As companies install stricter in-office rules and seek to spruce up their workplaces, real estate services giant CBRE has hired a former Facebook executive to help them design and run spaces that click with employees.
Annie Dean, who has led workplace experience and flexible work efforts at companies including software developer Atlassian, Meta’s Facebook and her own startup, Werk.co, joined CBRE in its New York office, the Dallas-based company said Tuesday in a statement.
Dean is set to lead the newly formed CBRE x Industrious Building Experience Lab, a venture that aims to turn offices, logistics centers, storefronts and other commercial settings into more “human-focused, empowering and delightful places to work,” CBRE said.
“How we work has fundamentally changed,” Dean said in the statement, adding that a different kind of workplace experience is even more relevant at a time of growth for artificial intelligence.
Dean, who started her career as a commercial real estate attorney at Wall Street law firms, was most recently with Atlassian, where since 2022 she guided the real estate and workplace experience divisions and oversaw a teamwork lab researching modern work trends, including the influence of AI.
"Flexible work is clearly now the norm,” Dean said Tuesday in a LinkedIn post. “But the next challenge is to take these physical spaces and to make them live up to the promise of what an office can and should be."
At Facebook, she was director of remote work, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her study on flexible work and new ways of working began even before the pandemic upended the office experience, the profile said.
Dean’s hire comes as the return-to-office trend nationwide is heading in the positive direction as employers including Samsung, Google and Starbucks have tightened their return-to-office policies in recent months, according to location analytics firm Placer.ai. New York, which has led other office markets in recovery from the pandemic, in July saw its office foot traffic topping the pre-pandemic level, the Placer.ai study found.
There are more signs that attendance may trend higher. While some three-fifths of companies, or 61%, said their office attendance rates have “reached a steady state,” another 38% still expect attendance to increase further, according to a CBRE survey of 184 firms.
“CBRE runs more workplaces than anyone else on earth,” said Jamie Hodari, chief executive officer of CBRE’s building operations and experience segment. “Increasingly, our clients want to make their workplaces welcoming, empowering, human-centered places. … We’ll be working with our most demanding clients, partnering with researchers and designers, and most of all, spending time with users until people see that workplaces and commercial real estate can deliver the kind of experiences that are typically associated with great hotels, cruises or restaurants.”
Hodari, whom Dean reports to, said he “searched long and hard to find the right person” to lead that effort and, “within two minutes of meeting” Dean, said he knew she was the right match.