The pandemic-led hybrid work pattern has reshaped the office market and led to both landlords and employers soul-searching on the kind of environment that will resonate with employees.
CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm, recently took a major step in an attempt to help clients solve that puzzle.
The Dallas-based company said last month it hired Annie Dean, billed as a “future of work” expert who has led office experience and flexible work efforts at companies including software developer Atlassian, Meta’s Facebook and her own startup, Werk.co.
In New York, Dean leads a newly formed venture that CBRE has said aims to turn offices, logistics centers, storefronts and other commercial settings into more “human-focused, empowering and delightful places to work.”
Dean also serves as global chief strategy officer for CBRE’s Building Operations & Experience business, a segment that manages the largest portfolio of real estate and facilities in the world, a total of nearly 8 billion square feet.
CoStar News spoke with Dean on her origin story and where she thinks the American workplace is heading. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You started your career as a real estate attorney on Wall Street. How did you end up becoming an authority on flexible work and the future of office?
I did start out my career as a real estate attorney on Wall Street, representing institutional lenders in the acquisition and refinancing of multibillion-dollar real estate transactions. That gave me an early understanding of how important and valuable [real estate is] and how investors think about real estate. When I was an attorney, I had two children, quite young, meaning that I didn't have as much autonomy over my schedule. I became very interested in that time about how we could change how work happens to better embrace the realities of life.
I was up at 4 o'clock in the morning sitting at my desk in downtown Manhattan and not seeing my infant child very frequently. So I ended up building a company that was all about data and analytics to understand the realities of how work happens, and that led into a series of transformational roles about flexibility in the workplace and how to design organizations that function in more modern ways.
What was your big takeaway from that evolution?
The workplace and real estate are critical components of every company’s strategy, and offices in particular need to look differently in order to meet the needs of businesses and people today.
We need to think about real estate and offices as an asset that has strong returns for the business. One of the things that we developed was what we called a cost-per-visit metric, where we measured the cost of every single visit at an office. We also collected information on who is visiting in an anonymized way, how frequently, and where they were coming from. That helps give a picture about how to make different choices, about how the office is designed, what the office footprint should look like. It gives us a signal in a product-driven way to make changes to that workplace that better reflect the needs of the people who use it and the business.
Offices are much more event driven. There are a portion of people who are residents in an office, but many other people are visitors of an office, more like a hotel might be. We found that hospitality was incredibly differentiated when it comes to the experience. You want to be able to get into any of the offices that you visited just on your phone instead of having to re-register at any office that you might go to.
The number of desks that are in an office have shifted in order to better reflect the amount of collaboration that happens virtually in an office. Large conference rooms have often gotten smaller because fewer participants are in the same room at that same time, and technology integrations into those rooms have become incredibly important. It’s doing things like looking at the org network analysis that includes all of the participants in a meeting room through Zoom, and those who are there in person that help you understand how to architect an office environment that truly works. Unless we upgrade how work happens, the experience won't meet our expectations.
What sets apart workplaces that may have delivered on those goals?
We absolutely believe that having a workplace that drives a good experience delivers value to businesses. It's clear that businesses recognize that as well. One of the big changes that I'm seeing is the move from task-based office design to behaviorally designed office design so offices feel more like a work club, where each environment specifically reflects a behavior, like a library focus area, a really activated collaboration studio that feels creative, and very highly activated cafes that serve as social space.
One thing that we found is that there's a lot of greater need for individual call spaces that are not as large as an office, but are enclosed and comfortable, with an ergonomic chair and monitor to drive the types of video calls that people tend to be in throughout the day, whereas before, in a task-based environment, you'd have a single floor where all of those activities would be right next to one another, which is certainly convenient, but makes it more difficult to do any of those tasks very well.
Technology and artificial intelligence are the big buzzwords of the day. Are robots bringing coffee to employees?
No, definitely not. But I do think that AI can drive greater personalization in the experience. AI is largely a data opportunity. It's about making sure that we can get to the same level of personalization as TikTok. We might not quite get there, but that would be the goal. In the past 20 years, we've thought about buildings mostly in terms of its space, its square footage, its occupancy, and we haven't necessarily had the data, technology and services to really make it feel like it's the person that's at the center of that journey.
We want to develop a more user-centered focus that looks more like a technology company would understand and learn from its user base. TikTok learns about you in five seconds, but a building doesn't have much opportunity to learn about you at all. So we want to make sure that both the people that service that building and the technology that services that building has the opportunity to get to know you, so that it can develop a personalized experience.