Remote Work and the Effects COVID-19 on the Workplace with JLL

Join your AVI-SPL hosts Nancy Lussier and Anthony Salveggi as we discuss all things collaboration in the digital workplace.

In our first episode, JLL's Dusty Duistermars shares his insights on how COVID-19 may affect our return to the workplace, remote work, and collaboration space design.

As we’re now a few months into our work-from-home reality and some workers are returning to the office, it’s interesting to compare our notes to the current environment and recent workplace changes.

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SPEAKER_02 0:09

Welcome to the collaboration space. We share ideas on how you can create an engagement. Join AVI STL hosts, Nancy List here, and Anthony SelfDs along with ExpertGests as we chat about fostering collaboration in the office and online through video conferences. Welcome back to the collaboration space. This is Nancy List here from AVI STL on the line with my co-host Anthony Telfetti. Anthony, how are you doing today? And joining us today is Dusty Dystermart from JLL. JLL is a global real estate service provider. And it's a very timely conversation that we're having today. You know, we were all set to talk about the need to optimize your real estate space and build the collaboration spaces you need to attract talent. But we're in the throes of coronavirus where a lot of us are working from home. And the need for collaboration technology has exploded. Dusty, can you talk a little bit about what you're hearing and seeing in the workplace?

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here today. This is really something I don't know if anybody really understood to the level of impact that it would have. We are, first and foremost, a facility management service provider. So our core business, if you will, is managing people at their workplace. And the landscape is a little unique right now, right? There's a number of folks who are have enacted some sort of work-from-home policy. There may just be certain light staff on certain campuses or buildings, but there's certainly definitely a very heavy need for either personal at home-based collaboration tools or for those, again, connecting with folks in different areas of the globe, good collaboration technology. It's really a must-have at this point. In fact, even my web-based system the other day, bandwidth was really stretched. So we had a period of a bit of an outage for a while there. So definitely an interesting time that we are in for sure.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

It is, it is. And we're kind of working in a different normal right now, as you said. But when we return to work, when we return to the office, we're kind of going to be working under the new normal. Maybe some of the things that we have because of the current situation, we'll keep and we'll move over to when we return to the office. So I think that people still, when we get back to the office, are going to need to build a flexible workplace, right? And even more flexible than before, right? Because of what we're experiencing now. And this may be something that people are even looking for even more when they choose where they want to work and the environment they're going to want to work in.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Yes, that's a great point. I think there's a few, a few layers there. One, flexibility has been increasing dramatically, whether it has been some sort of HR policy that's allowed folks to work from home at least one day a week or two days a week. Other companies have already started to lease some level of co-working space in markets where they may not have a large enough workforce to actually justify a full-time office. So that's meeting a need, if you will. There's also the fact that, again, in traditional spaces, there are leases that are probably locked in for a number of years yet. But I think the underlying issue here is for those companies whose cultures were quite resistant to that style of working, this is either going to prove them right or or wrong in the sense that I think a number of service-based companies, if they're able to perform those services either from behind the scenes and or over the phone, they're going to find that there may be a dip in productivity. It could be dramatic, it may not be that bad. But for some, this will probably build the case that the workforce either can be or needs to be more flexible. A number of folks are going to want to recoup some of their losses in this time. And real estate typically, you know, within the top five in terms of highest expense on the PL, if they can optimize, I think you're going to see more of that in the in the future for sure.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

You know, I was interested to hear you mention co-working spaces because a lot of what we were seeing was already working with freelancers in the gig economy and working from home. So I'm wondering if if that plays a part in building co-working spaces in different cities as well. Is that something that you were seeing?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Absolutely. I would say the gig economy is one of the fastest growing. We've seen it more than double. I don't have the exact stats in front of me, but the tremendous, tremendous growth. I mean, even in the future, there will be a lot more folks who will be working in a different model. And not only does that mean in a maybe from their home or in a co-working space, but they may not have a full-time job, a salaries, benefits. We think of Uber and Lyft being those ways to have a job in this sharing economy. But there's platforms like Upwork, for example, which is actually that was a merger between Elance and Odesk. And think of architects, software engineers being able to swipe right or swipe left, meaning they'll get a project requirements doc and they'll have an opportunity to review that and say, huh, do I want to take this or not? Or bid on it, if you will. So the nature of work itself is absolutely changing. That doesn't mean all work is going to be that way in the future, but that gig economy is certainly increasing. And just with everything happening right now, I think it is going to encourage a little bit faster pace of this change.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah, I think the adoption timeline just got crunched a lot, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Exactly. But I just want to add that, you know, it it all points to a an overall labor situation that's worth touching on here in the sense of talent has has been so in demand, right? Very, very high skills or certain. I know in Michigan we have about 90,000 engineers, whether they're designing cars or whatever, and and that's not enough. And so for a while now, companies have had to think outside of the box to actually attract the needed skills that they need to provide their services. So one way has been opening up more remote working opportunities. But in in some cases, for those who still report to an office every day, they've looked at their spaces as a way to kind of leverage their space in in order to attract the top talent.

SPEAKER_01 6:42

So, Dustin, you talked about attracting the talent, but also having the infrastructure in terms of the office space in order to bring them in and to be able to accommodate them. My question to you is do you find that companies are speaking out or need a lot of advice as to where they should start? How do they change their culture? How do they know what to focus on first? Is it the technology, is it the spaces that will host the technology? And do they need advice on how to figure out where they begin to start to put their efforts and see how it will align with whatever their business vision is?

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Yes, absolutely. One, knowing what their goals are is incredibly important. We find that there's a lot of data available that companies have, whether it's Outlook room booking, you know, information, which could be parceled into additional layers in terms of how many, who's actually collaborating is the marketing department meaning with finance or this or the sales team or whatever. There's some really interesting metrics. But we find that, at least at JLL, we've got a tremendously strong strategic consulting arm. And so our workplace strategy team can actually come in and make sense of that data. They would probably do some additional occupancy studies, but the whole concept is saying, all right, great that you've established your goals and what you think you want to achieve, but here's how you're actually working. Look at this gap here. Your requests for meeting rooms are way outpacing the actual level of rooms available. There's a lot of data that we see where people are looking for smaller rooms, high touch, high-tech, video conferencing capability, high quality LCD screen, and those may not be available. Sometimes we we see the lack of data for a use of a certain room. But if you double-click on that, you can see that it's it's a room that might work for certain things, but it doesn't work for everything. And so we try to come in and look at how people work, and then yes, try to align that with what their objectives are and go from there.

SPEAKER_02 8:43

So it sounds like Dusty, you know, you can take a look at the use of, say, a large conference room. Maybe you have a conference room that can accommodate up to 24 people, and it's either not being used or being used by three to five people. So maybe the choice is, you know, you want to optimize that space, maybe that space becomes two or three huddle rooms versus a large conference room. Is that the kind of thing you can help with?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Absolutely. That's a great example. And yet, depending on their corporate objectives, it's critical sometimes that even though they see low utilization in a room like that, they absolutely see the justification in having it because the alternative is going out into the marketplace and having to find a city and the right hotel and fly everybody in and hold these training sessions where if they're at corporate headquarters for meetings anyway, having that room, even though it's only used three times per month by 15 or more people, the value really is in having both types of spaces. So, yeah, we we find a whole broad range of analytics going in all kinds of directions.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Yeah, it sounds like you you need to dig a little deeper, right? Not just look at those first lines, like I was saying, well, this room's not being used. Well, maybe so, but it's serving its purpose.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Correct. Correct.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

I was gonna ask Dusty if you saw companies are receptive to having the kind of criticism or insight that you may bring to them and are confident that they can be flexible enough to change the way they do business and the way they operate in order to ultimately do a better job of reaching what their own business outcomes are, regardless of what trends are, just knowing that if they are more flexible, they can they can start to better fulfill their own mission.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

That's an excellent question. And I guess my response is people are people. And so it's tough to change a certain business leader who just sees things in a certain way. I think that's where this coronavirus stuff is really gonna open up the doors a bit. I've got a client right now that just they absolutely see that going to the workplace globally for every location they have across 40 million square feet is an absolutely necessary thing. Now, maybe that's true, but what we typically find in the data that there are certain business units that absolutely benefit from being in a space working every single day side by side. But there are also other business units that once we get back to this new normal, they're gonna be on planes every day. They're gonna be in different types of spaces or in client-facing meetings. I mean, there's there's a whole slew of needs. So one approach shouldn't necessarily be what corporate leaders are thinking works, especially now that we've kind of tested this theory of are people you know productive at home. I think it was Gallup just put out some information not that long ago that that said, yes, we've tested it up and down, and and people are productive, if not more productive from their home office. It slashes the commute times and so on and so forth. And and so there's there's opportunity there. Whether it's the right thing is a deeper question. And again, as I said earlier, I think there's there will be some that are looking to recoup any sort of losses during this time. So operational savings are just a reality. If if it's even possible to do shared desking, so we see a lot of neighborhoods where there's maybe 200 people assigned to this neighborhood or or pod of 100 desks. So could they get away with that? I just know we we did a headquarter project not that long ago where we between HR policy and the actual occupancy model allowed uh headquarters to consolidate from 6,000 spaces down to 2,000. It was a shared desking model, and for the really transient folks, they had the mobile app, which would allow them to book their desk in advance and so on and so forth. So lots of lots of ways to figure it out.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Are companies concerned about finding the right balance between you know how many flexible spaces they should have, how many permanent spaces they have, and how much say remote work they should be including in their plan?

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, as long as they have the right approach, understanding that it's a journey, certainly not a race. We could get into that mind coming coming out of this thing right now where we're people rush to get rid of their office space. I wouldn't suggest that. I would do the study, if you will, to really figure out what your needs are. Because I know one very, very, very large global manufacturer, they thought hoteling would be the absolute answer. Meaning, again, whether it's a mobile app or through my Outlook plugin, I would need to book my desk every single day. Because the thought was, you know, people are using different types of spaces. When we went activity-based work, we created huddle rooms, traditional conference rooms, training rooms, just kind of lounge couch areas, right? And sit-stand desks or whatever. Those are great options. And for some companies, forcing the employees to reserve whatever they need is great. But for this particular user, it was an absolute nightmare. They had the space to give people access to different styles of work environments. So what they found was a much more better use of time was doing that neighborhood model. So that way it wasn't taking time out of everybody's day to book the desk. Or you had people who would literally wake or uh as soon as it was like 12.01 a.m. when the system allowed them to book that desk, just like an airline seat, people were logging into the system and booking so that they would get that same desk again, or that spot near the window, or whatever. That's just added stress on people. So finding that right balance, yes, it took them some time. They they did a number of different pilots, different buildings did this model, different floors did this model based on the business unit needs. And they did find a balance of neighborhood free address pods, if you will. So again, they're assigning one or two hundred to that set of 100 desks, but for the for the more national transient folks, they did have uh half of a floor at their headquarters, were absolutely designated as those you know, touchdown zones. So if I'm coming in for a meeting, yes, I had a desk for three days or whatever. So it was a nice, a nice balance.

SPEAKER_02 15:18

It's interesting. It's we want flexibility, but we're also creatures of habit, right? I want to have flexibility, but I like to have my comfort zone of this is the desk that I use when I'm here, kind of thing. So that that's interesting to hear that. So it sounds like we're in interesting times now with what's going on with coronavirus. And then when we get back to the office, you know, we may be even in for more interesting times and change as we adjust to our new normal in our collaboration spaces. And also including possibly more remote work. I want to thank my guest today, Dusty Dystermars from JLL. Dusty, thanks so much for taking time out of your day-to-day chat with us.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

You bet. Thanks for having me, guys.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

I know that people can learn more about JLL at JLL.com. Dusty, do you want to throw out any social media accounts where people can reach out to you?

SPEAKER_00 16:06

Yeah, not on it too much. Twitter and Dusty C R E is probably the easiest, but you can also find me on uh LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

Okay, great. Thank you so much. Anthony, thanks for your time as usual as well. And uh I will leave you with that. And we will see you next time in the collaboration space. Thank you for listening to our latest episode. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast after. We'll see you next time in the collaboration space. Until we meet again, you can connect with us online. Our Twitter handle is at ABI SPLINFO. And you'll also find us on LinkedIn at avispl.gov.