How Everything's Changed & What 2021 Will Be Like with HelloOffice CEO + TEAMWERC Founding Partner

Okay, thanks for jumping on to learn more about the office of the future. We're excited to welcome the CEO of HelloOffice, Justin, and founding partner from Teamwork, Jen. Jen and Justin, thank you for joining us. Today's session is titled The Office of the Future: How Everything's Changed and What 2021 Will Look Like. Justin, over to you. Well, I'll start. Thank you. Hi everyone, thank you for joining us today and giving us this platform to share the thoughts on what we love, the office. I'm Jen Nguyen from Teamwork, and at Teamwork, our mission is to deliver workplace as a service, helping companies navigate the company's changing working environments.

And I'm joined by Justin Bedecray, co-founder and CEO of HelloOffice, and we're a full-stack technology-powered brokerage helping usher in the hybrid workplace and the office of the future.

So Justin, it's so great to be co-hosting this session with you. It feels like déjà vu. 6 months ago in January, you and I were nerding out talking all things workplace and how the workplace ecosystem was broken, everything from how workplace office spaces delivered to workplace services end to end, from how workplace tools are often the last adopted tools by companies, often cut out of the annual budget actually, and how the real estate brokerage industry was antiquated, lost in a century of manual workflow process. And I clearly remember back then you told me, Jen, this isn't scalable. The future of workplace is going to be hybrid. And fast forward, here we are today. The pandemic has woke us all up and has accelerated our need to change our mindset about the workplace and all things workplace. And personally, it's actually been very scary to think about as what I love to do, building workplaces, would no longer exist. And I've had a lot of my peers in the industry who have been impacted and laid off. And what I found is this silver lining. In that we all want the ability to come back, we want the choice to come back, and we actually want hope. And that's a really big thing. And companies are looking for guidance for us to pave that way.

Totally. I mean, I remember that conversation back in January and what we were planning on 5 years that it would take to really like usher in the hybrid workplace. Well, that got condensed into what, 5 months? Judging by the length of my hair and my, you know, COVID haircut. I, you know, it is truly amazing, like, how fast the mindset around the future of office has changed. You know, pre-pandemic and going into the pandemic has been really tough. We've seen a lot of layoffs, a lot of people hurt, but at the same time, there is a silver lining in all of this that, like, coming out of the pandemic, a lot more people are going to have the choice of, you know, how they work, where they work. And, you know, yesterday's workplace is going to get catapulted to, you know, to the future of office. And so that's something to be really excited about. You know, this industry in many ways has been broken, right? And there's things that have worked and there's things that really need to change. And a lot of our assumptions around yesterday's workplace are going to be challenged. You know, some would say that it's too rigid, that the 9-to-5, 40-hour workweek— what you were telling me, right? Like, that started in the Ford era, 100 years ago, a century ago. And so things do need to change. And decisions can be led by employees employees. And it's not, you know, it doesn't have to be a 100% office-centric. And so when thinking about yesterday's workplace, which is really important to touch on before we get into the future workplace, like you have built workplaces for some of the most iconic brands in the world, Pinterest, Zynga, Tesla. Like what has been your experience? What have you learned from building yesterday's workplace?

Well, first I still love yesterday's workplace. And I truly believe that it's not going anywhere. But yesterday's workplace, for my previous companies, we focused a lot about being 100% HQ-centric.

Right.

Constantly being under one roof. And the purpose, obviously, was to enhance face-to-face collaboration, innovation, and productivity. And we created this entire infrastructure to support this one-on-one seating model so that everyone under one location could be there at the same time. But it created this huge subset of issues that we were constantly trying to solve for. For one, there was never enough real estate. Given we were in San Francisco and Zynga and Pinterest weren't the only companies with a real estate strategy of being under one roof, there just wasn't enough square footage and there wasn't enough space to accommodate that. We also created this huge commuting congestion problem, driving thousands of employees to the city, which also had an impact on affordable housing. And we honestly were limiting ourselves by proximity on recruiting a diverse best-in-class team. And we also had multi-generational issues with people working with different lifestyles, with different obligations, whether it's childcare, taking care of elderly parents. We just never were able to solve for that. And then there was this great workplace experience of 2020, which we're still living now, and it somehow unintentionally solved a lot of this friction, right?

I mean, like, think about, like, like you said, the infrastructure needed to be a single, you know, HQ-centric, you know, workplace, right? Like, I mean, thousands of people being shuttled around the Bay Area for hours every day. Um, you know, I remember growing up, um, and, you know, my, my neighbor's dad, uh, would literally read the newspaper on the freeway because it was bumper to bumper to get into the city, and not much has changed. And so, you know, the idea that, um, You know, how many people would get shuttled down to Facebook? Like, it was only a couple of years ago that they introduced their first San Francisco office. And so things are really changing. And we have to think about, like, you have yesterday's workplace, 100% office-centric. The pendulum is going to be swinging back and forth, right? So now we're in this, you know, like you call it, the great workplace experiment of 2020. Where we're forced to be 100% remote. And the pendulum has swung the entire other direction. And now, like, after a few months, um, you know, it, uh, the novelty of being 100% remote is wearing off. And so we're all starting to realize, uh, what works and what doesn't, right? What, what we miss out of the office, the serendipity, the collaboration, just being around our colleagues, you know, in person. And so, you know, what we have to do to build the office of the future is take the best of the 100% office-centric, you know, world and the best of remote, where there is more transparency, there, there could be more productivity, and basically combine those. And it's a really inspirational thing to add technology and innovation to to the workplace, how you find space, how you manage space, and build the office of the future?

Well, I'm, you know, going back to this one-on-one seating and the workplace of yesterday. I actually now miss, after being in back-to-back Zoom calls, being able to walk between conference rooms and take that few minutes break to feel normal and bump into a peer of mine. And the other thing that it also reminds me of too is in this whole one-on-one seating model, what actually didn't work was that I realized for myself I was never at my desk. I was in conference meetings back to back, very reflective of what am I— what I'm doing now. And so my desk sat empty almost full time. And so what it means is we just need to retrofit and recalibrate how we use this space and change the purpose of why we come into work. So Justin, so now that we know all this, and for everyone listening, what does this mean? And How are you and how have you been advising your clients on this hybrid strategy?

I think that it's such an important question, right? And what people have to realize is that it is different for everyone. You know, we have clients— one of our clients has over 500 employees with offices around the world, right? And in major hubs like San Francisco and New York, what we're doing is helping create the vision for a more experiential space, almost like a café where they can come and go as they want. They can bring clients, they can bring customers. And so it's just going to be like in these major hubs, no one's going to have assigned seating, but in their Salt Lake City, everyone wants to come into the office 5 days a week. And so we're, we're still positioning that space for 100% office-centric. So even within some of our clients, they're thinking about like what their employees want in any given market. Another client of ours, Most of their employees came from the South Bay and commuted into San Francisco because they just kind of felt like they had to be there. Now that that assumption is being challenged, we're going to help them find an office in Palo Alto. Their employees are going to be able to come and go, and they're going to reduce their commute by 45 minutes. And then another client of ours is an international company that has decided that they truly want to scale up in San Francisco, and they're moving forward with really a significant lease because they get to save so much money because rents have stabilized and there's so many subleases on the market. And so, you know, through all of this, uh, we have so many different client stories about how they're planning, how they're figuring out, how they're getting back into the office. Um, and so it's not one size fits all. Uh, we're gonna learn so much about ourselves, about how we should and can run our companies, how we run our day-to-day lives, right? The challenge is that there's a lot of uncertainty, right? Like, we don't know when we're gonna be able to get safely back at scale. You know, some of your clients, I would imagine, are actually going back into the office already. Some of them are like a wait-and-see approach, right? We have, you know, Slack saying, hey, we're not gonna consider going back into the office until 2021. We have Google saying, look, like, we know we're going to get back into the office, but we're going to put a hard date at, you know, uh, mid-'21 of next year. And so, um, how, how do, how do people in this session, like, figure out, like, how to plan? Like, what, what do we think about?

I think just like we think about the pendulum of how we think about real estate— 100% in office, 100% remote— it's not one or the other. And as we hear companies like Google saying that they're going to push out the return to office till sometime next year, I think we're all forgetting that they're also still planning when that time happens. And they're taking the time now to create those workplace resilient playbooks as part of their business continuity plan. And it's not that— I've also heard, well, why plan if things are going to change tomorrow? We're already in this— [SPEAKING CHINESE] But it's important to plan that it's flexible enough so that you can pivot those realities of today and tomorrow. And quite honestly, It is a corporate responsibility to start planning now for the well-being of your employees, to implement COVID-19 guidelines into your workplace. And really, I think companies should really focus on the fact that both current and future employees will be closely tuning in on how companies navigate through this change and adopting a hybrid employee choice philosophy. This will be a really strong indicator of retention and recruiting, whereas before the old workplace that we know it of yesterday, we built these huge HQ anchor buildings for recruiting purpose. Now, giving the employees choice and this hybrid approach is going to be what, what's going to make the big difference in terms of recruiting intention, right?

I mean, these decisions have a lot of implications, right? If you are kind of temporarily remote, but you, you don't really have a solid strategy for when we can return to the workplace. You know, families are going to be making decisions whether they move or not. Like, are you going to ask them to, you know, move back after the, you know, pandemic? Like, people will decide to rent versus buy because they need to decide, like, what their workplace is going to be like. And so it's really, really important to, like, plan and understand what your employees want. You know, kind of going through a few of the points on our slide, right? It's not solely based on health and safety, but that is a big issue right now, right? Planning for long-term means like a lot of implications for how employees live and work, how they work together. And, you know, engagement and collaboration is now a preference. It's like really important, but they— we all want to choose when we do that versus when we go heads-down work and can, you know, can be flexible. Another really important point that we really believe in is that you have to use data to drive decisions. You have to use data on how people are using the space. One of our good friends actually just raised a big round called Density, where they can track— we're implementing that in all of our workplaces, where you can track how many people are coming and going in conference rooms and different things. We really need to layer on meaningful and efficient technology into our workplace to understand how people are using it. But that also never— what never changes is that the space has to represent your culture. It has to represent what you want to achieve as a company, right? If you're, you know, building automation for trucking or whatever, like, you need to be in the space, and so you need to figure that out. Whereas if you're a pure software company, you can wait until, you know, you don't have to compel people to come in sooner than they feel safe. And so there's a lot of implications for that.

Yeah, Justin, you actually made a really good point on data. What was really interesting in working with a lot of these clients on the return to office, 60% had workplace tools, 40% didn't. And in that 60% that actually had workplace tools, we can only use 80% of that data. So we haven't done a really good job using analytics, and the time is now to do that, to make the right decisions. So let's do— how do we unpack this? How do we unpack what hybrid means? What does it look like? What is it and what is it not?

Well, let's start with what it is, right? So, um, it's employee-led, which means that, um, we're really going to need to take a pulse of you know, what employees want and how they work best and help them make decisions on, you know, whether it's an individual contributor or if you're on a team and your team has the right cadence, right? So it truly has to be employee-led and it emphasizes choice. Something that's so important right now for everyone to realize is that, you know, for most of us, we don't have a choice right now, right? And so once we're given that choice, what do we actually decide? And it can't be a rash decision, right? Like, you have to continually take a pulse of your team and how they're feeling, right? We're, you know, what, 5 months into the pandemic, and for many of us, it's been 5 months since we've been into an office. And so the novelty, like I said, is wearing off, and now we're starting to recognize, like, Okay, maybe I don't want to be 100% remote, but I do want to come into the office 4 days a week or 1 to 2 days a week. It's going to differ employee to employee, and so you have to give choice and flexibility, right? Flexibility is so huge. Aaron Levie just did a poll on Twitter that thousands and thousands of people responded to on what is the future of work, right? Is it get me back into the office as soon as possible? Is it, you know, remote forever for the win? Or is it flexibility? And over 70% of people said, just give me the flexibility, from thousands and thousands of people. And so like that really start— the data is starting to prove that the hybrid is here to stay and that people really want it. One of the things that you and I talk about a lot is, is Hiring for skill and impact over proximity, right? Like, you don't have to live in a short drive distance away or a long drive distance away from HQ, like, to contribute and have a big impact. You know, during the pandemic, HelloOffice, like, our company, my company has, you know, promoted engineering manager Jaziel out of Dallas, like, our first remote engineering manager. and it's been working out phenomenal. And so we have to really think about, like, how people can have an impact, not just their proximity, um, and it has to be purpose-driven, right? Like, you have to go about this with a lot of purpose, um. So let's talk about what it's not, right? It's not prescriptive, right? I earlier, I gave 3 examples of all tech technology companies, all with very dramatically different approaches. And so it's not one size fits all. It's not the death of the office, despite the narrative that's been going around, but it's also not the death of remote, right? Like, there is the combination, like the sweet spot where you can have the best of both worlds. That being said, as we know, it is not the easy choice. Hybrid is not the easiest path, right? Like, 100% office-centric, we have playbooks for that. We've been doing it for over a decade, right? And For the playbooks for fully remote, you know, with GitLab and WordPress, like, those are relatively well established, albeit, like, less companies have done that at scale. And so the combination of both, you have to be really great at both, and you have to be really intentional. And the final thing that it's not is it's not standard or homogeneous. We all know the open office has just taken off over the last decade. And requiring everyone having the one-to-one seating like you talked about. The days of homogeneous offices are over, and every company is going to have to purposely build and design their workplace and how they run their companies that best fits them.

Well, the irony that you mentioned how we're currently in a pandemic and we don't have choice— this choice actually gave us— this lack of choice actually gave us a taste, just like our first time trying sugar, of what it's like to work at home and having the flexibility of working anywhere. And so now we can't untaste it, right? And so the idea of having that flexibility— and the other thing that you point out is pulse your employees, but it takes courage for a company to ask, really ask what it is that employees want, because you have to be prepared for what the answers are. But I think a really, really great example of implementing a hybrid workplace that we've seen recently this week is Siemens announcing that they're allowing 140,000 of their employees globally across 200 countries to work 2 to 3 days work from anywhere. And their focus is not time spent in the office, but the focus really is on impact, which is so amazing. And I think they did 2 things really, really well to your point, Justin, is that they took a forward-looking approach, not a wait and see. And second most important is they actually polled and surveyed their employees. They heard what they asked, and those employees highlighted the preference for greater flexibility in their approach to work.

Right. I mean, that is so pivotal. Like, I truly believe that with the hybrid approach, having 2 to 3 days of being together, you know, 2 to 3 days of work from anywhere, wherever you do your best work, that still could be in the office, it could be at home, it could be at a coworking space, spot or a coffee shop. But it's truly like giving people the option, but also like having some structure around when people actually come into the office, right? Like, for the office to be valuable, for the things that we're talking about— serendipity, collaboration, you know, just being around your team in person and having those, you know, in-between meetings where you can like throw out an idea and let it you know, kind of ruminate, like, that requires people to be in the office too. And so you can't just kind of work from anywhere, doesn't just mean that, like, you know, you don't have any kind of structure around it, right? So you have to intentionally manage through this, which is really important. And Siemens is a great example. All right, so, so we've talked about the value of the hybrid workplace, we've talked about kind of our experiences of building Yesterday's workplace. We're introducing a model of how to build the hybrid workforce, right? How to build the hybrid workplace. And it starts with distributed adaptation. You adapt and replicate the work environment to wherever employees live. And one thing that HelloOffice did early in the pandemic— I mean, our life's work is creating amazing workplaces for companies, right? But we also recognize that we're not going to rush back to the office and that there are going to be some lasting value of remote work. And so we gave every single team member a stipend to set up their home office. And again, this is coming from a company that, you know, our life's work is finding and building out and running workplaces. And we're also recognizing the value of the combination of remote and in-office? Mm-hmm.

I think the one thing that we actually took for granted when we were forced to work from home was the idea that the basic essentials to be successful— we know of folks that didn't even have internet connectivity. And those are the things that we take for granted, right? And the other thing about distributed adoption is, how do we create what we did under one roof and all those services? And how do we then create parity so that we not only see it in the office, or in hub and spoke, but we also feel the same perks and experience it in our own workplace.

Yeah, I mean, it's such a good point. Like, no one can feel invisible, right? Like, that is such an important point for people to recognize, that just because you're not in the office doesn't mean that you're not having an impact, and vice versa, right? And so we're going to get to questions in a little bit, but we have so many questions. And a lot of them are centered around like, how do you manage that? And so we'll put a pin in that and really focus on that later in the session. But it's a really good segue into the second important point, and that's consistent people management, right? Ensuring that all employees are equally engaged, both remotely and in person, and can be consistently inspired and elevated. And I think that like one of the things that we've introduced since the pandemic started is an amazing service called Lattice, where we did a really big engagement survey, and now we're— survey, and now we're gonna continually take a pulse of the team on like how they're feeling, like how we're managing this process, like do they have a sense of belonging, you know, for a lot of different reasons. And so it's really important to take a pulse of your team and gauge from an anonymous level, like what they're feeling and how they're managing through this process.

I think what consistent people engagement also really means to me is that it's not about micromanagement. I think if future of hybrid, if we are in the direction of the future of hybrid in Anywhere, I think it's really important that as a company, we need to ensure that impact and outcomes are equally acknowledged as if you were in the office face-to-face. I know in designing the workplace of yesterday, there was a lot of programming around centering the CEO in the center of the building and making sure that CEO was visible to the organization. And it was also important for functions to be near the CEO. So now what happens? Because work from anywhere shouldn't mean I'm invisible.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think about that a lot for myself, right? Like, um, am I gonna have a desk when I go back into the office? Um, I haven't decided yet, but what's really important is that You know, when you think about every team member's opportunity to grow, right, and to increase their impact in a company, it can't just be based on butts in seats, right? Like, you can't manage people, you can't judge people's productivity by whether or not they're in their seat, you know, 9 to 5, 40 hours a week. That is a century-old practice that needs to change. But, you know, like having— and even for our distributed team, we bring them into the office, you know, on a quarterly basis so that we get that exposure to them, and then we do an offsite every year. And so, like, how we manage people and help people grow and have a bigger impact should not just mean proximity to the CEO or to management, right?

I can't help— I'm going to ask you Q&A even before we're there yet. But as a CEO, one of the questions I want to ask you is, we have done so much in creating opportunities and visibility around diversity initiatives. And that has worked because we're actually transparent in each other's face. We're seeing, right? Now that we're invisible, how do we avoid all that progress we've made?

I mean, I think that this is actually an opportunity to make even more progress, right? How can we say that, you know, a working mom or, you know, a kid fresh out of college that is just starting their career have to be in the office at the same time and like spend the same amount of hours per day? Like, you have to think about impact and you have to put trust in your team that they're, you know, it has to be about output, right? Like, from all of our managers, we've all probably on this session read High Output Management, but But really, it's the impact that you have on the people around you. And that does not have to necessarily mean in physical proximity. And so I think that we can make incredible strides, you know, for everyone to have a strong sense of belonging and diversity and inclusion by opening up, you know, a 100% office-centric approach to a hybrid approach. And so I'm really excited about that. At HelloOffice, but for also for all of our clients and the industry at large.

I also think what's really important too, we kind of quickly glanced over, but we spent a lot of time, you mentioned earlier that we created playbooks that we're really good at. We're really good at playbooks around 100% remote and 100% in the office. But what we really need to be really good at is creating a playbook around AQ, adverse quotient, right? All our other playbooks have high IQ, EQ, but we haven't developed that playbook with high AQ that really has resiliency and grit, especially with this changing environment.

I totally agree. Like, that is a term that we're gonna use a lot, like adversity, you know, being able to be resilient. And it's a testament to what you were saying earlier about how important it is to plan around this and to really listen to your teams and understand what they really want, right? Like, you know, we, and we get such a broad selection of responses around our surveys. You know, some people feel really productive from like 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM at home, and then they can come into the office after commute hours and be with their team for a few hours and then, you know, go back home and beat the commute there. And like, that's gonna be enough for a lot of people, you know? And so it's just like breaking down those assumptions that we've had for so long and really thinking about like what the future of the office is, which we're talking about, but really it's like what the future of running companies is. Like, how do we manage people? How do we, and like the last point in our framework is, How do we actually build these spaces out, right? Like, and we really need to think about modular design and materials and think about like how a space can be adaptable to what the team needs at any given time, right? So you want to enable a comfortable and safe environment. You know, one of the things that I've learned is that temperature in the office matters a lot. And, you know, can, if it runs a lot cooler or a lot hotter, that can be less ideal for men or women. And so, like, you have to really think about, like, how can you adapt the space so that it's really inclusive and that people want to come for the reasons that they want to be in the office, but, like, not require them to be there, you know, 40 hours a week, 5 days a week. And so What do you think, like, first of all, like, what do people on this session do about all the offices that they have right now? Do they need to start over? Like, where do they start?

Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons a lot of companies we talked to are actually paralyzed. They're feeling that they need to start over after investing all this money in capital improvements and developing, creating this amazing workplace. But actually you don't. I think we're already forgetting that the workplaces of yesterday We're designed to be modular. I mean, taking food as an example and deconstructing it, I love my salads deconstructed, but I want more of, you know, croutons and I want more of tomatoes, right? But end day, I still want a salad. And so does my business partner. She wants the salad, but she does not want hers deconstructed. I think what we really need to do is take a bridge of deconstruct and recalibrate. And oftentimes with our clients, where we start is let's just look at the data of your space today. What can it do? With the COVID-19 guidelines? What are some of your constraints? And then separately, let's pulse your employee survey. How are they working from home? Who actually needs to come into the office? Like really having an understanding of the dynamics of how your organization operates. And then let's recalibrate the workspace. But we don't have to start over. There's a lot of different creative ways to come back to the office with the path of least resistance without sunk costs.

That's awesome. Well, that is the presentation for today. You know, we understand this is a confusing time and it's really hard for a lot of folks, but there is a silver lining in all of this that, you know, and there is a balance between, you know, not having to worry about the office being dead or like being forced to be remote forever, right? Like the hybrid solution, we believe, is the future and a really big opportunity to achieve a lot of things, you know, for your companies and your employees. So thank you very much. We have a ton of questions. So let me stop screen sharing. Okay, awesome. Okay, so let me see here. So a question that seems to be coming up a lot is on the theme of planning, like when do you suggest us, to sign a lease knowing that a second wave or another shutdown could happen? I'll take this one, Jen. So we have a lot of clients still super motivated to get back into the office and are searching for space right now. And one of the things that we are pushing to standardize in the market at HelloOffice is to provide, you know, COVID kind of 19 protections, if you will, So that if— until the shelter-in-place and the shutdowns are lifted, you know, our clients won't have to, you know, pay rent until the shutdowns are lifted. But then, you know, what happens in a second wave? And so we really want to account for that as well. So like if the city that you want to place your office enacts, you know, more restrictions, then you're secure in not having to pay rent while you can't actually legally use the office. So, good question. Jen, this one's for you. What, what does this mean for the future of the 40-hour workweek?

Going back to really understanding outcomes is extremely important. And, you know, years ago, before we had all these amazing tools to be engaged with our employees, I could see how being in the office was critical. But we're here today on this platform at SaaSr, and there's so many tools that we can leverage to help manage collaboration, performance, metrics. You know, that's what management is about, managing your people. So we need to start doing that, right? And the 40-hour work— one thing we're seeing a lot of too is, are we seeing a 4-day work week? As opposed to a 5-day workweek. Has that changed? Are we gonna— if we're gonna be 100% remote, should we just do a 4-day workweek given that we don't have those long commute hours and there's hours, say, that can be used towards work? So it's a lot of different conversations and it has to be specific to the company. Like we said, it's not prescriptive.

Yeah, I mean, I think that like, uh, you know, kind of thinking about the pendulum swinging in the other direction, like a lot of us are working way more than 40 hours, um, now that we're 100% remote. And so we have to really think about, um, it's just so easy to crawl out of bed and head on to your first Zoom, but then just, you know, 12 hours later you're on your last Zoom, and then you're catching up on work. And, you know, um, especially without having much other things to do, like, work is the default. Um, and that's okay too. I just think that, like, people have to really allow for time to take breaks and we're all dealing with Zoom fatigue as well. And so I think that once we actually can enable the hybrid workplace and build that, there's gonna be a lot more balance, right? And so I just think that there's not one size fits all with any kind of like, set number of hours or set number of days. I think it's gonna be like you said, like really important for companies to apply that to, you know, how their employees want to work and how they can have the biggest impact, not just straight up number of hours worked. Okay, there's so many questions to sort through. Okay, this is a really good one. So there's an issue of face-to-face bias.

Yes.

The idea that those in the HQ that are seen every day that have physical interactions, especially with assigned leaders, it can be reduced. Can that be eliminated? I'll take first go at this, Jen. I think that this is a really, really important question. Can you get promoted to a management level remotely? Right? There's like a lot of debate around that. Like, I believe you can, and we have at HelloOffice. I think that like one really shining example of this is the way that Stripe has approached remote. So they experimented well before the pandemic on their fifth engineering hub, was distributed. And so they started with a team and had, you know, managers, you know, with that team. I think that the important thing is that you have a balance, right? Like, if you have 6 people on a team and 5 of them are in person, 1 person is remote or distributed, that's an imbalance. And so you really have to think about you know, pairing people together that have more of a balance. And you have to lead by example. You know, you have to empower— if you're truly going to build a hybrid workplace, you have to have the balance, like, so that people can feel that they can be promoted and rise up even if they're not at HQ. One of the really cool things, I think, about this movement is that all the tacit knowledge that you get from being in HQ, that's going to spread. Right? And that's a really good thing that more people will be informed. Like, one of the things that I realized managing through this pandemic is that we're actually a more transparent company. Like, we have to document things more. We have— like, we are forced to assume that no one is in the room at any given time, right? And so I think that, like, you know, like, It is so important to intentionally manage through that, and you have to lead by example.

Mm-hmm. Justin, you actually bring a really good point. You had mentioned that playbooks exist for the two ways of working. But in some of the clients that we worked with, there was actually no playbook for yesterday's workplace. And this definitely highlighted some of the gaps where we were not memorializing our services and how we approach different things, right? And the other thing you talked about too in terms of face-to-face is I remember you telling me a story that you were having an all-hands with your organization remote, and you actually decided that you would go to a colleague's house. Some people would show up and some people weren't comfortable. And you recognized yourself as a leader that you didn't want the folks who weren't ready because of fear of COVID to come. So how did you overcome that obstacle?

Yeah.

That employee didn't feel that they were scapegoated or, you know, called out for that?

Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that like you have to really kind of, um, like first of all, like when you're dealing with people issues, right, like, um, you can work one-on-one with folks, but like as you talk about it with a team and as you address issues, like they really surface. And like one of the things that's been really important for, um, uh, for us is that having anonymous surveys and getting people's really like like how they truly feel and how, like, where they stand is so pivotal to understanding, like, the true pulse of the team and where you have to improve. You know, one of the things that we realized is that everyone needed to— everyone felt like we weren't doing a good enough job of, like, truly aligning on exactly what the company goals were and how those are communicated and how people's impact on on those goals were. And so now we've like, you know, we communicate those on a regular basis. We have them super transparent. And so like forcing the remote has really forced us to think about so many better practices in terms of managing the people in the company.

I just wanna go back on that one question though. I think also being able to get recognition also goes both ways.

Recognition is so important.

It's not top-down, right? It is also bottoms-up. And as we're working, in this remote environment, we're all equally responsible to stay connected. It's not one direction.

I think that's such an important point. Like, and it's so inherent in the hybrid workplace, right? It's really employee-led from the bottoms up. And so I just think that this is gonna be so amazing for companies like, you know, across the board, but you have to be intentional about all of it. Okay, so let me sort through some more of these questions. Okay, how are companies addressing health and safety for employees who are essential and need to be in the office? This is a perfect question for you, Jen.

Mm-hmm. So also very dependent on the geographies because there are federal, state, local, and county guidelines which we have to abide by. I think it's really important to— when you plan your playbook, your resiliency plan to return to office, that you have a set of guidelines of what your goals are. And the number one goal that we always recommend, that if you're not feeling safe, you stay home, right? Like, if you can't create that environment, we cannot force employees to come back. I think too, a company's goal should definitely be about going over and beyond these guidelines. So as much as we heard about 6-foot social distance, what we're finding, what I'm finding, is 6-foot within my circle of friends may actually not be— good enough. And so we've done studies of what 6-foot impact does, 10-foot, 12-foot, to the point where we find what is the comfort level for employees. And once you create this new post-occupancy for COVID-19, we look at then the occupancy from there. We do not come back 100%. We're all coming back methodically in a phased approach. We're hearing a lot about 5%, 10%, 25%. We just need to be thoughtful because, back to going to AQ, we're going to have to adjust if we're going to get a third or fourth wave.

Yeah, and like on top of that, the safety of essential employees has really moved workplace technology from like a nice to have or a not necessary to have to an absolute necessity, right? From Envoy Protect and Density and all of these things that like, you know, are relatively easy to implement, but really crucial to understand, you know, where the team is coming from, how many people are in the office at any given time, are they using, you know, social distancing and everything. Okay, this is a really good question too. The question is, but should it be prescriptive to some? For instance, there's many reports that entry-level employees' performance, time to value-add, and feeling of belonging suffer if work is fully remote. This is a really important question. And I think that when we say it's not prescriptive, we mean that everyone doesn't fit into the same schedule, the same, like, you know, 100% in office. But teams can vary, right? Like, I agree with you, the person who asked this, that, you know, when you're just starting out, like, you benefit so much from just being around other folks and learning and being able to ask questions in real time. And so, and that was one of the things when Facebook made their big announcement that they are going to entertain remote where they were 100% office before, you know, that didn't necessarily apply to, you know, the thousands of new grads that they hire. And so I think that I see a lot of value in having, you know, entry-level folks like be around, you know, other team members in the office. But that also, maybe that means 4 days a week or in the office and 1 day a week at home or, you know, a hybrid approach to that.

Justin, there's a really good question that I'm gonna lob over to you that came through. Okay. It's, what impact do you think the new hybrid environments will have on demand for coworking and managed office space?

Ooh, great question. So coworking is gonna, is going to be hit really hard during the pandemic before we have the virus under control. Because, you know, super dense areas are much harder to manage safely. But I think long-term coworking is still going to be a very important product in, in the workplace for companies. Think about, you know, if just because someone wants to move to Salt Lake City or, you know, somewhere in Colorado or whatever, coming like, and where that company doesn't necessarily have an office yet, that doesn't necessarily mean that they just like to work from home. And so like coworking is gonna provide that flex, you know, option for companies. So I'm really bullish on coworking long-term. I think that it's, you know, it's gonna be really hard to manage and survive during the pandemic because of the things I talked about, but long-term, it will absolutely be an important model going forward.

Well, we have a few minutes left, Justin. You can pick one more question. Make it count.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I like hybrid model, but I dislike open desk format. So how many distract— like so many distractions. Oh man, there's so many coming in. So many distractions. I like standing desks and the ability to look out the window, which helps with productivity. Any thoughts on the open desk model? Jen, I'll let you take that away.

Yeah, I don't think it's all or nothing. I think it's really important to understand how your particular company operates. But where we're challenging, what I mentioned earlier, the one-for-one, we don't think you need actually one-for-one. It could be, you know, shift seating or hoteling, more of maybe I'm sharing a desk with my partner at 50/50. But the idea of 100%, knowing that we spent more time in conference, and that's the way we worked at the time, didn't make sense for us, right? So we really need to reevaluate how we want to work and use that space. And what we're seeing and what Justin's seeing is the future really is about building these particular spaces to support some type of purpose for work and collaboration. We have a current client now that they actually work in physical space. They work with a lot of materials, so they need to be in the same place at the same time. But the other thing we didn't talk about, but we'll touch on really briefly, is when folks are returning to the office, they're not returning to the office as we know it, 9 to 5. They're actually returning for a specific period of time, the specific period of dates. So for example, coming in Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 to 2. It's not 9 to 5. We're not seeing that anymore.

Yeah, I think that the point I'll close with that is that it is so important to intentionally design spaces. Open office, open desk layout for focused work was done for financial reasons, right? It's just, you can pack more people in less space, but it's not necessarily the best way to focus, you know, do focused work. And so I think that like designating certain parts of your office to actually be intentionally designed for focused work, um, will be super critical, whether that's modular or, you know, actually structures built. So, um, all right, well, uh, we cannot get to all of these questions. Um, feel free to email us, um, you know, justin@hellooffice.com and, uh, jenna@teamwork.co. It's all right. All right, well, thank you so much, everyone. Have a great rest of the sessions.

Thank you, Jen and Justin. That was amazing. Thank you guys so much.