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 hello Office, Justin and founding partner from Teamwork, Jen. Jen and Justin, thank you for joining us. Today's session is titled the Office of the 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 Beddycray, co founder and CEO of hello Office 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 deja vu. Six 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, Bethan, 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. And 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 paint that way.

Totally. I mean, I remember that conversation back in January and what we were planning on five years that it would take to really like usher in the hybrid workplace. Well, that got condensed into what, five months? Judging by the length of my hair and my Covid haircut, it is truly amazing how fast the mindset around the future of office has changed 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 coming out of the pandemic, a lot more people are going to have the choice of how they work, where they work, and yesterday's workplace is going to get catapulted to the future of office. And so that's something to be really excited about. This industry in many ways has been broken 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 nine to five, 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, please. 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, 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 child care, 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 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. You know, I remember growing up and, you know, my neighbor's dad 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, you know, how many people would get shuttled down to Facebook, like it was only a couple 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 experience 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, you know, the novelty of being 100% remote is wearing off. And so we're all starting to realize what works and what doesn't, right? What, what we miss out of the office. The serendipity, the collaboration, just being around our colleagues in person. And so what we have to do to build the office of the future is take the best of the 100% office centric world and the best of remote, where there is more transparency, 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 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 taking that few minutes break to feel normal and bump into a peer of mind. 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, I was never at my desk. I was in conference room meetings and back to back, very reflective of 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. We have clients. One of our clients has over 500 employees with offices around the world. 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 cafe, 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 five days a week. And so we're still positioning that space for 100% office centric. So even within some of our clients, they're thinking about 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 we have so many different clients, stories about how they're planning, how they're figuring out how they're getting back into the office. And so it's not one size fits all. We're going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 mid 21. Of next year. And so how do people in this session figure out how to plan? 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. 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 in 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's going to make the big difference in terms of recruiting retention, right?

I mean these decisions have a lot of implications, right? If you are kind of temporarily remote, but 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 move back after the pandemic? Like people will decide to rent versus buy because they need to decide what their workplace is going to be like. And so it's really, really important to plan and understand what your employees want. 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 a lot of implications for how employees live and work, how they work together, and engagement and collaboration is now a preference. It's really important. But we all want to choose when we do that versus when we go heads down work and can be flexible. And another really important point that we really believe in is that you have to use data to drive decisions, right? You have to use data on how People are using the space. You know, 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. And so 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 building automation for trucking or whatever, 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 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. We haven't done a really good job using analytics. And the time is now to do that, to make the right decisions. 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. It's employee led, which means that 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, five months into the pandemic, and for many of us, it's been five 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 four Days a week or one to two 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 Levy 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 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 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 hiring for skill and impact over proximity, right? Like you don't have to live in a short drive distance away or long drive distance away from HQ to contribute and have a big impact, you know, during the pandemic, hello office. Like 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 how people can have an impact, not just their proximity. And it has to be purpose driven, right? You have to go about this with a lot of purpose. So let's talk about what it's not, right? It's not prescriptive. Earlier I gave three examples of all 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 with GitLab and WordPress, those are relatively well established, albeit less companies have done that at scale. The combination of both. You have to be really great at both and you have to be really intentional. The final thing that it's not is it's not standard or homogenous. 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 homogenous 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 benefits are. But I think a really, really great example of implementing a hybrid workplace that we've seen recently this week is something Siemens announcing that they're allowing 140,000 of their employees globally, across 200 countries to work two to three 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 two 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 post and surveyed their employees and 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 two to three days of being together, you know, two to three 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 co working space or a coffee shop. But it's truly giving people the option, but also having some structure around when people actually come into the office, for the office to be valuable for the things that we're talking about, serendipity, collaboration, just being around your team in person and having those in between meetings where you can 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. It 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 we've talked about the value of the hybrid workplace. We 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 hello, office 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 our life's work is finding and building out and running workplaces. And we're also recognizing the value of. Of the combination of remote and an office.

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, 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. Do they have a sense of belonging for a lot of different reasons. And so it's really important to take a pulse of your team and, 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 and 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, am I going to have a desk when I go back into the office? 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 and 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, nine to five, 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 off site 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 and 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 space. 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? Like, how can we say that a working mom or a kid fresh out of college that is just starting their career have to be in the office at the same time and spend the same amount of hours per day. You have to think about impact and you have to put trust in your team that it has to be about output from all of our managers. We've all probably on this session read high output management, 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 for everyone to have a strong sense of belonging and diversity and inclusion by opening up 100% office centric approach to a hybrid approach. And so I'm really excited about that at hello Office. 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 going to use a lot, like adversity, 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. And we get such a broad selection of responses around our surveys. Some people feel really productive from like 6am to 9am 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. And we really need to think about modular design and materials and think about 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. One of the things that I've learned is that temperature in the office matters a lot and you know, can, if you, if it runs a lot cooler, 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, you know, 40 hours a week, five days a week. And so, um, 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 the companies we talk 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 were designed to be modular. I mean, taking food as an example and deconstructing it. I love my salads deconstructed, but I want more of croutons, and I want one more of tomatoes. Right. But in 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 picture, 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 for 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 understanding of the dynamics of how your organization operates? And then let's recalibrate their 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. 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 and there is a balance between not having to worry about the office being dead or being forced to be remote forever. The hybrid solution, we believe, is the future and a really big opportunity to achieve a lot of things 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 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 hello Office 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 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 does this mean for the future of the 40 hour work week?

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 Saastr 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 worry, one thing we're seeing a lot of too is are we seeing a four day work week as opposed to a five day work week? Has that changed? Are we going to, if we're going to be 100% remote, should we just do a four day workweek given that we don't have those long commute hours and there's hours, say that could 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 kind of thinking about the pendulum swing in the other direction, like a lot of us are working way more than 40 hours now that we're 100% remote. And so we have to really think about. It's just so easy to crawl out of bed and head on to your first zoom and then just 12 hours later you're on your last zoom and then you're catching up on work and especially without having much other things to do. Work is the default and that's okay too. I just think that people have to really allow for, you know, time to take breaks and, you know, 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 going to be a lot more balance. Right. And so I just think that there's not one size fits all with any kind of like, you know, set number of hours or set number of days. I think it's going to 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 hello office. I think that like one, 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 managers with that team. I think that the important thing is that you have a balance, right? Like if you have six people on a team and five of them are in person, one 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 gonna 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 gonna spread 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 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.

Justin, you actually bring a really good point. You 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 called out for that.

Yeah, I mean, I think that like, you have to really kind of like, first of all, like, when you're dealing with people issues, right? Like 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 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 alignment 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 and the company.

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

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 six foot social distance, what we're finding, what I'm finding is six foot within my circle of friends may actually not be good enough. And so we've done studies of what six foot impact does. 10 foot, 12ft to the point where we find what is the comfort level for employees. And once you create this new post occupancy for the 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 acue, we're going to have to adjust if we're going to get a third or fourth wave.

Yeah. And on top of that, the safety of essential employees has really moved workplace technology from a nice to have or a not necessary to have to an absolute necessity from envoy protect and density and all of these things that are relatively easy to implement but really crucial to understand where the team is coming from. How many people are in the office at any given time? Are they using 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. So 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. That didn't necessarily apply to the thousands of new grads that they hire. And so I think that I see a lot of value in having entry level folks be around other team members in the office. But that also maybe that means four days a week or in the office and one day a week at home or a hybrid approach to that.

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

Oh, great question. So co working is going to, 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 the workplace for companies. Think about, you know, if just because someone wants to move to Salt Lake City or somewhere in Colorado or whatever 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 coworking is going to provide that flex option for companies. So I'm really bullish on co working long term. I think that it's, you know, it's going to 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 one. 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 desk 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, when I mentioned earlier the one for one, we don't think you need actually one for one. It could be 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. 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, nine to five. They're actually returning for a specific period of time, a specific period of date. So, for example, coming in Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 to 10, too. 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 focus work will be super critical, whether that's modular or, you know, actually structures built. So. All right, well, we cannot get to all of these questions. Feel free to email US, you know, justinelloooffice.com and jennwork. CO. 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.