Key Takeaways & Discussion Points 

• How do you enable a great working experience, at a coworking space, for example, if you’re no longer commuting into a popular downtown area? 
• What is the “screw it” mentality, and how has it affected the future of work? 
• Have we missed the deadline for creating a meaningful in-office experience?  
• Why don’t companies trust their employees to do their work, no matter where they are? 
• We’re moving towards a future in which everyone has 3+ streams of income and companies no longer form employer/employee relationships — the “lifetime career” is no longer
• As survivalists in a rapidly changing world, can we trust employers to uphold their end of the bargain in terms of providing financial security? 
• How do we define career success or success in life in a world of intangible outcomes? 
• How can companies enable people to feel like they’re a part of the company’s success? 
• What are the benefits of a coworking space over a traditional office? 
• The purpose of the office today is for (global) collaborative work, and socialization — so the office needs to become a venue for this 

Links:

• Sandra Panara – Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix 
• Kevin Anderson – VP, Enterprise Workplace Solutions at Upflex 
• CommonGrounds – Malaysia’s largest co-working community and co-working space 
• John Doerr, “Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs” (2018) 

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].  

I’m excited to introduce to you today our special guest, Kevin Anderson. Kevin is a proud Philadelphian, born and raised in the area. He’s had quite the journey so far, including being a three-time NCAA Golf Championship qualifier while attending Rutgers University Camden Campus in Division 3. In his professional life, Kevin has been a three-time founding US sales hire at PropTech and co-working start-ups such as CAD Management, OfficeSpace, and CommonGrounds. He’s even closed deals with big name clients like Sirius XM, Unity Technologies, Slack, Sonos, and Netflix. Kevin’s expertise doesn’t stop there. He’s also a former leadership team member at JLL’s Flex by JLL and currently serves as the VP of Workplace Solutions at Upflex.  

Outside of work, Kevin is a huge fan of the Grateful Dead! So grab a cup of coffee or your favourite beverage, sit back, and enjoy this conversation with Kevin Anderson.  

Hi, Kevin, really happy to have you on today! We did have a chat several weeks back and I really enjoyed that conversation. So, tell us a little bit about yourself! 

Kevin 

Hi, Sandra! Thank you so much for having me, and likewise, I enjoyed the conversation. As a fan of the podcast, I’m really thrilled to have been invited on. I’m calling you from my apartment in Philadelphia, PA, I’ve lived here for the past 7 or 8 years. I’m native to just across the bridge, a town called Delran, NJ. I’ve been working pretty much my entire career in PropTech and coworking. I got started at a company called Qube Global Software, which is now MRI Software. We work with a company called Common Grounds workplace, sort of the WeWork competitor in the 2018, 2019 start-up coworking environment. I worked in some PropTech companies that you might have heard of, OfficeSpace software, now Upflex, and I’m a former JLL employee as well, on the flex space team there. So, I like to joke around and say I’ve got the most experience in commercial real estate for somebody with absolutely no experience in commercial real estate. 

I’ve always been enamored by how people spend their time and what makes people tick. I’ve always had a lot of fun thinking about how the world could be different without having a 90-minute commute and I’m constantly thinking about this stuff. So, I’m really excited to be on the show and to chat with you about the future of work and how we’re all going to spend our days! 

Sandra 

That’s the thing that really intrigued me when we spoke last time, it was a very colorful conversation, which was great. I hope to copy that or have something similar today. First off, why coworking? What is it that attracted you into that space? 

Kevin 

As with everything in my life, I would say, the people. I was attracted to it because of who was leading it, the investors behind Emaar Properties, specific enterprises, really great, established and thoughtful real estate companies and the leadership team. Most specifically, the CEO at the time, Jacob Bates. 

Jacob was a client of mine, turned friend, turned mentor, turned best buddy and lifelong friend. I met Jacob, as I mentioned, he was a client of mine, but I ran into Jacob at CoreNet when he had just started Common Grounds. And we were talking about the changing dynamics of work and what at the time was a very forward-thinking conversation about activity-based working and activity-based offices. Jacob was the Head of Real Estate at Unity Technologies prior to joining Common Grounds. Can we talk about some of his office projects where they were the first company to diligently use movable wall technology, and they incorporated that into their workplace strategy and how they change teams and have scrums of engineers?  

So, when we got to talking, Jacob said a lot of things that just made sense to me. As I mentioned, I started in PropTech, not commercial real estate. I’ve never signed a 100-page lease, there are a lot of things that know that I don’t know, but a lot of things that Jacob was saying at the time made sense to me. I think at the time, Slack was getting ready to IPO, and we would talk all the time about how 8 or 7 years before the IPO, Slack was a video game company. Isn’t it wild that they’ve now got to sign a 10-year lease? They’ve got to make this crazy decision that might outlive their business?  

So it was mainly just the flexibility and I’m a curious guy by nature, I like it when things make sense. It just made sense to me, as someone who was thinking about real estate, but also as a person. The office should be dynamic, the office should change, and it should give me the feeling of Norm walking into Cheers, instead of a feeling of absolute dread.  

I’d be lying if I said I sat down and thought, I want to be involved in coworking. It was just being involved with the right person at the right time, and then following what made sense. And since then I’ve continued to meet more people and the more people I meet, I see such a diversity of thought and opinions.  

But I think at the end of the day, we all just want to live a good life. We want our work to be something that makes us feel that we’re living a meaningful life, and more importantly, fuels the rest of our life. I want to do other stuff! I want to fix the future of work, but I also want to go to a ball game. I want to take my girlfriend to Paris. You know, I’m a human being. As we start to be more involved with each other through social media and different working styles, I think we realize that we can take the mask off a little bit. We are actually people who just have a lot of the same shared experiences. A long answer to a great question.  

Sandra 

It’s interesting that you talk about the human experience and the things that we all seek. I feel like the pandemic has made us all reflect on that a little bit. It sort of takes you out of your day-to-day humdrum go to work come home eat sleep rinse and repeat. I think probably the fallout of that is what we’re experiencing right now, where people are thinking about themselves and what’s important to them and re-establishing their priorities and figuring out where work fits into that. Whereas before, work was the number 1 priority.  

Now is that to say work isn’t a priority right now? No, because obviously you still need to work in order to pay the bills, or at least the majority of us do. But how do you make the best of both worlds? Because it’s not an either/or, they definitely need to complement each other.  

I’ve heard, from talking to various people about the whole in-office experience that the need or desire for people to go back into the office is based more on the experience. Yet the employee experience or user experience hasn’t really been fully defined.  

I met the lady from Blackstone at IFMA when we were doing a roundtable, and she said something really interesting. They had done a study at their company — they basically decided on a location, but then realized that people weren’t really using the location. They were dumbfounded as to why that was occurring. And in comparison, they looked at another office location. It was because of what was around it, it wasn’t because of the office or who was there, but rather the supporting activities that could be done after work or after you had that meeting that really drew people in. It’s about location. And what’s interesting to me about coworking is that the offices tend to be in CBDs. The traditional experience has always been, you go downtown to have any half-decent experience. But now we know that people don’t want to do the commute. So how do you enable a great experience when you’re no longer commuting into a downtown popular area? 

Kevin 

That’s a great question. How do you cultivate an experience without forcing people to go to a downtown commute? Not to backtrack, but one of the first things you said was about how we came to this realization collectively through COVID about what we want to do. And it’s not just eat, sleep, work repeat.  

Also, I would say a lot of companies didn’t really help us feel differently. There’s a combination of that plus this sort of human awakening, and then people getting laid off and not being treated well during the pandemic. It’s been an insane whirlwind job market since the pandemic, which we’re only 3 years removed from the beginning of.  

So, I’m just trying to say, we didn’t really help ourselves with a lot of those things happening at once. We’re all realizing, oh my God, I’m a human being, I’m going to die someday. What I want to do while I’m here has skyrocketed, like country club memberships. And they’ve held through this recessionary period because of the “screw it” mentality. I think a lot of economists are calling it that. Screw it, I’ll max out my credit card, I’ll carry a country club bill, because I’ve been waiting 10 years to join, I’m not going to wait another 5. Because what’s going to happen in the next 5 years? 

I think we’ve all become a little more aware of the moment, and I think that’s what companies need to take advantage of to be able to cultivate this experience. They need to be able to create moments. We’re both in the real estate industry, centered around conferences and handshaking, and you’ve got all these different people through all walks of life, but we share a common interest, a common goal. We end up just talking shop — you and I could be talking about anything right now, but we want to talk shop because we enjoy it.  

I think the first step for companies is to introduce an element of letting go and an element of trust in our employees. We don’t need to know that you’re in the office sitting next to your boss and know that you’re sending emails. It’s actually more like, we want to let you come into the office and shoot the breeze and talk. It would attract me into the office if I could put an in-office message and say hey, I’m in the office, hanging out with my work homies who I see once a month, maybe I’m going to be in the moment with them and spend my time with them rather than sitting in a zoom meeting in an office. It’s 90 minutes from my house instead of at my house, where I can pop in and see my dog when I want to.  

So, I think trust and letting go and allowing people to mingle in ways they want to.  

And getting back to something else you said, it’s about cultivating the experience through the users in a way that’s thoughtful. My girlfriend works for a medical device research company, and she’s a psychology PhD. With that, I’m learning a lot about survey design and how thoughtful these medical device companies are about how they make their products and how much money they spend on where the labelling is. Spotify’s got like 100 PhDs who sit around for 3, 4 straight days and think about where the play button is going to go on your phone so it’s easy for you to hit play when you’re jogging. But workplace experience is usually left to 2 or 3 people with good taste who are severely undermanned and severely underbudgeted, to cultivate where we spend 80% of our lives.  

Sandra 

That’s a really, really good point. For the last little while I’ve been contemplating the whole concept of cultivating a worker experience, and I’ve said this in the past, but is it too late? I am of the belief that people have realized they need to be in the moment. So it’s up to me to determine what kind of experience I want to have. So can a company actually cultivate an experience? For me, I don’t know. Personally, I don’t think so. Maybe for others, yes, because it’s such a personal thing. It’s the same idea of trying to control what the experience is going to be, when really, as people, we dictate that virtually every day. I’m either going to have a good day or a bad day, or it might start out good and go sideways because of other people. But ultimately, it’s the mindset. It’s the way you think about the type of experience you want to have and where and what’s good enough for you.  

I’ve heard many times the idea that people can’t just think about themselves, they have to think about the larger team, the benefit of the team. Which I agree with, but I also think we should also have an autonomous state where the team can decide. It’s not all or nothing, it’s the flexibility even within the team of who can be present and can’t be present and not necessarily because it’s going to detract from the experience.  

I can speak from experience both at my current job and also where I worked previously where we were 100% remote, because the company was national. We had quarterly meetings and the preference was that the local team members went into the corporate head office for those meetings. But that’s not to say that, on that particular day, for whatever reason, if you couldn’t make it in that was frowned upon. You just dialed in remotely. Most people made the effort. Whatever worked for them. And that’s what made it. I think that’s what made it work, is that you felt like making the effort, but you’re not being pushed to be physically in the office one, two, three days a week. That’s the expectation that I think made it a lot more palatable. And it’s not because it detracted from the employee experience by any means because you went into the meeting rooms and guess what, you were on screen, you were communicating with people in a different province or state. So, what’s the difference between doing this from home or doing it in a meeting room with people who are in the same city, other than you get to share a lunch and maybe have a couple of laughs with those people? But if that’s something I value, and those are people I want to interact with, again, that’s a personal choice, isn’t it? 

Kevin 

I’m a sales guy, I’ve been a sales guy my whole life. I used to sell candy bars at my mom’s dance recitals when I was ten years old. That’s who I am as a human being. And part of the sales life since the dawn of time has been that if you hit your numbers, you can kind of get away with what you want, within reason. You can take clients out golfing, you can decide not to come into the office that day. When you’re a salesperson who hits their numbers, you’re given that trust, when really it’s probably actually just a fundamental right of a human being. You’re entering into a contract with us as an employee/employer relationship. Our business depends on you, your livelihood depends on us, maybe we should trust each other.  

It’s easier to say when there are black and white targets in a function like sales, but can’t we do that across all of our business lines and create targets that your groups are held accountable to and have been included in and agreed to be held accountable to, rather than just being told what to do. Part of being a salesperson is knowing that you need to say things a little bit differently to get what you actually want. I think that companies need to start to learn that lesson — so much of life is about how the message is received. Let’s think about how these emails about having to go back to the office are being received by people, rather than how they look on LinkedIn or Forbes.  

So, I think it’s about understanding your audience and speaking to your audience like they need to be spoken to, not how you speak. If I’m communicating right now to people in Podcast Land and they don’t understand what I’m saying, it’s my fault. Because I want them to know what I’m saying. I think you have to understand that to get people to buy in to your workplace strategy, especially if it’s going to be one around physical infrastructure.  

Sandra 

I think that’s it. I made a post a couple of weeks ago on LinkedIn talking about how companies are buying our time, as employees, so there’s an expectation that I need to show up. But then, I’ve worked as a consultant where a company has contracted to buy my time and they’ve paid more for my time, but I worked way fewer hours than I do when I’m working at a severely discounted rate as an employee and I don’t have the luxury of freedom, even though I’m technically delivering the same thing.  

So, it’s interesting to me to think about how that’s different. If you’re still buying my time, you’re still paying for a deliverable, one way or another. And yet companies feel like they need to have more control over where and how you do your work when you’re an employee vs when you’re a consultant, or you’re hired on as a contractor and you’re the one who dictates how work is going to happen.  

Kevin 

That’s a great point. That’s a tough thing to respond to, because you’re 100% right. Another thing that’s interesting about it is from a work perspective, there’s something that’s been there in the background that nobody’s really talking about, and it’s the question of what is it that we’re heading towards? People are referring to it as the gig economy, but companies have fewer legal ramifications or obligations because you hire people on as contractors, which releases them from a lot of stuff because they’re working as independents.  

Sandra 

But then how does that play out, when you think about it from a future of work perspective. Is employment from a status perspective going to remain the same, or will it change because that’s the only way companies can free themselves of legal liability? And I don’t know, from a legal standpoint, whether that’s even true.  

Kevin 

We’d need to ask the lawyers! 

Sandra 

But it’s interesting to think about, if you’re hiring someone on as a contractor, and I know for example in Canada, to be considered a contractor, you have to have multiple jobs, it’s not like you’re working for one exclusive employer — then you’re considered a proper contractor. That, I think, eliminates the legal liability in terms of where work happens.  

Like I said, I’m not 100% certain, but it’s interesting — if that’s where things go, what does that mean from a pay perspective? What does it mean from a location perspective, for where, when, why, and how work happens, where you have complete autonomy and control over that as a person versus a company just buying your knowledge or your services rather than buying your time as a person who reports to work from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.  

Kevin 

I think that will have to happen. It’s interesting having this conversation across borders, because right now, and the American economy is a little bit different from the Canadian one, but I think the economy on which our world is built will necessitate that change.  

We’re seeing right now, how long are companies going to over-hire and then lay off a significant percentage of that over-hire? It feels like anecdotal information, but a lot of my friends who have been unemployed for a while are now becoming gainfully employed very quickly.  

So, it seems to me like people are starting to realize that we overreacted to the overreaction when we cut too many people, now we need to hire more. I think that macroeconomically, when we have a federal government that messes around with interest rates, that impacts companies’ balance sheets in a way that has nothing to do with employees and now the employee account needs to be drastically reduced. That’s the easy button for satisfying the boards and satisfying the markets.  

And you nailed it, a big reason why people don’t want to come into cities to work anymore is that they can’t afford it. They can’t afford to live close to the city. Like, how nice would it be, Sandra, to be one of those dudes on Mad Men? They’re making $136 a week in 1965, and they’ve got a 3,000 sq ft house and an apartment in Manhattan. I would love to go into the office every day if it meant I could stay over in my apartment in Manhattan, rather than, I guess sleeping at the office if I have to work late!  

I think that, in order for people to afford the way they want to live, they’re going to need to adopt secondary, third, fourth, fifth streams of income. And then employers will realize that and say, OK, everyone’s got 5 jobs, 5 careers at a time, so we’re going to start to pay these folks like contractors. Then that also brings in questions of how that would work with regards to healthcare, why is healthcare tied to employment in the United States? There are a lot of things that can be fundamentally changed with the stroke of a pen. That would enable people to embrace the fact that they can have 5, 6, 7 opportunities at a time and control their time.  

Sandra 

Yes, that’s actually quite interesting that you said that, because I think that was an “a ha” moment for a lot of people. People got laid off, and some got rehired, but a lot of people decided to go out on their own. They said you know what, I can’t rely on an employer for my future. They’ve been upskilling during the pandemic, or that time working from home enables them to do a sort of side project while they’re gainfully employed, that enables them to do it on their own. So, they make the choice to basically be their own boss and do multiple things based on what they’re passionate about, the things they cafe about, so they’re not relying on a single source of income. Then when interest rates go through the roof and their job is on the line, they’re not at the mercy of someone else, dictating the kind of lifestyle you can live.  

Kevin

And that just goes back to what we mentioned earlier, about how employment is going to have to change. It’s going to have to, because the trade-off used to be, I’m going to take that job that I maybe don’t love, I’m not passionate about it, I might spend a bit too much time away from my family so that they can be secure, and the mortgage can be paid. So there can be a car in every driveway and a chicken in every pot. But that trade-off doesn’t exist anymore. Sorry, I shouldn’t say the trade-off doesn’t exist, it could still exist, but a lot of companies are not holding up their end of the bargain.  

Then you have people who have been laid off, they’ve gotten hurt, they’ve gone through hell the last 3 years of the pandemic. And they’re thinking, what am I going to do with myself? I don’t blame them for not thinking, I’m going to go get a new job. Because what is that anymore? People are survivalists. We’re going to adapt.  

My parents’ generation, and the generation before them, they had a career, and they maybe had one or two jobs. My brother who’s 6 or 7 years older than me, his generation is going to have maybe one or two careers, completely different career changes and 4 or 5 different jobs inside those careers. I’m 30 years old, my generation is going to have 10 careers over our lives. And I think with Gen Z and Alpha behind them, they’re going to have 5, 6 careers at once. What do you do? I’m a real estate property consultant, a stand-up comedian, and a drop-shipper for Amazon, and I caddy on the weekends. That’s what I do. Because that’s how I want to spend my time, not because I need a secure position.  

This goes back to the connectivity between all of us — you don’t get your news by reading the same paper as everybody, you get your news from a lot of different sources and it’s very easy to realize there’s a lot more going on out there in the world than we thought. It makes me maybe a bit less secure, but it opens up a hell of a lot of opportunity. I think one of the really great positive sides of the pandemic is all of these companies that now exist to enable employment across the globe, and how many more people now have opportunities to do things in 2019 that were just impossible, and not accepted by silly requirements like being in the office. There are a lot of talented people getting great opportunities they never would have before because of the chance that was forced upon us. Imagine if we fully embraced the change! 

Sandra 

I think that’s absolutely true, even just from personal experience, the whole world of work has literally opened up. Before, your opportunities were limited to the city you lived in, and maybe even more restricted based on how far you were willing to commute. I live 2 hours from downtown Toronto, so it’s got to be a really, really good opportunity for me to even consider the commute. My preference is to work from home, and I’ve been lucky to always have had that opportunity. But now there are opportunities that you never would have had exposure to before, whether they’re full-time employment or contractual work.   

It’s interesting, the narrative around the globalization of work, which has been around for a number of years, is the negativity of it, you know, third world countries are going to take your jobs. Well, that might be true, but it’s a balance. Companies are going to go after opportunities because it’s more cost-effective to hire in some other country vs their own. But by the same token, you have a skill set that you can take to the market.  

Like I said, I’m a Gen X-er, I’ve worked for 4 large companies. I’m working at a start-up right now, but I’ve worked for large organizations in my career, and they would sometimes do things I wasn’t particularly crazy about, but the money was good, and the opportunity was great. I learned to say OK, there are things I want to do in my life which are centered around owning a home and all of the things that my generation wanted to do. I have a millennial daughter who, because of Mom, was able to get into a home.  

But there are friends in her circle for whom buying a house is out of reach. She often argues with me and says her generation doesn’t care about owning, why does it matter if she owns or rents. And I said, technically, it doesn’t matter to me, as long as you’re happy. It really doesn’t.  

But it kind of made me think about how priorities are different. They would rather live and experience and do different things. And even when you think about just work — she lost her job. She was working for a tech company and lost her job just before Christmas. And she was like, I’m doing it on my own this time. So, she’s doing multiple things and she loves it. She said she gets out of bed every morning looking forward to her workday, because she’s doing all the things she enjoys doing and has complete control over who she works with, where she works, when, the tools she uses, and all those things. They’re not dictated to her, what to do to be successful.  

So, when you were describing this new way of thinking about work-life from a Millennial point of view, what about how success is defined? Because I’ve heard that many times over, that the generation is either lazy or not motivated or they have no initiative, and that’s not how you become successful. Well, how do you define success? What is it? 

Kevin 

That’s a great question. A lot of what we’ve talked about is very intangible. I think success is a lot easier to define in the trades or in those types of careers that were a bit more popular or in demand 50, 60 years ago. My dad’s a contractor, and when we drive around town he says, I built that house. I framed that house. I build that deck. You should see the kitchen I did in that place. There’s a sense of pride in his accomplishments. Look what I did. You get to marvel at what you did.  

I think a lot of the work being done by the tech boom does not give you this same sense of satisfaction. That’s why you see a lot of people who have made money not working very hard, working diligently, doing what their told, spending their time which is their most valuable asset, but not breaking their backs. But they’re unhappy because they’ve don’t have that sense of tangibility, and I think what your daughter is feeling is that feeling of tangibility.  

I think as generations change and grow, we learn that everything is a pendulum. And the pendulum right now is swinging back towards real moments. And you can’t blame us, we’ve spent 2 years inside our houses not being able to do anything we wanted to do. I think companies that start to enable real moments will help people feel successful. And then if people feel successful, they feel productive, if they feel like they’re part of a team, then those success measures can be agreed upon and established and probably more easily and achieved, because you know what you’re looking for.  

I have a great book by one of my mentors, John Doerr, “Measure What Matters”. If you can let people get in on the process of creating values and creating the goals — we can all have different priorities, but if we have the same values, it’s easier to define success. Success, for me, is when I don’t have to wake up with a sick stomach about what I have to do today. Success for me is my coworkers asking me, How’s Nicole doing? Success for me is playing golf every Saturday and Sunday with my buddies at the club.  

I think people just get caught up in dollar amounts and statuses, and a lot of that was stripped away during the pandemic. Having a lot of money was cool during the pandemic, but you’re still stuck inside your house. Success is starting to be less defined by titles, especially because titles are super duper inflated everywhere you go these days. I think that will stop being a thing soon. And money and status symbols, less “I own this, this is mine” and more about “I’ve done this, look what I’ve done”. 

I felt successful when I didn’t work for 3 weeks and went on tour with Dead & Company. That felt successful to me. And that’s something nobody can ever take away from me. I think companies need realize that enabling people to just feel like that is just as valuable as being able to measure the new productivity statistic of the year. Let people get in on the ownership. I think about this a lot.  

I think about the people who are in really serious knowledge working management positions in corporate North America right now. These are the kids who spent billions of their parents’ dollars on the Sims — they want to express themselves. I’m one of them, I’ve got stickers all over my laptop, stickers all over my high school notebooks. People want to be expressive. People want to identify with something — I’m a Deadhead, I’m a Disney Adult, I’m a sports fanatic.  

And they would love to identify with their company, but right now, companies are just so clueless to that fact. And they’re so concerned over their bottom line that there’s a lack of trust and a lack of big-picture thinking. There aren’t a lot of people looking themselves in the mirror thinking, maybe this isn’t working.   

Sandra 

I think part of it is also the expectation that in order to be successful with a company, you have to fit their mold. Their way of doing things. And when you don’t, it’s frowned upon. So, that may have worked way back when, but things change, things evolve. I know we’re all tired of blaming stuff on the pandemic, but it’s been 3 years, and things have changed. Peoples’ mindsets as they think about life and their priorities and how they want to live, and does work fit into that, it’s different from the older generations, me included. I’ll be the first to admit. Not that I’ve strived to climb the corporate ladder, I mean everyone did that way back when. But I had my hardships, as a single mom for many years, you just ate it and did it because you had bills to pay. There were things you had to do.  

And that might be different going forward, because if this situation had happened back then, I don’t know what I would have done, it would have been just crushing for me. But with these experiences, you go into survival mode, you get creative, it’s fight or flight. You think, how do I ensure that I’m not in this situation over and over? How can I rely on myself? That’s probably the best definition of success for me, when you can figure out how to stay afloat and not depend on someone else. That’s going to dictate whether you can maintain a lifestyle, and you can’t beat that.  

Kevin 

That’s a tough spot to be in, when all your eggs are in someone else’s basket. We all know that feeling, and it’s tough. That’s very well said, I couldn’t agree with that more.  

Sandra 

So, from your perspective, what do you see as being a fundamental difference between people working in coworking spaces versus the traditional office? 

Kevin 

First of all, coworking spaces certainly spend a lot more money on their offices. By and large they’ve spent a couple hundred bucks a foot. So, the sites themselves are fundamentally different. I don’t mean to speak with a broad brush, but typically with an office, you get what’s available at the time in the city where your CEO lives. You need to sign a lease, what’s the nicest building at the time? A lot of locations are just stumbled upon, and a lot of the infrastructure of the building is antiquated. And who’s going to spend a lot of money right now redesigning their corporate office? There are a few select niche companies with the money to do so, but realistically, in the economic environment we’re in right now where you’re trying to trim the fat, who’s going to take on this six-figure design project to make the space more attractive? It’s probably not happening.  

Whereas with coworking spaces, again, speaking with a very broad brush here, there are a lot of exceptions, but: most of them are less than 7 years old. They’ve spent between $120 and $220 per square foot. They’ve had a team of four or five really smart people research that location, figure out the walkability score, how to make it the most successful for everybody, it’s got newer technology systems, it’s accessible, it’s got hospitality. There’s somebody there at the front door saying, Hey, Kevin, what’s up, that Eagles game was sickening last night, wasn’t it? Versus going into the elevator, waiting in line, then going to your cubicle.  

It’s a great question with a stupid answer: they’re nicer. They’re not half-wall cubicles, their furniture is new and shiny and comfortable and have different types of seating. If I look around my apartment here, I probably have seven different types of chairs, and I use them all. Nicer touches lead to a frictionless experience, and there’s still a lot of friction going into the office, no matter where you’re going or how great it is, there are uncontrollable things that are going to happen to you on your way there, but you can control the controllables in a coworking space, and they’ve got people on site that are going to help you. They’ve got newer systems and they want to hear your feedback. They’re constantly spending money because their business is the office, and not just a by-product of what they think the office should have been when they started the company.  

So that’s my bold and underlying point, these offices are their business. And for the first time, these coworking operations are the ones that rely on hospitality and the daily incremental revenue that comes with that hospitality. They’re in it. Whereas a lot of major landlords, they’ve had it on easy street for 100 years. It’s lather, rinse, repeat with a lot of the agreements that have been done, because your customer is not the end user, the employee, rather it’s the capital markets.  

Whereas for a coworking operator, the customer is the customer. When I go into the office, I want to be treated like a human being, not just a vehicle for a nice financial situation. So that’s what I’m seeing as the bottom line.  

Sandra 

That’s really insightful. So, thinking about the office and what you were saying about the office experience, I hear this a lot about hospitality and how hospitality is what’s going to drive demand whether in a typical commercial building or with coworking — I struggle with that. A lot of the times you get companies that will compare to the hotel experience. But the hotel experience serves a very specific purpose. Yes, there’s diversification in the hotel industry because you’ve got the coffee drinkers, the lunches, the events, that kind of stuff.  

But at the end of the day, the majority of the business that goes into that space is vacationers, business travel, and they need a place to sleep. Now AirBnb came in and tried to disrupt that, and they probably did, I don’t know what their market share is now, but hotels do continue to exist.  

I don’t see how that same philosophy of hospitality would help businesses, because an office is an office. There’s no diversification in an office, yet anyways.  

Kevin 

So that’s key: “yet”. If the office is going to exist as it does today, it’s not going to exist anymore. I think it’s fair to say that most of the time, the office sucks. You’re a little too close to the toilet, too close to the guy whose breath smells bad. The conference room video tech doesn’t work. You’re at a zoom meeting in the office. That’s just a fact of life.  

If we rewind 100 years — and don’t quote me on this — the first office in recorded history, I think, was in London or somewhere in England in the 1700s, and there’s this whole dossier on why it was built, about how we’ve got men who need to make things happen. And there are two types of things that need to happen: work that requires privacy and work that requires collaboration. And that was a few hundred years ago.  

So, now, my opinion is that there are two types of work still: your job, which is a combination of in-person and collaborative work that can be facilitated anywhere on the globe at any time because we’ve got laptops and iPhones.  

And the other type is socialization. People need to know who you are. Whether we like it or not, part of your job is making sure your boss knows you’re working hard. Making sure everyone in the company knows that you’re not a pain in the ass. There’s a lot more politicking in the everyday life of the office worker than there was when the office was built.  

So, if the office is going to survive, it needs to be a place where people want to go and convene, like an Athletic Club or a Country Club. Somewhere you want to go because you want to be in the mix. I don’t want to be forgotten. People are starting to say, the Gen Zers, the TikTok kids, they want a bit more leadership — duh, why would I have a boss if they can’t teach me anything? So, make the office a place where your boss can teach you something that has nothing to do with the company. Make the office a place where I can go and do things that I can’t do normally because they’re too expensive these days. Like a VIP concert experience. And I know I sound crazy. I think about the Metaverse a lot, there’s some cool stuff being done there, but also when I see meetings held in the Metaverse that look like a WeWork, and people are wearing Metaverse Banana Republic clothes, I shiver. We could be having this meeting anywhere. We could be having it at Cheers, or Gringotts Bank. And we’re having it at a WeWork?  

And then I start thinking, well, they’re in the office. Landlords are giving away $300, $200 a foot. That’s all the money in the world. You could do anything with that money, just make it what your people want. Let them pretend it’s the Sims, and build your own office. And then it’s back to your question, which is very valid, but it’s almost unanswerable. If you don’t want to do that, then why have an office? Because you want to watch me do stuff? Nobody’s with that anymore. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. You want to go to a concert right now? Tickets are $1000 for the mezzanine. And people are going. But you couldn’t pay anyone to go to the office, the way it exists right now.  

Sandra 

Kevin, thank you very much for your time, this has been a fun conversation! I’m sure there’ll be many more.  

Kevin 

Absolutely, this was a lot of fun for me! Thanks for putting up with my schtick. 

Key Takeaways & Discussion Points 

• How can signaling apps like Café help to enable hybrid workers to engage with each other? Can they help with loneliness, isolation, and disconnection? 
• Employees are now being given more choice and flexibility in where and when they work — what value can your office offer to them? 
• Can virtual connections create that same creative spark or collaborative energy as in-person moments? Can you effectively mentor or network remotely? 
• Do we need to focus on the individual’s benefit, the “what’s in it for me?”, when designing solutions?  
• Not everyone is looking for the same thing when it comes to a workplace experience, especially between different generations of employees.  
• Are we stuck in old-school thinking? Are there newer, better ways to move forward in your career and climb the ladder than the way we’ve always done it? 
• Is the future of work self-directed? Is permanent, long-term employment on the way out? 
• How can a signaling app like Café provide your organization with useful data on space usage and working patterns? 
• Even if the traditional office is no longer, enabling connection within your organization is still an extremely valuable goal. Encouraging social ties based on non-work interests can help with this! 

Links:

• Sandra Panara – Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix 
• Tom Nguyen – Co-Founder and CEO at Café 
• Café – Your workplace engagement hub

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’d like to introduce you to Tom Nguyen. Tom is the founder of Café, a workplace engagement platform that helps companies optimize in person gatherings and improve workplace culture. Tom’s background is in software development and B2C apps, and he has been instrumental in building a high adoption rate for his solution.  

Hi Tom, really happy to have you as a guest today. I know that you’re the co-founder and CEO of Café, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Tom 

Well, first, thank you for having me. There’s not a lot to know about my background. I graduated from an engineering school, and I’ve been working in Product Management for a long time. I launched my first company five years ago, a social network for teenagers. And now I’ve launched another venture, which is called Café. That was three years ago, during the pandemic. It’s a B2B SaaS company that enables hybrid organizations. So yeah, that’s me! 

Sandra 

Great, so tell us a little bit more about Café in particular. When you and I chatted, I had asked you what was it that inspired you to build Café? 

Tom 

Well, it was more a personal problem than global inspiration. For context, I’m French and I launched this company with my older brother as a co-founder. Basically, what happened is we were both managers at the same company. We wanted to go back to the office when the first lockdown was finished, which was about in the summer of 2020 in Europe. We only got locked down for three months in a row. And everyone wanted to be back in the office less than they were before, maybe once or twice a week, but there was no easy way to find out what the best day was. This is how we started Café, trying to solve that specific problem and then iterating to understand the bigger picture.  

Sandra 

So how is the Café solution different from a booking system? 

Tom 

The biggest difference is that it’s more a signaling app. You could input your schedule for the two upcoming weeks and tell your coworkers where you’ll be working from: when you’ll be in the office, working remotely, not working, or from a coworking space for example. And that enables you to compare plans and meet on specific days, making sure that you show up on the right days. 

Sandra 

Interesting. I’m just thinking about the whole signaling thing, which I think is really interesting. As we think about work in general, what are some of the challenges that people are now facing as a result of everything that’s going on in the world of work? It just feels like every angle of work is being disrupted. What would you say are some of the bigger issues when it comes to how people now want to work in comparison to how we used to work before as part of a regular routine? 

Tom 

Well, when we think about the pre-pandemic world, the office was just a default option. There was not a lot of space to optimize for your personal life and optimize for your commute time, for example. I think that the hybrid mode and remote work brought a lot of flexibility and comfort in terms of when you will show up to the office or work comfortably from home.  

And I think there was a big shift, thanks to remote. On the productivity aspect, there are a lot of studies that show that people are quite productive at home. But the downside of it is that people are also feeling more lonely and more isolated towards the whole organization and the company. And I think that’s where it’s interesting, because most companies are seeing that new hybrid model and remote work as an opportunity to have fewer workstations in the office than employees, which is possible, right? You can go down to a ratio of 0.8, 0.7, maybe 0.6 based on the total number of employees. But in the end, you’re not going to save money on your space because you need to rethink your workplace and the whole purpose of your office to be attractive. 

And I think this is maybe where a lot of people are getting misguided on this: we’re not going to just save money on real estate, we need to redesign the whole experience. You have all this productive time, which is the focus time when you’re working comfortably from home. But you need to also have part of your time dedicated to collaboration and creative sessions, which should be in person. And that balance is hard to find. This is where I think most companies are struggling today and in the next two to five years. 

Sandra 

It’s interesting, one of the things that I’ve recently started to think about is, with the advancement of hybrid, what are the different work styles that we think about now? Most companies seem to think you’re either working in the headquarters, so basically the company office, or you’re working from home. But in reality, there are so many variables in those two opposite ends of the spectrum. Working “in office” could mean working in a headquarters, it could be working in a co-working space, it could mean working in a partner’s office or a customer’s location, or you could be traveling. Remote is the opposite end, which in traditional pre-pandemic days, meant you were out of the country, out of the province, out of the state, and therefore you couldn’t access the office. But that was your arrangement, you were 100% working remotely and you came into the office, if that was a requirement, once a year, once a quarter for quarterly meetings. Then you had work from home, and again, the proximity was there, so you could go to the office, but you were basically assigned to work from home the majority of the time. There’s all of that in between, in terms of the variables of when you come into the office, when you don’t go into the office.  

And having been one who worked that way, I sort of worked on both ends of the spectrum. One of the things that I found that was really interesting was the coordination effort. When you’re working in a traditional office setting, you don’t really think about who you’re working with that day, or what you’re going to do that day. You just go to the office and you figure it out as you go. But when you’re working in a remote setting, working from home, any time that you’re not in that regular routine of going to the office every day, you need to be proactive about that. And for me personally, I think the biggest pain point was the coordination of schedules. And even then, even when you coordinated on a day that everybody was going to be in the office, you still had people saying the day of, I can’t make it today because something came up. All the plans really got messed up.  

So how does this solution help that? Is it still based on helping the coordination of who’s going to be there? I’m trying to understand the angle. Is it more about the awareness of who’s in the office, in order to kind of nudge people to be there? Or is it more around the coordination of the team, so to speak? 

Tom 

It’s definitely important and necessary to have access to the information that we call location management, which is basically, “who’s where?”. Because now you need to be intentional with the way that you’re going to meet with people. Because the office is not the default option. You need to know beforehand who will be showing up on which day. So, you can optimize for high value moments and just meet in person.  

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to hybrid. There isn’t one thing that works for all companies. But we do see generally two sorts of hybrid. The first one is flexible hybrid and the second is strict hybrid. Strict hybrid is basically when companies ask people to come back three days a week to the office. You can think of Apple, you can think of Amazon, you can think of a lot of companies that just announced this. What’s super strict about it is that you have a number of office days, plus you have strict office days. So it’s a team day, which is all the marketing folks are showing up on Tuesday, all the IT folks are showing up on Thursday. 

And that’s very bad for the company. Why? Because it doesn’t mix people together. It means that only the same folks from the same department will be able to show up, connect, and build relationships. It’s reinforcing the silos.  

So, what we’re building is based on knowing who’s where ahead of time, and also knowing who’s who. Who is from which department? But then how do you get to know each other with non-work related topics? So everything that’s social you can think of, like who speaks which languages, who likes to do which kind of hobby or sports, and how do you create connection on an interest-based level. Helping people to show up on the right days is not just about your teammates, but also your favorite people from other department that you like to hang out with. Maybe you just like to have lunch together or just have a coffee break or water cooler moment, whatever.  

The idea of Café in the beginning was, how do I make sure that people show up and make the workplace attractive again? The workplace experience is something new. As you said, in the old world, we’re just showing up because that was the default action. Now it’s more like a theater, like a movie. I need to plan my trip to the office ahead of time and say, oh, there’s something I like on that day. I will show up. I’m deciding and I’m intentional in my choice that I won’t show up on that day because maybe someone’s here, maybe something’s happening, like an event or something. And that’s where it’s the biggest change from the old way: people now have that choice, they have the flexibility of selecting what days matter the most to them. It’s a people-first experience. You need to offer something to the employees and to the end users because what’s the need for me as an employee to show up to your offices if I don’t get something out of it? 

Sandra 

I totally agree with that. I like the reference that you made to the high-value moments. I think that hit the nail on the head.  

I have a question to ask you. Depending on who you’re talking to, furniture vendors, brokers, companies themselves, we’ve been hearing a lot lately in the Corporate Real Estate industry about this idea that companies can actually create high-value moments. I completely agree with what you said, that it’s people-driven. You can’t design a space to create high-value moments, because those interactions can happen technically anywhere. They don’t necessarily have to be just in the headquarters. Going back to what I was saying before, people can meet anywhere. Based on your experience, is there a push for this type of interaction to happen in the headquarters? Why do you think that is the case, or not? 

Tom 

People can totally create relationships virtually. We’ve been doing this for years now, and especially since the pandemic.  But it’s different when it happens in person. I also think that a lot of folks just look at the problem from a space perspective. The visible part of the iceberg is that you have empty spaces, ghost towns, or you have companies that have fewer seats than people and are struggling with over-capacity, but there’s no in-between. That was the first problem everybody rushed into: how do I solve my space problem? 

But if you dig into that, and look at the invisible part of the iceberg, it’s about people, interactions, connections, and creating relationships. The fact that you can create relationships at a distance, virtually, it’s less impactful because we’re social creatures. We’re human beings. Something is different when it’s in person. I’m not saying that I promote 100% in-person connection, that would be silly. But it’s just different.  

So how can we optimize for those high-value in-person moments to improve employees’ sense of belonging within the corporate world? We know that not relating to the company’s mission and values and DNA creates disengaged employees, and disengaged employees have a two times higher churn rate. So if we look at this problem from the lens of employees and users, we can understand very quickly that it was never going to be about just space. It’s about designing your space to optimize for X, which can be creative sessions, collaboration, all those new things we’re doing in the office that we weren’t doing three years ago.  

Sandra 

When you talk about the value of interactions, I look at it a bit differently. If I think about a small company, whether it’s a start-up or has under 2000 employees in one city center, you’re generally in the same city area. And the in-office experience, there’s value to that because the people are all able to connect in person.  

But when you work for a larger company with a global, national, international presence, you’re basically having to go across borders. Often your teams are decentralized. They’re not in the same city or location. So, this type of interaction is part of your day-to-day. I think that’s where a lot of the debate comes from about mentoring or networking or developing relationships. It depends on the perspective that you’re looking at it from. If your experience has only been in the vicinity of other people, then that’s going to be high value for you.  

But when you’re worked for an organization where you have no choice, you need to work with someone from another country, a different time zone, and you work with that person on a regular basis; that relationship isn’t any less valuable than one with a person you can sit down with in person. You can still work effectively together.  

It’s interesting to me that the arguments about coming into the office and the value of relationships is about what underlies the value of the relationship itself. It goes back to what you were saying at the beginning, that you’re making the decision about what draws you in to a place. It’s not because I can collaborate better, or meetings are more effective, or whatever. There’s a reason why, that’s usually driven by the individual, a sort of “what’s in it for me”? So if you want to develop stronger relationships with someone, maybe because it allows you to move ahead — some people say that if you’re working remotely, you’re not going to have the same opportunities available to you.  

But I completely disagree with that. I’ve personally experienced working 100% remote, and opportunities are just as available to me as to those who go into the office. Again, it all comes down to the organization that you’re working for and how that information or those opportunities get presented to people.  

But I think the whole concept of the individual making that choice, that decision, is what’s really important here. With companies, it’s usually that old idea of “build it, and they will come”. You’ve probably heard lots of talk about what can you do to entice people to come back to the office, or to attract people? I’ve been thinking lately about what we’re building. Are we building or rebuilding the workplace for the future, to entice or to attract, or are we building it to basically align with how people actually want to work? 

Ultimately, it’s the people that decide when, where and who they want to work with. I think that’s really what the future of work really is all about. It’s not something that you can shape and form. Yes, you have to provide the venue, where you meet. I know on your team, for example, Danielle is always on a plane travelling somewhere. She tells me about getting together with your team when she’s in the US and you’re in France, but you enable that sort of interaction where people can still feel a connection to the brand. And that’s a small company. So is that something that medium to larger companies can do on a more regular basis too? 

Tom 

Yes, it changes a lot from company to company based on how they structure their workforce. For example, in our case, we only hire employees from two cities, to enable people to meet each other at least once a week. It’s basically an 80-20 model — we all meet once a week for creative sessions or brainstorming or collaboration. Then for the other four days, it’s about production and shipping. And everyone knows their priority because they met once a week.  

But when you’re looking at a larger company, you want to attract people, not just make your workplace attractive. You want to give value to users, to employees. You want to give them something that’s worth the trip, because nobody wants to do 45 minutes in the subway, show up, and nothing is valuable to them when they show up. We need to be thinking about the workplace as a very strange new place where people will not all be there on the same days.  

And on top of that, we have different generations in the workforce together. Sometimes 4 or 5 generations. And the leadership team of most companies doesn’t usually value the experiences of the younger people. A lot of people, they’ve just graduated, never stepped foot in any workplace, and they’ve been virtual their whole life. It’s definitely not the same experience as someone who’s 40, has kids, and has been with the company for five years. This is also why the workplace needs to be redesigned, and we need to think about the purpose of that company and workplace. Because not everyone is looking for the same thing, when it comes to workplace experience. So we need to also take account of that.  

Sandra 

That’s a great point. I think that there’s definitely truth to that. So, in your own words, what is it that you think the younger generations are looking for in the workplace or the workplace experience? 

Tom 

That’s kind of logical to me. When you join a new company as someone that’s 22, 23 years old, you want to expand your network and grow and learn from people, and that’s harder to do remotely. It’s possible, but it’s harder to connect and create that relationship when it’s fully remote.  

There are lots of studies about creating relationships with managers and mentors and growing your network and networking skills.  

Sandra 

But do you think that, for lack of a better word, habit or behaviour is in play, because you’re basically being forced to conform to what or how work has been predefined? I often think about the younger generation who’s gone through university, and even the younger kids in high school who haven’t yet stepped foot in an office. They see their parents working in offices. And maybe, in the last five to ten years, when flexibility started to become a bit more mainstream, they make decisions for themselves about what type of experience they want to have. But their entire life, almost from when they’re born, is entirely digital. And you hear about the impact of working from home on building social skills and some other human skills. It’s hard to imagine how to do that when you’re not in person. So, we kind of look at it from the framework of how we perceive how we build relationships.  

On the flip side, I have a nephew who’s eight years old who plays Roblox and all those online games. He’s got virtual friends and they collaborate on what they’re going to do on Roblox. They’ve never met, but it’s amazing to watch how they interact with each other to achieve something. To me, that’s almost a training ground for the future of work. You have a goal, and everyone comes together, whether you know each other or not, with a similar goal and you work together to achieve that goal. And then you transition from a virtual world that you’re completely comfortable in to a new one where you have to get serious and conform to how things work in the working world based on an old-school mentality.  

That’s where I think this debate is happening. If you’re talking about work in the traditional sense of how you develop relationships and how you move on in your career, climb the corporate ladder, and all that stuff, it’s very old school thinking. Is that something that the younger generation still wants? Or is it something that the older generation of workers is saying to the younger ones, that this is how you succeed?  

To me, it feels like, for the younger generation, the concept of work is very different. They’re coming into it with these digital skills — there are things that younger kids coming out of school can do, whether they’re educated in tech or not, that they can do way more efficiently than older generations in the workplace. They can accomplish a task in a quarter of the time that it takes someone else who doesn’t have those skills. I hear this from my daughter, who’s 30, and I hear it from her friends all the time. You go into the workplace and look at how the older generation does things, and then you hear, if you use this tool, you can get it done in a fraction of the time. It’s almost dinosaur-like, how some workplaces function. And that’s the way people want you to work. So when you think of it from that perspective, there’s this digital element of working, and then there’s conforming to how work has been done in order to keep the idea of work and workplaces alive. And those are two totally different camps.  

Tom 

Yes, I think the skills of the younger generations is very interesting, because they way that we’re learning skills and looking at our careers is very different. Some studies and research show us that the newer generations just want more freedom and flexibility. That means not being with the same company their whole lives, or at least not spending more than five or ten years in the same place. They want to grow, they want to try new things, they want to be challenged.  

That’s also linked to skills. The new generation learns new skills easily and doesn’t want to be stuck in one position or one skill set their whole life. It’s definitely linked to wanting to grow their skill set and network, not just stay in one company. They want to work across different experiences, organizations, departments, and not get stuck. That means we need to create bridges, create those opportunities within the company and across companies to build something of your own.  

Sandra 

Your point about the growth opportunity is an interesting one, for sure. We’ve talked about this before, that people want to cross-pollinate. Having a career path, how you want to evolve your career, goes beyond the offering of just one company. The days of people being loyal to one company for their entire career, like our parents did, is long gone. People will go in, pick up some experience, learn about something new, and then move on. You might get people moving every two to three years. That’s where we’re at right now. It’s very rare to stay ten plus years, and when people do that, it’s usually because there’s a pension or a retirement fund or something that would make it crazy to leave.  

I’ve been thinking lately, is the future of work more self-directed? The whole concept of permanent employment, vs being able to work for multiple organizations and choose the type of work that you want to do. That’s potentially what the future of work is for younger generations, because there are lots of interesting people out there and interesting things you can do for your career. There’s constant learning because you’re not always in the same space, the same world.  

It addresses many of the challenges that are being talked about right now that are problems for organizations. As we said at the beginning, there are a lot of issues that each company has to work through.  

But going back to Café, and thinking about who the users are, it’s obviously the employees in the company who are indicating who they’re connected with. Is there a data output from that solution? What kind of data is available, and how do companies use it? 

Tom 

We bring three kinds of data sets that are really interesting and not really available on the market right now. The first one is most popular, and it’s everything about location. How much are offices used in all the different subspaces within the workplace, what is their status rate?  

Then, how are people adopting the product and making sure the data is relevant. That’s huge. It enables us to have lots of social data about how many events are created, how many random coffee chats are happening, what are the top events with most attendees, what’s the most active workplace? Each workplace has its own sort of scoring when it comes to social activities. It helps the whole organization understand what they can improve the different workplace experiences, and understand what events are performing best. So that’s the social information.  

It’s about bringing both types of information to workplace leaders and teams, but also HR and People teams.  

Finally, you can monitor your remote or hybrid policy. Even if you have a flexible hybrid model, you still want to understand what population shows up most. Is it based on department? Based on the usual office days? Having that breakdown, understanding what percentage of your population is remote first or fully remote, or hybrid or office first — it helps you narrow down how your workforce is distributed and how it’s structured, so you can better understand how to make changes.  

So, it brings value to HR functions, workplace functions, but also managers, because each manager has access to a specific amount of data based on their own teammates and departments. So, there are really three levels to make sure everyone gets the right value out of the solution.  

Sandra 

That’s very cool. I was just thinking about the amount of detail that you can get about how people are working together and where they’re working. From my perspective, that’s most valuable right now because there’s definitely a gap in the marketplace around visibility outside of the office. If you’re in an office setting, most of the solutions are focused on activity that happens inside the traditional office workplace. So if your employees are going to a coffee shop or a co-working space, or they’re choosing to meet over lunch, firstly you don’t know who’s meeting with whom unless they’re putting it in a calendar, but calendars are usually for more formal meetings. And then what’s the gist of that activity, what work is actually occurring?  

Going back to what I said at the beginning, the idea is you’re either working in office or at home. But the reality is, there’s a slew of other places that people can actually be connecting with each other, and that’s not something that companies seem to be aware of. And this was true long before the pandemic. You’ve probably heard that the metric of occupancy before the pandemic was at best 60%, because people travel for work, people worked at partner sites if they were in sales, worked at restaurants and coffee shops, are meeting with clients, what have you. You had all kinds of alternate places that people were actually working from. So that’s where that 60% comes from, because 40% of people were working outside of the office on a regular basis as part of their job. Plus obviously there’s PTO, so you’d never be at 100% with a solution like this.  

This surfaces the reality of the distribution of work, which is the “aha!” moment that most organizations need. They need to look at their reality, which will help them make decisions around distribution when we’re only using the office 20, 30% of the time. It’ll lead to decisions around real estate — do we need as much real estate? Or can we take some of the cost savings to basically reinvest into programs that will allow for employees to tap into other areas? 

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the fact that you’ve got, let’s say, an average cost of $8000 per employee per desk. And that’s again, pre-pandemic times in a traditional office setting, and that’s a conservative estimate because that cost could go up based on the city center you’re in. Now all of a sudden you’re learning that people aren’t coming into the office — they’re still working, but they’re finding other places to work from. So the company has this opportunity to save this money. Could some of this money be funnelled to employees to enable them to tap into these other locations, so you’re still valuing relationships and networking, and all those kinds of things that come interaction without being hooked on the physical office?  

That’s where I’m seeing the future of work going. It becomes a permission, if you will, where access is granted based on funds provided to you to allow you to go and use alternative places to work, with the people you choose to work with. Because there’s value in working with those people if that entices you to leave your home and connect with people in person. And you’re being enabled by your company to do so. That sounds like that’s where Café is right now, you’re enabling people to want to connect, because they can choose the people they want to actually work with, and there’s high value in bringing those people together. Right? 

Tom 

Exactly. It’s a good mix of ownership, flexibility, and transparency. This is how you create a positive employee experience where people are actually feeling empowered to do what they do best, which is work, but they’re also empowered to have social opportunities to connect and grow. Because the employee experience is not 100% about work. It’s also about engaging with the workforce and helping people feel like they belong to a group, not just their own inner circle of collaboration, their own teammates. It’s also about social ties across the organization that in the end, help collaboration. Like informal chats, that sort of communication. This is done through the lens of community interest groups and not just working groups.  

Sandra 

In your opinion, is that information considered “nice to know” for organizations, or is it “need to know”, who’s working with whom with all these social interactions that are occurring? 

Tom 

The idea is not really to give that information directly to the managers or admins. The idea is more to enable these connections and bridges between people, and to have access to information like: for example, who are the folks in my San Francisco or Austin offices who are interested in yoga, and how can I connect those people? We have the same interest in organizing an event together, like a yoga session on Thursday. So, I know that if I show up on Thursday, I’ll be able to connect with like-minded people for a specific activity, maybe with some folks I’ve never met before.  

And that’s how you create a better network internally. It’s not about a top-down approach, it’s about bottom-up and having these organic gatherings, meetups that are self-organized. This is how you give ownership to employees, by leading them to organize themselves too.  

Sandra 

Is the app geared towards the end user? Are you selling to the end user directly, or are you going through the organization to offer it as a benefit? 

Tom 

We do both. The best case that can happen is that the end users are just using the product. We have a free plan with unlimited seats like Slack or Notion, and end users are just using it. They’re sticky with the product. And when that’s the case, we can go to the company and say hey, you have X amount of users using it, those numbers are pretty good, we should talk.  

It’s not just a top-down approach where end users are feeling forced to use something. They’re in that phase where they can sort of choose how they want to shape their employee experience based on value. If they’re getting value out of the product, there’s no question about adoption or stickiness or engagement with the tool, because they see its value directly. It’s as simple as this. If you want to have a super sticky product experience, you need to bring value to end users.  

Sandra 

That leads me to the next question I was going to ask, about the whole information gathering process and concerns that organizations present with respect to privacy. If you’ve got users sharing interests and things like that about who they are under the umbrella of work, how do the users feel about that? That’s either my personal information if it’s a B2C app, kind of like how I choose to use Facebook, because it’s my personal account and I can do whatever I want, vs something that’s under the umbrella of a company, and then the company potentially has access to information about me. Do you run into challenges like that when it comes to privacy information, and what data you can actually surface to organizations? 

Tom 

It’s not really happening, because the data is basically declarative data and the users choose whether they want to share anything. So, what’s happening in the end is people want to be social, so they share social information about themselves. People that don’t want to be social, they don’t share it. It’s like in the previous world of work, some folks in the workplace were social and sharing info about themselves. Some people were just here for work and that’s also okay. We can’t force and we won’t force anyone to be like extroverts when they’re not, and to create connections at all costs. It’s not the goal. And the end mission is just to let people connect if they want to, and provide a safe and transparent place where they can do so. 

Sandra 

Fantastic. Tom, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you very much for your time. Any final remarks? 

Tom 

Well, it was a great conversation. I think we’ve talked about the problems linked to space and the employee experience. If there’s one more thing that would be interesting for another discussion, maybe with someone else on your podcast, is to talk about how the new way of working is impacting cross-collaboration. Today individuals connecting within teams is not that affected, but across organizations. When you’re looking at organizational structures and social behaviours. It’s really hard to create bridges between groups of people that most of the time are not connecting or talking to each other. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges of all companies, building those bridges before those islands move away from each other. 

Key Takeaways & Discussion Points 

• Is ChatGPT destined to disrupt community building? And/or is it something we have to build into our approach to community building? 
• Collective is a new resource hub for those just starting in facilities management or corporate real estate where you can find high-quality information and useful templates. 
• The design and real estate world are full of tunnel vision — we all look at problems through our own subject matter lens. Ideally, we learn to work more cross-sectionally in our approaches and perspectives.  
• How do subject-matter-focused conferences perpetuate this tunnel vision? What might a different, more community-focused experience look like? 
• Do change projects need a champion? Or do champions harm the value and success of the project? 
• Has LinkedIn’s algorithm walled us all into our own little echo chambers? How can we hear more opposing viewpoints and have fruitful debates about the workplace? 
• What is the “Google-ification” of workplaces, and why doesn’t it produce the desired results? 
• How do we let employees determine their own personal mode of productivity? And at what point does self-optimization tip into unhealthy behaviours? 

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn – Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix 
• Omar Ramirez on LinkedIn – Co-Founder of Collective 
• Collective – curating resources at the intersection of work and place
• Future Forum – consortium based on building a way of working that is flexible, inclusive, and connected 
• ChatGPT – a chatbot that interacts using natural language open to the public to use 
• MillerKnoll – a collective of dynamic brands for the modern world 
• Nicholas Bloom – Professor of Economics at Stanford University, heavily involved with the remote working movement 
• Arpit Gupta – Professor of Business at NYU, with a research focus on real estate, household finance, and urban economics 
• Salone del Mobile – design and furnishings conference held in Italy 
• NeoCon – design conference focused on commercial design, offering ideas and introductions that shape the build environment today and into the future 
• Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World 

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, please help me welcome Omar Ramirez. Omar is the co-founder of Collective, a platform curating resources for professionals at the intersection of work and place. Omar’s extensive experience in workplace design and facilities programs includes working with top companies such as Google, Atlassian, Netflix, Dropbox, Stripe, and Miro.  

With Omar, we’ll be talking about creating more productive and fulfilling work environments from his point of view, so let’s dive in and learn from Omar’s valuable insights.  

When we spoke last, you told me you had started this new venture. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about it? What inspired you, what’s the intent, and who would it benefit? 

Omar 

So, Collective is curating resources at the intersection of work and place. It started from this idea. My co-founder Kayla and I found that we just couldn’t find the information we really wanted to find in an easy manner. We found that from the beginning of our careers, it’s been very hard for somebody coming up in workplace who isn’t going to a traditional FM 4-year program at Cornell or somewhere like that, to get into the world of workplace and to truly get started, to understand where they can get information, what websites have good quality information. Now, it’s even more confusing, because we’re looking at the future of work and trying to understand what’s happening in the world of work and place. And those two things have become a little bit disjointed in our minds.  

So, we started with the idea of gathering free information and curating information for people to bring clarity and quality of information together in one place. That’s the problem statement we started with, and now it has three iterations and has grown into a much larger idea, which is why we co-founded the company called Collective that we’re going to be building over the next year. We’re starting slow, with small iterations, and with our website which we’re launching this coming Wednesday, the 15th of February. We’re launching the website with an initial newsletter to bring people together, and then we’ll form the community portion of this.  

And then over time, we’ll build out other aspects of Collective, which includes everything from a community forum to in-person community events, as well as some other implementations that we’re in the process of getting resources to start building now.  

Sandra 

Interesting! I have to ask you, with all the latest stuff in the media, and all the craze around ChatGPT ⁠— just this morning I was talking to my daughter about something completely unrelated around the use cases for ChatGPT and how community building, in the traditional sense of bringing people and knowledge together, which has tremendous value still today, is going to be completely disrupted as a result of using AI. Everybody’s inputting information into the AI system they’re using, and I’m seeing for myself how it works. I’ve been using ChatGPT since it became available, and I’m finding that I put things in, ask it to edit what I’ve written, it recalls some stuff from months ago, which is creepy but in a cool way. So, it’s obviously learning about me and my writing style and knowledge, because I’m not just extracting information, I’m putting information in.  

I’m just thinking about how all this could impact on the idea that you have.  

Omar 

It’s definitely something we’re constantly thinking about. We’re using ChatGPT to ideate blog posts and things of that nature already, and for some future iterations of the site. We’re not starting off by writing our own articles, because frankly, there are a lot of articles out there, there are a lot of great websites, and a lot of good information. We’re trying to highlight the information that we think is good quality, before we go and start trying to write our own.  

I think that ChatGPT, in its current state, is actually very interesting from a technological point of view in the workplace world especially. We’ve considered the idea of putting a ChatGPT helper bot who’s trained on workplace, facilities management, and these knowledge bases into the site.  

The cautionary approach there is, though, how do we ensure it’s up-to-date information? Because as you know, in workplace, a lot of it is nuanced information that’s based on a number of variables, and those variables are dependent on the type of company, the industry they’re in, their geographical location, those are all a factor. And then also what your local rules and regulations are. There are a lot of things that are in play that are very nuanced and I don’t think that ChatGPT is really quite there yet.  

I think eventually the models will get there, from everything I’ve been reading at least, and I think it’s a helpful tool currently for ideation and iteration and helping to condense information. For example, if you have a 14-page article and you just want three bullet points, it’s very helpful for that. I think those kinds of use cases are really good for it.  

I’m interested to see what it does in the future. Obviously, as a photographer and sometimes artist, I do have a cautious approach to it as well from the standpoint of where the information is coming from, and how do we attribute it to people without stealing their ideas and stealing their creative output. I think there are still some questions around that, but it’s a fascinating thing and we’re definitely thinking about how to integrate it into our approach. Because the problem that we started with was obviously about information, and there’s new information being created every day.  

But at the same time, part of the purpose of Collective is to help solve or alleviate some of the old problems of workplace. You know, some people keep recreating a 3-year budget or recreating X template every time they go to a new company or every time a junior person starts as office manager and office assistant. There’s no reason why, if we’ve been doing workplace moves and space planning for over 50 years now, that we have to keep recreating those templates. Those templates often exist in someone else’s personal folder, and we want to help bring those resources together.  

We’re not actually really heavily monetizing the first part of Collective. The first part is about bringing together those resources, those templates, and aggregating them as a community so we can start to focus on higher level or higher order problems together. And that’s what phase 2 is about, solving those higher order problems.  

Sandra 

That’s pretty cool. When you talk about this sort of aggregation of tools, or at least exposing the tools that are used and constantly being recreated, where do you see that in terms of its relevance given where we are right now and what we’re foreshadowing what the office will be in the not-too-distant future? 

Omar 

I think the tools are constantly changing. Some of the tools will always remain the same. It’s kind of how I think about design in some ways: a table will always be a table. We’re probably not going to make the table much better than it is today. It’s been this way for thousands of years. We might add technology on top of it or change little features, or the aesthetics, raise or lower it. But a table is still just a table.  

We think about space planning and approaching things like that. Yes, the methodologies might change or the variables might change, but there are still some basic approaches to space planning that just make sense.  

If we can bring together templates and bring together frameworks for those things, we can cut out some of the non-creative work that doesn’t need to be done repetitively, and enable people to focus on other things. I think some of the tools will still make sense. Some of them may slowly die out, and I think some of them will die out faster if we can get people better educated about workplace and about the cross-sectional aspects and specialties that they kind of ignore.  

Sometimes we all look at the problems through our own lens. I look at it through a multifaceted lens, because I’ve worked in different roles from FM to CRE to PM. But like we see a lot in LinkedIn comment sections, someone will put up a post and someone will look at it from an FM lens and say the plumbing is the problem. Then the CRE person comes in and says no, the lease is the problem. And then the technology person comes in and says, why wasn’t there a sensor? We’re all looking at it through our own lenses.  

But we want people to learn cross-sectionally, so they can better understand and solve problems together. That’s part of what the Collective name is about, bringing this collective of different professions together and helping them understand that we’re all one ⁠— we’re not a bunch of disconnected people. We all affect the other person.  

Sandra 

This is so interesting. As to the traditional collaborations, if you will, within organizations specifically revolving around corporate real estate, we all know HR and IT and CRE need to work together. The interlock between these three is really key.  

But I’ve also learned over the years that you also have other teams in organizations, and I think it’s probably become even more obvious since the pandemic hit and more people are working from home, how legal gets involved, and communications, and brand, and all these other things you never think of. Some of the companies that were more on the edge, a lot of their decisions were not just real estate based. They were about real estate, but they were smart enough to realize the potential impact it would have on other areas. You need to make sure you have all your Is dotted and your Ts crossed before you pull the trigger, so to speak. Do you foresee that being a part of Collective in the near or longer-term future? 

Omar 

Absolutely. One of the first things we’re doing is organizing our first in-person events. We’re planning a dinner series that we’re calling Collective Experiences. We want to bring together groups of 10 people in different cities, we’re already planning our first one for Los Angeles at the end of March. We’ll bring together, say, two people from HR, two people from CRE, two people from workplace, two people from the technology side of things, and bring those people together for cross-sectional dialogue, to start sharing ideas and building that community and relationships with people who might not be on your direct team. Understanding what makes them tick, why are they concerned about X? What are their needs and concerns?  

I think building that cross-sectional relationship will enable people to have a better viewpoint when they’re going to their own company and having to work cross-sectionally. Because you’re absolutely correct, the diagram we always draw has the employee right at the center with all these bubbles revolving around them. And you’re right ⁠— Comms, HR, IT, workplace, CRE, FM. Whenever I say “workplace”, CRE and FM people always say, oh, well isn’t FM and CRE workplace? Not necessarily, and that’s the nuance.  

I think all of these groups together, legal included, that’s the employee experience. You can’t make decisions about the employee experience without understanding the legalities, especially in the light of some recent court rulings. You can’t make decisions about, for example, benefits without understanding the constraints of your finance org.  All these things are interconnected.  

I think if we can learn to work better together as humans, the outcomes will be better because it will no longer be the approach of meeting once a quarter, this is my budget, this is yours, everyone’s split apart and then we try to accomplish things in tandem. I don’t think that’s a good approach for the future of work. I think it’s a great way to produce substandard outcomes.  

If we can all work together and actually work cross-sectionally and understand this as a holistic problem, then I think we can create better outcomes. That, in the end, is our altruistic goal with Collective, and that’s where we started from ⁠— creating a better opportunity for the world of workplace. Because right now, we’re kind of lost in the woods and we want to help people navigate their way through this and fight the signals and the noise.  

We did a survey a few months ago, and we found that 94% of people were reliant on social media or LinkedIn for their future of work information. And that’s a huge problem because SEO is not based on best-in-class research. SEO is based on optimization of search performance ⁠— it might be a good thing that ChatGPT is disrupting this and helping us get past this.  

But I don’t think LinkedIn is going anywhere. And that’s where most people get their future of work news, and it’s not necessarily the best research. I think everyone knows the Future Forum exists. I am constantly surprised when I mention the Future Forum, or MillerKnoll and there are people who don’t know that exists. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg. They’re some of the better-known ones.  

And then you get into people like Nick (Nicholas Bloom) at Stanford, Arpit Gupta at Columbia. You go down the research levels, there are so many people doing great research and large studies of humans about the future of work, and where we could be headed. I don’t think a lot of that is getting light shone on it.  

That’s what we want to do – shine a bit of light. That’s why we’re doing our newsletter, to shine some light on people who might not be getting enough attention, who are doing great research and great things. And shining light on products that might not be getting enough attention, or might just not be breaking through that SEO barrier.  

Sandra 

That’s really interesting. When it comes to some of the challenges and difficulties you’ve had in the past, thinking back on being in organizations working with maybe corporate real estate teams both as a consultant and also being part of a corporate real estate organization ⁠— one of the things I often found, and still find, is this weird sense of ownership. With the people who are in this space because it’s a sort of cool emerging thing, there’s this ⁠— I don’t even know how to describe it. Almost like this desire to be the one who says, “I did that”. They’re the champion of bringing that change forward and so not necessarily recognizing that it literally takes a village.  

How much of that do you think will change as you move forward, both as a result of what you’re doing, but even from an organizational point of view? Because it feels like that’s still very much alive in a lot of organizations.  

Omar 

I’m of two minds on this, because I think that in the end, we want to have people who are champions, and it’s great to have people who are very vocal about things, and you need internal champions to move things forward sometimes. Especially when not everyone is on board. You might have somebody who’s really motivated from the IT department, who’s really, really excited about championing this thing. And you might have somebody from the workplace side who’s not. And that’s okay, it works both ways sometimes.  

I think the magic starts to happen when you’re all on the same page and all at the same level of motivation to be championing stuff. That’s when you get those teams. I think you’re less focused on one person, or one person being the hero.  

I think there’s also a very negative side of this, which is that some people like to play “hero ball”. In leadership classes I’ve taken, the idea is that, if there’s a hero, there has to be a villain in that two-player model. Who’s the enemy of the hero, right? When people have these binary conversations on LinkedIn, saying “it’s all in-office” or “it’s all remote”. Or it’s all X or Y, like they need some sort of “I” and the “other” to parry against, in order to make their points seem more relevant. That’s the negative side of this. You have one person who’s the focal point in championing it ⁠— but I guarantee you in any workplace effort, there’s 50 people working on it, there’s not just one person.  

That’s always hard for me to swallow, when you see one person as the very focal point of a change or transformation. We keep seeing great people pop up, great practitioners, but there are definitely 50+ other people involved in that change process, and the formulation of these things take so much time. I think it gets a little lost, and when we start having “heroes”, we miss out on the team win, which I think is an important part of this. There’s not just one person working to make change.  

Sandra 

I also find it interesting about LinkedIn being the source of information when it comes to the future of work. One of the things that I’ve observed just in my day-to-day conversations and discussions that either I start or other people start on my feed, is that it’s more workplace practitioners than people who are actually in the workplaces that are in dire need of change. They’re there, you know that they’re there, but they’re observing more than they are participants.  

It’s interesting to me, it’s like preaching to the choir a lot of the time. If people are in that space, they kind of know what the issues and challenges are, and potentially where some correction or improvement might need to happen. But to your point, it’s kind of expanding, because there are so many other areas where these decisions are being made, and now we’re having impacts on other areas of the organization. So we talked about legal, we talked about finance, and we talked about HR and policies, and the list goes on and on.  

One of the things that surprises me though is there are organizations like CoreNet and IFMA ⁠— you would think that those would be the places where we’re talking in great detail about the challenges and the interlock that’s required between these various teams, and you don’t really see much of that. Corporate real estate is corporate real estate, HR is HR. Which I’ve always found really interesting, because we’ve all known for many, many years that these groups have to work together. But when you look at conferences or opportunities for these worlds to come together, you never really see that.  

Omar 

No, you never really see it. I think the other conferences tend to take one focus or another. You see a people-centric conference or a workplace-focused conference, and none of us are really ever going to the same events. Yes, sometimes you’ll run into architects at CoreNet, because they’re hanging out with the brokers and working with the PM and construction people. So, you get to see a lot of that intersectionality, but good luck finding one at a people-oriented conference. We’re starting to see smatterings, but very few and far between. Or good luck seeing an HR person at CoreNet.  

I think it’s very similar with IFMA and things of that nature, and I see the opposite side as well, having been a designer myself. I went to Salone last year with the interior design team who I was supporting with some projects and I found some great workplace people there who I knew from the Bay Area. Workplace people, yes! But the majority were interior designers and industrial designers and the like. NeoCon is a good example as well for design in the US.   

And we don’t really find each other at these conferences. There’s not really a series of events yet that brings together everyone in a larger way. I think for us, we’re focused on the smaller community aspect, because found that in having deep, intellectual conversations, eight to ten is a great amount of people for a wonderful dinner and a wonderful conversation that stays in one conversation. When you go above ten people, suddenly you start to get those broken up conversations.  

I think we tend to be in our (as we call it in the digital front of things) walled garden of the algorithm that LinkedIn has developed for us. If I open LinkedIn on my friend’s laptop and then my laptop and then another friend’s laptop, you see three different versions of LinkedIn. I find that fascinating, because you hear, “all I’m seeing on LinkedIn is X, is Y. It’s the same thing on Instagram or TikTok or all of these platforms.” You wind up in a walled garden that you kind of create for yourself. 

But the problem is that you’re not seeing much information that might challenge you or challenge your worldview. And that’s something that we want people to feel ⁠— challenged. It’s one of the reasons why we’re going to build a community forum into our site very quickly after our initial launch because we want to enable people to have intellectual debate and to discuss ideas, not in the way that we do it on Slack, at least in some of these communities. We want to have true discussions about, what does ABW really mean? What does hybrid really mean? How do you define hybrid, and things of this nature, that are essential to the future of work? 

Sandra 

That sounds fantastic. There’s definitely a need for something like that, a building-up of the community and the cross section. And keeping groups small, staying in one conversation, I think those are key. And more so, the opportunity to remain curious, I think that’s really key when it comes to LinkedIn. You get these walls up where you only see what you see based on what you build for yourself.  

My personal experience with any social media platform ⁠— I mean, obviously business is different than personal use ⁠— but when it comes to business, it’s about having curiosity. And I think the key is, you can’t just take what you see on LinkedIn at face value. You have to go and research different things, and decide if it actually makes sense, go on the Wayback Machine or look at stuff that’s really current and do that comparison. There are hordes of information.  

Every once in a while, I’ll come across what appears to be this great news article, its title is very “now”, and then you look at the date and realize the thing was written in 2003. You start to realize, wow, this is how long this type of conversation has been going on, what the heck? Why is it taking so long for people to get with it? And you’re tempted to share, but then you know you’re going to get lambasted for posting this because it’s from 2003. But it’s very relevant.  

Omar 

I think some things from the 70s are still relevant. This is how I think about it ⁠— there was a lot of work that was very aspirational, that could have been better implemented over time. But the problem is, it’s a very natural human thing to take something that was a beautiful idea, a beautiful design, a beautiful concept, and then we optimize it.  

It’s the same thing with the open office, or cubicles, or “action office” ⁠—- that, too, was a great design and a great idea of working in different modes of setups. It was probably initially a 12- by 12-foot area, pretty large for the initial setup. And I think about what that became over time, the 6 by 6 cubicle, and it’s been optimized not just for cost but for efficiency. It becomes this very Taylorist approach to the action office. Unfortunately, I think we continually see that happening. There are a lot of good lessons from the beginning of “workplace” history. A lot of them have some universal truths within them.  

The thing that bothers me personally is when you have a headline that’s optimized for SEO and it’s just obviously optimized for clicks. And that might turn some people away from what otherwise might be a great article filled with awesome insights and information. The headline is, however, not actually what the article is about at all. That really bothers me, because we want people to read good research and find good information. But the SEO optimization game is a huge challenge. Obviously, it’s helped people define information and sort information, and change the way the world works.  

But we started this conversation talking about ChatGPT ⁠— I think it’s also going to shift the way the world looks in some interesting ways. I think we’re still at the very beginnings of it. But I’m hopeful that it will help shift some things away from SEO and maybe base things more on the information and content people are generating, as opposed to just the title of an article.  

Sandra 

That’s actually a really interesting concept. I can totally see a shift like that, because of the appetite for good information and how hard it is to get. Like you said, SEO has really been the guiding light to get there, but as you said, people have gamified it. So, OK, it’s not what it used to be, and now it’s just for clicks. You can’t really take article titles at face value, because you don’t really know what’s in them unless you go in and read. And time and time again you see comments saying, this title is totally clickbait, but there are some good points in the article that are worth sharing.  

Omar 

I think something we’re also thinking about and haven’t been able to implement yet in this iteration of the website, because it’s very complicated ⁠— I always tell people this, Facebook has an interesting feature now, when you click “Share” an article, a pop up jumps up and says, “you didn’t read the article, are you sure you want to share this, because you don’t know the context of the article yet?”  

That’s a really interesting feature, because the first thing I would say to people when they read an article about workplace and get all fired up is, wait ⁠— who wrote this article? Who do they work for? Those are two great things to check. And the third thing is, what is the sample size of the study they’re referencing? Sometimes you can go back and look at sample sizes and it’s a 100-person study in the UK from 10 years ago, and they’re making extrapolations. Is that really what the future of work is now? This random SEO title generated about this article that somebody cherry picked the study for?  

You have to dissect information a little bit and be critical and think critically about it. I think that’s important for people to understand. We’ve been trying to figure out a great way to do that on the website without upsetting too many people and marketing in a way that tells you where the information comes from, this is the company it’s from.  

We’re not linking a lot of articles in the beginning on our website under our resources page ⁠— we’re mostly directing people to organizations, books, podcasts, templates, and things of that nature. Because for one, there are so many articles all the time. We want to be pointing people toward larger resources as opposed to smaller resources in the beginning. And also, because we want to find a great way to tag things in a way that enables people to understand what they’re digesting a little more.  

Sandra 

This is really fascinating. I can’t wait till you launch!  

Let’s shift gears a little bit. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn for quite some time now, I know you have quite the background in real estate and many highly coveted technology companies. We know that non-tech companies pre-pandemic wanted to be like the tech companies, thinking that by having an office space that mimicked those environments, they’d somehow get the same effect.  

Having been completely immersed in those worlds, what would you say are the similarities and differences as you’ve moved across different companies and how they view real estate and the role that the office plays for the employee? 

Omar 

A lot of questions in there! Going through tech companies as I came up was interesting because I found myself going to smaller and smaller companies as I took different roles, and then helping them to scale upwards.  

I thought that was interesting because it’s very hard to make change at a larger scale tech company, or just a larger scale company in general, because once the cake is baked, everyone has these roles that they’re solidified in and their way of doing things. It becomes much harder to implement change as somebody new coming in, because there are a lot more considerations. There are a lot more people to talk to. There’s a lot more cross-sectional dialogue that has to happen before any change happens. Change in a start-up might take 2-3 months, whereas at a larger-scale company, a 10,000+ people company, change could take six months to a year to two years, just to get something to change.  

At these different companies I worked for, like Google or Dropbox or Atlassian, they all had very specific, thoughtful approaches to how they thought about workplace. They all looked at their culture, looked at what their company wanted to accomplish, looked at the kind of company they wanted to scale into, and based their workplace off of that.  

I think the positive part of that is they’re doing a very thoughtful approach. The negative version of this happened too, which is what I call the “Googe-lification” of workplaces. People would look at Google and go, it’s all about their great office, the slides, the amenities. They took a surface level copy and paste of Google’s workplace and started trying to do that.  

I’d have to have this conversation whenever I joined younger start-ups ⁠— this is not the most important thing. What made Google’s offices great was the culture that was behind it and the intentionality behind the design. Google was doing that even in the earliest days. They were doing studies and employing scientists, people with anthropology backgrounds to understand how people were using the kitchens, what kinds of foods they were eating, how can we encourage people to eat healthier foods, what effect does putting an espresso machine in the kitchen have? If we put that there, are people more likely to stay in and have discussions about ideas? Ok, let’s put whiteboards next to the coffee machines. How does that have an effect? There were all these little nuanced things.  

At each of the technology companies I worked at, they were being thoughtful about developing based on their specific culture and their specific type of company. And I think that’s a really important thing for people to understand. They were 1) always a work in progress. The work was never really complete. And 2) it was a very thoughtful, cross-functional approach to developing workplace over time.  

I think a lot of companies just see the surface level, then copy the surface level. That’s what a lot of companies did. They said ok, we’ll add ping pong tables and make the office bright and airy and have an open office, and that’s going to make us creative.  

No, what makes you good for innovation and good collaboration is developing a cultural model that works for you, and then have the physical model of your space based off that cultural model and your work model. And then once you understand those two things, you can start to develop the physical space in that image.  

I think that’s hard for people to understand. It’s hard for people when there’s not an easy button. People think, people have done workplaces before, surely there must be an easy button. Like, yes, but you would never copy someone else’s house just because you like the style of their house. That would make for a really bad living situation for you. You have very different needs and ways of living than the next person. Similarly, people just copy and paste workplaces as though that would work for everybody. But that’s not how it works.  

Sandra 

That’s actually a really good analogy.  

You said something really interesting about using design intent. There’s an intent behind the design that’s ideally aligned with the culture. That seems to suggest that there’s information behind it, that there’s data at play here. And thinking about, Google for certain, I’m not sure about the other ones, but how much did they actually use data to drive those types of decisions? 

Omar 

I was in the space planning side of Google right before I left, and it was about doing all these moves and updates and things like that in North America. I would say that they were always looking at the information they had and trying to make better decisions.  

For example, food programs use data in a way that actually has an effect. There’s a lot of information in food consumption. The intention there was to measure what people were eating, and how could you encourage people to eat healthier snacks. A lot of that comes from not just quantitative information, like how many pounds of peanuts are we going through, how many pounds of M&Ms are we going through, but qualitative as well ⁠— getting feedback from people, observing in person, seeing people use the kitchen, seeing how they interact with different objects that you put in the kitchen. It was about the balance between both types of data, that made their design intent good.  

Dropbox did a similar thing. I remember talking to the chef when we were designing the new headquarters of Dropbox in 2015, 2016. He said Omar, do you know why we plate our food here? I said, well, the presentation is awesome. He said yeah, presentation is great, but I plate the food so I can control the portions so we can measure down to the ounce how much we’re actually putting out, and then measure the number of plates and portions and successfully budget, do our procurement better, so we’re not wasting food. So, it looks better, a better experience, but you’re also measuring more successfully. That’s great.  

I think people don’t realize how much thought goes into some of these programs to make them successful. Say what you want about that time period of tech companies, the perks and whatever, the free food ⁠— yes, it was designed to keep people in the office and encourage them to be at work, to eat together ⁠— but I think we’re beyond that now in some ways.  

That doesn’t mean I don’t think we should break bread together. I think we should, but I think the types of information we’re going to have to measure are probably going to change. We’re seeing companies start to recognize that a little bit now. Just measuring utilization is not enough, measuring occupancy is not enough. You need more information, and better data sources.  

I think that’s tough for a lot of people because if anything, the job is infinitely more interesting, but infinitely more difficult. We’re all having to learn new skills to adapt to the future of work and the future of workplace. I think if you’ve been in the same job for 30 years or 20 years, even myself, having been in this for 16 years now, it’s hard to adapt. It’s constant change and adaptation. We went from facilities management to workplace, to workplace experience, to employee experience, to the future of work, to remote, to whatever this is within 23 years, from 2000 to 2023. That’s a lot of change for people.  

Sandra 

Absolutely. I think what’s interesting too is the different roles and focus, more so, that’s evolved within the corporate real estate space. I find myself reading articles sometimes that are coming from thought leaders in the corporate real estate space, and I think to myself, why is that coming from someone in corporate real estate, that’s more of an HR-focused piece, or it just doesn’t mentally fit within the construct of what we know to be corporate real estate.  

Because number one, you have no control over it. You can’t control the productivity of employees, right? The other day, I was talking to someone about productivity, and they said, productivity is like love. Try to measure love. That got me thinking for 3 to 4 days. And you know what, it’s so true, because it’s such a personal thing. It’s a feeling. Yesterday I had all the intention in the world of having a productive day, but I woke up this morning and said you know what, today is not the day. I’ve had a few of those in the past week. That’s not something that a business or corporate real estate can control.   

So, this whole thing about changes impacting productivity is all just a wash because it’s not really true, but I think what’s interesting is when you’re talking about how many packs of M&Ms get consumed, my curiosity kicks in ⁠— like, I wonder if there’s a certain time of day that everyone’s going in to get treats because energy levels are down? Then you see that pattern, and what can we do as an organization to keep that from happening? Maybe a yoga break or something to get people re-energized.  

That’s kind of how I look at it ⁠— there’s an intent. The intent is then supported by research, and then the piece that comes after is the reality of it. Then once you learn the reality, how do you adjust, how do you go back and make the adjustments and tweak? It’s not linear, it’s never one and done. Ask anybody in corporate real estate, it’s never been one and done.  

Omar 

It never is, and I think you hit on an important point. Productivity is measurable in very specific ways for very specific types of outputs. And even that’s still debatable. Cal Newport was on the HBS Podcast a few weeks ago, he’s the author of Deep Work, and he was talking about how for engineers, there’s an agile methodology which makes remote work very successful. With an agile methodology, you’re pulling down tasks and you’re writing code and you can easily remotely do that, there’s a good standard way of doing that. That’s repeatable and scalable and great.  

But for a lot of knowledge work, it’s not the same thing. Measuring the productivity of someone who’s a workplace coordinator, or an employee experience manager, you have to create KPIs, but what are you measuring? The number of events you held this quarter? A lot of people are guessing.  

We’re also concerned with Collective about helping people develop better business cases and better measures, to not just justify the existence of workplace, but to enable great conversations with work leaders about workplace and its benefits.  

I think when we talk about productivity, it becomes this nascent conversation and you have to define what kind of productivity we’re talking about, what industry, what team, what specialty, what geography. Because if we think of ourselves as a monoculture, sometimes that’s not how the world is. Productivity is measured very differently in the US versus other parts of the world. And when we talk about optimization ⁠— let’s say our goal and intent is to have productive, healthy employees. There’s got to be a tipping point at which productive tips into unhealthy.  

Sandra 

Absolutely.  

Omar 

Like, to what level do you optimize yourself as a human before it tips into unhealthy? I think about this, especially as we get back to the conference cycle. I can see your badges hanging in the background of your setup. Right now I have all my conferences badges too from last year when we started doing facilitation. That’s where the idea for Collective came from, a lot of these conversations with people. But I think about ramping back up, going back in person, going back from the pandemic time period of not really having to go to in-person events ⁠— and it was exhausting.  

It was something my wife and I talked about at a very personal level. What level of intensity do I want to go back to? Because I think I was burnt out in 2019. The passing of my mother caused me to switch careers, switch jobs, and really reconsider my life. That was just two months before the pandemic.  

I think collectively, the entire workplace world is having that same consideration. Every employee is having the same consideration of, how productive can I be without reaching a point of exhaustion, and how do I have a better work-life balance? I think that people are optimizing for that now, and I think companies should be aware of that tipping point between productivity and having a healthy life. Obviously on the employee side, they’re going to want to be more on the healthy side, and the company is going to say hey, we want you to be healthy and productive. Can we optimize a little bit for productivity sometimes?  

I think finding the balance between those two things is going to be interesting.  

Sandra 

Yes, and just to add to that, you’re talking about the whole concept of optimizing productivity, and it kind of makes me laugh a little bit, because if you think back to a few months ago, probably in late Q3, early Q4, when the whole concept of Quiet Quitting emerged ⁠— it’s like well, what really is Quiet Quitting? It’s pushing the boundaries around optimizing productivity.  

When you were talking about engineering, they have their list of tasks, they’re pulling things and that’s how they measure productivity from a company’s perspective. Well, from the employee perspective, it’s a list of To Dos. I get those things done. I’ve had a super productive day, whether it took me an hour or 8 hours to do it. The measurement is that I’ve met the requirements for productivity, and this is where we run into challenges around measurement.  

As I said before, I could wake up this morning and feel super productive and get a whole whack of stuff done in two hours and have six hours of me time, if I wanted to. Is that OK? If I’m in that mindset and that happens to me, sometimes I get up at 5 AM and by 9 AM I’ve done 3 days’ worth of work, and it’s like ok, now I can start working on other stuff to get ahead so I can keep up with the day-to-day. But when you sort of put that into context ⁠— the company is pushing for productivity so they can get more out of people. It’s not that they’re not being productive, they’re being productive based on what you’re expecting of them, but it begs the question ⁠— on whom is the onus of responsibility when it comes to exceeding that expectation? That’s where the whole conversation around Quiet Quitting started. If I’m going to take initiative to essentially do more, because that’s what drives me, that’s my prerogative. It doesn’t mean I’m more or less productive than you. That’s just my way of working. 

Omar 

Productivity is interesting. First of all, I think Quiet Quitting is a false narrative. That’s just recycling an old storyline of resting and vesting, which was a very popular thing. If my company’s not going to give me more, why would I contribute more of myself to this thing and burn out? There’s a natural human debate here, that Quiet Quitting is sort of putting a headline on.  

Not everyone works the same. Not everyone is productive every single day, and some people burn out because the company has asked too much. They say, you’re doing 110%, what if you did 120%? That’s not sustainable long term. There’s something about taking advantage of human productivity to the point of burning people out ⁠— it’s a toxic culture trait. I think that’s very negative.  

For me personally, I never worked well in those scenarios. As someone who’s very focused on what I’m working on, I kind of zone in and work very hard on what I’m working on and become very passionate about it. But I work the same way you do. I wake up at 6 AM every day, because that’s when I naturally wake up, and some days I’ll be like OK, let’s go. I just start doing stuff and I get going and I’ll get it done before 9 AM. I’ve done a bunch of stuff and I could do more, but I take a break and do something else. I go for a walk, maintain work-life balance in that way. Is that bad? I don’t think so.  

But I also think it’s different, because I’ve been working with my cofounder Kayla, and we have our own way of working. We’re doing it in a different way and we’re managing ourselves, trying to build something new. I think that requires a lot of extra output. So yes, I do work Saturdays. But will I work Saturdays and Sundays always? I don’t think so. I think when you’re managing your own company versus working at a company, it’s two very different types of output. Two very different types of standards, because you’re creating your own standard vs the other one being based off society’s Monday to Friday work week. That is a construct that we have society have created, and we’re fitting work inside that box.  

I think what’s interesting is it’s about time zone more than anything else. As we become more remote and asynchronous, there’s time zone management. Where you hire your people becomes more and more important. Kayla’s in Atlanta, I’m in Los Angeles. We manage our time zones the way we think is best. She works a little later, I work a little earlier sometimes. But I think that becomes really important.  

I could ramble about productivity and time zones for the rest of time, probably! But there’s no one-size fits all solution to productivity or workplace or design. I’ve seen you write about this before, it has to come down to the team level and the individual level. Otherwise, you’re not getting deep enough on things, if you’re just setting standards at a company level, you’re going to fail and your data isn’t going to be good enough.  

Sandra 

Yes, it’s way too generic.  

I would say in response to your comment about working independently or for a company ⁠— as someone who’s worked in both of those worlds extensively, I don’t think there really is a difference. I think if the company gets it, they get it. And you can exercise the same level of ⁠— dare I say it, freedoms, of being able to turn into your most productive state.  

That’s one of the things I learned very early on in my career especially when I first started working from home. In the first couple of years, it was horrible. I can’t manage. Then over time, I started to realize that I’m super alert in the wee hours of the morning, or I’m my best after midnight. I get a second wind. If I need to figure something out, it’s an after-midnight thing for me. I can do it in half an hour versus trying to do it in 6 hours during the day when my brain just can’t get there.  

So, when you’re in tune with your capability, I think that makes a tremendous difference in terms of how you work, what you produce, how long it takes you, and then how you want to use that free time you get as a result of maximizing your own personal productivity to do other things.  

Omar 

Yes, I think that’s an important point: you learn this over time. I learned this through reading, through curiosity, and I think we need to enable management to teach people how to manage themselves in some way. We need to help people understand how to build systems like this for themselves. If we can do that, we’ll have a much more balanced and productive but also healthier set of employees.  

Most people don’t understand how to set up systems like that for themselves, so they end up burning out because they don’t understand for example, their best times to work on XYZ. They don’t know how to set boundaries for themselves. They don’t understand how to set up systems for themselves. I see this in workplace as well as in regular employees. I think it’s people we need to start training people on, because if you can learn how to do that, you’ll be much happier and more productive because you’re happier. And because you have a lot of guardrails for yourself, in order to make yourself actually successful at home or in the office or wherever you’re working from.  

Sandra 

Absolutely. I can’t believe an hour has already passed! 

Omar 

I know! 

Sandra 

I could go on for another hour, this is just too good of a conversation. Any final thoughts or comments that you wanted to share? 

Omar 

No, I think we’re just really excited at Collective about the future of workplace. We think this is the most exciting time to be in workplace that we’ve ever experienced, and we hope that everyone will soon start to see that the same way. We’re excited to have people join us and we’re excited to start sharing what we’re doing with the world.  

Sandra 

Fantastic. Thanks, Omar. Really appreciate your time today.  

Omar 

Thank you, Sandra!