www.relogix.com Open in urlscan Pro
141.193.213.21  Public Scan

Form analysis
2 forms found in the DOM

GET https://www.relogix.com/

<form role="search" method="get" class="ubermenu-searchform" action="https://www.relogix.com/" data-hs-cf-bound="true">
  <input type="text" placeholder="Search" value="" name="s" class="ubermenu-search-input">
  <input type="submit" class="ubermenu-search-submit" value="">
</form>

GET https://www.relogix.com/

<form role="search" method="get" class="ubermenu-searchform" action="https://www.relogix.com/" data-hs-cf-bound="true">
  <input type="text" placeholder="Search" value="" name="s" class="ubermenu-search-input">
  <input type="submit" class="ubermenu-search-submit" value="">
</form>

Text Content

Skip to content
Your new workplace insights platform – Conexus. Watch the video to find out how
Conexus can help you. Watch now.


Request a Demo Skip Navigation
 * Solutions
 * Products
 * Learn
   Back
   
    * Learn
   
    * --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
    * * Blog
        
      * How to Use Your Booking Data to Build a Better StrategyBooking data is
        only as reliable as the people who use it---and as it turns out, there’s
        lots of room for error.
        
    * * Books
        
      * The Ultimate Workplace Sensors Guide: Everything A CRE Leader Needs to
        Know to Succeed
        
    * * Podcasts
      * Let’s Get Real – Discussions on the Workplace and Corporate Real Estate
        Podcast
   
    * * Videos
        
      * What We Do – Conexus Workplace Insights Platform Powered by Relogix
        
    * * Case Studies
        
      * Insurance Firm Plans Real Estate Growth with Desk Utilization Analytics
        
    * * Webinars
        
      * Data Stories and Corporate Real Estate: A Seminar Series
        
   
    * * Tools
      * Workspace Sharing Ratio Calculator

 * Company
   Back
   
    * Company
   
    * --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
    * * About Us
        Our mission is to turn data into valuable outcomes.
    * * Careers
        It’s a perfect time to join Relogix!
    * * News
        
      * Relogix Announces Former Amazon Director of Global Workplace Solutions,
        Don Crichton, as Head of Workplace Insights
        
    * * Our Partners
        We’re transforming the experience of work with industry leading partners
        who share our vision.

 * 

 * --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 * 
 * * Back
   * 
   * 
 * Sign in
 * Contact
 * Request A Demo


LET’S GET REAL EPISODE 15: CULTURE ATTRACTS TALENT – DOES IT RETAIN TALENT?


DISCUSSIONS ON THE WORKPLACE AND CORPORATE REAL ESTATE PODCAST

Written by Sandra Panara, Director of Workspace Insights



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 podcast@Relogix.com.

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!

LinkedInLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new windowFacebookTwitter


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sandra Panara, Director of Workspace Insights

Sandra has both a deep and wide understanding of Corporate Real Estate and
Technology. With over 25 years hands-on experience she is able to apply
non-traditional approaches to extract deep learning from the most unsuspecting
places in order to drive strategy. She has developed an appreciation for always
challenging the status quo to provoke and encourage new ways of thinking that
drive continuous improvement and innovation. Sandra believes square pegs can fit
into round holes and that the real ‘misfits’ are those environments that fail to
adapt. Her expertise ranges broadly from CRE Portfolio Research, Analytics &
Insights, Workforce Planning, Space & Occupancy Planning & Workplace Strategy.



Let's Get Real Episode 13: Commuting and the Future of Work
The Best Way to Make the Most of Your IWMS Data
Let's Get Real Episode 12: Facilities Management and CRE Strategy
21 Questions To Ask Before You Build A Return-To-Office Strategy
Skip Navigation
 * Solutions
 * Products
 * Learn
   * Blog
   * Books
   * Tools
   * Case Studies
 * Company
   * About Us
   * Careers
   * News
   * Our Partners
 * Terms & Privacy

Get In Touch Phone: 1-(888) 712-6448
Email: info@relogix.com
Mailing Address:
411 Legget Drive, Suite 102
Ottawa, Ontario
K2K 3C9
Skip Navigation
 * 
 * 
 * 

© 2022 Relogix. All rights reserved.
 * Sign In
 * Terms & Privacy

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok
with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Close

PRIVACY OVERVIEW

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through
the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary
are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic
functionalities...
Necessary
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and
security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal
information.
Non-necessary
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function
and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other
embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to
procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT



✓
Thanks for sharing!
AddToAnyLink opens in a new window
More…





We're offline right now

Please leave a message!