The Facilities/CRE/Workplace sector has a language problem. We use a long list of terms and concepts that may have multiple, or even conflicting, definitions. “Occupancy” and “utilization” are two that are often used synonymously, but it’s crucial for us to understand the differences between these two concepts. Once we’re clear on this, we can better determine what technology we need to capture these metrics and make great workplace planning decisions.

Our language is often centered around “place”—where people are working. We’ve got agile, flexible, activity-based, smart working, and thanks to the global pandemic, we’re all talking about “hybrid”. When it comes to the employee experience, a physical space can and should enable great work. But before considering the location and the physical space, we have to consider culture, processes, and technology.

We have to first understand why people work, how they work, and when. For many, the location no longer matters. The global pandemic has shown there is another way—and that other way needs data-driven decision-making.

Conexus, the Relogix SaaS platform, enables data to be collated so you can look at it through a single pane of glass. It provides a single source of truth for many metrics, including occupancy and utilisation, to drive informed decision-making.

Conexus can answer your key questions:

• How many people are attending the physical workspace each day?
• How did people intend to behave in these spaces?
• How are they actually behaving and using these spaces?
• How much space does our organisation need?
• What types of space do people need?
• How many of those different types of space do people need?

Facilities Management Isn’t Really About Facilities

Facilities Management isn’t about managing brick and mortar spaces anymore—it’s about people. Our goal is to create and deliver an employee experience that allows people to thrive at work. Data-driven decision-making must underpin this—it can inform cleaning schedules, catering, and provide resources to inform the design of spaces.

We know Facilities Managers have busy schedules. They fight for budgets, have too many spreadsheets on the go, and manage a fast-paced and dynamic environment. That’s why Conexus brings live data into a single pane of glass to take this pain away!

Understanding the data within our spaces is crucial. Not just for employee experience and business efficiency, either. There are far- and wide-reaching impacts, much further and wider than many probably imagine.

Pre-pandemic, office utilization sat between 45-55% on average globally. But as Neil Usher’s article this week has highlighted, the office occupancy rates in London are currently at 27%. And considering the CRE sector is estimated to consume 40% of global energy annually, accounting for a third of international carbon emissions—Houston, we have a problem.

What does space utilization have to do with the planet? Humans are keen to get out of the building if it’s on fire, but are workplaces truly considering that they’re fuelling the fire that our climate is currently burning in?

CIBSE reports that each unused desk in an office is, on average, contributing one tonne of unnecessary CO₂ every year. To give this some context, that equates to around 2,500 miles of driving, about the distance from Boston, Massachusetts to Salt Lake City, Utah. Or if you want to be truly alarmed, look at the recent public health studies produced—for every 4,434 metric tonnes of CO₂ produced, one person globally will die.

To drive change, we must understand. And to understand, we must start by collating data.

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Space Occupancy and Space Utilization: 4 Key Data Points

Space occupancy and space utilization are terms that people often use synonymously. Let’s start by demystifying what they mean and why they’re important for Facilities Managers.

1. Space Occupancy

Also known as “signs of life” or “presence,” space occupancy is the percentage of time a space (such as a desk, office, room, or collaboration area) looked like it was in use.

For example, when you sit at a desk at 10 AM for 15 minutes, the occupancy for that day would be 100%, because presence was detected at some point during the working day.

The best way to collect space occupancy data is with occupancy sensors. Occupancy sensors determine at what point spaces have had signs of life.

People counter sensors will determine at what point spaces have had signs of life and by how many people, so are best used in open collaboration spaces and meeting rooms.

If you only want to know how many people used the building or floor, then look to use security badging system information instead.

Note that total seat occupancy (how many seats were used at some point during the working day) can help to inform building and floor level occupancy, but it’s usually not an accurate measure. It’s quite possible that you simply switched seats mid-day, or you may have changed spaces and worked within a room or a collaboration area. To validate the data at a building or floor level, aggregate data sources such as security badging system data.

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2. Space Utilization

Also known as “signs of life,” “presence,” or “seat utilization,” space utilization is the total amount of time a space is used out of the total amount of time it is available.

So, if you use your desk for 10 hours of the 40-hour working week, you’ll get a utilization rate of 25%.

Occupancy sensors can be used to determine at what point spaces had signs of life and for how long, using heat and motion detection technology.

When measuring individual spaces for occupancy and utilization, make sure you communicate effectively with your employees about the purpose of the sensor, what data it’s collecting, and how. People tend to get nervous and think all sensors have camera and voice capturing technology.

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3. Building Occupancy

Also known as “occupancy” or “usage,” building occupancy is the number of people using the building each day. This is usually broken down into floor level data.

For example, your HR department says 100 people use the building. Your security badging data shows 90 people attended on Monday, giving a building occupancy of 90%.

The best way to see this data is with your security badging system. It will determine how many people have accessed the building and/or floor.

The key challenge here is to determine whether you have a tailgating issue or not. People may follow one another into the building without swiping their own designated fob, or some hold the doors open for others. In these cases, your access data isn’t going to be that reliable. If you use technology that allows the control over the flow of people (“speed lanes”), your access data is going to be much more accurate.

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4. Building Utilization

Also known as “usage” or “accessed,” building utilization is the total amount of time a building is used out of the total amount of time it is available.

Say your security team opens the building at 7 AM and closes it at 7 PM (12 hours). If your first employee arrives at 9 AM and leaves at 6 PM (9 hours) your building has a 75% utilization rate.

Again, the security badging system will help you best determine how many people have accessed the building and at what time.

This data as a single source can inform building opening and closing times. But only when it’s combined with occupancy will you have a true indicator of how you could improve your building operations.

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Dealing with Complexity in Data Collection: How Conexus Can Simplify It All

How people say they will behave and how they actually behave are often quite different. One of the hardest lessons to learn in user experience is that researchers can’t always trust what test participants tell them.

Behavioural psychologists have long understood that people are not entirely rational creatures. We’re influenced by many factors—emotionally, cognitively, and rationally—which drive us to “bend the truth”.

• Social conformity – What do people think their environment is telling them to say, do, and want? Part of this is considering the , which is when study subjects alter their behaviour precisely because they’re aware they’re being observed.
• Wishful thinking – People say what they’d like to be true.
• Context – People respond differently in different contexts.
• Mindset – Daniel Kahneman suggests another reason we can’t predict our own behaviour in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Our “system one” mindset is fast, instinctive, and driven by emotion. The “system two” mindset is just the opposite: slower, more deliberate, more rational. When people attempt to predict what they’ll do in a particular context, they use system two to weigh the options rationally. When people actually make a decision, they’ll use system one, which responds instinctively.

If we look at these within the realm of how organizations capture occupancy and installation, we can see how these factors will influence the data we’re trying to gather.

With so many factors in the works and so many different ways of capturing data, it’s key that organisations make decisions based on the right data. Conexus integrates and layers data sources to surface data stories:

By collating and aggregating data, Facilities Managers will be armed with the right insights to enable key decisions on space and how it impacts the employee experience. You’ll be able to co-create a place that people actually want to go to, all the while making sure the space is aligned to and a value driver of business needs.

The last few years have highlighted not only how the world moves on quickly, but also how it never stands still. Clipboard studies and siloed data sources are a thing of the past. Nothing stands still or operates in isolation—so your data collection can’t stand still or sit in siloes either.

Using Conexus, Facilities Managers will have access to a single pane of glass to inform and enable data-driven decision-making that will impact the employee experience. You’ll be able to take into account multiple data sources to understand people’s desires and intentions, how they actually behave, and how this translates into business efficiency and impact on the planet.

To drive change, we must understand. To understand, we must start by collating data.

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Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Has COVID-19 permanently changed business strategy?
• Employees have the right to be listened to without redress
• Linking the attitudes of the employees to the performance of a company
• What happens to real estate flows from talking to and listening to employees
• The culture of a company and how it affects finances
• Companies need to be agile – and that leads to technology
• Agility is a company’s top cultural value
• The Great Resignation
• Can a larger enterprise really be agile?
• If the return to office doesn’t happen, how will that impact the industry?
• Design should be part of business strategy
• How does the furniture industry adapt?
• The design industry as a leader for change
• What happens to commercial spaces that are left empty?
• Work/life balance, post-pandemic
• Culture attracts talent – does it really retain talent?
• Companies that prioritize agility perform better financially
• Does the employer or the employee determine the rules about when/where to work?
• Focus on how to optimise people performance over building or space performance
• How do we boost culture and not drag people into the office so we can boost our productivity?
• Savvy companies looking at re-constructing themselves need technology to do so.

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Sholem Prasow
• MIT Sloan Management Review Fall 2021 Issue
• MIT SMR / Glassdoor Culture 500

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

Transcript

Sandra

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

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

This week, I’m talking to long-time colleague and friend, Sholem Prasow. Sholem is the founding director of Bayview Insight Management Inc. Over the past few years, he’s been focused on pandemic resilience planning, in particular on strategies for going back to the office during uncertain times. Previously, he was the President of Business Development at Teknion Furniture Systems in Toronto, and he was a past member of the USGBC LEED for Health Care Core Committee, and a past member of the Canadian Green Building Counsel Technology Advisory Group. Sholem is certified in LEED-AP, ARIDO, and is also an NCI-certified Charrette planner. He delivered free LEED accreditation coaching courses to the architectural and design community in North America and Asia over a 5-year period and he was awarded an ARIDO honorary membership for those efforts. Sholem has spoken at Greenbuild, the AIA National Convention, the Health Work and Wellness Conference, IFMA World Workplace, Niacon and IIDEX. His articles have been published in the CoreNet Global Leader and the CoreNet Canada Chapter Newsletter. Welcome, Sholem!

First off, thank you for being a guest on the show this week. We go back several years—we met when I was at CBRE, so that’s going back many, many years. I think you were at Teknion at the time. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Sholem

About myself—I’ve been struggling to survive the pandemic and have been working at going back to the office through its various ways that the thinking has followed or preceded the next wave. I think we are ready for another wave of thinking and planning and going back to the office.

Sandra

I would agree. It’s interesting, I was looking at just the email exchanges that you and I have shared over the last several weeks, and I too have been thinking about how the real estate industry as a whole is affected and all of the different parts that make up the industry, so thinking about the construction industry, the design industry, office furnishings, and then obviously the internal part of the organization, HR, IT, corporate real estate. I’ve been thinking about all the players that have a say or have a part in some of the decision-making around what the future of work is going to look like, and what the impact is going to be, both short term and long term.

When you and I met, you were in the office furnishings industry, so let’s start there. How do you think the office furnishing industry will be affected as a result of this pandemic?

Sholem

I think the office furnishing industry as well as the construction industry are likely to be severely affected. But it’s also likely to stay the same if you look at how it took 20 years for the alternative office to really get implemented and we’ve had less than 20 months of pandemic that has generated a whole bunch of thinking. I think it’s important now to go back to the reasons why, to the business thinking that is being generated by this pandemic first, and then come back to the office and construction and other real estate industries. What do you think?

Sandra

I would agree. Let’s talk about the real estate industry as a whole and the thinking behind all of it.

Sholem

Well, I want to go back further, to talk about industry as a whole. And fortunately, we have a wonderful publication called the MIT Sloan Management Review, whose fall issue just came out 2 weeks ago, that really dug into what business should be doing. And in one of their articles, they start off with the big question: “Has COVID-19 Permanently Changed Business Strategy? What Experts Say”. Well, they say it hasn’t, actually. They say that while the content of strategy has changed as the pandemic has shifted, demand patterns have affected supply chains and transformed desires, but that really hasn’t changed what business strategy should be. And some of the changes with respect to the pandemic are likely to be permanent.

They’re also saying that the pandemic has just nudged us into the future that has been inevitable since the arrival of the Internet and digitisation. The pandemic has forced the experimentation that should have been done anyway. So, at the top level, the business strategists are saying, this is just an incentive for everyone to think about strategy and think about integrating the company into the other issues that are changing right now.

What I’m going to show you is why they think the employee is the focus of all this. MIT has a program called the Culture 500, about who’s being affected by the question of where they go to work. Well, that’s the employees. What do employees think about corporate culture? What’s important to them? With a measure of 17.9 (not sure what that means), the top one is that employees feel respected. What that means is that employees have the right to be listened to without redress. It’s not just the company telling them what’s going to happen. And the second most important item, which is at about 16.7, is leadership. Supportive leaders and leaders living the core values. So those are the two most important items with respect to strategy.

So, where does all this fit in and how do we get to real estate? Well, the Culture 500 has really linked the attitudes of the employees to the performance of the company. The first thing they say is, a strong culture, and I’m not going to go into the 150 variables here, is associated with strong financial performance. And interestingly, they also say that culture champions are more than twice as likely to be led by women than our typical Fortune 500 companies. Again, they come back to respect. That could be linked to women leading. Psychologically safe environments, this is something that happens more in women’s companies as a whole, than in others.

Back to what companies should be doing right now, and how it’ll affect real estate—they need to talk to and listen to their employees. Because that affects culture, that affects financial performance, and what happens to real estate will flow from that.

Sandra

Going back to the beginning when you were talking about business strategy and the idea that not much has really changed—from the standpoint of what the company should be doing, I can see how that probably hasn’t changed, but when you look at what companies are actually doing, that’s where I think this appetite for change is coming into play. A lot of the points that you make I think are very relevant—listening to the employee, the employee wanting to feel respected, and obviously having a supportive leadership are all really, really important in order to ensure that you have a healthy work environment or you’re nurturing a healthy and productive work environment.

But when you read the plethora of articles and things that come out about what the current conditions are in most organizations, and potentially even more importantly, the position that some of these large enterprise organisations are taking, where they’re almost bullying people to come back to the office, it makes you wonder—what is the strategy? Why would companies be pushing this agenda of bringing people back to the office? It doesn’t make any sense. What are your thoughts there?

Sholem

My thoughts are exactly that. The MIT Sloan fall issue is rich in the concepts that really focus on the culture of the company, and how it affects its financial importance. High on the list of assessing the culture of the company is engaging the employees, so clearly telling them what to do seems to be the wrong thing to do.

Now, I want to throw in a point of real data. On Friday, Allstate announced they were closing their 2 million sq. ft. office in suburban Chicago, which houses between 5 and 6,000 employees. They said, 95% of our employees are working at home right now and we’re not moving out of Chicago, we’re moving out of this big building. And this is shaking people up. Not just the insurance industry, but the banking industry too. Now, I don’t think the banking industry is anything like the insurance industry. But this is what’s on the top of peoples’ minds right now.

What do you do about it? Well, what you don’t do is what Joe Biden did in Afghanistan, which is pick a strategy and go for it. You don’t say, we’re going to get our people back to the office and go for it, because it might not happen. You need to have alternative strategies in case it doesn’t happen. They have got to do both and they’ve got to be able to switch in an agile manner from one to another. And that leads to technology.

Sandra

I agree completely, I think if there’s been any learning from this pandemic, it’s about the whole concept of emergency preparedness planning. I remember when we were planning for Y2K back in 1999, and all the time and effort that went in to prevent whatever it was that we thought was going to happen, and then it never actually happened. And then with SARS, back in 2003, I remember going through that process as well and all the planning around how to prepare for something like that, and never really thinking of the longevity of how a pandemic can actually continue on for unpredictable periods of time.

The part that floors me time and time again is reading about the success of organisations who have been able to be completely agile and pivot and say, ok, yesterday we were working from the office but we have the infrastructure in place to enable our employees to work from home, so it’s business as usual, and companies are reporting great successes, more so than even than with their employees in the office.

You’ve probably seen the debates online about CEOs who are pushing the return-to-work concept and people are not really getting it, because they’re saying, well, we’ve been working this entire time. And if you stop and think about it, that’s probably true for companies who have the technology infrastructure. But it’s not necessarily the case for all, because there are a lot of companies who, surprisingly, don’t have the infrastructure in place to enable their employees to continue to work productively from home.

What’s surprising to me is, what have they been doing for the last 2 years? Are they banking on things going back to normal? Or have they made attempts to try to bring technology into the workplace to enable this flexibility? Because if we’re lucky, this pandemic will hopefully disappear at some point and it will be something that happened in the past, but that’s not to say that there won’t be something else in a couple years’ time. I think that going through this experience has certainly opened everyone’s eyes to the gravity of it and what can happen. If a company isn’t looking at their technology infrastructure to enable employees to work from anywhere, how does that work? If they’re banking on people coming back to the office, what happens the next time around? What are your thoughts on that?

Sholem

You mentioned agility. The Culture 500 2020 survey put agility as the top cultural value and high cultural values generate high profits. So that’s very important. There are companies that have been agile for a long time; take Autodesk, for example. They bought up a bunch of companies and what’s different for the employees is the paycheque comes from somewhere else. I worked for Exxon once in Princeton, New Jersey in a walk-up just like all the other start-up companies, except for once a month from Houston I got this paycheck.

Companies like that are much more agile. Companies are going to have to deal with the bigger elements than where people go to work. They’re going to have to deal with supply shortages. They’re going to have to deal with climate change. Right now, we’ve got the gas prices shooting up through the roof, fueled by bad thinking about climate change. They’ve got to make alternative assumptions—what are they going to do if people are not going to come back to work?

Right now, we’ve got studies on the Great Resignation. A third of the people who leave are leaving because they’re unhappy with the company for years past, a third of them are happy with working at home, and a third of them want a new career. And that affects a third of the people in total in the workplace. There are ways of making that a positive. Because as the company changes its technology, it may not need many of the people who are leaving. They need different kinds of people to run the technology instead of doing the operation themselves. So, this is not necessarily a bad thing, if you look at what the business strategy should be holistically.

Sandra

I think the idea that not as many people are going to be needed, though, can be views as a negative. In the traditional workplace where you don’t have the technology readily available, you obviously need more bodies to do the work. How do you make the fact that you can automate some of these positions or not need as many positions, a positive? What happens to those people?

Sholem

We’re seeing the Great Refusal to Work. 10 million job openings, and 7 million people looking for work. It’s not necessarily what people want to do that is replacing what the technology can do for them. I think that’s the way of dealing with that where you can, where you don’t have to have people with other people-to-people contact.

Sandra

I would agree, I think there’s truth to that. I wanted to go back to the comment that you made—you were talking before about start-ups and agility. I’ve heard time and time again that there’s a difference between a smaller-sized organization or a start-up and a larger enterprise, because they tend to be much more readily adaptable and agile. When we think about incorporating agility in the workplace, do you think that that holds true?

Sholem

I think companies have been working really hard to bring that into their large companies. I think that holds true, and I think that is a big challenge for larger companies these days.

Sandra

What do you think is driving that? Do you think it’s the thinking of management, the nature of the work? We’ve been hearing, “you need to be in the office to be innovative, to be creative, to be collaborative”. You see it mostly in the banking industry, and you hear it also in the legal industry, where there are a lot of tradition in the way those types of industries work. Or are you hearing and seeing that it’s really across various types of industries at the enterprise level?

Sholem

I think you’re hearing a lot of hopes rather than data-supported facts, with respect to the idea that you’re more productive if you get together in the office. I think that you are not hearing what people really think from corporate North America. On the other hand, you’re hearing what professors really think in the MIT Sloan Review, who are remote from the companies. So, this is the balancing act. How do you relate one phrase from an academic to the real activity of a company, who may be saying one thing and actually doing another, because what they are planning to do, they believe is competitive advantage? Really tough for us.

Sandra

Ok, let’s shift gears for now. Let’s take this down through some of the other channels now, as we think about construction, design, and office furnishings. So, if we’re looking at a future where there’s less dependency on office space, obviously there’ll be potentially a lot of vacancy. So, if return to office doesn’t actually happen the way people are thinking or hoping it will, how is that going to impact the construction industry?

Sholem

I want to talk about design first. Design should be moving higher up the food chain, into business strategy. They should be participating in the business strategy, then helping to design the places, the interiors, the core office space, and also the hubs which are going to be generated from it. If design teams are at the table, they can help a lot.

About construction, the data shows with respect to office moves that they dropped a large amount during the pandemic, maybe 40%, and have now recovered most of that. What happens in the future is—I don’t know. When you look at the occupancy average over a week, I don’t think it’s going to remain as high as it was before. I think companies will see the value, as Allstate did, of shedding their bit of real estate. With respect to construction, there are other industries that could use the space. We’re expecting a doubling in seniors needing living space over the next six years. Many buildings can be converted to seniors’ homes, for example.

I think there is still going to be upheaval, and anybody who’s focused on a plan for going back to the office is going to be in a little bit of trouble. We’ve got to stop thinking about going back to the office and going back to the real world. We need to understand that the real world is now, and we need to integrate the office into what we’re doing now. That needs to be the focus of our thinking.

Back to furniture—again, we’ve got the designers who are participating at the high end of the table, and I think what they need to do is to promulgate what kinds of furniture are going to be used in the offices when people come back, because they sure as shootin’ aren’t going to be sitting at a desk typing keys when they can do that at home.

With respect to furniture manufacturers, they need to take a look at their product breadth compared to what is going to be needed. I think we may have some sell-offs, we may have some purchases of other companies, in order to bring their product mix to what’s going to be needed. That’s going to be an interesting thing to look at.

Sandra

For sure. Before, you talked about climate change. This is something that, when the pandemic first started and there was the mass exodus of the buildings and people being told to work from home, I remember one of the first thoughts I had was, what if this is forever? What happens if people don’t go back to the office? What happens to all the equipment and the furniture and fixturing and things that are in these buildings, and all the effort that’s been made around reducing climate change and sustainability? Suddenly you have all of this, for lack of a better word, garbage that nobody wants or needs anymore.

I’ve always been interested to learn about how furniture companies think about the existing furniture. Because, as you say, when people are going back to the office, they’re not going to be sitting at their desks in cubicles like they used to, because they discovered that that focused, heads-down work can be done from home. They don’t necessarily need to be in the office. So, what happens to all of that furniture and fixturing that’s in the office that supported old ways of working, and how are furniture companies thinking about that, if at all?

Sholem

Well, the last wave happened about 15 years ago when the high-panels all of a sudden were not popular anymore. One of the things that happened is a lot of people working in used furniture picked up some of them and repurposed that furniture, remanufactured it. I don’t think furniture companies think much about the old furniture that they sold. They’re more concerned about how to rejig their product lines very quickly, to match an unknown future need that the designers haven’t shared with them yet.

Sandra

I’m thinking about the comment you made about design having the opportunity to move up the food chain, so to speak. Before this conversation, one of the notes I made was that the design industry certainly has the opportunity to lead change, because of all the excess that’s in the market as a result of the pandemic. So, if we think about designing, not for the unknown, but designing for a healthier, more sustainable future, it’s not about creating new product from raw materials that are sustainably sourced. Rather, it’s about thinking about all the stuff that’s already out there, and how you can reuse that product to minimise waste.

I remember back in the 90s, there was School-In-A-Box, where you pack up all your old furnishings and you ship them off to third world countries that were setting up schools and such. The idea was to avoid this product going in a landfill. Several years later, the market was completely saturated, and so that program died off, at least from what I recall. Everyone was shipping their product to these places and it made me wonder—we shipped it on the premise that it was going to good use, but did it end up in a landfill? In which case it’s not marking you as an organisation as being the company who’s doing that, because you’ve identified that you’ve diverted waste, rather than really following where that product actually went. Are those programs still in existence? What’s happening from that perspective?

Sholem

I don’t know, but what you’ve raised is a very interesting point—I think we need to have people from various parts of the food chain get together and think about these things. If we don’t, they won’t. It’s like pulling the people together to think about the pandemic. And waste is certainly a huge part of climate change, so those people who are in that area should be pulled in to this one. What do we do with the waste? Waste is a huge problem, worldwide.

Sandra

Exactly. To your point also about the need for housing, whether it’s for seniors or the homeless or other people in society in general that have struggled with affordable housing, can we look at this as an opportunity to rethink how we make housing more readily accessible to all, and not necessarily just to those who can afford it? Even from a space perspective. The pandemic has certainly highlighted that, especially when you have these high-density neighborhoods, people want areas where they can have more space.

So, you’ve got people living in very small and dense condos with a high housing cost because you’re in the downtown core—will this exodus afford more space for people so that they don’t have to feel like they’re crammed into small quarters? Which, actually, gets problematic again when you have pandemic situations possibly happening again, a risk that I think is definitely there. We’ve gone through it now, so who’s to say we’re not going to have situations like this in the future?

Sholem

With respect to residential space, I think the problem easily gets solved because people are moving out into the countryside with lots and lots of space around them, at a third of the cost of their small downtown condo. And other people who want to live in the downtown condo are moving in. I think it’s the commercial waste that’s a big unsolved issue.

Sandra

Right. We also hear that people who go back to the office will have greater visibility and therefore more success in their career. This kind of stuff is being said out in the marketplace, and I personally don’t think that there’s truth to that. How ludicrous is it to think that your place of work, or your office dictates your quality of life?

Recently I wrote something on LinkedIn about how for years we’ve been talking about work-life balance, and how the pandemic has caused a lot of people to reflect more on their quality of life. What kind of life do they want to live? Is it always about work, and always being “on” all the time? They’re allowing themselves permission to slow things down a little bit and realize that there’s more to life than just working all the time. I think that that’s potentially what’s causing the tension in all of this fallout around people not wanting to go back to work, or people resigning because they’re thinking about where they are in life and really what they want. Maybe they were in a job that they really didn’t enjoy doing, and because of the pandemic and maybe from not commuting or whatever the circumstances were, has allowed them to learn a different skill that now has opened the doors for other opportunities. It’s interesting, the changes that are happening in society as a whole because of this change in dependency on office space.

Sholem

I have a close relative who left his job, which is almost exactly the same as his old job, because of issues with management, and because he wanted to work remotely. Now, let’s talk about “remotely”. Once upon a time, I foolishly answered an ad in LinkedIn because I wanted to know what this kind of person did. Since then, every week I get lists of jobs for me. So, last week there were 10 jobs for me, and 7 of them were remote. I think the train has left the station, with respect to people going back to the office. I don’t think the industry likes to recognize it, and I think the industry should not be a Joe Biden.

The other issue here is, the only place I hear about people getting together to improve the culture and work better, is from real estate people. That could be because I’m not looking elsewhere, but it certainly isn’t in the Sloan material I’ve just read 5 articles in.

Sandra

Culture is another topic that’s intriguing to me. I could ask, is culture something that was created by HR? Because companies talk about how great their culture is, but the employee experience really determines how great that culture is, and nobody really talks about that. There’s a lot of side conversation about what it’s truly like to work in an organization versus what the organization thinks their culture is like.

Just this weekend I was talking to my sister, who’s currently looking for another job. She’s a senior person at one of the consulting firms that she’s working at, and she’s exploring the tech space right now. I said to her, there are a couple of large organisations that are coming into Toronto, and I named one of them and said, I’ve heard about how great the culture of this particular culture is. And she said no, I know a couple people who work there and it’s not my cup of tea, from a culture perspective.

So I’m thinking now about how, in the past, we’ve been driven by the idea that culture is what attracts people to an organisation. And that might be true to some extent, but I don’t know if it’s the culture that keeps you there. Because what is culture? It’s the sum of the behaviours. So, to your point, that decision to work for a company that’s offering a remote opportunity is telling you something about the culture. You’re going to make that decision based on whether the organization’s values align with yours. But then once you’ve made that decision, something changes. There’s got to be something else that determines if you’re going to continue your commitment to this employer or not.

I know for me, personally, there’s a deeper sense of value —you were mentioning integrity and leadership at the beginning. I think a lot of companies say they have those but then you get in there, and it’s not really quite the way it works. And I think the key is, if the organization is willing to tolerate bad behaviour, that’s really where “culture” comes into play, because that’s more of a leadership issue. Your leadership team that your organization is looking up to is demonstrating a behaviour, and people are either going to eat it because they have to for whatever reason, and others aren’t. Go ahead?

Sholem

Yes, I was going to talk about Indeed.com. On Indeed, if you take a look at their jobs and you take a look at people giving recommendations, you see the questions are about the company and about leadership. That’s because those questionnaires have been created by two individuals called Donald Saul and Cheryl Saul of MIT who use the answers to rank 500 companies with respect to what they think are important values. They have 150 values, and they think the top ones are agility, collaboration, customer orientation, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. They then correlate these with financial performance. They say that those who do well on these variables do well in business. I don’t see how well they retain employees on that list, but I think we’re going to see a sea change in the future.

But to get back right to the beginning, what do the employees want? The employees want respect, they want to be able to talk without consequences, and they need to be listened to. Listening is very important. And if they do want to come to work, telling them they don’t need to come on Mondays and Fridays is not respectful.

Sandra

Yes, I think it’s definitely a huge change from the perspective of our obligations or our commitments to working life. I did a podcast several weeks ago with someone who was talking about a case in the UK about a lady who won £185,000 because her employer wouldn’t allow her the flexibility to end her day a half an hour or so earlier. There was a discussion around the inflexibility of the organisation and should employees have the ability to dictate what they want, versus an employer feeling that their business should be run a certain way. There’s a polarizing debate around whether the employee or the employer should determine the rules, as they relate to work.

Sholem

The MIT study says that those companies where the employers dictate tend to have low financial performance. Companies with low financial performance can’t contribute to society, so you get a double negative here. Employers need to think out and re-think out what they are able to do. Just like countries and states and provinces and cities of people have thought out, perhaps badly in some areas, what restrictions they can place on people who have or have not been vaccinated. You’ve got to address the problem.

Sandra

So how do you think that they’re determining low financial performance? Because this widespread idea of working from anywhere didn’t exist—well, it existed, but it was a very small percentage of the population. So, this is all relatively new. How are they making that assessment that the companies that are not willing to adapt are low financial performing organisations?

Sholem

Well, they have measured agility. They measured collaboration, customer orientation, those things are somewhat related to adaptability itself. I’d like to see the 2021 version of this study, which they don’t say when it’s coming out, but that’s probably in the middle of next year when they may have included these particular values. Unfortunately, the people who are talking about this among themselves aren’t working for the companies who are thinking differently than they are. We’ve got a gap here between the academics and what companies are really doing. And if I were a company and I had the answer to improving my performance with respect to my competitors, I’d be keeping my mouth shut.

Sandra

So, by my understanding, your thinking is that the performance focus should be more so on how you optimise people performance, and not necessarily how you optimize building or space performance?

Sholem

Yes. I’ll give you one example that happened about ten years ago. I had a job in a company where I went to work every day, but since I was a senior manager, I didn’t have to. Friday morning, I woke up and said to myself, you’ve got two important projects to finish by 4:00 today. If you go into the office, you’re not going to get them done. If you stay at home and only work on those, you’ll get them done. I stayed at home and worked 13 hours straight on those and other little things I wouldn’t have gotten into. So, I think there’s a myth that seeing peoples’ faces and talking to them socially is necessarily an improvement of company culture.

Remember the time when the concern was all this time is wasted at the coffee machine? Now, we need to pull them back in the office to get them to the coffee machine. We’ve got to stop thinking about variables that have not been demonstrated scientifically to matter.

Sandra

Based on that last comment, who do you think is driving that agenda? Because yes, the companies have their positions from a business strategy perspective, but it’s interesting to watch the position that others will take like design firms, furniture companies, construction, the leasing industry, all these peripheral service providers that are pushing this, “the workplace is still going to be prominent, there’s still going to be a need for the workplace, but the purpose is going to change”. There’s also a whole discussion around how the space needs to be redesigned to now meet this new purpose that’s being created, if you will, but is that really what the employees are asking for, or saying? Because there seems to be conflicting sides.

Sholem

There are a lot of employees who are saying, why do I have to live in the 500 sq. ft. condo downtown so I can spend 50 or 60 hours a week in the office like my boss does? Why can’t I move out to Minnesota and buy a house that’s 12 times as big for $150,000 and work remotely, because I have to get away from the office to do any real work. I think the employees are going to drive it, I think everybody who’s trying to make the office a better place for today’s employees are doing the right thing, but again, we can’t be Joe Biden. We’ve got to look at Plan B or Plan C or Plan D—how do we boost our overall culture scores, not to drag people into the office so we can boost our productivity. And that, MIT is measuring.

Sandra

Do you think the future will be much more focused on productivity and those types of measures? Or do you think at some point sustainability and climate change will be leading this change? Because it is now, sort of, but it still feels like it’s lagging a little bit. Productivity is still front and center.

Sholem

I think they’re all intertwined. If you make mistakes in planning climate change, your fuel costs will go up in the short run. And since your stock price is measured every 3 months, it hurts you and the value you have gotten from the company for those shareholders. So, I think it’s all got to be pulled together, but unfortunately, with our divisive political climate, it’s really hard for the government to do its job and pull people together to deal with common issues very well.

Sandra

So, what’s next? What do you foresee as the future of work?

Sholem

Well, the elephant in the room is the pandemic. We have to see what happens with that before people begin to get back to the office. People are voting with their feet now. And I do believe that savvy companies are looking at how to re-construct themselves internally, so that that’s a good thing and not a bad thing. And guess what? Technology is the way to do so.

Sandra

I totally agree. Any final comments?

Sholem

Yes—I think there’s too much concern about going back to the past, with respect to going back to the office. Just because 80% of companies are saying they’ll be reopening in January doesn’t mean that 80 or 40 or even 20% of people will be in the business. We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves as an industry, publicly, or else we’ll never be able to create those alternative strategies.

Sandra

Great thoughts. Sholem, thanks for sharing your perspectives, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today!

Sholem

Me too, thank you for the opportunity, Sandra!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Facilities management role in building CRE strategy
• Working with IT and HR to bring companies together
• Workplace experience roles and Facilities Managers
• Facilities management is all about the people – Function over design
• How can CRE enable different working styles and locations?
• Assumptions and pigeonholing people and how they work
• How to immerse new employees in the organization with no office
• Appearance of company culture vs. reality
• Role modeling company culture
• Moving away from the 9-5, Monday to Friday grind

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Simone Fenton-Jarvis on LinkedIn
• Real Innovation Academy
• Read Simone’s book: The Human-Centric Workplace: Enabling people, communities and our planet to thrive

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

Today, I’ll be discussing the role of facilities management (FM) with my friend and colleague, Simone Fenton-Jarvis. Hey Simone, happy to have you join me today! Please take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners.

Simone

Hi, I’m Simone. I’ve been working with Relogix now for around 4 or 5 months. Prior to working at Relogix as the Workplace Consultancy Director, I’ve worked in FM on the ground, I’ve done workplace strategy as Chief Workplace Officer and as a workplace consultant. So, over the 15 years’ experience that I’ve got, I’ve seen a lot and I’ve heard a lot and I’ve done a lot. And I’m at the point now of working from a data standpoint, to make sure that the data-driven decision-making happens when previously in my experience, it’s all kind of happened by accident. So that’s why I came over to Relogix.

Sandra

The various roles that make up corporate real estate in most organizations have been elevated tenfold. Functions like workplace strategy, occupancy planning and design, and facilities management, are all busy trying to figure out how to align the workplace with new ways of working, all brought on by the experience of the pandemic. It’s been said that facilities managers don’t own workplace strategy. Do you think facilities management should do strategy?

Simone

Yes, absolutely. How many times have you been involved in projects where it’s passed to facilities managers to execute, and there’s a massive disconnect. It takes me back a few years ago where I was involved in refurbishing a leisure center. The architect actually put glass stairs in the swimming pool area that went up to the reception. Now, obviously from a facilities management point of view, that’s not going to work. That’s an extreme example, but it shows how facilities were left to basically manage what happens next to maintain health and safety. And as much as that’s an extreme example, there are so many of those examples that happen within the workplace.

It’s linked to how meeting rooms are used as well. Often they’ll say, let’s put the nice meeting room in front of all the windows, and then you’re trying to manage the employee experience but they’ve got no windows because they’re all in meeting rooms. It’s really small examples like that that are all operational, but if facilities management were involved in the wider strategy planning, then these kind of operational things would be raised quite early on in the project, which can only be a benefit for everybody.

Sandra

So you’re saying that facilities management should be included in the actual strategic planning process and be brought to the table similar to change management? That they shouldn’t just be operating in a bubble and saying this is the direction that we should go, implement it, and then say, here you go facilities management, now you manage it.

Simone

Yes, absolutely. I think if facilities management is done right, they’re the hub of the office. They know people, they know how people behave, they know where the challenges are, they’ve got that constant temperature check of what’s going on in the workplace. And that is crucial to determine what future strategy looks like. It’s crazy that they’re not involved in early discussions, really.

Sandra

That’s interesting because that’s been my experience as well when I was in facilities management. I remember working very closely with designers that were coming into the office who would go off and do their thing, and I would maybe provide some input in terms of what was needed. Then you’d get these beautiful designs and you’d look at them and you’d go, ok, that’s not going to work. There I’d be with my tracing paper rejigging things.

It’s true, it’s problematic that facilities managers are always at the tail end of projects. Obviously, I agree too that they know the internal customer, they know the users and the problem areas. Do you think, from a skillset perspective, that they have the appetite to do strategy?

Simone

I think it’s hard to blanket it with every facilities manager. Some facilities managers go into facilities because they love the operational aspect of it and they don’t want to be involved in strategy. But as facilities managers progress through their careers, they realize how the operational and the strategic actually affect each other, and that if they got involved in strategic, it’d make operational easier. That’s when the penny drops and they realize, I actually should be involved in this now.

But that’s when you start to discuss being at the strategy table, but ideally they’d have been there years ago. You can’t just say, here’s a project, you need to be at the table. How do we get facilities managers involved in strategy?

It goes back to the job role, the accountability, the responsibilities. If organizations expected that FM were involved, then I do think facilities managers would naturally step up and say yes, we can see the importance. I think we’re almost caught up in this kind of imposter syndrome situation where FM are saying, I’m not strategy, because I’ve been told I’m not strategy. And I think strategy really needs to come from both sides of the organization, from FM and the leaders.

Sandra

I would agree with that. So, thinking about organizational structure, recently you just did a fairly decent deep dive into corporate real estate as a structure and as a whole. There’s the fact that each organization has got so many different titles and roles and functions that are spread all over the place, and we both know that there’s not really a standard for who does what. Do you think that facilities management is positioned to work well with IT and HR in bringing the organization together, because of the fact that they understand the customer?

Simone

I think so. I think that’s where my previous frustration has been with the sector. Pre-pandemic, facilities were the ones that had the power to start bringing in HR and IT in a room together and saying, this is the employee experience, this is how we need to work together. But FM have not really grabbed that opportunity, and I think that’s why within the UK, we’ve really started going down the workplace route. This is where “workplace experience” started hitting off and it was workplace managers or chief workplace officers who were the “workplace person”, there to be people-focused within the space. I think this is something that’s happening within the UK. And globally, you’ll see a lot of workplace job titles, but that’s not quite the “workplace” that the UK mean at the moment. I don’t think we’ve seen enough conversations about how we get HR, IT and FM to get rid of the silos that exist day-to-day within a workplace. So, I think FM have a really good opportunity to drive it. It’s just a question of whether they’ll take the opportunity and run with it. I think that’s the key.

Sandra

You talk about workplace experience⁠—I’ve seen more workplace experience jobs in the last 18 months than I have I think in my entire career. And it’s true, again, there’s a lot of differences, depending on who the organization is. Does it report to HR, does it report to corporate real estate, in some instances it’s even part of marketing or communications. So you look at that and think, what exactly should that role be?

Workplace experience, to me, is kind of an elevated role of facilities management. I wouldn’t say traffic cop, because that’s a little extreme, but in the sense that you know how the space is supposed to be used and you make sure that the experience that comes with those spaces is actually working for the people when they’re coming into the office.

I think what’s interesting too is the fact that, as we know, the whole idea of work is no longer limited to just the building. So workplace experience also transcends the traditional office. I think that’s where the communications component comes into play, of promoting or trying to  get people to come to the office or just making sure that people are still communicating.

On that front, how do you foresee the impact on facilities management of the fact that more and more people are saying that they don’t want to work from the office as often as they used to? How do you think the role will change?

Simone

Throughout the pandemic, it was interesting to watch how some FMs were automatically put on furlough and told, you’re not needed, we’re in a pandemic, the building’s empty. And then some FMs were crucial to enabling people to work from home.

I think it goes back to the organizational attitude and the culture, and how people perceive FM. With regards to how FM will or should change going forward—FM shouldn’t have ever been about the building. If it’s about the building, what happens when we’re in a pandemic and the building’s closed? FM should have been about the people.

And that’s where the workplace experience piece comes in. A few months ago I was doing a bit of a parody webinar with Ian Ellison, and I was the person that was saying, it’s all about the workplace, and Ian was being the person saying, it’s all about the building. And I think the conclusion we came to at the end was, FM need to adapt quite quickly, because otherwise, HR are probably going to run with this. I saw that this week CIPD are doing a conference where somebody’s speaking on workplace design. So if FM don’t step up, HR are going to take it and that would be a shame.

Sandra

That’s one of the things I’ve always found fascinating in our industry—everybody wants to own design, everybody wants to own strategy, that’s the fun part, the creative part of designing what the future of the office and the future of work is going to look like. But to your point, when you take the physical building out of the question, suddenly the requirements for designing the future of work are very different. There’s a huge people element to it, there’s IT infrastructure, the tools and technology that are required to enable people to work. There’s the communications of making sure people can connect with each other. With a building, you sort of just put the infrastructure in and then people come in and do whatever it is they do. That’s very different when that no longer exists.

Simone

It’s funny, I had a real-life example of this in the last few weeks. I’m building a garden office, and I was there arranging armoured cable to come through from my router in the house, and I’ve got a good Wi-Fi connection, I’ve arranged the practical things like heating and insulation, the windows and making sure there’s no glare. And my wife has been the one saying, I want to decorate it like this, and I think we should have a window there, you can put your desk there. I had to say, I’m not having my desk there because I’ll just be bleached out all day. I’m the one that’s been quite practical, and she wants to make it look nice. I said, I’m using the space, not you, so I think I need to have a say in how the space needs to work.

It’s been interesting, this happens every single day in organizations. I said to her, you should know better because you’re an FM so I’m disappointed! But I think that speaks to how we need to make sure the FM are setting strategy, because they’re the ones that should be bringing the voice of the people and saying actually, this is irritating for people using the space. Let’s make sure that we design this element out right at the start.

Sandra

So it’s function over design.

Simone

Yes.

Sandra

You also touched upon earlier the concept of the pandemic and the impact that that’s had on the physical space—I know from previous experience as well, having gone through Y2K and SARS back in 2003, FM are very much involved in disaster recovery. How do you think disaster recovery might change in organizations from an FM perspective?

Simone

I put my FM hat on the other day and I thought, what was my disaster recovery plan when I was operational FM? And it was always, let’s go to this other building, or let’s make sure that this process is in place. It was never that the building is generally unavailable, and no buildings in the country are available. You need to work from anywhere with an internet connection. It just wasn’t on the agenda because no one really expected it to happen.

Even with things like snow and weather planning—it’s always been, we know we can get skeleton staff in the office. But why are we asking people to go in to a physical building when we’ve just learned quite clearly that many jobs can be done remotely? That’s where the disaster recovery planning now needs to adapt to the world that we’re in. It makes the internet connection more important, not the physical space. As long as there’s an internet connection and we can perch somebody with a laptop, we can work. That’s where disaster recovery needs to really start focusing.

We spend thousands making sure our buildings are fine and working, but organizations are not spending thousands making sure that their employees have got a strong and stable internet connection in their home, and I think that’s probably the first thing I’d look at—how can we make sure that that connection is there.

Sandra

It’s funny, I had the exact same thought about the fact that when we thought about disaster recovery, it was always on the premise that, the building burns down you just go to another building or if there’s an event of that nature, there was always another building as a backup. You’d never think that suddenly no buildings are available, and what do you do? So that’s quite comical, actually, that we had that thought probably around the same time frame.

Thinking about then the role of corporate real estate specifically, and the role that they play in developing strategy and even potentially influencing management and operations, what are you seeing from that angle?

Simone

In my experience, CRE have always been the people that are saying, this is when the lease is coming up, these is the rates. From an FM point of view, it’s almost been, “this is what we have to do because this is what the lease says”. I think where CRE could start working with the wider organization is, now that we know we can work in a different way within an organization, how can CRE enable the locations of the properties to enable that? Not so much a hub and spoke model, but more thinking, do we really want people to travel 2 hours to a physical building if they can travel 20 minutes instead to a building because there’s 10 people in that local area who could all work together? That kind of more operational, day-to-day aspect and what that looks like from an employee experience point of view.

For example, if I was living 3 miles away from you, I would say, let’s just go and work here. I wouldn’t say, let’s both travel into Ottawa and go to work. We need to think, how can we enable not just CRE to drive that, but to give people the choice as well. It’s not about people not being trusted, and having to be visible in an office. Actually, it’s about working with others where it’s convenient to work, where we don’t need to travel in to an office. But we need CRE to say, this is what location strategy can look like off the back of all this. We don’t really need massive buildings in one central location anymore.

Sandra

I think there’s definitely truth to that. It’s something I’ve been very passionate about over the years where I’ve worked for large organizations that have had portfolios with multiple buildings in the same city center. You’ve often got your downtown location and your suburb locations. But being a data person, I want to try to understand where people are located relative to the buildings. You’d always see people living on the east side of the city working in the west, and people from the west side of the city working in the east. They’d basically wave to each other on the highway as they went to work in the morning because their teams were on the opposite side of the city. That’s crazy, right?

I think what makes it challenging is you still have business unit mentality. If we think about what’s happening right now and all these conversations around collaboration and teaming—when people think about teams, they think it’s the entire business unit that has to come in to the office on a certain set of days and work together, when in reality, that’s not how teams work. Just because you belong to the same business unit doesn’t mean you’re working with the person that sits next to you. Often, you’re working with people in other departments, or in other areas. I think that’s a huge miss, to say, this is how we’re structured and therefore this is how we should sit together as a team.

Instead, we should be using information to understand how people really interact with each other. So we can look at where people live and where they work, but we can also go a bit further and look at who they’re actually interacting with. When you’re thinking about having a meeting with someone or working on a project with someone, it should be, here are the buildings available to me, which one makes the most sense based on what we’re trying to do. There were some companies several years ago that started to do that. They were saying, if we reduce the square footage in our downtown location, we can go into the suburbs where rent is cheaper and still service our employees based on wherever it is they live.

Simone

And for sustainability as well, we don’t want people adding an extra carbon footprint in if we can avoid it. I think there’s definitely that angle as well.

Like you say, with the whole neighborhood concept where we say, right, you’re in finance, go and work in the finance neighborhood—I’ve always struggled with that as well because you don’t just need to work with each other as a department. And I feel there’s almost this conflict between a person being a human being that needs a sense of belonging, so “I work for finance, I’m sat with my team, I’m building relationships”, and then the need for collaboration, that expands way outside of that team or department. I think that’s where the conflict comes in. I think we’ve been driving things by that sense of belonging and saying yes, you’re in that team, you should sit there with your team, when actually we should have been saying, who do you most work with? Who do you never work with? Who should you be working with? How many emails are you sending to different people across your department, and how can we reduce that email traffic by just moving you next to them? Obviously, that works in a physical environment, but if you look to things like Slack and email, where is the traffic? That should be determining what the office layout looks like.

Sandra

That’s a really good point, because it raises a couple of things that I think have always been issues in the past but I think are more prominent now—that’s around privacy, and just the general use of data or the value of data. All of the things we’re talking about to understand the nature of how people work, where they work, who they work with, it’s all in the data.

That’s been my thing—yes, you could survey people and ask them, who do you work with, who do you want to work with, but it’s all there in the data. More often than not, when you compare the reality of who they’re actually working with, it’s usually a very different story.

We can use data to guide people around timing, for example, when is a good time to meet with someone. Or if there are groups of people in an organization interested in a certain topic, there’s always a digital trail of conversations to get a sense of the topics, so we can say hey, Simone, let’s talk about FM—and you’re going to be in the office Thursday, so maybe Sandra wants to go in Thursday too, because we have something in common.

It’s interesting to me because there’s a lot of conversation out there right now about how you entice people to come back to the office. There’s a lot of focus still on the physical, trying to mimic the hotel industry and making these spaces that people are just going to magically hang out at. I saw an article someone posted the other day about creating co-working spaces in a department store. My comment was, when it comes to office space, we need to define what the value is, what people are willing to pay for, whether it’s the actual employer or the employee, that will bring people back into a space of some kind for that specific experience. I think it has something to do with learning and growing as an individual and being able to connect with people that are usually out of reach. But that’s my personal opinion, and everybody’s motivated for different reasons as to why they’re drawn to a specific space.

Simone

What was interesting throughout the pandemic was all of the assumptions that were being made around the office—you go there to sit at a desk so we still need rows of desks, and then it changed to, no we’re going to the office to collaborate so we’re just going to rip out the desks and we just need meeting spaces. All these assumptions are being made, but somebody that has not got the environment in their physical home, they might want to go to the office for a totally different reason. I think we’ve fallen into that trap of making too many assumptions and pigeonholing people and how they work.

It comes back to the question, what is the persona of the organization or the department. With a persona you can make that generalization, but what about the individual? What if you listen to what their actual needs are. I think it goes quite deep into that kind of parent-child transactional analysis relationship, because people come out of university and they might start a job and they’re still in that kind parent-child mode. But in an organization, why do facilities have to keep walking around the office and say, put your mug in the dishwasher, do that, do that—why are facilities still the police of some organizations? We’re adults. If we can start enabling people to be an adult in the workplace and trust them, I think that is the core piece here. If we trust them, people will use the space how they need to and it will be output based, and best for the organization, best for the individuals. I think culture is absolutely the underpinning thing across all of this.

Sandra

I totally agree with you, I think there’s tremendous truth in that. Just the behaviours in general and the role that facilities often take as the traffic cop or sort of policing space to ensure cleanliness and making sure that it remains presentable and professional, but—why? That’s not really your job, per se. But somehow that’s expected because there’s a professional appearance that needs to be maintained.

Simone

Look at the Google garage and where Amazon started—these organizations didn’t walk into a flashy workplace where everything was rustic wood and scaffolding and filament lightbulbs. They didn’t walk into that environment and start Google or Amazon, they started an organization by working effectively together and as a result, they got a nice workplace.

Sandra

And people are respectful of the space. You mentioned something about new people coming into the workforce. I’ve heard a lot about new hires coming in, too. I was listening to a podcast yesterday where they were interviewing 2 people from different walks of life, and the older person was challenged by the idea of mentoring and bringing in new people to an organization. How do you completely immerse that person in the organization if they never step foot into an office?

It got me thinking, you’ve got 2 types of people: people who’ve experienced something and now it’s gone, so you have something to compare to, and then you have people who’ve never experienced it, so they wouldn’t know the difference. They may have heard about it but they’ve never actually experienced it. If we look at the generations that are in the workplace today, they’ve experienced the whole concept of working in a building, but as we think about this new generation that’s coming in, where everything they do is digital, I for one can’t see how that’s going to be problematic for them.

I think Dror Poleg made reference to this in one of his courses at the Real Innovation Academy, about music. I’m going to date myself, if you think about back when you had LPs, or even 8-track tapes and how music has evolved over time, the reality is that everybody has music in their pocket. It’s the same sort of thing. You can technically have work in your back pocket because everybody has a phone, you’re connected to your coworkers, so how is it different? This whole concept of mentoring is interesting to me because it’s usually voiced by people who have been working in the workplace and not stopping to realize that people that are coming in or coming out of school have never experienced working in the workplace.

Simone

I totally agree. There’s a CEO, I can’t remember who it is, but he doesn’t have a laptop. He travels the world and he does his multi-million pound business by office phone. He doesn’t need a laptop.

I’ve been writing an article around culture, and how we’re used to pushing culture on people. They walk into an organization, there’s a nice shiny vinyl on the wall, and they say, “this is what we mean by our culture”. I think what we need to do instead is have the people pull the culture out of the organization. If we have to keep pushing it, that’s a lot of work that we have to keep doing.

A good test of this is when I joined Relogix. It was the first time I’d joined an organization that was based in a different country. I had no idea what to expect, I was used to being in an office, but then I was choosing to work in my home office. I was thinking, I’m not even going to see my colleagues, what’s this going to be like? I made a point of going in and trying to almost forget everything that I knew previously and ask myself, how do I need to work? What do I need to achieve? How am I going to do that? There certainly have been days where I’ve said to myself, I really should speak to another human being in Canada because I’ve not spoken to a Canadian in a few days! And you do have days like that. But I think, we always talk about culture as a thing, but culture is people. And we can make sure that if people are working together, they will naturally pull the culture out of collaboration. And that doesn’t need a physical office.

Sandra

Everybody’s talking about culture, and I often question, in the sense of how it’s talked about, is culture real? Or is it a crutch? Culture’s being tied to the physical space—they say when you walk into a space you get a sense of what the culture’s like, and I can be the first to say no, that’s not true. I’ve walked into gorgeous spaces or I’ve worked in offices that have beautiful spaces, whether as a consultant or even as a direct employee, and then you talk to people and you’re realize it’s nothing like that. So, the appearance of culture is one thing, but then what is the reality of the culture? And that’s really what people are trying to get at, which has nothing to do with the physical space.

Simone

And we always try to measure culture, and it always ends up being the question of how do we create a business case for culture? Something I wrote about recently was, I’ve come up with 9 cultural indicators on how to measure culture. It’s not as simple as a score though. It’s got to be a mixture of things. I’ve pulled out things like the finances of the organization, the sustainability, employee engagement, absence, customer satisfaction scores—that’s the culture of the organization. I’ve written about this in quite some depth, and I think we need to come away from measuring it. It goes back to a point I was making earlier this week about how many more reports do we need on gender diversity in the workplace, about it being a good thing? It’s not about it being a good business case—it’s about it being the right thing to do. And it’s the same thing for culture. If you’ve not got a good culture, that’s just not the right thing to do. So why do we keep trying to measure it. It should just be a given.

Sandra

I totally agree. Another interesting point you made was when we were talking about the concept of facilities management policing the workplace. If we think about the whole aspect of culture and maintaining, improving and managing culture—there’s an element of babysitting happening as well. Is that really necessary? I personally struggle with that, especially when there are obviously things happening in an organization that shouldn’t be happening. That’s where the focus should be if you really care about culture. And yet you have companies looking at putting monitoring software on laptops so they can watch their employees to make sure they’re actually working. What are your thoughts on that?

Simone

I totally agree, I think when we get caught up in the physical and talking about how the physical and culture interact, I think it’s basically about a façade that’s going up. We’ve got a good culture because look at our workplace. And actually, I’d prefer to work in an organization where dirty dishes were stacked high but I wasn’t being watched when I was working on a laptop from home. It’s that kind of culture that’s deeper than what the physical is. You can almost put it in the context of cultural iceberg—you’ve got all those things above the water, but it wasn’t the top of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, it was what was underneath.

I had one experience of an organization that basically banned their employees from talking to each other about what their pay was. It was in the HR handbook they were not allowed to discuss pay. As a consultant, when I got to the bottom of it, it was because there were people doing the same job with different outcomes and there were certain people who were being paid more than they should have been, because they had certain relationships. And there were people who were getting paid less because they were mums and they were working 3 or 4 days a week. And there were all of these really significant issues going on in this organization. And I said, so you’re trying to babysit people by not talking about their wages. And you think that shouldn’t be being done. But actually, if someone wants to discuss it, they should be able to. You’re trying to cover up the fact that you’ve got issues with your culture. I think we need to come away from the babysitting. We shouldn’t have to babysit culture.

It goes back to that idea of push vs pull. I think if we’re pushing and we’re babysitting, there’s something wrong. Because once a kid gets to a certain age, you don’t have to babysit them anymore. For the first few weeks or few months of somebody being in an organization it should be quite prescriptive—this is the culture of the organization. But then we should be able to leave them alone without going back and reminding them. That’s where the other people in the organization come in because your people should be the ambassador of the culture. And it shouldn’t need FM walking around reminding people, because everybody else should be reminding people every day. It’s about role modeling.

Sandra

I also think that the mindset we have as employers, managers, and leaders when you’re working in a virtual environment is very different. If you think about the workplace, you could waste 8 hours if you wanted to and nobody would know. You could just shuffle papers around and that would be fine. But I think in a virtual world, your success depends on how much ownership you take, how much accountability and responsibility you have for your own actions.

I sometimes wonder if the whole concept of work has been in the past just waiting for people to tell you what to do, which doesn’t translate well online. You have to be very forthcoming, you have to own it and take initiative. In the workplace, some people do and some don’t. But online, you have to, because as you explained, being in a different country for example, you could go 2, 3 days without seeing anyone. I’m the same, our office is in Ottawa and I’m in Toronto, so I don’t see people every day. So, I’m very dependent on communicating through our tools, and I have to take initiative if I want to know something. Yes, there are channels on Slack to see what’s going on, but if there’s a specific thing I want to know, the onus is on me to reach out.

How much do you think the culture is really referring to trying to manage or measure the engagement of people? I think that’s the fear right now, that without actually seeing it, you have no idea if people are actually working or walking their dog.

Simone

Exactly. And I think to some extent, does it matter if someone’s working or walking the dog? Because I could walk my dog for 45 minutes and do some of my best thinking. If I sat in front of a computer screen, I’d go nuts. I think sometimes it is the understanding the outcome. I think if organizations are clear in the vision of the organization and the objectives, and they know how to measure the impact that people have in the outcomes, then I don’t think it matters if someone’s working 10 hours or 50 hours a week. If the outcome’s there, and they’re performing, and that’s the level that you’re expecting, I think everything should be good.

We’ve got to come away from the 9 to 5 or even Monday to Friday. 4-day weeks still keep getting talked about, and now it’s in to the 7-day week. Actually, I think a 7-day week sounds nicer—often on a Sunday, because I’ve relaxed, I’ll get an idea, and I’ll start doing a bit of work. If I know that I do that, then I’ll just start a little bit later on the Monday. That’s working to our optimum. And sometimes you wake up and think, I’m not going to be productive today, you just know. Well, why are we trying to work? Why don’t we just have a few hours, re-set ourselves and then log on, and we’ll probably end up doing the 8 hours of work in 4 hours, because we’re more productive, rather than just sitting there and getting worse.

Sandra

I’ve been there, I’ve experienced it when I started working from home. You get the loneliness, which lasted for about 4 to 6 months, and then you had that feeling of guilt, where you always felt like you had to be working so you overdid it. And then probably about a year into it, I started to understand just how I operate. The time of day that I was most productive, and how I think best. If I have to think, I can’t do it sitting in front of my computer. I’ll go take a shower or go for a walk or do something completely unrelated to work, and suddenly the brain just kind of kicks in to all of the creative thinking, problem solving, all of that great stuff.

Simone

I was at a conference last week and Kirk from Google was talking about the need for a cognitive cleanse between tasks. That’s your brain resetting. You’re probably not going to do your best thinking sat in front of a computer screen. Nobody probably ever has.

A few weeks ago I walked into our office, and I was like, yay, I’m walking into the office! And when I came home, the first week back, I was miserable. I actually just missed being in an office with people. I’m in a different time zone again and I felt really lonely and disconnected from the organization. So I said, I need to get a grip and sort this out. I said, let me get into a meeting with that person, let me reconnect in my virtual world and get in the habit of being virtual again. It takes some discipline. It takes reflective thinking and knowing how you work to get it right.

I think that’s where organizations need to come away from personas and into the realm of, we trust you, you’re an adult, how do you need to work?

Sandra

Do you find that going out and hanging out with friends, or even just having the ability to go out and have coffee, have a chat, helps your state of mind? The pandemic certainly has limited this, but does it help your state of mind when it comes to working virtually?

Simone

Absolutely. I think obviously the pandemic was an extreme version of it because you’re working on your own all day and living on your own, or just being with my wife—I just needed a conversation with somebody else.

Sandra

It’s true!

Simone

I think if you’re going to be working remotely and virtually, I like to make sure that there’s planned things in the evening or in the middle of the day. It’d be easy to just never leave the home. And it’d be easy to just remain in this weird kind of world. So, I think you have to be quite disciplined. “I’m going to leave the house tonight, I’m going to go for coffee, I’m going to see a friend”. Because otherwise I’m on my own all the time, and it’s definitely not healthy.

Sandra

This has been fun! Any final thoughts?

Simone

My final thoughts are to anybody listening, take initiative and run with it. Don’t ask for permission, just ask for forgiveness after you’ve tried it. That’s for FMs, for anybody wanting to drive change in a new world. Just crack on with it and show what can be done. Because if you wait, somebody else will do it instead.

Sandra

Fantastic. Thank you again for your time today, I really appreciate it.

Simone

Thanks!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• What should you really be measuring with workplace technology?
• All eyes on corporate real estate
• New jobs in workplace strategy and analytics
• Using technology and data to strategy plan space
• The role of AI and predictive analytics in workplace planning
• Moment-in-time data vs. on-demand, real-time data
• The “death” of CAFM software
• Managing and using co-working spaces

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Simon Davis on LinkedIn
• Impec Group Sensors 101 Guide
• Relogix Ultimate Workplace Sensors Guide

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

Today I’m co-hosting with my special guest, Simon Davis, the Senior Vice President of Workplace Technology at Impec Group. Simon leads Impec’s workplace technology practice. As a recognized thought leader in real estate technology, Simon has nearly 20 years of related experience. He is the lead faculty on CoreNet Global’s Masters of Corporate Real Estate professional designation program, and assists CoreNet global chapters across the Americas with developing technology symposiums. He also serves as event chair and strategic advisor to the International Facilities Management Association IT community, and is part of the workplace Evolutionaries Phoenix hub. Before Impec Group, Simon worked for leading technology solutions including experts in machine learning, virtual reality driven design, workplace and space optimization, and integrated workplace management system consulting and software.

So welcome, Simon! I’m really happy to have you on as my guest today. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Simon

Thank you, I appreciate the time. My name is Simon Davis, I’ve spent about 20 years now working in real estate technology, focused on the corporate side of the house. Maybe not what I wanted to be when I was growing up, but it’s certainly become a real passion and drive in my life. I’ve formulated many friendships out of all of my work and activities. I’ve really done most of the different avenues around real estate technology from working on the vendor side, developing and selling products, and working on the consulting side for companies large and small, helping to advise clients on the type of technologies they need. I’ve also spent several very entertaining years with a series of start-ups, helping to develop products and also trying to meet needs in the market that I felt were unfulfilled.

Recently, about 9 months ago, I joined a company called Impec Group. Impec has been eye-opening for me because they gave me a mandate to come in and do what I felt was necessary in the market. And with all my years of experience on the various sides, I felt the one area that was truly lacking was companies that were agnostically advising clients on the right technology. It seemed that companies either favored particularly technologies because their teams were trained in it, or companies were even getting referral fees for recommending specific technologies. I felt that the end user, the corporates, weren’t always getting the right advice coming from the right position. I wanted to establish a consulting practice that could come in and quickly help clients get to the crux of their pain points and provide them with the right technologies and the right options in order to solve those pain points.

Coupled with that, one of my big passions was trying to identify new technologies that people weren’t aware of that really mattered. One of the big concerns I see these days, if you look at organizations like MIT and Unissu that track these things, you’re looking at somewhere between 10 and 12,000 players in the prop tech market, which is a very nebulous thing in itself. I find there’s a lot of technology out there that was built for the sake of it, solving a problem that might not exist. It might be cool and sexy and fun, but it’s not necessarily getting to the underlying issues clients are facing. So, on that side of the house, I’m identifying companies that are in that very early start-up mode that don’t necessarily need my help from a financial perspective, but more from a positioning perspective and introducing them to clients and prospects that have the problems they’re actually solving.

So that’s my journey and how it’s crafted what we’re doing now at Impec Group.

Sandra

That’s fascinating. We seem to have a little bit of a similar background, because I also started my career in the IT and technology space, way back in 1988. I fell into corporate real estate by accident—I just applied for a job that at the time was office admin/office services, and that role expanded over time. Back then my thing was learning about how to use technology to help you in your day-to-day, at a time when you didn’t really have prop tech readily available. There probably was some stuff back then to manage leases and things like that, but that would have been pretty basic things. When you look back on 15, 20, 25 years ago, and how much prop tech is out there today, there’s a huge mountain of tools out there now. Thinking back, if I was in that role today, where do I even start? How do you figure out what tools are out there and what tools you need? This is very timely because obviously workplace technology is on the rise, lots of start-ups in that space are building new technologies to help organizations manage the workplace. I’m curious, based on what you’re seeing and experiencing, what are companies wanting to measure with these technologies?

Simon

It’s a great starting point – intriguingly I would say that a lot of companies don’t know what they want to measure, or what they really need to measure. And I find it really intriguing. There certainly is proliferation of tech in the market, so there’s a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of investment going to these companies that are certainly striving to be successful, and I’m seeing end users get sucked up in the flow of marketing and events and feeling like they have to buy this tech. But when I sit down and talk to them about what they’re trying to achieve, they don’t necessarily know what that is.

I have one very specific example where a friend of mine said, we need to get a sensor solution by January. I mentioned that I felt that some of the solutions they were looking at weren’t necessarily the right ones, that even by January they might be a little bit redundant, and she said to me, Simon, the CEO wants technology in to measure how many people are coming into the office.

I think you’ve still got a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the pandemic, when it comes to looking at technology around utilization from that perspective. The reality of it is that if you’re just really looking for something to help you determine the flow of people coming back, you can get enough level of detail using a badge card reader. You don’t have to invest in costly infrastructure to do that, or you can look at some more throwaway technologies that can do a great job, but aren’t necessarily a massive capital investment.

That’s the biggest issue right now. People don’t necessarily know what they want to measure, but short term, they seem to want to prove that people are coming back in. I think the smart money and smart players in the field are looking more at the long term. They know that sensors do have the ability to show you that data but more importantly, they can do a lot more. I’m actually hosting a webinar in a few weeks with speakers from Uber, Microsoft and Oracle, around the question, how do we use tech in order to make better space? As we come back into what is likely be a more collaborative area, what spaces are particularly good or bad, by clients, based on utilisation?

The other big piece is going to be looking at the question, how do we make real estate more purposeful? For example, using sensor technologies to identify things like, if our standards say we should have a 6-person meeting room, how often are there more than 3 people in that room, or should we really be building 4-person rooms? And if we have built space for drop-ins and we find that people are dwelling in that space for 8 hours a day, we should re-evaluate what we’re building and how we’re building.

I firmly believe that the pandemic is going to make people more hesitant to go into the office, not from a health perspective, but just from a quality-of-life perspective. I do feel that companies are going to really need to focus on creating a valuable, meaningful workplace in order to get those people back in to the office at the right times. I certainly see that the right types of sensor solutions and data can help do that.

But I think there’s a bit too much short-term motion with the use case. I think people need to focus on, what is the long-term benefit of doing this? Should we be doing this? Can we make do just with badge tape? Because maybe they can! And if not and you’re looking at a longer-term solution, it probably needs to do more than just track utilization. It probably needs to be able to help you understand things like indoor air quality and temperature, and other key aspects of the space as well, because I think those elements, and being able to share that data with your employees, is also going to help encourage people to come back into the office.

Sandra

You’ve touched on quite a few points—the first one I wanted to make was about the pandemic specifically and how that’s really pushed the need for tech in the workplace to the forefront, just because people are trying to manage the safe return to office or just making sure there’s some sort of control in terms of not having the densities that you had before. But you made the point that there are existing data sets within an organization that you can actually use where you don’t necessarily need new technology to do, which lends itself to the whole idea that generally you need to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you run. Are you seeing that companies want the hardcore technology just for the sake of having the technology because it’s available and therefore sort of discounting the existing data sets that are within their organization? Or is it just purely because they don’t really know what the capabilities are with respect to the data sets they do have within their company?

Simon

I think there are certainly instances where you might have a CEO or a head of real estate going to a really cool webinar about a sensor technology, they really like the sales pitch, they really like the visuals, and they say, we’ve got to get this, without really thinking about the purpose of what they’re trying to do. And I think absolutely, they do this without realizing the level of data and information that you can get to without having to make that investment.

For me, the biggest piece is trying to make people think, why are you spending this money? Because if you’re buying sensors that really just track entry and egress and spending millions of dollars, in my mind, that’s money ill-spent. Yes, it’s going to tell you that information, but I think most people would probably opine that in the next 6 months to 12 months, all our data is going to tell you is that we have less people in our office than we expected. So we might get a better level of accuracy—we might say there’s 48% of people coming in whereas your badge readers might not pick up that level, and it might be able to tell you what days are peak and what aren’t, but I don’t feel that investment for that specific use case is worth it, given you can use other data sets.

I see a lot more outside influence in real estate than you ever had before. It’s ironic, because I think real estate leaders for years were asking for a seat at the table, and now the pandemic is giving the whole C-suite visibility because of the need to attract and retain talent.

That was certainly a theme prior to the pandemic, and I think the forward-looking countries and companies were doing that. This is not new. I worked for an Australian company for several years, and 8, 9, 10 years ago the Australian market was going to more of an activity-based model where you weren’t expected to be in the office, it wasn’t 1-to-1 people to seats. So there has certainly been a more holistic view of this.

A friend of mine runs a company that never would have gone to a hybrid model without the pandemic happening. It just wasn’t in the nature of the company, and I think the executives use the stories to the employees that working from home doesn’t work. But now you have an entire globe that can tell you it does. There might be some issues with it, but it does. And the big twist was seeing now the employees have some of that power and that say more than they ever have before.

We’re also seeing the Great Resignation. Our friend Stan Gibson posted the other day about 14 million people having resigned since April from their positions. And I think that’s the fear factor, that you’re going to start losing valuable members of staff, and some companies have. So I think we might have to start looking at some different equations around real estate for how you determine what you should measure by. Because if you look at just pure attrition cost, in a market like I am in Phoenix, losing several high-level employees, executives, etc., may well be more than the actual cost of retaining space that’s not being used. If you’re paying $6000/sqf in Arizona and the average replacement cost is 2x salary, there’s not that many people you’d have to lose to write off the cost differential. And I think people might look at those models slightly differently, which again, would tell me you don’t need to necessarily make a drastic decision about your real estate now because your focus should be on keeping your employees and keeping them happy.

Sandra

I think that’s a valid point, because I think a lot of companies are talking about making decisions about the future of real estate, with the pandemic kind of still hovering over all of us. It feels like it’s still too early. You get some of the insights that people are not returning anywhere near the volumes of what we had before. There’s some consistency that we’re seeing in terms of 20, 30, very rarely 40, 50% back in the office. I think it requires more time to trend and see, is that number going to continue to climb, or is it going to stay at that 30 to 40% mark?

Which, interestingly enough, if you think about how organizations were using space before, that even though working from home or just working out of the office wasn’t necessarily a program that was formalized by many companies, it didn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Like you said, if people weren’t looking at the data before, it seemed like it’s a huge swing from them thinking that they were 100% in the office when maybe they were only at 55, 70% on a good day, and that’s being really generous, and now seeing maybe 40, 50% again on a good day—it seems like a drastic reduction. There’s a lot of eyes now looking at corporate real estate, and the cost savings seems to still be up there, because there’s a tremendous opportunity to say,  well, if we don’t need that much space then we can reduce the amount of space, still keep potentially some vanity space or look to alternative spacing to support our workforce based on whatever the requirements are, or that we deem are necessary for our company, and then call it a day.

Simon

I couldn’t agree with you more. It was crazy to me—many years pre-pandemic you would go to a cubicle farm or an office or a large corporation, you’d walk around and you’d see a few heads, and the comment would always be, oh you know it’s normally busier than this. But if you actually look to the empirical data, as you pointed out, 40 to 60 to 70% was good pre-pandemic. If you weren’t a butts-in-seats kind of company where the expectation was everybody was in, any of those Silicon Valley companies having that number of people actually in the office was good. So I fully agree, if anybody’s expecting 80, 90, 100%, they’re going to be sorely mistaken.

Again, the data was there previously, but people either just weren’t looking at it or they wrote it off as an anomaly. That is absolutely going to change. I think regarding the information at the forefront of this data, the importance of it is right there. And it is going to be scrutinized and it’s going to take a while for everything to play out, and for individuals to work out where when and how do they work best.

I’m in a city in a state that frankly, was probably less oppressive during the pandemic than many other places. I think for people that have been in true lockdowns, I’m thinking of friends in Europe and Australia, they may all say, we want to get back to the office, and they may well go straight back when things open because they’ve been working for home during a pandemic where they can’t go out and do anything. But when you can actually leverage your time, and spend more time with your family or on your golf game or whatever your hobbies are, because you don’t have to travel 2 hours a day, I think that could change. So I think in some of those regions, you might see a big bounce back and get up to maybe even pre-pandemic levels of occupancy, until people sit back and realize, wait a minute, I don’t necessarily have to do this commute every day. And I can do things and work in a different manner. It’s definitely going to take some time to play out.

Sandra

Another question I had was with respect to thinking about corporate real estate analytics in general.  We’re talking about occupancy planning, trying to understand and quantify the opportunity for reduction, redeployment, cost-avoidance, all that fun stuff, and I’m thinking about how it was done in the past. I’ve been doing workplace strategy since 2007. Most of the companies I worked with in the past on the consulting side typically hired consultants to do that. So whether you were part of a large consulting firm, a design firm, furniture suppliers, these were the companies that were coming in and doing an assessment of your space, taking whatever data they could through surveys, looking at badge data or whatever else, going away to work their magic in Excel, and then coming back to the organization with some recommendations, and then obviously with goods and services to follow. With the advancement of workplace technology, are you seeing that there’s more of an appetite from organizations to do it themselves? Or are you seeing that it’s still pretty much dependent on these larger organizations to do that on their behalf?

Simon

I think the appetite is increasing for companies to manage a lot of that information themselves, and I think part of it is driven by cost. I think in the past, these were treated like a one off—they say, we’re going to spend $100,000 and someone will come in and tell us what our portfolios should look like for the next 3 years. But my view, along with seeing recent hires of friends of mine into big roles that are more workplace strategy focused internally, is that’s going to become a table stakes position. Somebody that can actually look across the board and say, where should we be growing, where should we be shrinking, where do we have need for specific types of space, taking into consideration things like cultural aspects, geographic aspects, even just age of the employees and what they might want.

Pre-pandemic, there was a gentleman I met from Cisco who said, your building is the body language of your company. And I think that’s still going to be true to an extent, but now you’re going to also have the workplace experience, whether that be a physical, in-office, or that be the ability to work in a hybrid manner, be big, big aspects of attraction and retention of talent. We’re seeing that already. We’re seeing people leaving positions because they don’t have flexibility. We’re seeing companies like Twitter very, very openly coming out and saying hey, if your company isn’t remote first, or remote favored, then come and join us.

I think having that internal resource is going to be necessary in order to make the right decision for the company, and to understand those cultural aspects of the organization so it’s not cookie cutter, it’s not one size fits all. It’s very much looking holistically. As I say to people, what are we trying to be where we grow up? Where is our company going, where are we focused? And I think it’s going to be a challenge for a lot of people because it’s something they haven’t necessarily done in the past. They probably have a large investment financially in real estate. And there’s certainly also an emotional attachment—if you’ve been with a company for even 5 years and going to the same desk every day for 5 years and now all of a sudden, is it there, is that office even there—it’s going to have an impact.

I believe those internal-focused roles are things that need to be looked at in a similar vein. Today so few companies actually have a real estate technology leader within their organization. I can look at companies like Salesforce who have for many years had them, but a lot of companies don’t have that kind of a role. So they don’t have somebody holistically looking at technology, or the workplace, and I think those are two things needed in order to ensure that the overall strategy of retention of those valuable employees is at the forefront.

Sandra

That’s what we’re seeing as well, that the role of corporate real estate analyst is a relatively new role in organizations. I think that’s probably the reason why a lot of organizations are struggling with trying to voice what they’re looking for, what they want to achieve, what their objectives are. They don’t really quite understand it, and so they look at the shiny object over here—hey, there’s some cool technology, and that’s what we need—and then they bring that technology into the workplace, and are disappointed because it doesn’t deliver what they expected, and they didn’t really have an idea of what it was supposed to deliver in the first place.

The other thing that we find that’s really interesting is the role of IT and HR. Prior to Relogix, I worked in an organization doing workplace strategy enablement, working with HR and IT doing a kind of blend of the corporate real estate analytics with people analytics. It’s not just about occupancy planning per se in terms of how many people can you fit into a building, but also around growth strategy, location strategy, hiring strategy—when you bring this data together and you start to understand the demographics and the makeup of your organization, and what the trending patterns are for certain age groups or tenured groups, or the combination thereof, you can look at that and say, okay, if this is what we look like today, what’s our organization going to look like 5, 10 years from now in terms of the makeup of the organization. You can start to use some of that data that you’re observing and saying okay, this is how this particular group of individuals use space, then you could use that to help shape what the potential future of the office might look like.

So it’s really fascinating, but one of the things that I’ve always been a little bit dumbfounded by is the number of organizations that will do analytics, and turn to their BI team and say, see what you can do with it. But that’s very hard to do if you can’t actually talk that person through what it is that you want. What are the types of questions that you want to ask your data to be able to draw out the insights that you’re looking for? Technology doesn’t do that for you, that’s the business subject matter expert that has to be able to lead that.

Simon

It’s an interesting view—I was going to make the point that now, as opposed to 3 or 5 years ago, there are technologies out there that can help companies get a long way along that journey. I look at an organization like BeyondHQ and Continuum that are commercially available, shrink-wrapped product that help you make some of those determinations. Then I look at other companies like NavigatorCRE who’ve really burst into the scene with BI and data visuals that frankly, blow away companies, some of the bigger service providers that have spent millions of dollars trying to build these solutions, and they put the power of the data in the hands of the user.

Now, to your point, you have to be an astute user to understand exactly what’s coming to you, but technologies can help you with different ways of strategically planning out space, with volumes and volumes of data that you might not traditionally get access to because you’re getting them through your service provider. This is going to put the occupant in the driving seat more and more.

We’ve long had this conversation with friends in the industry about why there isn’t a Zillow for commercial real estate. Why isn’t there a way to connect that data? At the end of the day, it is data. It’s getting the right level of information, and it’s another area—a bit off topic, but—I think could change coming out of the pandemic. Because I think people are going to look at these things with a lot finer view, to say, really, why aren’t we doing this in a more automated, more consistent fashion? In my very simplistic view, if you have a landlord that says, I’m willing to rent this space for $65/sqf, and a tenant who’s willing to pay that, why can’t you connect the two? Right now, the power is probably not in the hands of those two entities as much as it will be going forward. Again, it’s all driven on data and driven on the fact that you can now access commercially available tools to do these things that in the past were done in smoky rooms in the back of an office with a lot of proprietary information.

Sandra

So from a user perspective, considering your feeling that more and more the data and the power is going to be in the hands of the user or the tenant, who do you think would be the ideal consumer of this data within an organization?

Simon

I think, from a consumer perspective, in terms of using data around utilization and workplace etc., there has to be dedicated resources in those kinds of roles. As to your point, they understand what they’re looking at and the value of it, and I think in some areas that just doesn’t happen. I think in some areas, data is getting produced, it’s getting thrown into a PowerPoint or other application, and no one’s getting the value because they’re not actually leveraging that information.

I firmly believe, with a few different data points, you can make a lot of good decisions. If I’m the head of real estate, and I can go to a system and say, show me what leases I have expiring in the next 18 months where utilization is less than 30%, and we have a deferred maintenance cost of X, then that should point me to space we should look at getting out of. And that was even pre-pandemic thinking. So it’s really about taking that data, understanding it, and understanding the value.

One of the greatest analogies I’ve heard was somebody talking about space and saying, they don’t build the parking lot at Nordstrom’s for Christmas Eve. You don’t build space for the possible peak of what it’s going to be. You have to look at the value of it on an ongoing basis. I think that’s going to be one of the biggest challenges for companies. I see, certainly in the US, that traditional companies are saying, we’re going to go hybrid, which can mean a lot of different things but to most, it means you work from home 2 days a week, which to employees means I don’t have to come in on Monday and Friday.

Well, if you can’t do anything to divest of the real estate, then in a year or two years’ time, the CFO will come and say, we tried this hybrid thing, it didn’t really work, we didn’t save any money. You may have way happier employees because of it, but unless you’re able to shed some dollars off the bottom line, then the natural assumption is going to be to push back. That’s where the value of the data and understanding that information really comes to play. I think also, taking that information, you can use it help people determine where their schedules should be in terms of when, where, and how they work. If I was told tomorrow that 3 of my team members are going to be in the office, then maybe I’ll think about going into the office. So I think the data again will drive those behaviours and understandings, but it needs to be appropriately managed, visible, and it needs to tie into other key data sets.

Sandra

You briefly touched upon predictive analytics, we could talk a little bit about that and AI—what are your thoughts on the role and value on artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, specifically in planning for corporate real estate in the future?

Simon

AI is a bit of an overblown term and is tied to a lot of things that aren’t necessarily truly AI-based, but where I think the value comes is in predictive analytics, the predictive capability to understand how much space a company needs and how it’s being used. But then at the micro-level, also, to understand how we should encourage teams to use this to work the best way they can. Not to force them back into the office, but to understand, for example, if this team works this way, then this is the right combination of collaborative vs heads down, and this is how they can work.

I think that also can bring in, from a cost perspective, a third-place component, which is saying, ok, maybe today I don’t want to drive all the way to San Francisco, but I want to be around people. I don’t want to work out of my office because somebody’s knocking down a wall, so I want to go to a WeWork or a Convene or one of those third-party places. And I think from the analytics perspective, it’s coming up with a mechanism to understand all of that.

But my biggest caveat is, without it being onerous on the employee. I was talking to a friend the other day, and they rolled out a workplace experience technology at one of their facilities that was opening up in Australia, and within a week they were asked to remove it because it was too convoluted. You look at a lot of these technologies, and standalone they look great. They do really well. But how well are they playing to the infrastructure of a large corporation? How many apps do people really want to open to get to where they need to get to? And I think that’s where the complexity causes some issues, because you’re going to need the intuition of the technology to help leverage the predictive analytics to be of value. Because if you have a great predictive engine, but I’m never logging in to be told when I should go into the office or what spaces I should use, then it’s pointless.

That’s where a lot of companies are missing the mark. In the sensor world, we just did a report that we made available, where we looked at 20 sensor vendors and I think of the 20, there was only 1, Relogix, which was actually building a platform with the view of absorbing data from other sources. They’re all hardware plays, and they’re not really looking at being able to ingest other data. And to me, that blew my mind, because I’m thinking—longer term, surely the play is the analytics. We don’t really care who the sensor vendor is or what type of sensor this one is, we care about what information we’re getting out of it.

I’m seeing a few different approaches there—one large entity I’ve spoken to is saying, their sensor vendors have to adhere by specific standards, and another large company I work with have said, we’re sole sourcing one product. Which is dangerous. Does that product do what you need it to do? And I do think there’s that gap in the market for an analytics platform that can ingest all of this data around every aspect of how space is being used, regardless of whether it be badge reader or Bluetooth or WIFI or radar or passive infrared, whatever it may be, but to bring that all in—because the other point about infrastructure and why smart lighting sensors never really worked, because if you have to retrofit every single one of your buildings for a specific brand of light, you’re not going to do it.

There needs to be some more thought about that and some more commonality, and an approach to looking at it. The data is the key, the winners are going to be the ones that come up with the best platforms to ingest this data no matter where it comes from. And that’s why when I look at companies like NavigatorCRE, that’s their bread and butter. They pull in information from any source. It might not even be traditional real estate, to give you additional value, and to making those real estate decisions.

Sandra

I know personally I have a gazillion apps on my phone when I was doing consulting. Depending on who I was working with I had to use this app, that app—okay, which app am I supposed to turn on? That gets annoying very, very quickly.

Also, we’ve often thought about, from a purely other-data-source perspective, can you extract that kind of insight from other data sources that will essentially help you understand how people are working together? So, rather than using the active data that might come from an app, can you pull that in from looking at information from calendar data? Or from collaboration that’s taking place? Who’s talking to whom? Not necessarily the subject matter, to some extent, because there’s value in that, as you start to see the networking that’s happening within the organization.

And what’s interesting about that is, as we hear more and more these days about enticing people to come back to the office and all this talk about creating great amenity spaces or this hospitality environment, that’s all great and it may have a wow factor that first day or two, but that wears off really quickly. But when I think about what drives me to want to go and work in this space it’s really, who’s there? Is it someone that’s going to allow me to grow in my career? Is it somebody I want to learn from, that inspires me? That kind of stuff or, just colleagues and coworkers working on a project together, saying let’s all get together today because we’re all going to be in the office, and we need to hammer out a couple of things and it’s better to do it in person. So being able to observe the patterns of that kind of interaction that are taking place, and marrying that to occupancy data and dwell times and all of these things where again, it just becomes another dimension or lens of how you look at your occupancy data, I think will help drive the predictability element. To say, these are the patterns of how people work, this is who they’re working with, why they’re coming into the office and how long they’re staying—looking at that data will help predict potentially what’s going to happen in the future.

Having said that, I was having a conversation this morning about the unpredictability of occupancy and utilization. I’m sure you’ve experienced, surveys go out all the time asking people how many days a week do you want to come into the office, and people will respond a certain way, but then reality is very, very different. So, how do you guess which days Jane Smith is going to be in the office, or the hundred Jane Smiths that are going to be in the office to know that, today we have a demand for X number of seats and tomorrow, a demand of Y. There are ebbs and flows that happen over the course of the day, the week, the month, so on and so forth.

This leads me to the next question which is about what you said earlier about how much of the analysis that was done before was based on moments-in-time data, so just kind of looking at a study, a snapshot, and using that data to form the design and then 3 years later we’re doing it again because things have changed, vs. more of this in-demand real-time data that not only serves to inform occupancy but also can help with other things, to kind of help companies better manage their space. What are your thoughts on that, where it’s more of that always-in, always-on type of situation?

Simon

My boldest prediction coming out of the pandemic is I think you’re going to see the behemoth technology companies, the Microsofts, Googles, Salesforce, come out with products that will help with this. Because I think they’re now realizing the value of the technologies like Slack and Teams etc., coupled with being able to understand and interrogate the interaction of calendars and correspondence. And I think a reason that those companies have never really gotten involved in real estate or workplace in the past was because they didn’t see a big enough dollar value associated to it. And I think that’s changing.

I think if you look at Salesforce, who’s very much going digital HQ, and that’s their sort of mantra, they’ve got to see that the products they produce, slacks, CRM tools etc., can actually really help enable a more fluid hybrid workforce. Microsoft and Google even more so, if I can see, for example, how often is Simon meeting with his team, where is it, how often is it remote, how often is it in person—then I can couple that with sensor data to understand what spaces are best to be used. And then I can look at other interactions through access to those unique data sets. Then all of a sudden, I do get that real-time view of where people are best working, which I think should be the question. I think it’s asinine to ask somebody how many days a week do you want to be in the office because it’s going to depend on the week. There might be a week where you want to be in every day because you want to be heads down, you don’t want distractions at home, and there might be other times that you’re not in the office for a few weeks because you’re doing things of a different nature.

To me, that collision of these bigger companies with a product to sell that is enabling hybrid work, I think will really change our industry drastically. I think, if I was out buying software right now, even looking at booking software of that nature and it didn’t integrate with a Slack or a Teams or a GSuite, I wouldn’t even look at it. Because I think that’s the level that you’re going to get to. I think those players will come in at some point with commercial products that can do a lot of these things, because they’re the ones with all the magic—they have all of the data around connections, correspondence, and if you layer in that sensor and utilization information as well, then that is the secret sauce that people are looking for.

Sandra

I agree. I think from a booking software/calendar, that’s more the intentional side to understanding what the planned demand is for space. It’s similar to asking on a survey, how many days are you planning to come in—I mean, Calendar’s probably really accurate in terms of what’s happening in the course of your day, who are you interacting with, but it doesn’t tell you if it’s a virtual or in-person interaction, so that kind of gives you a little bit of uncertainty around where is that actual interaction happening.

I was just on a call with one of our partners about IWMS and how similarly, IWMS also can illustrate what the intent was for design. So, if you think about going in and doing all the research, whatever the outcome is of that study that ultimately leads to a design, which gets fed into your IWMS from a program perspective to say, ok, we have X number of employees, we provision X number of desks and meeting spaces and so on and so forth—and so even as a starting point, if you just extract the IWMS data and you look at that, you can say, okay, how did we plan our space 10 years ago? What were the assumptions? And now look at it from a standpoint of what’s actually happening today. How are people actually using the space? There’s always misalignment. And that’s where that opportunity is. How do you bring those much more in alignment with each other?

To your point about the variances you see from day to day, week to week, at least in my experience working with gazillions of data lines over the years, is that over time, peoples’ behaviours generally normalize. You’re going to get the randomness of one week they’re in 1 or 2 days and then the next week they’re in 5 days a week. But when you’re looking at it over 6, 12, 18 months or so, quarter over quarter, year over year over year, you generally see plus or minus 5% per user. You generally see consistent behaviour. I think what’s going to be interesting is how the pandemic is going to impact that. We didn’t have that flexibility before, and now we do, and some people have a preference for the office or for not working in the office—is that going to normalize as well, or is that going to be something that’s always fluctuating, depending on what’s happening? Because you have the ability and flexibility to use the space like a tool that you didn’t before.

Simon

That’s the key aspect, that space is just another means to work. That’s what its purpose is, it’s enabling you to work more effectively. Right now, the one business I would not like to be in right now is selling CAFM ). I think traditional space software could, in the short term, die as a result of what could happen out of the pandemic. Companies are going to be way less concerned about things like chargebacks, way less concerned about physical allocation of seats, actual booking into space. I can definitely envisage, if you’re a company that says you know what, we’re going to go hybrid, we’ll allocate 5 to 10% of our seats fixed for people that need them, everything else is drop-in, and all you’re actually doing is requesting access to the building so you understand the supply and demand—why do I need a CAFM solution if that’s the case? I probably don’t.

And I think some of those things could dramatically change. For example, if I don’t have people allocated to space I’m not going to need a Mac capability, because we’re not going to be doing those changes because we’re just going to have space for people to drop in, use, and drop out. And I think some of those things intrigue me, looking at vendor consolidation of companies that have got now several CAFM solutions under their wing—that’s not a bet I would have laid. I could be entirely wrong, but I think the trend is going to be away from that. I don’t see anybody coming post-pandemic and saying you know what, I really need to understand down to the inch my space, so now I’m going to invest in a CAFM solution to give me BOMA measurement standards. That whole thing is going to go away. People aren’t going to care about those comparatives.

Today I was speaking to a friend of mine about a well-known company who’s decided to let all of their leases lapse, take the savings from those leases, and portion on a monthly basis for employees to use so they can either invest in home space or they can use it to go to a WeWork or the like. That company is not going to need those types of solutions anymore. The landlords and the WeWorks might, but I do see there being some real sea-changes coming out of this.

I think, frankly, a lot of companies may be talking to peers, but they’re not necessarily overtly coming out and saying what they’re going to do. When the chips start to fall, I think people are going to be shocked by how big a reduction a lot of companies are going to make in their physical footprint. There’ll be some, Microsoft and Facebook, probably the most active, and Google with their new HQ building in New York, that are looking at more space because they want more collaborative spaces, but you know, they’re also making a lot of money. I think they’ll be in the minority, and I think the hybrid model will veer more towards remote and third-place work, and therefore the impact and need for some of the traditional technologies may go away entirely.

Sandra

I totally agree, I think the flip side of that is that if systems or tools like IWMS are no longer going to be required, and co-working does take off, like many are predicting—I too have actually talked to a customer as well who shared a similar plan where they were just letting their leases lapse for now, and just waiting and seeing, tapping into the coworking spaces and allowing their employees to work wherever it is they felt comfortable. And when the dust settles, figure out what they’re going to do about their real estate strategy, to which I thought, that’s pretty brilliant that you’re able to do that.

But on the flip side, there’s going to be a need to figure out how to manage things like corporate travel, for example. When you used to do your own travel it was one thing, but then Expedia came to be and everyone could book their own travel, so they’re not going use the corporate travel contact, they’re going to go online and book their own tickets. So suddenly, the cost goes through the roof because the company has no visibility into what people are doing. Now, you can minimize that by giving people a fixed amount monthly for renting space or whatever it is, but if that’s not the case, where it’s just more of hey, companies set up a relationship with Regis or with WeWork or whoever, and you reserve a block of seats that are available for your staff, how can you know—are people actually using the space?

So they are pushing the problem to the outside world, and you have no visibility into how your employees are using those spaces, because they don’t have the ability to report back to those companies to say hey, you’ve got 50 seats but only 10% or 15% of those seats are being used. They probably wouldn’t even tell you that because they’re making money off of you regardless of whether you use the seats or not, right.

Simon

It’s an interesting point.  I can see some of the smarter ones, and one I’ve spoken to a bit, and peers in the industry like RXR out of New York—they’re a landlord, but they’re really looking at how to do these things proactively. Because we know they’re coming. So, if you try to sit quiet and hope your tenants don’t realize nobody’s using the space and keep paying the rent, at some point they will probably not be very happy that you have been proactive. Some of those companies are looking at things like utilization and reporting it back to the tenants so the companies now have a space that’s being used. And I think that’s the right way to do it, because you need to have that visibility of data.

As well, unlike maybe coming into the office, I think the human nature is probably going to be, if my company is paying for this, then I do need to go in and use it. But again, the question seems to me to be more so, not how many days do I want to work at home vs third vs in the office, but what am I trying to achieve. What different work styles do I as an individual need to meet my job duties? And where can I deliver those best? That’s the question that just not enough people are asking. Because there’s a lot of vested interest in getting people back to the office—but that’s a different story we could probably spend another hour on. But it’s going to be interesting for sure, just to see how these things evolve.

Sandra

For sure. Well, thank you Simon, thanks for being a guest today, I really enjoyed hearing your insights and our conversation. Any final comments?

Simon

No, I just appreciate the time. I’d say certainly if you’re out there in the market and you’re looking at technology, be very careful about and very prescriptive about the use case you’re trying to meet. What are you actually trying to achieve? Because I think those sort of inadequately defined use cases and requirements for software are the reasons why people can end up with the wrong product. And there are many companies like mine and several others out there that are really geared around helping you ensure that you can make those decisions.

I’m always open, with our industry being as close as it is, to a 30-minute conversation with somebody just to help walk them through how they should start, and where they should look. That’s certainly something I’d be happy to offer to any of the listeners out there.

Sandra

That’s great. Thank you again!

Simon

Thanks, I really appreciate it. Take care!

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Setting and managing goals
• The 40 hour work week
• The Great Resignation
• Purposeful connection in the virtual world
• Building meaning
• Accessibility – Making work work for everyone
• Remote working strategies

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Pam Ross on LinkedIn

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

This week, I’d like to introduce my special guest and friend, Pamela Ross. Pamela is a culture catalyst at Blue Rebel Works, located right here in Toronto. Pam, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started?

Pam

Thank you so much for having me! I’m Pam Ross, and I’m the founder of Blue Rebel Works. I believe that we spend far too much time at work for it to suck, so our purpose is to improve peoples’ lives by making work awesome.

Sandra

Fantastic. When we were talking about the whole ideation around managers and who sets the goals, you gave an example of your employee coming in and inviting you to a meeting and running the meeting. This kind of makes you wonder, if managers right now are struggling with the whole idea of setting the goals and then managing the goals, to me it wouldn’t be any different. If you’re setting the goals, you’re setting the goals.

I know from personal experience and others that I’ve spoken to that people will sometimes go through a good portion of the year without goals. It can get overlooked. Then, at the end of the year, you’re scrambling to complete the process that requires you to fill out a review form with your goals.

It makes you wonder, is it because management has been more complacent because there wasn’t a requirement, or should there now be a requirement for goals because everyone needs clarity? Especially as a manager, you’re held responsible for the outcomes and output, so if there’s no goal—whose responsibility is that? I don’t personally think there is a difference based on whether you’re in the office or working virtually from that perspective—but, it feels like there is because the work experience is very different from the in-person work experience.

Pam

I agree that there isn’t actually a difference, but there is the perception of a difference. If I see you coming in to work every day, I assume that you’re getting your work done, even if I’m not clear about what the work is. So if I don’t see you, I don’t know if you’re getting the work done, I still don’t know what the work is—it’s not deliberate complacency, it’s just how we’ve learned to manage work.

This is where I’d love to challenge our ways of thinking—what if we never had offices? What if we had never said 40 hours a week was the right amount of work to put in? Why did we go along with that? Why have we continued to go along with that?

I was reading an article the other day that looked at a prediction from the 1930s about technological advances. They had said, within 50 years, people would be working something like 20 hours a week instead of 40 because of technological advances. Well, we didn’t do that. We kept working 40 hours a week, and more.

Now, we’re continuing to reduce headcounts to increase the objectives or increase the amount of work people have to do, and people are putting in more and more hours. I really want to challenge corporations to think differently about why they exist. Is it really all about profit? How could you actually make a difference in peoples’ lives and the lives of all the people who work for you? How could you add value to their lives instead of just being something they have to do for one third of their lives that’s sucking their souls?

I really think there’s an opportunity to re-think that, because everyone I talk to is overwhelmed. You mentioned burnout earlier—you’ve heard about the Great Resignation, right? To me, it’s a great opportunity. People are leaving, but what if we re-thought work totally and created workforces or—not work places, because I don’t think it has to be a place—but what if we created organizations where people could be connected and work there without feeling like they had to quit their job to live a great life? What if you added to peoples’ lives instead of just taking away 8 or 10 hours a day from their lives?

Sandra

That’s a really good point. I think that’s what the pandemic has surfaced for a lot of people—just having the time to reflect on their priorities and how much time is actually invested in work. The thing is, we all work for different reasons. Some people work for money more than anything else, and some people have the privilege of being able to do what they love and follow their passion. But I would venture to guess that the majority of people are working to pay the bills. So, it almost feels like some organizations hold people hostage with the idea that, if you don’t like how we do things, then leave, go find a job somewhere else.

And the reality is, if companies want to win, they need to be able to address the fact that not just their employees, but the whole world has gone through this period together. They have come to the realization that there’s more to life than just work. Nobody’s saying we don’t want to work, but give us the choice.

You’ve probably heard just as much as I have around all the reasons why you need to be in the office.

Pam

We need to connect, we can’t really collaborate without being together—it’s all honestly BS, if you actually take a few steps back and look and re-imagine.

Sandra

And to your point too, it’s not because you’re saying that everything should be online—yes, it’s possible to do much of the stuff that you do in person online. It doesn’t devalue what you do. I’ve had numerous conversations, and been introduced to so many people in the past year online that I’ve never met and probably never will, just because of where they’re located. It’s no less real than actually meeting the person in real life for a coffee or a lunch.

It’d be nice to be able to do that—there’s the social element of that. Maybe in the virtual world it’s more purposeful, there’s more of an objective for why you’re connecting. And sometimes that objective isn’t necessarily business; it could be to learn from each other, which I’ve experienced tremendously in the past year. You’re just curious to know how other people are feeling and thinking, and what their opinions are about the direction work will go in. Whoever you may be, it can help to get those different perspectives. But it doesn’t take away from the realness of the relationship.

So, the conversation that seems to be underpinning the push to return is, you have to go back to the office in order to maintain the realness and value of that relationship. I’m not buying it.

Pam

I mentioned someone started on my team on Monday—she’s in British Colombia and will probably spend part of her time in France, because that’s where her family is. So, I’ll likely never meet her in person. But I don’t feel like that should hold me back from getting a great person for the position.

The other thing that came to mind for me is when you said, people won’t choose not to work. No, absolutely! People want meaning and they want to feel like they’re making a contribution. Absolutely, people are not going to choose not to work.

There’s no one-size-fits-all. Today, I can personalize the jeans that I’m going to buy, but I can’t design my way of working. Rather than thinking there’s a one-size-fits-all for your introverts,

your extroverts, your neurodiverse, even able-bodied versus people with disabilities, there are so many opportunities if we just allow people to figure out how they can get their work done.

I know you shouldn’t get your news from memes, but I saw a meme of people who are disabled saying hey, can’t we work from home? That would really help me to be able to do the work, and able-bodied leaders said no, this has to be done in the office. And then all of a sudden, the pandemic hits and able-bodied leaders are saying we can all work from home now. That’s what it took, but people with disabilities had been asking for this kind of thing for years.

There are so many opportunities to rethink how we’ve been thinking about work.

Sandra

In an earlier podcast, a guests said sometimes the resistance to flexible work is because there are too many things to think about. There are so many stones to turn over and it’s hard to figure out what to address first. And it’s just easier to bring everybody back and put everything back the way that it was.

But when you think of it from the standpoint of what companies do, even the example you gave around disabled people, like investing money to fix the physical place to enable people to go to work there—how much more access can you give to people by just allowing them to work from the comfort of their home? Especially if it’s something they desire.

Pam

Even if you think about some people living in Toronto, I have clients living in small condos in Toronto that can’t wait to be able to come back to the office so they can get out of their little space. So, some people are going to love going in to the office a certain number of days a week. Your extroverts might want to get together for beers after work, but your introverts—some people hated that the whole time and were forced into these unnatural social situations that they hated. So this is an opportunity to allow people to work in the way that fits them best.

Your comment about uncertainty really resonated with me. When I talk to executives, they say—well, nobody’s got this figured out. There’s no one to get the playbook from. But actually, there is. GitLab has a playbook for remote work, and there are some companies that have been doing this for a while. There are tonnes of information out there, maybe even too much information, and it can be a little overwhelming. I’m also trying to create something that would be a super simple guidebook. But leaders like to be able to make good decisions with certainty, and it’s very scary for them not to have the answers. So, I think that’s a huge part of this too—that’s where the ego comes into play. They think, I can make a decision to do what I know will work, to bring people back.

But what if you came at this with more of an agile mindset? What about thinking, let’s test this way of doing it, and measure it, and see what’s working and do that for a few months, get

together and look at what worked and didn’t work, and tweak it. You can be tweaking it! It’s going to look different for every organization, every team, so why not choose your own adventure and figure it out as you go along?

Sandra

I agree, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s such uncertainty, there’s no one place to turn, and everybody’s kind of on their own figuring it out, even though we’re all going in the same direction. I’ve said over and over again, every company is unique because of the makeup of the people in that organization. So, the GitHubs and the Googles and the Apples, the way they’re approaching work or have traditionally approached work, is to look at what works for their people. And what works for one company won’t necessarily be applicable to another company. It doesn’t work that way. You need to know how your people are behaving, what’s working, what’s not working, and as you say—tweak it and iterate over and over until you’ve got something that’s working. You’ll get to a point where everyone is happy, and that also enables you to attract a certain type of worker that wants to work within that kind of environment.

It’s definitely an interesting topic as it relates to the view of management and how you approach the future of work, and being able to make a decision when you don’t have anything to guide you except your gut. But I think this is where leadership and management have an opportunity to shine.

Pam

We’re working with some clients right now to teach their leaders a process to engage the team in figuring out what work needs to be completed in the next 3 months, how to best get it done, and how often to meet and collaborate—it’s the process of making a roadmap for your team. You do this, and then iterate. Check in and ask yourself if it’s working, and keep iterating on that. But it takes a leader to be able to engage people and be purposeful about where you’re going, what you need to complete, and then engage your people in the solution and let them get the work done.

I think there’s so much potential and opportunity and I really hope that we don’t get stuck in small tactical decisions instead of looking at things more broadly. If we just do those small things, like re-design the office, you’re not going to tackle the underpinning issues, and you’re probably just going to end up bringing people back in to the office.

Sandra:

Well, thank you for your time today, I really enjoyed this conversation. There’s always more to uncover and learn, so again, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

Here at Relogix, we talk about the importance of understanding the data on what people intend to do versus what they actually do. But normally it’s in the context of occupancy analytics and how people use spaces. Now, it’s time to talk about the intentional versus the actual behaviour of leaders.

Employers and employees are trying to set out a new way forward, but there’s a huge disconnect between everyone’s wants, needs, and expectations. We have to find ways to bridge those gaps. We’ve had 18 months of workplace hokey pokey, and it may seem like the finish line is in sight. But the journey’s just beginning—and the control and certainty that employers gave up all those months ago is not about to come back.

Everything we know has changed forever. Where people work is sometimes out of our control, but when and how we work is up for grabs.

In order to build strong foundations for our people and organizations to thrive, we need to do three things:

1. We need to show intentional leadership.
2. We need to work with our people to get it right.
3. And we need to sweat the small stuff.

Everyone’s got questions at this point. You may think they’re trivial, but phrases like “there are no silly questions” and “if you’re thinking it, others are too” are popular for a reason. Getting clear on these kinds of small details are what’s going to make or break an organization’s return to the office.

• I know I need to come into the office 3 days a week, but how will I know if my colleagues will be there on the same days?
• How will hybrid meetings work?
• Do I need to take my laptop home, even if I’m coming back to the office tomorrow?
• Should my team meet together in person? How often?
• How do I know if my colleagues are working and if they are contactable?
• Is working flexibly just about location, or can the time be flexible too?
• I’ve worked just fine at home for 18 months—why do I have to come back to the office?
• What exactly do I want from work? My workplace? My colleagues? My boss?

• How do we get our people back to the office?
• How often do we want people to come in?
• How do we manage what days people come in?
• What type of work will our office be used for?
• How do we know people are working?
• How do we keep our people?

• How do I know how many people are coming and when?
• How do I make sure I have enough fire marshals / first aiders / security / catering?
• What types of spaces do people want and need?
• Will visitors return in person? How many?
• Will there be a peak in usage on Monday? Will there be a drop on Friday? How do we manage that?
• Do we have too much space?
• Are people’s declared intentions (gathered from surveys, workshops, etc.) in line with their actual behaviours?

Many organisations have made public their plans for how work is going to look for them in the future. Among the strategies we’ve seen so far, “hybrid working” is taking centre stage. That being said, the discussion is mostly about the use of space, rather than about culture, ways of working, and the employee experience—and that’s a dangerous position.

Our human nature desires clear, solid answers, but we don’t have these—and we won’t for some time. Over the next few months, we have to keep testing, learning, and adapting. We need to find the balance between a customer-focused approach, an employee-led approach, and employer comfort in relation to how people are working and if they’re being effective in their roles. And we need to continue with this approach into the future, in order to keep evolving.

• Deep listening
• Focusing on transparency
• Embracing not knowing the answer
• Nurturing relationships and connection
• Exercising trust and curiosity
• Making decisions based on smart data

• Leaders role modelling behaviours
• Hosting town halls
• Senior leaders organizing Q&A drop-in sessions
• Sharing personal experiences
• Communicating workplace etiquette
• Forging guiding principles with your employees
• Visiting the company’s mission and values
• Assessing what data you have, and what data you’ll need for the future

There’s no right answer or right approach—there are only the right questions to ask. Organizations will need to sort through the simple-but-wrong answers to find the complex-but-right answers.

One thing is for sure: the behaviours that got us to this point are not the ones that will get us to the future. But what the future looks like is up to us all.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Returning to “normal”
• Resistance to the new normal
• Control over schedules
• Adapting old ways of work to home
• Rethinking work
• The changing role of management
• Self-management
• Managing the outcomes of work
• How many zoom meetings do we need?

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Pam Ross on LinkedIn

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

This week, I’d like to introduce my special guest and friend, Pamela Ross. Pamela is a culture catalyst at Blue Rebel Works, located right here in Toronto. Pam, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started?

Pam

Thank you so much for having me! I’m Pam Ross, and I’m the founder of Blue Rebel Works. I believe that we spend far too much time at work for it to suck, so our purpose is to improve peoples’ lives by making work awesome.

Sandra

Fantastic. So, it’s mainly management and leadership who set the stage for what the larger culture of the organization is. To me, there seems to be a lot of resistance at that level around defining what the future of work looks like. There seems to be this belief that in some shape or form, we’re going to go back to normal, whatever that is. I’ve heard from several people all over the world that they believe that, at some point, this is all going to go away, people are just going to go back to work, and everything will just go back to the way that it used to be.

We obviously have a great opportunity ahead of us to change the course of history and to look to the future to essentially improve so many aspects of our lives, society in general, the environment—and yet you have this resistance which seems to be stemming from the leadership level. Do you have any thoughts or insights as to what might be causing that resistance?

Pam

So, short answer—ego. When you think about it, executives already have flexibility. Nobody’s telling an executive they can’t leave early or work from home, in most companies. In most organizations, a senior executive is already managing their life and work. For them to say we have to go back to work—it doesn’t affect them the same way. They’re still going to want to go to the office sometimes and they’ll do that. They’re going to need to work from home sometimes and they’re going to do that. But then to insist on a standardized policy for everyone else, I think is counter.

I was just reading a funny article that had adapted Tim Cook’s email about coming back to the office and written it in a funny format instead. It said things like, the real reason for the return-to-office is that I really need people around me to stroke my ego more often. I don’t think it’s ego to quite that extent, but I think it’s the unconscious ego of being in control, or the perception of having control over what’s happening. Executives have control over their own schedules—what people want is control over their schedules.

As you know I’m a huge fan of Results Only Work Environment (ROWE). There was just a new article in the New Yorker a few days ago, and Jody Thompson, who’s the founder and creator of ROWE said, employees don’t want flexibility, they want total control over their schedules. I would agree for a lot of people. Now, I think there are some people who would rather just have someone tell them when to come to work, because it’s easier, and they want someone else to manage that. I’m willing to be challenged on that. But I do think that senior leaders already have flexibility so they’re not really thinking about how that impacts a regular person day to day.

I think a lot of time, they have good intentions. They’re thinking, let’s give people flexibility, let’s give them Fridays off, or move to a 4-day week, or let them work from home on Mondays and Fridays so they can have long weekends, etc. They’re giving employees these structured flexibility plans, but that’s a bit of an oxymoron. People would rather control when they have their days off. I see a lot of frustration with those plans, because for example, some people might run payroll on Fridays. So now they feel like this isn’t fair, everyone else gets to work from home on Fridays but I have to go into the office for payroll. Why don’t we just let people figure out what they have to do to get their work done?

We’re so used to thinking that work is measured by time and attendance, and not thinking about just letting people get the work done. Through the pandemic, we saw people working from home and working even more hours. Tonnes of studies say they’re working more hours than they did when they were coming in to the office. Maybe a parent is working from home but also homeschooling, so then if they feel like they didn’t put in their hours, then they have to work later at night—and then they’re putting in even more hours in because they’re back and forth on email or Slack. There’s this overwhelm that was happening for so many people.

Instead, what if we were just really clear about what our objectives are, what you really need to get done? Maybe you don’t have to be online from 9 to 5 while you’re homeschooling. Just figure out when you want to work to get your tasks done. I think people were trying to manage their time in a world where that time couldn’t be 9 to 5 for so many of us. It led to some really unhealthy ways of working. So instead of just adapting our old way, we need to re-think how we’re managing work, and what work is.

Sandra

I totally agree, I think that’s part of the problem right now—there’s this push and pull between going back and going forward, and a lot of the habits that we had in the workplace have now been transferred to online, causing this overwork. I was reading articles too about how burnout is at an all-time high because we’re constantly connected, we’re constantly working. Even though you can shut your computer down, you’ll still get the ping from Slack or email. And yes, you have the choice not to respond, but it’s there.

Pam

And what does your culture say about that, right? How is that actually recognized?

Sandra

Exactly. You were talking earlier about the management role and the ego—how much do you think the role of management and leadership is changing? Is it threatened? Could we even go as far as saying management might not even be a requirement anymore? In an office environment, people are there to oversee their teams. Now, in a virtual world, it feels more equal. Everybody has a voice, people can communicate, create micro-teams, and work on projects that the manager might not necessarily have oversight on, but it’s all deliverables-based. We have an objective, we have a deliverable, so you figure out how to make it work. So what’s the role that managers play in this new world? You could be spending your entire day in meetings.

Pam

And many are!

Sandra

And not actually get any work done! There’s this recognition that you can’t have that many meetings, you can just let people work. What is the impact on the managers who used to be managing and overseeing all of that? Maybe that requirement isn’t there anymore.

Pam

Self-management has been around for decades. There are lots of organizations that don’t have managers. You make agreements with the team depending on the roles you play in the organization, and there’s democratic decision-making. There’s actually a lot of structure in a self-managed organization around how decisions are made and how the meetings are held to make the decisions, but there isn’t a person who is in a hierarchy above or making the decisions for people. I’d love to see more self-managed organizations.

It does require a big shift. I have a very small team—I have 2 part-time people on my team and then 2 sub-contracted facilitators. I just hired the second part-timer, and I was thinking, how do I not be her manager? I don’t want to feel like I’m managing someone. I don’t want to make the decision about how often we want to meet. Instead, the question is, what do we think together will help us both be successful here? She decided on her first day to put some questions together and lead a market strategy meeting with me. This is awesome, but it is different for me—I was thinking I had to structure what she needed to work on. But if she tells me what’s needed, then why would I do that? She’s the expert in her field. And even for me, who has studied self-management, I’ve taken courses, I’ve worked in self-managed teams outside of my business—it’s still a big shift in thinking. I’d love to see more of that.

I’m thinking back to a study Google did a few years ago where the question was, could they manage without managers? They ended up deciding that managers were essential. But the function of managers was seen as coaching, sharing vision, and that sort of thing. Do you need to be a manager to be someone’s coach? I would suggest not. And in fact, there are people that are better coaches for you outside of your manager. It’s a deeper question, what that management role is.

I think there is opportunity. I’m guessing that most companies won’t go that far. But who knows —if it was going to happen, now would be a great time!

Sandra

It’s true! You said earlier that people could just figure it out if they were given the opportunity to. I’ve often asked, are we over-engineering this whole return-to-office idea of what the future of work will be, where instead we should just let people figure it out? They have control over their schedule and they know what’s expected of them. That could open up a whole other conversation around goals and how you measure success, but imagine just having the autonomy to make the decision and to give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re going to do the right thing. And if they don’t, then obviously there’s going to be repercussions, and people need to understand that.

Imagine if you gave people the freedom to choose when they wanted to be in the office, and you gave people the freedom to choose their time of work. Obviously, there’s flexibility because sometimes you’re going to be required to work on a Friday because you’re working on a project, or you might be required to work till late at night because you have a client on the other side of the world. But then the next day, you can basically take that time back, or start a little bit later or whatever, and you still get your work done. When you’re in the position to be able to make those decisions, and not feel like you’re being watched or that you’re being judged or measured for productivity because you’re not sitting in front of your computer and working for the 9 hours or 7.5 hours a day, it changes your mindset.

I think when you have that level of freedom and ability to make those choices, I know from my personal experience, I’ve always been way more willing to put more into it than when it’s when you know that you’re being watched. You kind of think, I’m not giving more than what’s expected.

Pam

This goes back again to what your cultural norms are and patterns of behaviour. I’ve worked in the corporate world and in specific companies, your time at work was such a measure of whether you were high-performer. So, people would talk all the time about being so busy, having to be at the office all weekend, having to miss their child’s recital, because you got recognized for the time you spent. Now, were we more productive than any other place? I would say definitely not.

Can I talk just briefly about ROWE? Because I really love the way it thinks about work—it’s 100% autonomy and 100% accountability. This is where people go wrong, they think—we just give everyone all the autonomy, without getting clear about what they’re responsible for and what the required outcomes are. Then you lose the accountability piece and it’s just a free-for-all, and we might not meet any objectives. You need both.

That’s where a lot of organizations and managers are going wrong right now—because they don’t know how to manage the outcomes of the work. The easiest way to manage people is to know that they worked 8 hours. In a ROWE, you don’t say, I left early today but I’ll put in extra hours tomorrow. You don’t talk about time. You just get your work done. I really think that’s such an effective way to think about work.

You need to really get clear on the outcomes your role is responsible for, and then in a ROWE, what happens is people start to be more pro-active. For example, I’m working with Sandra, and I can’t assume that she’s going to be available 9 to 5. I have to think about what I’m going to need from Sandra ahead of time so that she has a heads up and knows what I need from her so that she can figure out how to get it done in her own way. People get used to being more personally responsible and collaborating in different ways. Because your job and your outcomes depend on other people all the time, you just have to communicate better.

One of the principles of ROWE which I love is that every meeting is optional. I’m hearing now that people are in Zoom meetings all the time. In the office before, you used to pop by someone’s desk to ask a question. I think what’s happened is we don’t have those pop-bys, so now we schedule meetings to do all those check-ins on all those things we used to just casually drop by and check on.

This is where I say: don’t adapt, re-invent. Adaptation is to say, we used to meet about this this way, now we’ll meet about it this way. Re-inventing would be, what if I could never speak to a person live? How would I do this differently? What would be a different way of managing this? Collaboration used to be in a board room with a whiteboard, so we adapted to an online white board in a Zoom meeting. Well—no. Re-think that. How can you be collaborating asynchronously? Our team sometimes just opens a Google doc and we’re not even on a call, but 2 or 3 of us will be in there working together. It’s this little burst of collaboration even though we don’t have to talk. There are so many ways to collaborate without being in a meeting with a whiteboard.

Sandra

That’s really interesting—we do the same thing. We have Slack in our organization and when I first joined Relogix, it was interesting because I had worked in large enterprise organizations that used Exchange, for the most part. And everything was by email—you’d get a long list of emails every day. And transitioning over to Relogix, we use Slack internally, which is like a chat to quickly reach out to someone, so it’s kind of like walking up to somebody in the office. It’s also useful for updates—there are a series of different channels for different projects, private groups or teams that are being formed because we’re collaborating on a project together, and ideas and questions get posted there. And it doesn’t have to all happen at the same time. Somebody will post a question or an update, and then people will chime in at different times of the day or over the course of the week. And sometimes those conversations last for a long period of time.

The other thing that we also started to do was whiteboarding. We’re using tools like Mirror where you can asynchronously start to build an idea out and you have the ability to move stuff around, you can see who did the edits, who said what, who did what.

I think a lot of the resistance in corporate is because of the traditional tools that you’re given. Even in terms of the transition from one company to the next—when I was working in large corporate organizations, the tools that were available to me as a user made or broke my ability to be successful. I always tell the story of leaving an organization where they had adapted their network and then going to an organization where the network system and even the email system they were using was extremely outdated. If you work so many years using Outlook and Exchange, and you suddenly have to re-learn how to use a tool you haven’t used in 7 years, this has an impact on your productivity. I think that’s a key element to it as well.

Pam:

Yes!

Sandra:

Well, thank you for your time today, I really enjoyed this conversation. There’s always more to uncover and learn, so again, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• New ways of managing and leading teams
• Trust and empathy in leadership
• What is work really?
• Is company culture dependent on the office?
• Culture eats strategy for breakfast
• Blending behavior with culture and strategy
• Countering culture creation

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Pam Ross on LinkedIn

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

This week, I’d like to introduce my special guest and friend, Pamela Ross. Pamela is a culture catalyst at Blue Rebel Works, located right here in Toronto. Pam, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started?

Pam

Thank you so much for having me! I’m Pam Ross, and I’m the founder of Blue Rebel Works. I believe that we spend far too much time at work for it to suck, so our purpose is to improve peoples’ lives by making work awesome.

Sandra

Fantastic. I know that you’re very much involved in leadership and management conversations in organizations, that everything is up in the air and nobody knows what the future really holds, but I wanted to get a sense from you about what you’re hearing and seeing from that perspective. Are there some emerging themes in management and leadership that we haven’t seen before or is it pretty much the same old thinking?

Pam

I tend to come at things with mostly an optimistic viewpoint, so I think we’re seeing some new things that are really hopeful for the future. I’m hearing a lot of talk about how much managers have had to adapt to being more empathetic and building stronger connections with people. In the past, in our conversations with managers, they were so focused on the operations and the work, and they didn’t understand why they would waste time getting to know someone personally or spending time talking about personal lives. Over the course of the pandemic, that was one thing that we definitely saw shift. People were seeing how much that helped to build trust and to help people as they were working from home. That’s one thing that I hope continues—this shift to more human management and leadership.

I do think some leaders are having a struggle balancing this empathy with the accountability for the work, which is a whole other challenge. I think it relates back to some of the conversations you and I have had about what work really is. People haven’t gotten clear about work. Going forward, I would love to not just adapt what we’ve done in the past, but really re-invent how we’re thinking about that.

With regards to the return to the office, I don’t know anyone who is saying everyone is going to come back to the office 100% of the time. Most of the companies I’m talking to are looking at hybrid models, which are different based on many different factors. And it’s so fascinating, Sandra—you and I have known each other for several years and have been talking about new ways of working for a long time—and I don’t know about you, but I always saw a lot of resistance to “these things can’t be done from home” or “people have to come to the office for certain things”, so seeing people realize that employees can be productive from anywhere has been great. I hope that we don’t return or go back to the old ways.

So those are a couple of things I’m seeing. As well, there’s a huge movement for diversity, inclusion, and belonging that is so needed. Companies have been talking about it for a long time, but I’m seeing some more movement actually happening, and some deeper commitments. We’ll see if the commitments play out.

Sandra

You’ve raised a lot of good points about current discussions and some of the challenges we’re facing right now. When you spoke about empathy and “what is work”, you alluded to the fact that we’re hoping that this empathy is going to continue past the pandemic, as people come back to work. But do you think that, at the management and even at the leadership level, there is an understanding of what work really is? We’re hearing a lot of conversations on why people should go back to work—from a cultural perspective, for collaboration and innovation, etc.—but it makes you wonder, is that just ideas from what we’ve been told, or what we think work is? That’s very different from the reality that employees are now voicing, with regards to having the flexibility to work in a way that’s more convenient and comfortable to them as individuals.

Pam

My brain is going in so many different directions as you bring up culture and connection. First of all, if your culture is dependent on your office, then I’m worried about that. Your culture is actually the pattern of behaviours of your employees, and if that is dependent on going to an office or being in a space, then I am worried about how you’re thinking about culture. I love getting together face to face with people (although I’m probably in this group of people who are hesitant about that coming out of the pandemic—I actually can’t imagine going back to full rooms of people).

But that’s not what your culture is. Your culture is how people are behaving, how they’re serving your clients and customers, it’s their day-to-day decisions and what they’re basing those on. If that’s dependent on going to work and being able to have water cooler conversations, then your culture is not very strong. So, I don’t think that’s a good excuse.

I do think you have to be more intentional about communicating culture and how you’re making decisions when you’re working remotely.

That being said, I’m actually challenging my own thinking on that. Sometimes we think that culture is more explicit because we’re in one place, when actually it isn’t, unless we’re communicating why we’re making our decisions. Regardless, I think that’s a good thing to think about, whether you’re bringing people back to the office or not.

Sandra

Prior to joining this podcast, I was in a chat conversation with someone who made the comment which we’ve heard many times before, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. You’re probably familiar with that. Lately I’ve been thinking about if that still holds true.

To your point, if your decision is to rely on the physical space to define the culture, there’s a strategy behind that. The culture doesn’t just magically appear, and the culture’s not just what we say the culture is going to be. There’s the element of integrity and actually following through with what you say you’re going to do.

Right now, all eyes are on organizations about how they’re going to respond to the return to work, and what the future of work is going to look like. It seems like there’s a struggle between needing the physical office because that’s how you develop and define the culture, versus just having a strategy around who you are as an organization first, and from that, develop a culture, which may or may not include workplace. What are your thoughts there?

Pam

First of all, I think your culture and your strategy really go hand in hand. If you have a strategic objective, whatever that is, like selling your business in 3 years, growing the business, or a more purposeful objective around making a difference in a certain number of peoples’ lives—your culture is how you meet that objective. So, if you have a strategy and you haven’t thought about the behaviour that’s going to get you to that strategy, you’re missing out on the culture piece and you’re probably not going to reach that objective.

When I think of culture and strategy and how they work together, I’m looking at: where are you going, what’s your vision, and what are the patterns of behaviours of the people across your organization that are going to help you get there? And we can layer back, looking at those behaviours, and what values they’re based on, and really start to instill those in your culture. Because if you don’t do that, then you’re not going to meet your strategy. So that’s how I see them play out.

I just saw that a couple of weeks ago, Google came out and said they’re going to have people coming back to the office 3 days a week, and 2 days a week they can work wherever they want. But some jobs will have to be in the office every day, and everyone’s waiting to find out whether they can relocate. And then, just today, I read an article that said one of the senior executives at Google announced he was going to work from New Zealand.

Sandra

I heard about that too.

Pam

When you’re doing things like that—you haven’t made a decision about anything for your larger employee base and then you have senior executives making a decision that goes counter to the culture they’re saying they want to create—if you haven’t really thought about culture, how we make decisions, what do we base our decisions on, then you’re creating culture that’s not the culture you say you’re going to create. The integrity of the culture isn’t there.

Sandra

That’s great. Well, thank you for your time today, I really enjoyed this conversation. There’s always more to uncover and learn, so again, I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Post-COVID workplace strategy development
• Aligning workplace strategy decisions to corporate strategy
• Employee-driven workplace strategy
• Will the future office be empty?
• Balance of power shifting to the employee
• Offering choice and flexibility
• Slow down the decision-making process

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn
• Vik Bangia on LinkedIn

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

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

Vik

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

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

Sandra

That’s amazing! So, thinking about how you would approach the development of workplace strategy prior to COVID, do you think that the approach to developing workplace strategy will be different going forward?

Vik
I haven’t really changed my approach to developing workplace strategies pre- or post-COVID. My mantra has always been that any kind of change or any kind of workplace strategy needs to be a democratic process and needs to be bottom-up. You need to get all the people involved in the decision and really take stock of what their opinions and perspectives are. Bring them along in the process, and even if you don’t end up doing exactly what they say, giving them a voice in the decision is great.

The top-down, push-down approach to workplace strategy—I don’t think it works. We’ve done this in a few different places before. I used to call it the “build it and they will come”, “Field of Dreams” type of approach, where you say: we want people to collaborate, be more open, more productive, so we’re going to do this and then they will be. If we give them open space, they’ll collaborate. If we get rid of their cubicles, they’ll collaborate. If we get rid of private offices, well, it’s privacy that’s driving the problem. Privacy is the enemy of collaboration, let’s force people to get together and they will naturally collaborate.

I’ve never subscribed to that. I’ve always said it’s got to be very organic and a bottom-up approach. So, my approach hasn’t really changed. It’s just been more on the listening end these days to the folks that are telling me more about what they need, not just in the workplace but how they need to balance their lives with their workplace.

Sandra

One of the things that I’m very passionate about and the way I’ve always approached workplace strategy was, when you look at corporate organizations and you look at what they indicate they value—you turn to their annual reports or their CSR reports or sustainability reports, where they identify some of their goals and their mission—you usually see things like diversity, inclusion, wellness, sustainability. They have very specific goals. The question is, how does the workplace strategy, or the approach that you’re going to take to the future of work, align to the goals that you actually have as an organization? So, corporate real estate aside, the decisions that you’re making about how you’re going to integrate workplace as part of who you are as a company, sends a very strong message to the outside world. There’s an optics element to the decisions.

We’ve seen some backlash to some of the decisions that have been publicly stated by Apple and Google and some other things going on in that world. But when you think about what they say or have said traditionally that they care about, and then you see things like that at the forefront, it kind of makes you wonder—what do they really care about? Because we’ve heard time and time again that some of these mission statements and value statements are more marketing-driven. Now companies have a real opportunity to demonstrate what they truly care about, and yet there seems to be this craziness and misalignment around the two. In your experience in talking to organizations, how often does that come up, the desire to align the decision-making around the future of work to actual corporate strategy?

Vik

I’ve seen some of the same press from some organizations, where there is a very top-down command-and-control-driven statement—“you’ll be in the office or else”—and I don’t think that’s a very healthy way of approaching the discussion. The clients that I work with have all taken the pulse of their employees. It still ties to the value-driven piece of this because they’ll say, we want to make this a new initiative that you’re a part of—but we want it to fulfill our company’s goals. It’s a matter of marrying the two.

But you also have to take into account the company’s cultural capacity for change. An enormous amount of change is difficult for any company to withstand, so this has to be done in a way that allows for “successive approximation” —you try something, see how it goes, take surveys, learn from it, and then you do it again. Over time you get closer and closer to the actual place that you want to be. But you don’t leave your people behind.

I think those statements that I’ve seen from some leaders, especially in the financial services and investment world, seem to be ripe for backlash. There’s a lot of sentiment that people are incredulous about what they’re seeing—how can somebody actually say some of that stuff? I think that’s really important, listening to people and having really active engagement to inform what kind of direction you want to take.

That’s what I always do with my clients, too—I don’t come in and, as a consultant, say, here’s what I think you should do. Instead, I take a good snapshot of the company’s corporate culture, and then, within their culture and set of values, ask a lot of probing questions of the employees as to what they want the future to look like. They know the answer, and they really want to tell somebody. And as long as I can create that open channel so they can speak those requirements or requests to their leadership, there’s a better chance that some of that will actually take place.

Personally, if I was approached by a new client who wanted to do a forced-down kind of approach, I would probably not take the assignment, just because it’s not my style to think that way.

Sandra

When that whole thing was playing itself out, and we were just kind of watching the responses of the employees, I’d go on Reddit and read from the employees’ mouths what they were feeling. There was a huge disconnect between what some of these companies are saying and then what the employees are actually saying.

Somebody made a comment to me, what if companies were to all band together and basically push this agenda that people will come back to work, without being given a choice? There was this whole conversation of the “Great Resignation”, that was the coined term for this year—if companies weren’t giving people the flexibility to choose, then people will just quit and go work for companies that did provide that flexibility. This individual made a comment that said, what if all these big enterprise companies just came together and said, this is how we’re going to approach the future of work, and this is it!

Vik

So be it!

Sandra

Yes! I don’t really see that happening, but it would certainly be interesting. It makes you wonder, has there been a shift in control? Yes, people have to work—some people have the ability to work because it’s a passion that they have, and they have the ability to really enjoy what they do. Other people work because they need to pay their bills. They don’t necessarily have that flexibility to just quit their job tomorrow and go somewhere else.

It begs the question, where does that balance of power actually reside? Is it still with the employer? Or is it with the employees that are pushing back? Because we’ve all been in the same boat, so to speak, and some people have had a better experience than others. No one’s saying that they don’t want to go back to the office, obviously, but everybody’s asking for the ability to have the flexibility to make those choices. Yet you’ve got companies that are still on the fence about whether they want to pull the trigger, and what’s that going to mean for them longer term.

Maybe even more importantly, what does it mean for the real estate industry as a whole, including the landlords, and the owners of the buildings? That’s also at the foundation of a lot of this as well—yes, right now, people are hanging on to their spaces because they’ve got lease commitments they can’t necessarily get out of. It will be really interesting in 3 to 5 years from now when the leases come due—is there going to be this big uprooting of offices of companies realizing they don’t need as much space as they once did, and the offices will just eventually empty out?

Vik

You touched on a number of subjects there, all of which are very intriguing and interesting—first, the balance of power shifting to the employee actually started a few years ago. We started to see Millennials enter the workforce and we started to see generational shifts taking place. I used to talk about how at my age, (I’m 56 years old), if I go in to talk to an employer, I’ll bring my resume with me and set it down in front of the HR person. I’ll say, here’s my background, my skillset, here’s what I’ve done in my career, and this is why you should hire me. The younger workers are coming in and saying here’s my background, here’s my skillset, here are all the things I’ve done in my career so far—why should I work here? There was a shift in the way younger workers were approaching the job market. They were already coming to the job market and asking the employer why the employee should work for them. That shift had already been taking place.

But the balance of power has shifted even more so to the employee now, because there’s choice. A lot of companies are actually looking at what some of the other companies with a heavy “command and control” situation are doing—the competitor to that company ought to put themselves in a favorable position by saying, you don’t like your employer? Come work for us! We’ll give you that flexibility you want. I think there’ll be a competition like that that favours the employee, not the employer.

You mentioned companies banding together—I think it’s going to be the other way around. I think the companies that are going to offer choice and flexibility and have a good beat on what’s important to the employee are going to win out. I think the companies that are trying to force the old structure and the old approach to the employer-employee relationship are going to lose out.

I’ve always told people in my consulting practice that there’s time. You don’t have to make any knee-jerk reactions today as to what you’re going to do with your portfolio. Workplace decisions are something you ought to think about. They’re in the mix, but they need to roll out slowly. To my earlier comment about successive approximation, you’re going to continue to fit your future into what your office space needs to look like. If you start to slough off space, you may overdo it, and it may not be the right decision for you. It might be too much change, it might disrupt your cultural balance, there might be other issues.

I always like to put everything in terms of the game of Jenga. I like to do systems thinking, where every one move ought to be planned out with an eye towards what that move might do to another move. As long as you can think that way, you’ll hold back on making any decisions that will come back to haunt you. I tell people: you have time. As you mentioned, there’s a lease that’s 3 to 5 years out? Great—talk about reassessing that particular location in a few years after you’ve gone through your reverberations.

I think there are a few companies that have already announced they’re going to scale down, and I think that’s a little premature. We don’t know enough today. They’re making those decisions trying to stop financial outlay, maybe stop the bleeding, or their shareholders are putting pressure on them. Or they’ve just said, we’re good remote workers, let’s get rid of ¾ of our office, we don’t need it. That’s fine for now, but I think they’ll come back and say, we overdid it. I think they’ll regret the decision.

So, I think we have to say to everybody, there’s time, workplace decisions shouldn’t be made in a hurry, and they should certainly understand that the balance of power is shifting to the employee.

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

Vik

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

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

Sandra

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

Vik

Take care.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• The role of innovation and connectedness
• Talent attraction and retention
• Effectiveness of people and productivity
• Weak ties and strong ties: social cohesion, knowledge transfer, trust and social capital
• Work ecosystems
• Connections, serendipity and the purpose of place
• Serendipity as a design industry term vs. old school water cooler connections

Links:

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

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

Transcript: 

Sandra

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

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

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

Judy

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

Chris

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

After my PhD, which I finished in 2017, I went to Hungary, where I worked remotely for a start-up called Javelin, which focused on building trust and social cohesion in cities. After year and a half, I then returned to the US in January 2020, and that’s where I began to explore the workplace and how culture forms within workplaces.

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

Right now, I am working with a workplace management software company called Facility Quest to help them understand what types of data need strategies going forward. I’m also working with a commercial real estate organization to look at well being in the workplace and how we can create regenerative workplaces. Thanks a lot for bringing me into the panel and I look forward to future discussions.

Sandra

Judy, it’s interesting that you talk about innovation because this is something that I’ve heard as of late and it’s definitely a topic of conversation around the requirement for people to be in the offices for innovation.

But if you take a step back and think about the majority of companies and specifically about innovation, is that more of a buzzword as an excuse to bring people back into the office? Or is there real innovation happening? Because if you think about the newer companies – so the tech startups, the companies that don’t have high dependency on physical space – they’re innovating. And they’re really successful in what they do and have a minimal dependency on physical space to do that. So, it challenges that whole idea of the physical proximity to be innovative.

Judy

As I said, there’s lots of research going on out there, and they’re showing that these weak ties – when people are virtual – the weak tie, that connectedness, that ability to just reach over and talk to somebody is really critically important when they’re talking about knowledge sharing jobs, or innovative or jobs that include a lot of innovation within their responsibilities.

For example, IBM is pulling people back in. Because they saw their productivity decreasing as they moved everybody remote. They’ve been slowly pulling people back into an onsite environment so they could see a more effective work environment that would allow these people to innovate and knowledge share and hopefully their productivity would go back up again.

Sandra

Thinking about companies that are considering bringing flexibility into their future of work planning. You have these companies that are saying “No, we’re going to go back to the way we used to be because of productivity,” or whatever. “We want our people to come back into the office 100%.” How effective or how successful do you think those companies would be in 2-3 years time from now when flexibility becomes more mainstream?

Do you think that they would be behind the 8 ball because they haven’t fully adapted? They’re still stuck in their ways of how they think about work today because they think that is the better way to approach it and therefore would be further behind when everybody else is further ahead in flexibility.

Judy

Like looking into a crystal ball, right?

Sandra

Well, there’s an element of understanding who you are as an organization. As we said at the beginning, flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean work from home or work from anywhere or whatever term it is that you want to use. It could be people are returning back to the office, but potentially not working the way that they were working before. Some understanding of OK, well, what’s changed?

But I still think that if other companies are moving in the flexible working direction outside of the office, companies who are not adapting will face some backlash. They’re going to have a harder time attracting and retaining staff because they can go work at another company and get the flexibility. Do you think that’s going to be problematic when it comes to attraction and retention?

Judy

I’m going to say no, because I think there’s many factors that go into why somebody goes and works at a certain organization. So, we think about culture. We think about mentoring. We think about opportunity. We think about all these number of factors. I think each company really has to reflect on what’s going to be best for them.

And I think quite honestly, there is a short-term solution to be dealing with what we’re seeing right now and in regards to ensuring the well being of our people. I think a lot of companies are taking a very serious thing into consideration: the psychological well being of our employees, making them feel safe.

They have this very flexible arrangement going on right now, but I think there will be a midterm solution where some companies may skip the midterm, but some companies may move into a midterm solution where we see this hybrid, co-locate, still testing the water, testing things out.

I think there will be a long-term solution. Once we’ve seen the pandemic has moved on and we’re not dealing with that, I think companies will really look again at working arrangements from a long-term perspective. A smart business would be doing that planning today, would be really thinking to themselves, “What makes sense for us from a business perspective and what makes sense for our people?”

And I go back to that word again, “effectiveness.” What’s going to have our employees be the most effective that they can be because, as we know, the more effective, engaged employees you have, the more sustainable your business should be. I think businesses should be really looking from these two points of view: what’s good for the business and what’s good for the people.

Sandra

So, when you talk about effectiveness, I’m assuming that you’re referring to productivity, right?

Judy

Could be one factor.

Sandra

What other factors might be?

Judy

Maybe your job needs to be very interactive with other facets of the organization. Could be something around that, off the top of my head. I think each company has to – I’m sorry it sounds like a business answer – but I think each company has to define what effectiveness means to means to them. So yeah, I think they have to define that themselves. Cause everybody does something different.

Chris, what do you think?

Chris

Well, just to go back to what you were talking about earlier about weak tires and strong ties. From an anthropological standpoint, a tie is a connection between one person or another within a network, so you’re really talking about social cohesion.

A weak tie is good for knowledge transfer. It’s good for connecting groups of people who might otherwise be separated. A weak tie is like a bridge, in a way. It’s the person you don’t really communicate with that much or the type of person you don’t really collaborate with that much. They’re not necessarily in your department, they’re not necessarily in your team, but they’re someone you see every now and then, like maybe in a cafeteria or maybe more formally in a meeting occasionally once a month. You kind of have a connection with them, but you don’t really. But if you had a problem you needed to solve, they could reach out to you, and vice versa.

A strong tie is more about support. It’s more about these are the people you collaborate a lot with, and these are people you interact with a lot. Within a work setting, they’re your immediate team. Overall, they could be your family members or your close friends and associates. That’s where the interaction and the exchanges are more frequent and in social science these relationships are often built is through exchanges and interactions. The ways that you interact with someone else. You might send, not just send a message, but you might send an invitation to join a meeting to collaborate with someone and they may do the same to you, and that’s the exchange.

To connect back to the current topic, if we’re talking about the work situations, or to use the phrase “the work ecosystems” that are being built. The hybrid ones where you might go into an office, you might go into a coworking space and then the central office too. And then you might be at home for some of the rest of the time. How do you sustain a network across all of that?

I think that’s one of the types of things that businesses should consider as well. It’s great to have everyone be able to work wherever suits them, it’s great to have that flexibility. It’s just also a matter of having that infrastructure in place. What kind of rituals or what kinds of platforms will you use? If you’re not connecting with each other every day in the office, then what is going to take the place? What’s going to take the place of the supposedly spontaneous coffee meeting? What’s going to take the place of being able to go into a cafeteria or cafe and just find someone, the serendipitous interaction? What’s going to take place of those informal things that go into making the formal things work?

I remember even during the beginning of the pandemic, some of the earlier surveys that came out highlighted that collaborative work effectiveness was decreasing due to the remote work setting. But it’s really not necessarily whether the work gets done which is the issue. It’s more of the collaboration and more of – to use another social science word – the trust and social capital. How are those built?

I think that’s what’s key to me is really how do businesses, in order to create the environment that best suits them, figure out how did the people within the organization work and how do they collaborate? And how do they want the teams to be structured? It’s all about organizational design too. So, I think there are a lot of issues at play that organizations will need to consider.

Sandra

What’s interesting too is, when you talk about hybrid and all of these challenges in terms of who’s going to be working in the office, who’s going to be working out of the office and just the concept of hybrid working even through the designation of who is a flexible worker and who isn’t, I think it’s still going to create challenges. Because if you’re in this situation where you are going to allow certain people or say, “OK, these designated job functions can work out of the office and then another set of people will be working in the office.” The people that might be working in the office might– like that whole collaboration thing is completely lost in some regards because there still has to be virtual collaboration.

Unless you’re bringing everybody back into the office to sustain this serendipitous collaboration and meeting of the minds, as soon as you step into flexibility, the assumption is that there’s going to be virtual collaboration as part of your everyday experience, regardless of whether you’re in the office, everyday or not.

The other thing also is when you talk about serendipitous interactions, when I think of that, I’ve heard a couple of people say, you missed that element of the office. But the serendipitous component to me seems to be much more social than it is work related.  A lot of people do miss that social interaction of work, but is that really what the office represents? Is the ability to be social rather than the ability to actually get work done?

And I’m just questioning what is the purpose of place? When you think about all of the research and all of the feedback and the comments of people about their experience having been out of the office for a long period of time, there’s the social element as human beings that we’re missing tremendously. Which somehow gets rolled into being work, but it’s not really work, it’s a social aspect of work.

I’ve been working from home for over 25 years. I remember when I first started working from home, it was pretty lonely. It took about three to six months before I started getting into my groove, and even then, every once in awhile I would just pack up my stuff and go and work at the local coffee shop, just to hear people or just to see people. That was enough to be able to do that one or two days a week. Even if I didn’t interact with someone, or if I had a random conversation with someone that was enough for me from a social perspective, but it wasn’t because I needed to go into the office to do work. It was more just to be around people.

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