, and real estate is number two, so reducing or eliminating real estate costs will save companies millions if not billions of dollars. So, do you really need to go into the labour bucket? If you’re eliminating your number two most expensive cost, I think the labour bucket can pretty well stay constant as it is, if not maybe improve, because of the savings you’re having.

Turn to the people that do work for your organization and start to re-visit how people are paid, because that’s another topic in itself. Look at how you can improve that so that you do get the level of productivity and engagement that, for years, companies have been saying that they struggle with. That may be tied to the fact that there’s inconsistencies or inequities in pay.

Mitch

Yes, and to your point about being a good steward of the community, even if it’s not your local community as an employer—you can pay differently. Or rather, compensate and reward differently. If you’re saving money on real estate and you want your people to be as productive, happy, and satisfied as possible, well—one of the gripes is, if we start working from home, we’re seeing an uptick in energy waste at home. So, invest in your peoples’ homes. Here’s money that will go towards buying energy efficient utilities, or here’s money to go towards a community event to learn about gardening, or rain capture, or whatever the case may be. You can use that money to build a more sustainable world, which ought to be a goal within that corporation. There are a million things you can do with that money; it doesn’t have to go into the pockets of employees for discretionary use. And if you want to be a good member of the community as an employer, there’s a lot you can do. And there’s so little that’s been done to date that it’s really a challenge that needs to be addressed.

Sandra

I love your ideas, there’s a solution for virtually anything if you put your mind to it and think outside the box. I really enjoyed this conversation, Mitch, thank you again for being a guest today, and for sharing your wisdom and insights with our listeners!

Mitch

Thank you so much for having me, Sandra, it’s a pleasure!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Managing supply and demand of office space
• Using technology to predict space utilization
• How to decide what leases to renew or end
• Co-working and workplace strategy
• Remote work and corporate culture

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Vik Bangia on LinkedIn

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

With me today I have a special guest, Vik Bangia. Vik, welcome! Before we dive in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Vik

My name is Vik Bangia and I’m the CEO of Verum Consulting. We’re a corporate real estate, strategy and operations consulting company. I spend most of my time helping corporate clients outsource their real estate services to some of the larger service providers like CBRE and JLL, Cushman and Wakefield⁠—especially with those clients who have integrated facilities management needs along with their other real estate services needs.

In the strategy and operations world, I’m also a workplace consultant and a business strategist. I help companies of all kinds do various things, from training and development to workplace strategy to public speaking. It’s a pretty wide-ranging set of services that I do as part of my consulting practice.

Sandra

That’s amazing! I often think about prior to the pandemic when we were looking at customer data in terms of how they were using space, you could see a 25 to 30% reduction without issue. There was always an excess amount of space that companies had within their portfolio that they didn’t really need. Even if they got rid of that 25 to 30%, nobody would really feel the difference, and you didn’t have to do very much to know that. And now when you hear conversations about hybrid—whether it’s trying to allocate a workstyle to someone, or the various working personas and the requirements to support the way in which people work—that’s all associated with a certain amount of space that’s based on understanding their dependency on physical space, whether it’s an office space, a third-party space, or whatever the case may be.

So, thinking about the changes of the workplace going forward, how do you think companies should be looking to manage the supply and demand of space? It’s no longer going to be a 1 to 1, which is the easiest type of space to manage. Now, companies are starting to see some sort of rotation. You don’t really want to restrict people or dictate which days people are going to come in—this takes away from the serendipity and ability for people to collaborate as they need to, because nobody really collaborates on a dictated schedule. Instead, things happen day by day and you figure it out. So, how do you foresee companies being able to manage their space and understand that supply and demand?

Vik
That’s going to be a challenge. I think some technological support for scheduling the capacity of a facility is going to be necessary for this to happen, so you don’t have a rush on the office one day and then have it sit empty for 4 more days during a 5-day week.

But that’s where it’s really interesting, because some of the technology that I’ve seen that allows for buildings to learn from utilization and capacity over time can actually predict what peoples’ behaviour will be—what days are busy days in the office, etc. But then it’s also incumbent upon leaders to schedule things for themselves if they’ve got at least some neighborhood space within their facility. They can say, we like to have our teams come in on Tuesday, and another group likes to have that same spot on a Thursday, and they kind of rotate around that. But that is going to be a bit of a challenge.

The other potential way of handling this is by having large congregation-type spaces for collaboration that aren’t necessarily as dense, and can accommodate a larger number of people. In this case you can go to a scheduling system and see that it’s got 40% availability based on the people that have booked it, and then you can still fit in there if you need to.

I do think that this type of software will need to be part and parcel of what an office building provides, whether it’s provided by the landlord or the tenant. I do think there’s going to be a shift and markets are going to have some challenges. There’s going to be a lot of sub-lease space on the market, and that’s going to impact not just landlords. It’s also going to impact service providers—oftentimes if it’s a fully integrated account, it involves facilities and transactions, projects, lease administration and strategic planning, and often they subsidize some of the revenue coming in from facilities from anticipated transaction revenue. If they’ve written the account that way, and all of a sudden, the transaction revenue falls off because of the pandemic, it puts a squeeze on the facilities management operating profits. So, the overall model is going to get hammered for some of these accounts, especially the larger ones.

I think some of those dynamics are going to put some pressure on the industry and probably play out a little bit longer-term than some people think. They think it’s going to happen right away—I don’t think this market runs hot and cold like that. But I think once people start to figure out what they want to do, and they come up with their strategy for disposition of space, it could be challenging maybe 3 to 5 years out.

Sandra

I agree, it’s too early for companies to be looking to get rid of space, unless there’s an imminent lease. In that case, they may see an opportunity to get rid of the lease now—they don’t necessarily need it, and it’s still iffy what the next 12 months are going to look like, so they can save some money in the interim and then get back in at some point if they choose to.

Just last night I was talking to my husband about the market in general—he’s not in real estate but we always talk about stuff as it relates to what’s happening—and one of the things that we spoke about was a lot of the press around companies that are taking up leases because they’re great deals.

How much pressure is there to take advantage of a great deal, to move into nicer space, newer space, better space? Moving out of the older buildings and going into buildings that are better outfitted from a technology point of view and with better air quality is going to be important with return to work, and potentially with getting a good deal. But you’ve obviously got to commit to it. Or, you could just wait it out. Is there an advantage to committing to something now, based on the fact that you might not get as great a deal in the future? Or should you instead use this time to figure out exactly how much space you actually need before committing to something long-term. Which is the better of the two?

Vik

It’s a bit of a gamble. You could be 50% wrong on either end of this, and I see some of that. And as a proponent for the middle of the country, since I live in Minneapolis, I also see that this central part of the US stands to benefit from some of these decisions. Lately people are trying to go from very expensive downtown CBD space on the coast to a more horizontal footprint in the middle of the country.

I wrote an article at the end of last year called “Start Thinking About 2022 Now” that said, you ought to think about what’s going to shift and change a couple years out from now. I was seeing that some tech companies can hire talent in the middle of the country that they can pay less than they’re paying their folks on the coast. Some of the pharma centers up in New Jersey and other places in Boston that can hire talented people, and places like Houston, St Louis, Minneapolis—all of these central US cities stand to benefit.

As an outsourcing specialist, what that ends up looking like to me is—instead of outsourcing the work to India, or outsourcing the work offshore, it’s that same kind of model. Instead of hiring people on the coast where there are expensive employees and expensive real estate and expensive occupancy costs, you hire for talent, but you have talented people located in the middle of the country. You might actually see populations move to lower-cost locations like the mid-central part of the US because they can get the job, they can work remotely, and they can still make proportionately a better living if they can give up Southern California. They have to be able to make some sacrifices too, but they can move to the middle of the country and live a lot better and still have a good job with a good company. I see that being a model that takes shape the more remote work becomes the way we do things.

Sandra

What are your thoughts about the role of co-working space as part of workplace strategy going forward? Traditionally when we thought about the workplace. it was about the owned or leased portfolio, which you basically manage. Now, all of a sudden, there are these co-working spaces that could become an extension of your portfolio. Do you think corporations will take advantage of co-working spaces? Traditional co-working spaces have been more for entrepreneurs or the self-employed who didn’t necessarily have an office to work from.

Vik

I absolutely believe that if co-working is done right, it will be a hit. I actually had that on a presentation slide that I was delivering in some webinars late last year, but I put an asterisk by the word “hit”. I said that co-working space will be a hit if they can get this right. They have to make it a compelling third option to working from home or working from the office. Just like right now, working in the office has to be a compelling option compared to working from home. If it’s not, people will just work from home. Similarly, if that third space is not a compelling option compared to working from home, or doesn’t give you what you get when you go into the office, they won’t be able to do it.

But I think they will. I personally think they can provide the right types of amenities and the right types of connectivity. And if they geographically locate it in places where folks from that company can all still work out of that co-located space, it makes sense. It’s an idea that’s really important and has been well-received with corporate clients. There’s obviously some IT security concerns and other things like that that have to be worked around. There’s also the expense—if you’re going to spend money, would you rather have people in your own space or would you rather pay almost a premium rent for co-working space? That’s to be determined and that’s why the asterisk was always there. But I think it’ll be a hit.

Sandra

I also think co-working definitely has a place in the future. And I agree, I think figuring out what that compelling reason is going to be is probably the biggest challenge, because it’s such a personal thing.

For example, I’ve been working from home full time since 2007 or so. When I used to work for a corporation, I’d go down to the office 4 to 6 times a year for quarterly meetings or all-hands-on-deck type of meetings. But I often think, now with the pandemic, if I was still working there and there was a co-working space close by, would I actually go to the office? If I’m going to be going there to work by myself I might as well just work at home.

And what’s funny about it is the company that I worked for had an office literally just down the street—I used to go there when my network went down, I’d go there to plug in. And I used to think to myself that I should go and work there sometimes, but I never did. What’s the point? Why drive 10 or 15 minutes to go work there when I can work from home? The team I was working with was scattered across Canada, so you weren’t actually interacting with people in the office either. I was thinking, I can do that from anywhere, I don’t have to actually be physically in the office to do that.

On the flip side, when I first started working from home, I used to make it a point to go and work at Starbucks for a half a day because I wanted to be around people. There was that feeling of loneliness when I first started. But eventually when I got into the groove, that disappeared.

Just knowing and feeling where I wanted to be on a particular day was very empowering. I didn’t have to feel like I was being pressured to be somewhere because somebody’s expecting me and I could make decisions based on either how I was feeling or what I needed to achieve for that particular day. That was a very different mindset from working based on an expectation.

Vik

Absolutely. Going way back, I wrote an article called the “Virtual Collapse of Corporate Culture”, right around the time where virtual work and remote work first started. It was about this feeling of disconnectedness I used to have. I’ve been a remote worker for the majority of my career, and when you’re not in the corporate office, you think, what’s going on back there? I don’t know what’s going on, I’m not in the company grapevine, I’m not connected to the latest scuttlebutt in the office—and you feel a little disassociated.

I also talked about corporate culture that you can actually feel while you’re in the office. I still struggle with that today when I work with my clients. I ask them, do you have that sense of corporate culture that used to exist? Because when I first started my career, every employee bled the same colours for the company. When we were all part of the team, there was a lot of cheering going on for successes, there were newsletters that talked about all sorts of stuff the company was doing, there was a sense of identity that everybody had with their company.

Now, everybody’s a freelancer. It feels like they’re committed to the company to a certain extent, but there still seems to be this disconnect, or at least the thought, I work for this company, but I’m not owned by this company. Back when I started, maybe I was a sell-out, maybe I did overcommit, but there just seemed to be a greater sense of that. You were on the team. And you really were on the team, you were a franchised player, you weren’t just a free agent. I think we’re going to see more of that disassociation as we start remote work en masse because everybody’s going to be a sort of gig worker.

There’s also a greater chance that they can get picked off by a competitor because they’re in their offices at home, as opposed to going into the office every day. There’s some advantage to employers to have people go into the office, in terms of preventing their people from getting recruited away. There’s all sorts of challenges there—it’s easier for head-hunters to call you on your cell phone than it is on a company line, for example. This leads some companies to want people in the office.

Sandra

I totally agree. The future remains to be seen, it’s a TBD.

Vik

Oh, I totally believe that. I think we don’t know a lot more than we think. In my posts on LinkedIn, I don’t make a lot of claims about what’s going to happen. I may say, “in my opinion”, “I’m seeing this trend and I’m curious about it”, and I’ll ask other peoples’ opinions about it. I like to say, I don’t have all the answers, but I do know how to ask all the right questions.

When it comes to working with clients, my job isn’t to tell them what to do. My job is to elicit from them what they want to do or what they think they want to do, and then I’ll push back to make sure that their plans are clear, achievable, and realistic. I always use those words. That’s where the art is—it’s in asking the right questions and getting the client to crystallize what they actually want to do. And it’s important that things are done in a very democratic way and in a way that’s aligned to their culture and values. Everything should take into account balances of power, psychological safety, and be done with a bottom-up, systems-thinking, change-management approach. All of those are elements that people have to be aware of.

Sandra
Well, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time and your insights and thank you again for your time today. Any final thoughts?

Vik

I think we’re on a journey together, so anybody listening to this podcast, I would love it if they would link in with me, find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter or visit my website. On LinkedIn I publish a lot of content and I do bring that whole community of workplace professionals together, and we have a lot of lively debate about what’s going to happen in the future, and what we’d like to see happen in the future. I’d love for others to join in to that conversation.

Sandra, I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with you, I had a great time!

Sandra

You’re very welcome. Thanks again, Vik.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Return-to-office challenges
  • Post-COVID transformation of the workplace
  • Physical and psychological safety
• The remote work index – how much work can be done from home?
• Employee participation in the decision-making process
• Who owns the return-to-office strategy?
• Why flexible work hasn’t been more readily adopted

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Vik Bangia on LinkedIn

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

Today I’m going to be talking about the return-to-office challenges that companies are facing. Are they real or are they perceived?

With me today I have a special guest Vik Bangia. Vik, welcome! Before we dive in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Vik

My name is Vik Bangia and I’m the CEO of Verum Consulting. We’re a corporate real estate, strategy and operations consulting company. I spend most of my time helping corporate clients outsource their real estate services to some of the larger service providers like CBRE and JLL, Cushman and Wakefield⁠—especially with those clients who have integrated facilities management needs along with their other real estate services needs.

In the strategy and operations world, I’m also a workplace consultant and a business strategist. I help companies of all kinds do various things, from training and development to workplace strategy to public speaking. It’s a pretty wide-ranging set of services that I do as part of my consulting practice.

Sandra

That’s amazing! I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what some of the return-to-office challenges are that you’re seeing from organizations you’re interacting with.

Vik

I think part of the challenge is that everything around the post-COVID transformation of going back to the workplace is a moving target. There are a lot of folks that have put together return-to-work strategies and plans, only to pull back on those plans when we went further into some challenges late last year. There was original conversation about returning to the office even before the end of the year last year. But here we are, 7 months into the new year, and another potential effort to re-open workspaces may be pushed back again because of the COVID variants. I think it’s a lot of start and stops.

The other challenge, the other gap, is that a lot of people have put together return-to-work strategies that have ignored the psychological safety that’s required to make these plans viable. People are interested in going back to the office, but are concerned that the employers haven’t done enough to ensure their physical and psychological safety. So, they start to evaluate the cost/benefit, or the return on investment for the commute and for the potential of putting themselves in some jeopardy with respect to people who aren’t vaccinated and public transportation. These factors play into this “start, stop” mentality that everybody seems to have around going back to the office.

Sandra

From a psychological perspective, for employees coming back, safety is obviously going to be top of mind⁠—making sure that the spaces are not like they were when they left, and that some adjustment has been made in terms of spacing, etc. But what about in terms of the idea of adopting hybrid work in the environment? There seems to be a lot out there in terms of how different organizations are approaching what the future of work might potentially look like, and the debate between bringing everybody back or adopting hybrid. I often wonder, if some of the challenges include being able to collaborate and being able to be innovative—is this whole concept of the challenges of bringing people back real? Or is it perceived, in that there’s something else?

Vik

I think one of the challenges that exists right now is that we don’t have a scientific way of determining the different types of job functions that are required to run an operation or an enterprise. I coined a term called Remote Work Index⁠—what percentage of that work can actually be done from a remote location versus something that has to be done from a physical location in the office. For example, there’s certainly a greater demand on folks that are in the manufacturing or distribution types of businesses where the work has to be on-site or the operation doesn’t run. Because of that, the challenge that a lot of folks are stuck with is, how do you measure performance and productivity based on a job position, profile, Remote Work Index, or the ability to do that job remotely?

I think that unknown factor gives a lot of leaders pause as to what they can expect and what direction they will go with embracing this whole concept of remote work. Certain folks are doing a fantastic job. In fact, some of my clients are probably more productive and have greater collaboration from a remote work standpoint than they did when they were in the office together. I think that’s a positive sign. But then others, not those I’m working with today but based on some social media posts on LinkedIn, are really struggling with that⁠—trying to get their teams to be a cohesive unit when everybody is scattered.

Sandra

In terms of measuring productivity or readiness to return, I know that a lot of companies have been surveying their employees to ask about how they feel with respect to their productivity level. How much does the actual employee voice count in that decision-making process?

Vik

It’s a little bit subjective⁠—I’ve also answered some poll questions about how much more productive I feel. My productivity has actually increased, only because all of the other things I was doing pre-COVID have fallen by the wayside, like air travel time, hotel time, time between meetings, transitioning from one to the other. I’m not doing crazy travel anymore, so my productivity has soared, but so has my free time, because I’ve been able to balance all of that out and re-prioritize everything in life.

I think one of the challenges is going to be this subjective versus objective measurement. If you can create outcomes-based performance measurement criteria for your employees, then you can manage them by outcomes. If the outcomes are achieved, then the employee is productive. If the outcomes are not achieved, then the employee is not productive. It’s fairly simple, depending on the job. That’s why I went back to that Remote Work Index label because I think every job has to have some type of remote work capability in order to put the right measurements in place.

I think it’s fairly simple to do, but the question always becomes: who’s going to do it? Often you’ve got a bit of a battle going on about who’s in the lead on this entire remote work concept: is it real estate? Is it real estate facilities, or is it HR? When it comes to that type of job classification, I think HR should be the group leading that charge. But when it comes to how that work gets enabled, then it’s real estate. So, all these groups actually have to work together and they have to work together well. Some are, but others have yet to bring those two groups together in a very high performing way in order to come up with their strategy. I see a lot of gaps in these in these plans because they just don’t involve the right constituents.

Sandra

That was my experience in the years that I was doing mostly consulting. Workplace strategy has been something that we’ve been working on for a number of years, including this concept of flexible working. I officially started consulting in 2007, but my first experience in flexible work dates back to 1996⁠—that was the early days of the idea of hot desking and flexible working, so it’s been around for quite some time. But obviously, the terminology that’s been used to describe it has changed.

Just yesterday I read a post about when you’re doing a workplace strategy survey, and you’re asking employees to rate their satisfaction and the importance of the current workspace—you always ask them what they want. And one of the questions was always a list of a dozen or so things, like to have the same desk to go to every day, or to have the flexibility to work wherever you wanted to in the office. I’d say probably 99.9% of the time, those were always #1 and #2: I want to have my own desk, but I want the flexibility to move around in the office. People don’t want to be tethered to their desk 8 hours a day, 5 days a week—they want the security of knowing they have a place to go, but also the ability to move around and work in other spaces.

Fast forward now to 2020-2021, and there’s this concept of untethering yourself from the physical building. Some companies started toying with the idea of flexibility years ago, enabling people to work outside the office. I’ve always wondered why this idea has dragged its feet, and why it never really picked up the momentum that it could have, when the benefits of working this way are clear, from a positioning and competitive advantage perspective. What are your thoughts on why that’s the case?

Vik

So, I come from an old guard, stodgy environment in the in the energy world⁠—I used to work for an oil company. I think it really boils down to culture and leadership styles and the way leaders look at items like flexibility. I remember when I first started in my career, casual Friday meant you could wear a coloured shirt with your suit rather than a pure white shirt with your suit. The company was that formal⁠—if you were at your desk and you had a meeting in the conference room at the end of the hall, you had to put on your suit coat to walk through the halls. You couldn’t walk the halls in short shirt sleeves.

The change was enormous. First, we were trying to get people out of 2- and 300 square-foot private offices to smaller offices. At that point it wasn’t really about flexibility or co-working or collaboration, it was really a culture shift away from command and control to a little bit more flexibility.

And if you look as well at what everybody else was doing, even in the tech world at the time in the early 90s, it was more about managers and leaders wanting to have their people within sight. If you were out of sight, you were not working. I talked about Hewlett-Packard and some of the things they were doing with their mobile workforce, who were mostly sales folks and people out in the field, like giving them hot desking capabilities or touchdown space in an office where they can go and check in. But for the most part, they’re on the road, working remotely and meeting with clients. They didn’t need to have that day-to-day presence in the office. But the other people that did, they were still in that same fishbowl of “I have to be visible to my boss, otherwise I’m out goofing around”.

I think that mentality still exists. I think there are a lot of leaders who are still concerned today that unless they bring everybody back in the office, people aren’t really working. And that’s a really interesting challenge.

Sandra

Well, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your time and your insights and thank you again for your time today. Any final thoughts?

Vik

I think we’re on a journey together, so anybody listening to this podcast, I would love it if they would link in with me, find me on LinkedIn or on Twitter or visit my website. On LinkedIn I published a lot of content and I do bring that whole community of workplace professionals together, and we have a lot of lively debate about what’s going to happen in the future, and what we’d like to see happen in the future. I’d love for others to join in to that conversation.

Sandra, I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with you, I had a great time!

Sandra

You’re very welcome. Thanks again and take care.

Vik

Take care.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Definitions of hybrid, flexibility when there’s no standard to follow
• Employment law on working hours
• Standardizing Human Resources workplace policies
• What HR and companies need to “catch up” on

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Judy Holcomb-Williams on LinkedIn
• Chris Diming on LinkedIn

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra

Hey everyone! Welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix.

I’m super excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

If you have any questions or comments or any suggestions for future podcasts, please drop me a line at [email protected].

Sandra

Hey Judy, hey Chris, welcome.

Judy

Hi Sandra.

Chris

Hi Sandra, thanks for bringing us on today.

Sandra

There really is no standard in corporate real estate. Everybody defines it differently. There’s a lot of gray areas where the definitions are crossing into each other.

Using the example of hybrid, what does hybrid mean? People have said hybrid is a combination of working in the office or working from home. It’s the physical split between two different types of spaces. When I think about hybrid, I equate it to the electric vehicle. You have gas or electric, and you couldn’t inadvertently switch between the two on the fly. When I’m in the office, I might be working in a face-to-face scenario because there’s other people in the office. But then I might also be in a face- to-virtual combination, working with people that are not in the office. The difference is when I’m working from home, I don’t have the option of being able to switch to a face-to-face because I’m completely virtual. To me, that’s how I define hybrid.

It was interesting, some of the comments that I got on that post about how different companies define those different terms—people are using the same terms, but they mean very different things to different companies. Chris, have you encountered anything like that in your space?

Chris

In my perspective as an anthropologist who’s stepping into workplace, there isn’t really a definite meaning of what hybrid is. Hybrid is a buzz word that came to fruition around July and August. I haven’t seen much of a definition of what hybrid is and what’s included in hybrid. Hybrid involves distributed work too. Sometimes it’s just seen as being virtual and physical. Hybrid could involve co-working spaces in addition to home and in addition to a central office. It could just be a bunch of distributed offices or a central office. And elsewhere it could be a virtual reality, or could be augmented reality. Hybrid is essentially another word for a combination of stuff.

I think what’s exciting about it is that it points the way towards using an organizations context to define what the future workplace can look like. I think that’s where the possibility goes. I think that trying to make a hard and fast definition of what hybrid is, in this case, may actually limit the possibilities of what could be done.

Sandra

The other one that I thought was interesting is the term “flexibility”. Flexibility, again, is a very grey area because it means so many different things to different people. Some people think about it from a space perspective, some people think about it, similar to your point, Chris, as the use of multiple types of spaces. There’s the ownership component of, “I’m flexible, but I’m only flexible within the confines of my portfolio,” or “I’m flexible within a certain city or certain areas”. There’s the degree of flexibility, but also how the hours play into flexibility as well.

Actually, interestingly enough, this past week I’ve seen a few articles come up about the four-day work week. From what I gathered, it’s a rotational four days, and the objective is to manage and minimize that “mid-week mountain”, as we often refer to it in corporate real estate, where you’ve got everybody coming in on Wednesday and then you have the earlier and later parts of the week where nobody comes into the office, or fewer people come into the office. It’s almost like you’re engineering the occupancy to some extent, in terms of who should be in the office and when.

But I’m not sure that’s the solution when you think about why people are coming in the office in the first place. You can’t engineer serendipitous communication, conversation, collisions, and those types of things, so it seems a little bit strange to me that the four-day work week is a consideration to try to address that. And what does that actually mean? Is it 10 hours a day, four days a week? How do work hours play into that as well? Have you heard anything along those lines, Judy?

Judy

I’ve been reading the same articles as you have, but if we go back to your first question around flexibility: I think that term has to be defined by each business itself, because it’s an umbrella term. Each company can decide what “flexible” means to them, and then from there all this other stuff falls out from it. So, let’s talk about flexibility, what does that really mean? Does it mean remote work, hybrid work, on-site work? Does it mean flexibility in hours, flexibility in workspaces, offices? I think that’s where a lot of companies should start.

As to your question around this four-day work week, I think, again, companies have this flexibility to decide how their workers can best meet their new work environment, whatever they deem that to be. Maybe some people can work a four-day work week, or a four day-work week with reduced hours. As an aside, when we talk about employment law, when we start adjusting the hours in a day, companies sometimes have to apply for special permits through the HRD (Human Resources Development), so they have to be mindful of that. I think flexibility is where people really need to start.

It’s interesting, I’ve been watching this going on within the HR circle and I’m beginning to see HR workplace policies starting to be developed around exactly what you’re talking about. Companies are getting at this now—they’re trying to standardize these things so people don’t get caught in that. I think we’re all catching up as all of this is unfolding.  We’re in uncharted territory, so companies have to figure this out.

Sandra

But do you think that there has to be some sort of control or standardization or regulation around how things get done? Or do you foresee in the future that people can be more autonomous in making those decisions, not based on a policy of whether you behave a certain way or you don’t? What are your thoughts there? Pre-pandemic, there were a lot of companies who had policies on certain things, but they didn’t really mean anything. You knew that they were there, but they didn’t really mean anything to the users, because the behaviour still either happened or didn’t happen. It’s interesting that the business element is interjecting themselves into an experiment that ran wild for a year and a bit, and the question now is, is that going to mess things up?

Judy

I think when people get hired on, they’re hired on to work a standardized amount of hours to get paid a certain amount of pay. Let’s say your work week is a 37.5-hour work week. Does it have to be exactly from 9:00 till 5:00 every day? No. This is where we see this word “flexibility” coming in. We talked about autonomy and empowerment, and can organisations now empower people and hold them accountable—who cares when you get your 37.5 hours a week done? You could do it any way you want, as long as it’s done, because that’s what you get paid for, as an example. That’s an empowered organization and a flexible organization.

I think there are already some companies who are embracing that. I can’t think of who it was who said, “We’ve always operated that way. When we hire somebody, we trust in the fact that they’re going to get their work done. We don’t care where or when, we hire them for their knowledge and expertise. It’s their accountability to get things done.”

Sandra

In terms of just general business decision-making, I’m thinking about companies that I’ve worked with in the past that had that flexibility component. There was still an element of core hours where there was an expectation that at minimum you have to be available, so that if somebody was either trying to reach you either via email or text, you were readily available to respond. But in an asynchronous environment, that accountability would be on the person, to your point, Judy, to know what your accountabilities are. What are the things you need to do and how you choose to do them should be a decision that you ultimately make.

For example, if you’re part of a project and you know your team is reaching out to you during those core hours because the expectation is that you would be available, then so be it. The alternative would the person who says, “I need to work more asynchronously than the rest of my team,” then you make arrangements or make it known to your team that the best time to reach you would be at such and such a time. So if, in the organization, there are core hours of 10 to 2 or 11 to 3 and that doesn’t work for you, you then take the responsibility within the team to say, “this is the time that works best for me”. That way everybody is clear on what happens when.

From an experience point of view, when there are teams working and collaborating together, it’s easier to do in the office. Whereas now, there are not only people either working from the office or working away from the office, but different time schedules also play into it, which creates further complexity.

Chris

Who has flexibility, and who is given flexibility? How do you decide who’s given it and who isn’t? In some companies, at least before the pandemic, some people were given the choice to work remotely or not. But others might not be able to. Was that because of their seniority, or because of their role? Going forward, companies will also have to figure out who gets the privilege of being flexible and what that flexibility means. Does it just mean you can work wherever you want? Does it mean you can work when and where you want? Does it mean it work when and where you want, but if your manager messages you, you have to respond absolutely immediately? What kind of controls are in place?

Flexibility can mean people and policies, but it can also mean space—how flexible the leasing is. If the leasing terms are flexible (12 months or monthly), that means that there’s perhaps more potential for the workplace itself to evolve as a sort of product or service that changes depending on what’s needed. That’s the potential of a flexible lease. What if the lease is more conventional, say five years, or 12? When people talk about flexibility, is it flexibility in space or is it flexibility in people—but what is it that they care about? I hear both sometimes, and it seems like they’re synonymous, when actually “flexibility” could be referring perhaps to the space rather than the people.

Judy

When we have this conversation, there’s two sides to this equation. There’s a business side to this equation—what does flexibility mean to the business? They have to serve the customer at the end of the day, so they have to ensure that that need is being met. Customers have to be taken into the equation as well. They talk about flexibility, flexibility of workspace, flexibility of policies, flexibility of hours, flexibility of jobs (meaning the work that somebody does).

Then, on the other side, you have the people. There may be a group of people who want more flexibility. There may be a group of people who want to be in the office more, or maybe somebody wants to do both. So, there’s two sides of this equation. On one side, the business has to figure out what flexibility means to it and what it can actually enable to ensure sustainability going forward. As much as these people may want this, can the business accommodate it?

Sandra

Well, thank you very much to both of you, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think there’s a lot more to be discussed and I look forward to future conversations with both of you. Thank you again for your time today.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Slack survey results
  • Feeling connected at work
  • The insignificance of proximity
• Trust and accountability
• Experience of working and why you need policy
• Trust, culture and privacy at work in and out of the office
• Learning is still part of culture

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Judy Holcomb-Williams on LinkedIn
• Chris Diming on LinkedIn

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra

Hey everyone! Welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix.

I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I am Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

If you have any questions or comments or any suggestions for future podcasts, please drop me a line at [email protected].

Sandra

Hey Judy, hey Chris, welcome.

Judy

Hi Sandra.

Chris

Hi Sandra, thanks for bringing us on today.

Judy

Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. My name is Judy Holcomb-Williams, I’m an advisor, consultant, and executive life coach providing support for individuals, teams, and organisations to reach the next level of success and thrive through reinvention. I’ve spent the last 20+ years of my career as an HR executive and change leader. Recently I have been facilitating and participating in discussions around the future of work.

Chris

My name is Chris, I’m an applied anthropologist. I’m originally from the Richmond, VA area, but by weird twist of fate I ended up going to Durham University in the UK to do a PhD in anthropology where I focused on public space and how culture forms within spaces.

Recently, I’ve been participating in various workplace evolutionary events, and I’ve been articulating how applied anthropology contributes to workplace strategy and design and that’s why I sometimes refer to myself as a workplace anthropologist.

Right now, what I’m doing is, I am working with a workplace management software company called Facility Quest to help them understand what types of data need strategies going forward. Thanks a lot for bringing me into the panel and I look forward to future discussions.

Sandra

I came across an article this morning where there was a chart, I think there was a survey that was done by Slack and there was a graph that was interesting where they were talking about how people were feeling about burnout and productivity.

There was one metric that really surprised me, and it was the whole idea of feeling connected to the organization and the difference between working from home and working in the office. It was just a slight difference between working in the office versus working from home, but 42% was in that gray zone where it didn’t really make a difference. Because it was the largest percentage overall of how people were feeling, the takeaway was that space or the idea of proximity to people wasn’t driving the feeling of connectedness.

Which I thought was interesting because everybody is talking about the need for the space to feel connected. But that wasn’t showing up in this survey. I thought, well, that’s interesting because how much does space play into this whole feeling of belonging, this whole feeling of connectedness? Is it the physical space that does that? Or is it more about the culture and the leadership and the values and things like Judy you were saying before? I thought that might be a good starting point to talk about: what is this whole feeling of connectedness and where does that come from?

Judy

I can’t think of who it was who said, “We’ve always operated that way. When we hire somebody, we trust in the fact that they’re going to get their work done. We don’t care where or when; we hire them for their knowledge and expertise. It’s their accountability to get things done.”

Sandra

In terms of general business decision making, I’m thinking about companies that I’ve worked with in the past that had the flexibility component. There was still an element of core hours where there was an expectation that, at minimum, you had to be available. So, if somebody was trying to reach you either via email or text or whatever, you were readily available to respond.

But in an asynchronous environment I would think that the accountability would be on the person, to your point, Judy, about knowing what your accountabilities are. What things you need to do and how you choose to do them should be a decision that you ultimately make. If you’re part of a project, for example, and you know your team is reaching out to you during those core hours because that’s when the expectation is that you would be made available then so be it.

The alternative would be, as the person who is on the side says, “Hey, I need to work maybe more asynchronously than the rest of my team.” Then maybe you make some sort of arrangements, or you make it known to your team that the best time to reach you would be at such and such a time. If, as an organization, there’s the core hours of let’s say 10:00am to 2pm or 11 to 3 or whatever that time frame, that doesn’t really work for you, then you take the responsibility to work within the project team that you’re working with to say, “This is the time that works best for me.” And then that way everybody is clear on what happens and when.

Thinking about it more from an experience point of view, the whole idea of teams working and collaborating where if you were in the office, it’s easier to do. Whereas now if you’ve got not only people working from the office or working away from the office, but then you got all these different time schedules that also play into it, that just further creates complexity.

Judy

I think when the pandemic hit, it shifted that mindset a little bit. Because now all the companies said, “OK, you got to work from home now.” I think it shifted that mindset. I think some businesses have really changed their mindset of this flexible work arrangement because they did see how productive people were. They didn’t have to physically see them sitting in a desk and they were still delivering upon their obligations. I think, if anything, this last year plus has shown businesses and leaders and managers, you don’t have to physically be in front of somebody to still be looked at as somebody who’s very productive and accountable and fulfilling their obligations.

Sandra

Another topic that I thought was interesting, and this is one that I came across this morning, I think it was in that same survey that I was talking about earlier, was the whole aspect of learning. There was a question that was asked in the survey, asking people about upskilling themselves. During the pandemic, how many people learned something, took the time to learn something. And I was shocked at the metric.

50% of the people that were surveyed had upskilled themselves. My first take was probably because of the uncertainty of work, maybe rethinking about your current position and not really knowing where this was going to go. It’s like, “OK, maybe I take advantage of the time to learn something as a Plan B.”

But then I thought about it. This is interesting cause learning and development has been huge in organizations. I mean, every company that I know of has a learning and development strategy. But it’s interesting from the standpoint of the struggles that people have had in organizations with upskilling. And again, thinking about structured versus unstructured, where here you have people working from home, generally, reporting that productivity has been OK for the most part and people finding time to upskill themselves, I find fascinating.

Judy

You know, it’s interesting because with this HR council that I sit on, a small group of us just produced this report around talent acquisition now and going forward. One of the emerging areas that we saw a lot of movement around was this whole concept of upskilling.

Companies were supporting the upskilling because they needed employees to be more versatile to meet the needs of the business over the past year as they had to exit or layoff some individuals. They were empowering employees to upskill so they could have more opportunity across the organization, not just this specific area.

In specific functions, we saw a lot of upskilling. For example, we’ll talk about recruiters per say. Recruiters now have to be much more versatile and understand the business as a whole as opposed to being so task focused and just hiring this job, they have to take much more into consideration. For example, become much more knowledgeable around diversity and inclusion, and understand maybe more than one functional area that they’re recruiting for. They were upskilling themselves to be more valuable to the organization and add more value and contribute at a higher level. This was a trend that we were really seeing emerging because of this past year.

Sandra

Interesting.

Judy

So, not surprised.

Sandra

Chris, do you have any thoughts?

Chris

I think when you bring up learning and development and upskilling, I’m reminded of the discussion recently on weak ties and strong ties in organizations. Weak ties are viewed as being a conduit for knowledge within organizations, and there have been some papers on social networks and how creating cohesion within organizations can allow knowledge to flow easier.

In addition to upskilling in terms of individual people and for bringing more of an interdisciplinary frameset, you’re looking outside of maybe a siloed skill set if you will. But I think it’s also about breaking down silos between teams and within departments, because to Judy’s point, if you’re going to try to contribute more value, then a big part of it is working with more people and being able to facilitate that knowledge flow between people of different skill sets or people within different departments. A way to do that would be to build networks of interpersonal relationships between people as they act like highways for information flow.

Sandra

Yeah, that’s interesting cause I was thinking the same thing around the learning aspect and people taking it upon themselves to upskill rather than it be a requirement of the job. This particular article spoke more to people taking it upon themselves more as a fall-back plan. There may be a requirement from a job perspective where if the employer is giving me an opportunity to upskill, that’s one thing, but if I say, “Hey, you know what? Maybe I’m going to learn a completely different skill because I’m not sure whether my job is even going to exist in 12 to 18 months from now. It’s probably in my interest to learn a new skill.”

I was just shocked at how many people took advantage of that, given everything that was going on, the stress and trying to maintain their job, their family life.  So, thinking about if you work in a traditional workplace environment, I don’t think that that 50% would have been as high from an upskilling perspective like basically someone taking it upon themselves. I don’t know Judy, maybe you’ve got some insights.

Judy

I was just going to say, it’s kind of interesting because, if the last year shown us anything, how quickly technology is evolving and how quickly companies are embracing that technology. We’re seeing portions of jobs moving to technology. Companies leveraging artificial intelligence, for example, to answer basic questions.

So maybe people are catching on and saying to themselves, “You know, as I’m looking at this technology coming maybe parts of my jobs are going to become automated. So, either a) I have to upskill from a technical standpoint so I’m more relevant. Or b) maybe I realize that in a year from now I may not have that position. So, I’m going to upskill and try to learn some new job so I can go to a new opportunity.”

I think that person is being in an astute individual and in some circumstances maybe the companies even have conversations with that employee saying, “Hey, listen, you know as we’re implementing technology…” maybe a year from now they could be even having conversations with them.

Chris

I think that’s a really important point. I remember for a project I’m on I read this paper from the World Economic Forum called Global Risks Report 2021. Now one of the risks it highlighted is digital inclusion as a result of the increased reliance on technology, but I think also as a result of automation and how automation could end up with some people be excluded from the job market. I think that’s just an important point is that with automation, well, what are we going to do?

And I think it leads to another theme of agility which would be agility for the workforce but also agility for the organization. So, ability to respond to challenges and being resilient, but being resilient through agility.

Sandra

I think there’s opportunity to continue this conversation specifically around the whole idea of knowledge transfer and learning. Especially around the conversation we had online a couple weeks back around tribal versus organizational learning and different things like that. I think that whole knowledge transfer piece is going to be an interesting area to explore in this new world of work.

Also, to your last point, Chris about exclusion and the risk in that regard, I’m thinking more along the lines of we’re making assumptions that everybody has access to technology and the reality is that’s not the case. If anything, this experience is going to highlight the fact that there’s people that don’t have the same level of access. How can we potentially design a future that is more inclusive of people in areas that are not as advanced as some other places in the world so there’s more of an equal opportunity from a social perspective. So that’s what I’m thinking for future conversations.

Well, thank you very much to both of you, I really enjoyed this conversation, I think there’s a lot more to be said, to be discussed and I look forward to future conversations with both of you. Thank you again for your time today.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Definitions of flexible work
• Flexible hours, asynchronous working
• Employment standards and making changes
• How do you decide who can or can’t flex work?
• Who gets to make the decision about flexible work?

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Judy Holcomb-Williams on LinkedIn
• Chris Diming on LinkedIn

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra
Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work.

I’m Sandra Panara, director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

I’m joined today by Judy Holcomb-Williams, a certified Change Practitioner with progressive leadership experience in driving valuable, transformative change by strengthening people, process and performance and developing an approach for ongoing workplace reinvention that is more resilient to all types of disruptions.

I’m also joined by Chris Diming. Chris has a PHD in social anthropology. His interest is in how people form, negotiate, and mobilize interpersonal relationships, which is enabling him to apply those anthropological methods to emerging new ways of working.

If you have any questions or comments or any suggestions for future podcasts, please drop me a line at [email protected].

Alright, hey Judy, hey Chris, welcome.

Judy
Hey Sandra, thanks for inviting me.

Chris
Hi Sandra, thanks for inviting us. Really looking forward to it.

Sandra
Yeah, very excited about having an opportunity to talk about the future of work and thinking about what the workplace will look like 2021 and beyond. Lots of good conversation, on social media and with organizations that we’ve been talking to, about how to plan for the future of work as we think about the workforce, the workplace, and really, what’s the significance going to be longer term in terms of productivity, performance, and all these factors.

I’m very excited about having the opportunity to chat with you guys and get your thoughts on where you think things are going and the types of conversations that you’re having with your audience around similar topics.

When we think about the role of the workplace and where technology enablement helps companies transition in that regard, we’ve heard a lot lately about the whole idea of working from home, work from anywhere, flexibility. There seems to be a lot of terms out there that I think it’s causing a little bit of confusion.

When people speak about remote work, for example, are they really talking about remote work? Or they talking about work from anywhere? You know, we all know what’s happening: companies are thinking about what their return-to-work strategy is going to be. We’ve talked in the past about the challenges that many organizations have faced in terms of determining you know who can work flexibly, who can’t, and how those decisions are being made.

But before we get into that, let’s talk a little bit about what does being flexible mean to organizations. Because I think there’s different definitions of that out there, and I think just getting your perspectives on what you’re hearing would be helpful.

Chris
I think in general there is a lot of discrepancy over these terms, like ‘flexible working’ and ‘remote’ and ‘working from home’. I think remote working as a term and as a practice has been on for awhile. It only became working from home and the #wfh format with the rise of the pandemic when the term itself was popularized.

I think what’s more interesting to me now is this idea of what hybrid working even is and how do you produce hybrid working for your organizations? And what is the difference between a hybrid work format that reflects your organization versus some kind of McHybrid that Google, for example, gets because Microsoft got it, and so other companies get it because Microsoft and Google got it. That’s what I’m thinking about right now and why I think this is an important conversation to have.

Judy
Building on what Chris said, I think this word ‘flexible’ can mean many different things and I think it’s up to the organization to take the opportunity to figure out what it means to them specifically. And then determine what that hybrid solution or co-locate or all this different terminology means to the organization itself.

I think it’s a real opportunity for business to figure out how they best move forward from this point of view. One, from a business perspective and two, from a people perspective. That should guide them on what “flexible” means.

Sandra
Do you think flexibility will always incorporate some level of working outside of the office? I’m thinking about projects that I’ve worked on where flexibility was part of the language or the requirement, but it didn’t necessarily mean that people were working from home or working from different locations like what is being spoken about today. It’s more when you come into the office, thinking about the old design of workplace where you had one to one dedicated spaces and you came in, and you sat at your desk all day long and that’s where you worked.

Flexibility could also mean you know, coming into the office, but then moving around in the office. I’m wondering, do you foresee flexibility being that going forward, or do you see the actual the division between in office and out of office as a part of the flexibility definition?

Judy
Well, to a point that Chris made earlier, this term ‘remote’ has always been around. And this flexible arrangement has been around for many years. Employees will enter into the organization and agreement around what this flexibility means. They can come in later. Maybe they have four-day work weeks. It could even be hours of work.

And then, I would say over the last several years, we’ve seen progressive organisations really being flexible about their work environment. Meaning that you could work from, for example hoteling. So perhaps the employee didn’t have a designated workspace, but they could come in and hotel. And this is for many reasons: flexibility, savings of costs, real estate costs, all sorts of reasons why perhaps this has become an emerging trend.

But I think we’re going to see that even more so now, since we’ve hit the pandemic and we’ve seen so many issues arise from this. I think companies are really going to embrace this flexible work environment and work arrangement and continue to embrace it.

Chris
I would say that I see flexibility in a few different ways. I think on one hand you have the flexibility regarding where and when you can work, and that’s what Judy just touched on. But I think there’s also the flexibility and the arrangements. Once you go into the office where can you work within it? So again, like hoteling and hotdesking.

But I think there’s also flexibility in the way that the offices are constructed, in the way the designs are constructed. Can they be fit around and change depending on what a team might be using for that particular time period? Regarding the furniture, can the furniture or elements of the furniture be changed to fit someone’s needs or to fit what activities might be done?

What this all speaks to is flexibility is going to be more pronounced. It’s not really a question of whether flexibility is going to suddenly exist. Again, I agree with Judy that flexibility along with remote working has been part of the discourse. Especially when I was looking for jobs in the UK, I’d see things like flex passes and flex days and flex time, and so the ability to flex was there too.

I think it’s just a matter of the magnitude and how it’s going to become more widespread for certain professions and certain companies. To an extent it will be more widespread, but for whom? And who not is one of the questions that I have. It goes along to the role that the workplace and the office will have.

For certain groups, I think maybe more knowledge workers, the office might become more of a service, might become a product that’s designed over time to increase the productivity and make it so the knowledge worker wants to go to the office. If the furniture is flexible, if the design is flexible, and if the policies and overall ability to work for one place or another, if that’s flexible then that means you can create and constantly iterate an environment that’s attractive to employees.

To me it speaks to flexibility itself as part of this wider concept. The office becoming more like a product or a service that’s designed, but for specific populations and for specific people and organizations.

Sandra
I read an article this morning where there is now another element that’s being layered on top of this, which is flexibility around hours. Where before it was the whole asynchronous working your 8 hours a day but spreading that out. Now there’s kind of this emerging conversation around what should the workday consist of.

Should it be an eight-hour day? Should it be a 5-hour day? Should it be a four-hour day? A 10-hour day over four days? Do you think flexibility should also incorporate flexible hours as well? Because the flexibility around the space is one thing in terms of where work gets done, but then how does that also play into the hours that people work?

Judy
It’s an interesting question, right? We were all so used to going to work from 8:30 to 4:30 or 9:00 to 5:00. Now I think we see companies beginning to think outside of the box.

Sandra
We’re going into something that’s completely new. It widens the scope around the amount of disruption and change that would be required as we look to the future. It’s not just about the place, it’s not just about asynchronous working, it’s really looking at everything that relates to work.

Judy
Is there opportunity? Absolutely, and I think as things continue to evolve and companies start looking at how they need to get back to business and drive business continuity and sustainability. Maybe these conversations will rise out of this.

Sandra
Along the lines of flexibility, a lot of companies are trying to figure out, how do you decide who gets to work flexibly and who doesn’t? And so, you’ve got conversations around on one side, let people figure that out on their own, give them the autonomy to decide for themselves whether they can or can’t work out of the office. And then you have on the other side organizations that are reviewing jobs and making the decision. So, I wanted to get your thoughts on who should be deciding who can be flexible and who can’t and why.

Chris
Yeah, this is an interesting one because it speaks to who has control. I mean, if the company is employee centric then wouldn’t they give their employees the choice of how they want to work? But as soon as the company makes this declaration that some people can work flexibly and some can’t, then that immediately starts to pivot away from the company actually being employee centric.

I think it’s an interesting situation for companies to be in because it is so fraught with contradictions. It speaks to who is included in it and who’s excluded from it. Or one way to look at, who would have the right to be able to decide where they can work flexibly and not, and when and where they work? And how will employees decide that?

I wonder if part of it’s already happened through the distinction between essential workers and non-essential workers. I wonder if because some people have been viewed as being more essential for the maintenance of society than others, does that mean that they’re going to have less freedom to work flexibly? And since that distinction is already been made, won’t companies just follow that? And I don’t really know. It’s just an interesting topic to explore.

Sandra
Yeah, to your point Chris, if you want to be people centric – and we all know how we feel about that word – it’s really leaving it to the people to decide. But the part that I find fascinating is, where in the past we might have been looking at a job function, for example, as a determinant of whether a job could be done remotely or not, is that really true given the fact that we’ve all been pushed out of the office and have had to figure out how to be able to work? Are there other factors that really sort of make that determination?

I can think of a lot of examples of when companies would use that and people would sort of stomp their feet and say, “Well, I can do this job from home. Just because my title is X doesn’t mean that I don’t have the discipline or the capability of working from home.” It seems like it’s more of a personal choice, just like somebody can say, “Hey, you can work from home,” but then personally it’s like, “But I’m not disciplined enough to do that.” Or “I prefer not to work from home.”

How do you deal with it that way? Because it could go, not only for the people that are being recommended to be working out of the office, but then those people also coming back saying, “Well, that’s great, but I don’t necessarily have an interest in working out of the office. I actually want to work in the office because that’s my preference.” So how does that add to the whole complexity of figuring that all out? Judy, you’re on the HR side, so let’s hear your thoughts.

Judy
I do have a point of view on this, and I think you said a really interesting word: “effectiveness.” I think right now this situation is providing opportunities to experiment with hybrid ways of working. When we look at returning to the office strategically, there’s two sides of this: there’s a business side and there’s a people side to this. We really have to start focusing on the activities best performed in person in this process.

As we know we have a lot of jobs, I’ll say here in Canada, they say 60% are on site jobs that cannot be done remotely because they’re manufacturing jobs or maybe you know on site retail jobs, etc., etc. But in this process, we should be evaluating the overall effectiveness of when we see it done remotely or maybe even when the world can be a co-located work situation where perhaps they spend some time at home and some time in the office.

Sandra
Well thank you very much to both of you, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think there’s a lot more to be discussed and I look forward to future conversations with both of you. Thank you again for your time today.