Webinar on Demand: Back to Anywhere

This isn’t your classic in-office vs. remote debate.

Corporate real estate and workplace experts weigh in on the real future of remote work. Join panelists Shannon McLendon (The Motley Fool), Eric Nelson (LiveRamp), Ben Wright (SquareFoot), and Ryan Turner (RefineRE).

As we move forward following the official “corporate declaration” on the workplace and put decisions into play, unanswered questions and missing pieces of the puzzle remain. Join us to hear leaders in corporate real estate, workplace, and technology weigh in on the future of remote work, including:

• Keeping company culture intact and employee satisfaction positive
• Employing digital transformation solutions to inform strategy with data and analytics
• Leveraging this transitional period to optimize and improve real estate portfolio position
• Optimizing budget along the way and finding answers to the questions Finance is asking

Transcription

Mallory Pitts: 

All right, well as our last few people are trickling in, let’s just go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming to Back to Anywhere. We’re super excited to have you. I’m Mallory Pitts, the marketing associate at RefineRE, the leading platform for data analytics and benchmarking for corporate occupiers, I’m just going to kick us off with a few housekeeping items before we get started. So you can expect this webinar to go for about an hour, but no worries, if you need to hop off early, because we’ll be sending out a recording afterward. We also ask you to, you know, engage with our speakers, we really want the audience to be involved. So please send any questions you might have throughout in the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. And we’ll have a Q&A portion at the end. Thank you all for being here. And thank you to our wonderful panelists. So I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to our moderator, Ben Wright from SquareFoot. 

Ben Wright: 

Great to be with everybody this morning. And it’s not quite afternoon, I don’t, maybe on the East Coast, we could, we could think about it almost being the afternoon. But good morning. My job here is to make sure this is a fun and engaging webinar. And I think it’s really going to be so we all know that there’s been massive speculation about the future of the workplace. By now most companies have really kind of stated their position on return to the office as being either in-office remote or hybrid. These are words you’re probably all kind of sick of at the moment, but if you’re responsible for this like our panelists are, you know that the future is actually happening now. So in this webinar, you’re going to learn how leaders in corporate real estate are really making the transition from the kind of a speculative or passive or reactive mode, to really achieve a post-pandemic, work environment that works for their business. So this panel is about active actual transitions, not speculation. We’re going to talk a lot about what to look for, how to execute, and you’re going to hear from the folks in the trenches every day. So as we kind of move. Yeah, as we move forward, there are a lot of unanswered questions like, like we’ve said, We want you to use the Q&A, and we’re gonna actually prompt you quite a bit to use it. So you see the Q&A at the bottom there. We’re going to use a panel-style format, meaning you’re going to hear different strategies, different perspectives, and different styles. And we believe that each workplace is unique. And I think you’ll see that today. So I’ll start. I’m Ben Wright, head of flexible office solutions for SquareFoot, who is New York-based. The company is a commercial real estate brokerage that’s really leading into digital and leading into flex, and square foot has five locations around the country headquartered in New York, about 75 employees with about 10 or 15 open positions at the moment. I’m calling in from Boulder, Colorado, though. And one fun fact about my day-to-day life is I tend to be the remote work executive, the one that espouses that and learns that every day and probably annoys people in the headquarters. So that’s kind of my fun fact. So I’m going to introduce or hand it over to Eric Nelson, the head of global workplace experience at LiveRamp. Introduce yourself, Eric. 

Eric Nelson: 

Thanks, Ben. Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you’re sitting these days, kind of all over the place. So dispersed these days. So yeah, thanks so much, Ben. Eric Nelson, I head up our global workplace experience at LiveRamp. And those of you who don’t know LiveRamp, I’m gonna try my best to tell you what we do. It’s a little complicated. So you might need to look it up yourself, because I don’t think I’ll nail it. But at the core, we’re a data connectivity platform. What we do is we enable companies and our partners to better connect, control and activate our data to transform customer experiences, and generate more valuable business outcomes is essentially what we do. So we’re about 1400 people globally. And I’m calling in today from San Rafael, California. So we have our main headquarters is in downtown San Francisco. And we’ll get into what in the world is going on down there and our other offices later. But also I guess I’m supposed to tell you what is a fun fact of my day to day Um, let’s see here, Ben, a fun fact of my day to day is that well, I have eight projects going on currently construction design projects all on flight, all running in parallel. And so we named those projects dubbed as project spirit animal. We all want to like gotta sometimes Calm yourself and you’re dealing with a project. So that’s a fun fact, we have pretty, we have some fun when we do work. I, you know, and the partners that we choose, have tried to do the same, you know, teams everything. So there’s a fun fact we try to have a little bit of fun. And we’re project spirit animals, San Francisco project spirit animal, London and all the team members have to tell you what their project spirit animal is as they come on board. So thanks so much, Ben, I think passing it off. 

Ben Wright: 

Yeah. Go ahead, Shannon. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure. Hi, I’m Shannon McLendon, I’m the director of office services in real estate at The Motley Fool. We’re a financial services company with our purpose being to help the world become smarter, happier and richer. I think we’re pretty well known for our culture, and being a little bit unique and really caring about our employees. We have about 600 employees worldwide. I’m calling in from my home in Virginia which is right outside the DC area. Our office, we started based out of Alexandria, and since grown, and we’re a global company, we’re all around the world. Fun fact, before coming to the Motley Fool, I bartended for 12 years. And ironically, I have found those skills to be the most helpful now in my day to day job than my actual degree. 

Ben Wright: 

I’ve got great follow ups for each of you after that, you know, spirit animal and the most transferable skill. But we’ll hold those off. Thank you, Shannon. Next is Ryan Turner, founder and CEO of RefineRE. I think you’re muted Ryan. 

Ryan Turner: 

Been doing this long enough. You think I’d know that by now. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. And Thanks, Ben for running the show here. Really appreciate it. Ryan Turner, founder and CEO of RefineRE, as Mallory shared, we’re a leading benchmarking analytics and data company for corporate occupiers. So if you think about RefineRE, we are corporate real estate data nerds. And I think that that’s really the fun fact about my role is I get to be all things corporate real estate data nerd, helping customers think through all sorts of unique challenges and solving them with data. It’s something I’ve been passionate about since I started my career in commercial real estate over 20 years ago. So RefineRE is based in Dallas, where I live where I’m sitting today. And we’ve got just under 30 employees. And we’re really excited to be a part of yet another discussion about, you know, the things that are on all of your minds as corporate real estate leaders. 

Ben Wright: 

All right, fantastic. Well, we have a great panel, one of the things I want the audience to do is use the chat function, there’s a chat function and Q&A. But I want you to chat in your name, your company name, and one issue that you’re seeing in your day to day that you want us to talk about when we get into actual questions for the panelists use Q&A. But let’s get you guys engaged with some of the chat functionality here. Okay, so. So, the first topic I want to put out to the group is about change in general. And you know, each of you come from different workplaces. In fact, I think all four of us are in different time zones, which is interesting by itself, that we’re collaborating this way. But you come from different workplaces with different roles. Some of you use spirit animals, some of you use bartending skills. Others of you are former brokers, but you’re all responsible for interpreting trends and applying them to your business. So what’s one thing that each of you are doing in your job today, that you never did pre pandemic at work? Who wants to take that one first? 

Shannon McLendon: 

I can take that one first. Um, it’s funny, before the pandemic hit, we were trying to figure out at The Motley Fool, how to really embrace our small group of remote employees, and we are trying to figure out how to embrace that. But it was hard to get in that mental mindset because I was an in office person, and that was just the majority of the company was very much the old fashion, you everybody expected to come into an office and, so it was hard to try to wrap my brain around it. But obviously, the pandemic has forced me fully into it. I completely understand now. And actually, I think it has helped propel us forward and really embracing what virtual first means for us as a company and trying to create a level playing field and thinking about how when we do start returning to an office, how we’re going to continue to keep this level playing field that we’ve found with everybody being fully remote. So that was something that we definitely couldn’t figure out before. That now I feel like I’m way more experienced and have more history with now.  

Ben Wright: 

Eric. 

Eric Nelson: 

Yeah, yeah. I’ve Become a pandemic expert. Crisis expert, a therapist a You know, I don’t know you name it. Teacher one point with my son. I would say, you know, pre pandemic. Well Lets say post, but like right now. So the remote experience, and I would say experience overall. So what’s that change management look like really diving deep in the change behaviors like behavior patterns? Like, how do you do it? What the progress or process is, you know, how do you think about that? And so and then the other thing, I’d just add that wasn’t, we’re doing more workplace experience, but now we’re just experience right? You have to really think about this, like equitable experience across when you’re remote or a hybrid, or, you know, and how do you balance that out with all sorts of different tools? And again, with behavior change, right, kind of starts there. So I think those are the two biggest, biggest pieces, just the overall experience of it all. And then just how do you? How do you handle, you know, the change management behavior management at the end of the day? 

Ben Wright: 

Eric, it sounds like you might be headed for another title change. It’s not workplace experience, it’ll be head of global employee experience. Is that what you’re that what you’re hinting at? 

Eric Nelson: 

Yeah, yeah, to some degree, it’s Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty spot on. I mean, that’s you, we really think about all the employee lifecycle, right, you think about when you’re trying to recruit, when they’re onboard that first 90 days, when they’re trying to get developed and find a career path? And then should they, you know, actually, you know, then grow? And then should they actually exit, right? And now that happens, like, you know, not all physical, like, we used to be all our onboarding used to fly into San Francisco, that does not happen, obviously, anymore, and will not happen moving forward. So that onboarding experience is different, how you get developed and grow and have a career and you know, if let’s say you end up staying remote, so yeah, it’s really working with all the, you know, from the C suite to our people. So we reported that the people and culture team, and you know really and we’ve always been a very people first, like what the business needs, and then what LiveRampers needs to be successful is, you know, what we focus on. But, you know, it’s, you know, work with BT, and then work with comms and you’re just your array is now so much different, especially we take that behavioral change, and really that experience kind of point of view. So yeah, you’re spot on. And it’s complicated, right? It’s not an easy, it’s not an easy ask. 

Ben Wright: 

Ryan is the the CEO of a growing company, but also a company that works with, you know, dozens and dozens of large enterprises. What are some of the things that you’ve seen change that maybe you never expected? Before the pandemic? 

Ryan Turner: 

Yeah, you know, I thought prior to all of this the corporate real estate function was about as wide and deep as a single role or function within a corporation could be. But that proved to be really wrong, we got wider and deeper in terms of what our customers are being asked to do for their organizations, to both Eric and Shannon’s point, the the levels of expertise, we have to have around things that nobody knows about, you become the de facto expert on some of these things, has been really interesting for us, I think, we used to be able to, to run corporate real estate portfolios through knowledge and experience. And that doesn’t really apply anymore. We’re seeing new roles, like data wrangling and data management, and using words like technology stack for our eight year old industry, that are popping up. When we started this company. Five years ago, you know, we would talk about data. And our customers didn’t speak that language. They never talked about data. They talked about deals and transactions and design. And now it’s about data. Those customers are coming to us. And looking to talk about data. I think it’s really, really interesting. So that’s a huge change. We need that information in order to drive all this forward to enhance the specific challenges, employee engagement, recruitment team, all of those things are so essential to these businesses.  

Ben Wright: 

We actually got an awesome question already. So I’m just going to kind of jump into it.  because it’s right on point. So I’m going to read the question and a comment here. So as Eric said, We hear a lot about experience versus work workplace experience. So somebody’s really, really adding and enhancing your point, Eric, I translate this into planning for today versus planning for a few years out, this is them saying that. While today we really care about that experience. And then here now for the panel. How are you weighing planning for the future, meaning two to five years out in terms of office space design and continuity planning, and I’ll pass this one to Shannon because she’s got some really interesting things that Motley Fool is doing and she mentioned culture. So I think it’d be really interesting to see how that planning and is reflecting that the The Motley Fool culture as well. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure, um, Ryan, like you had said, we’ve always been very much a data driven company. And so throughout this whole pandemic, we’ve been serving our employees probably every three to four months, just trying to understand how they’re feeling, how they expect to work in the future, what they’re thinking they’re going to do, obviously, all things change, when you actually get down to actually doing what you say you’re going to do. But so we’ve been looking at the survey results, making some, some estimates and predictions of how we think things are going to go and then looking at the data and seeing the trends on that. And the trend so far that we’re seeing at the fool is that people are wanting to work from home, or they are wanting more of that flexibility. I think that is the future. And so as far as planning two to five years out and thinking about our office space, we’re wanting to keep the most flexibility that we can. So we’re considering looking at co-working spaces, coffee shops, food halls, things like that, that we’re not signing long term commitments. So that gives us flexibility to test some things out, understand why employees are wanting to come together, is it teams wanting to meet for strategy and collaboration? Or is it you know, individual contributors, who are just wanting to get out of their house and want a change of scenery. And so we’re just wanting to keep that flexibility, knowing that we have some ideas, we’re testing some things now. But we don’t want to commit to anything, because we’re just not sure where exactly things will land. I have some really great ideas of what I think we’ll end up but I think we just want to keep that flexibility. So I think the co-working in the coffee shops there. Those are great options to just try some things. We’re very much a test and learn culture. So we’ve implemented that throughout multiple places. 

Ben Wright: 

I love it. Eric, what’s your What’s your response to essentially weighing the present versus the future two to five years out? How’s that going? At LiveRamp? 

Eric Nelson: 

Well Shannon I love how you guys call yourself the fool at the Fool. So fun. Um, it’s, you know, it’s always been a challenge like in the tech world forecasting, you’re getting them to even think about headcount forecasts, or how we would structure deals, leases, space, design, struggle, right. They don’t know, like, it’s, that’s, it’s, it’s a tricky slope. I mean, especially in the tech world, right, it’s especially to like a smaller company like the Fool or you’re startup, like you’re growing 30 40%, that could change with one product line. So, you know, to Shannon’s point as well always been data driven, always been trying to help the business think about these things, and scenario plan accordingly. But in the these days, it’s even that much harder, like my crystal ball isn’t working less than half the time now, we just works about half done. Now. It’s like 20%, because everything the ground underneath you is pretty shaky, right? And changes. And you have to say, so agile, whether it’s kind of this moment in time, or heaven knows what’s going to happen six months. So I think, you know, we’re not as flexible as Shannon, like, we’re not thinking about like coffee shops, and like, we’re doing like a lounge in Seattle, like more of a LiveRamp lounge, which is more of a drop in space. So a bit smaller, reduce the size there, you know, and found a good sublease, which keeps you somewhat flexible, a little bit shorter term than you would have to go with a direct lease things like that, you know, definitely looking into, you know, how we utilize, you know, platforms like liquid space, or we work or something like that, to to be more ad hoc. So as they need, like your remote employees need to go meet for an off site, or just want to get together like to have that flexibility and platform to do so. But those are, you know, pretty nominal investments and, and keep it flexible, very ad hoc, right, we haven’t decided on, you know, a solution that works really good for us. Because I think we don’t really know exactly what that’s going to be we don’t know, like a remote experience. You know, what that platform looks like versus like our hybrid, we have a concept of, like Shannon said, we’re gonna apply that to our designs, which the projects that I mentioned, which is the flip side of that coin to do it all parallel so that, you don’t get lessons learned, right, so we can’t test stuff. But because we had so much data, we started researching our employees, our teams, our business, for what they need, even pre COVID we had started this process and what we call the workspace Manifesto. Like we started to understand that while before then we had to pivot in COVID. Obviously, then we became much more remote friendly, which is great. And then we applied both those learnings to then what our concept is moving forward which is going to be much more agile, but so we felt really confident about that. But like everything, it’s a concept, right? And it’s even more conceptual because of the current environment like macro environment. 

Ben Wright: 

Ryan, is there anything you’ve seen across all the enterprises that you look at that feels that feels maybe permanent? On one hand, meaning it’s changes happening, that’s gonna keep happening, or anything that maybe doesn’t feel permanent, that feels temporary? You can talk about either side of that. 

Ryan Turner: 

Yeah, I think just thinking about our customer base. So our customers cover about 3 million employees in 126 countries. And there’s obviously a lot of different and new challenges for those corporate real estate executives to try and manage through all the things that we talked about that I think is permanent. Is that flexibility factor, Shannon, that you mentioned, and I know, Eric, you guys are supporting that. There’s a metric that everybody’s trying to get to. And whether they say it or not, what they’re trying to understand for their ELT for leadership is what is the price of flexibility? What is our cost of flexibility? And can we make that sustainable for the future. You know, when we looked at it, this is the beginning of the pandemic, the average lease term remaining across 18,000 leases in our customer database was four and a half years, this is an aircraft carrier that you cannot just turn on a dime. So how do we understand this going forward and plan for that? Obviously, the thing that’s front and center today that I think will hopefully either go away or or minimize is this return to Office function that we’re all being forced to deal with. You know, that’s, that’s just a lot of making sure the trains run on time, in a unique project that doesn’t involve swinging hammers, most of the time, that we’re seeing as I think that’s hopefully going to be something that’s, that’s fleeting, we’re all gonna become experts on it, and hopefully it goes away. So that’s sort of the near term thing, and I think we’re all spending on. 

Ben Wright: 

Yeah, it makes sense. So one of the things from my observation here is, there are some permanent things going on. And so I’m going to put a slide up here that kind of leads a little bit to it. And I’ll tee this up by saying we did a lot of research with our clients. And, and one of the things we found is, is the one part of this that of the changes in COVID, that that senior management, as well as employees agreed on was the commute needs to change. And I remember when we first saw that in the data, we were like, Oh my gosh, that if everybody agrees that the commute is going away, that alone is a huge change. So this is data that has come from a larger study that ULI and Ernsten Young did that I think, really talks about where work is being done. So actually, the comment here is less from real estate exacts more from execs in general. But 78% of executives say that execution tasks are the things that are going to be done remotely. And 76% of execs say that strategic things and creative things like talent management and product management are going to be done in person. So these are leaders of I think 600, 500 to 600, large companies saying, one shift they’re making is what type of work gets done remotely, and what type of work gets done in person. So I want to use this to kind of tee the panel up and say, Have you seen changes in where work is being done? And is there a difference between execution tasks and strategic tasks in each of your businesses? So I’ll kind of go in reverse order here. Ryan, have you seen anything that relates to this and how your clients are making shifts in person versus remote? 

Ryan Turner: 

Yeah, well, I’ll start with kind of the data nerd answer, which is, you know, what are the metrics that we care about, and we’re seeing metrics pop up, like days saved in commute time, and using that as a way to get to go no go while having the HR discussion. So I think that a big part of it is the bridge between real estate and HR is really, really big right now. Very, very important. We need to bucket these employees into those functions that we think. I think the big challenge, though, that we’re all facing is how do we know if it’s working? And how do we know people are actually doing what we said they’re going to do in terms of coming in three days a week or more or three days a week or less? So that’s kind of the big challenge we’re trying to untangle with our customers now is how do we measure this? But yeah, I think that, you know, we’re seeing a general trend, Ben, I think you and I have talked about this a lot. It’s at remote, at hybrid, or at office in some form, is sort of where everybody’s ending up. And how you bucket them totally depends on the business, we have customers that are saying, who’s got direct reports versus who doesn’t. And you know, using that as an indicator of what might happen, and they’re implementing that. We’ve got one customer, that’s making it almost like a healthcare enrollment, they’ve got a rolling 12 month commitment that you make in terms of hybrid, or remote. And you have to declare it, and then that goes into your HR piece. And that gets funneled back into real estate so they can make the decisions for that. awfully hard to make decisions, you know, when you only have 12 months of commitment. So they’re having to get super flexible, and it’s really interesting. Those are kind of the gamuts we’re seeing . It’s all over the spectrum, fully remote, lopping off 100 sites, to you know, supporting what we already have is having spoken and trying to reduce commute times.  

Ben Wright: 

Eric, what are you seeing in terms of the type of work and how it’s driving where people work? 

Eric Nelson: 

Well, yeah, so when we started our workspace manifesto was to figure that out, right, so this you know, work force, like we have, which together then translate to the workplace data. You know, like, what are the teams like that was the one of the hardest parts we got it, like workday was about like, my, when I before I got to LiveRamp two plus years ago, the team was trying to like manage, I think it was like 52 different subsets of teams, like there’s no way you can manage that. You can’t manage 52 teams like that’s way too micro. So trying to find the light, right, like level of detail of a roll up, trying to figure out so in the manifesto, what were the tasks that they do, what do they do on like a day to day. So we created personas that we could have space topologies or toolkits and things that they need to then make it more manageable. Right. So again, we’re on our way, pivoted in COVID, obviously, quite a lot, who were remote when we all went full remote. As we’re coming back, one of the main things we’re thinking about between these two are like more strategic and more task oriented, like asynchronous work versus synchronous work or collaborative work? Right? Well, the use cases for the office is absolute collaboration. Number one, Primo, you know, a secondary would be like some socialization. Third would be some of those tough conversations, one on ones, you know, things like that. But absolutely, collaborations are one where, you know, as we’re trying to teach an in-drive behavior, it’s like, Okay, if you are gonna be hybrid, what do you do when you come in? What should you be scheduling? What should you not be scheduling, what should you be doing at home, if you have zooms all day, one on ones, like, you should probably be doing that at home to try to schedule and that’s a hard thing to do. Like, people have to really sort of get organized, organize their, their meetings, effectively organize their one on ones, their, you know, their days a week, they’re going to come in, and then hopefully that commute is now worth it when you’re in the office because it’s about people it’s about collaboration. So that commute, hopefully impact even though we’re you know, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone you know, everywhere. That it’s worth it because you know, the people so we’re toying with this notion, which is what we call like flexibility with predictability, because Ryan’s point like, I need to change every 12 months, like whoever’s doing that, I would drive up people Ops, crazy HR crazy, like, payroll crazy, like, Oh, my gosh, talk about a ton of work. And so anyway, we have this flexibility with predictability. That’s our notions like, you know, when the certain teams, your team is going to be there. Other teams, we’ve built like a calendar by office, now, we have no idea who’s going to adhere to it. But we want to get like the offices here. Here’s what we’d like you to come in, here’s when you can know your people and the people you collaborate with will be here so that when you do come in office, it’s worth it. It’s worth that 30-45 minutes, whatever the commute is, like, it is absolutely worth it for two to three days a week. So that’s, that’s what we’re trying to sow there, I think. Absolutely. And then we’re talking to our boys about like, think about your week, think about your day, like you can come in obviously, if you want it’ll be here for you. But think about like if you are going to be at flex or hybrid, you know how you would plan your week accordingly. Because we want the space to perform lets other things like as we’re thinking about how we create these spaces, not only remote experience, the remote and physical like what that equity looks like then that when you come into the office, like we want you to want that and be productive and enjoy it and all those fun things and want to come in. But in so they have to think about it, we’re driving some of that behavior change, like being really effective around how you use the space and how the space performs. 

Ben Wright: 

Shannon I’m excited to hear your answer just because I know so much of what you’re doing and how you’re hiring but talk to the group and talk to the audience about what types of tasks are being done remotely. Which or in person? Or is it? Is it all in one for a company like the Motley Fool? 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure. So I’ll tell you before the pandemic, we were very much like, there’s the expectation of you, you would come into the office five days a week, I mean, we’ve always had that flexibility where you know, you have a sick kid or something, obviously, you know, you work from home that day. But it was a pretty rare pre-pandemic, for people to be working from home for significant amounts of time. So I think this shift that we’re seeing in the company is, you know, one, everybody obviously got forced to work from home. And we’ve all still to this, to this day, we’re still all working from home, we’re targeting March of next year as our start to return to an office. But even then, how we’re thinking about returning has changed. So we’ve shifted from everybody having their own desk, and all their own little trinkets and things, and you know, their uniqueness at their desk, to we did a full clean out of our office and took everything home. And we’re shifting to Hotel desking. Because we found through this pandemic, that you can do everything from home, we’ve seen it, we’ve seen it in action the last year and a half. And if you don’t think your employees can do everything from the home, you’re not thinking hard enough or trying hard enough for testing the right things. Because there’s so many tools, I feel like technology is starting to catch up. Yeah, there’s definitely some holes where we can use some work and more support and different things. But I think technology is getting there, and the rest of the world is getting there. And I think if you’re a company that’s telling your employees, you have to come in a certain amount of days per week, I think you’re thinking about it wrong. I think if you’re giving employees that flexibility in that trust to get their work done, and they’re showing they can get their work done. That’s the way that’s the way you’re gonna get more performance from your employees. It’s that big trust. But we definitely feel value in coming together in person. Obviously, we haven’t done that yet. But we’re just now trying to think about how to be strategic about bringing employees together and sort of like what you were saying, Eric, about how we want the office to be a more purposeful place that you come like your if you have zoom meetings all day, like, Why are you coming? Why are you commuting, you don’t need to come in to be on zoom. You know. And we’ve also seen too, we’ve hired over 100 new employees, there’s so many people who’ve never even stepped foot in our office, they have no idea what to expect. And so just thinking about like in teams are more spread out, we’re seeing now, you know, we were very much based in Alexandria, we’re seeing our employees are starting to move out further. And you know, different locations that our cost of living is cheaper. And so we’re thinking about just the purpose of why you would come together, is it collaboration, is it strategy, and we’re thinking about, you know, when we do start traveling and allowing that, again, that it’s more purposeful in the sense of you come together maybe two or three times a year as a team. And you’re very personal of why you were there, you’re working through a strategy, a plan, a huge brainstorm. And then you go home and do your heads down work at your home, and that becomes your home base. So this is a huge cultural shift. We haven’t seen it obviously, obviously not an action yet, because we’re not back in our office yet. But I just feel that in all of our employees that we’re moving that direction, all of our surveys are telling us this is what employees want. Great. And I know everybody misses each other. And I know they want to see each other. But I think the workplace is less about being a place for coming for social interaction, and it’s more purpose of you know, that collab and that strategy and being really purposeful in that. 

Ben Wright: 

So I’ve got a great question from the audience here. Actually, three. So this, we’re clearly hitting a nerve. And Shannon, I’ll talk with you. I’ll start with you on this one. So this one has to do with young talent. Right? So when you’re looking at mentoring, building young talent in our organization, so this is the question they are asking, we’re seeing split sides on preferences in office versus remote. We see this a lot in big cities as well with young talent who don’t have the work from home kind of environment that we would all want to see this too. So here’s the question, while the entry level employee tasks are execution focused, how are you balancing career growth of new team members? So I’ll start with you, Shannon. And then we’ll go to Eric max. So this is a great question. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure. So I’m at The Motley Fool, something we have kind of built internally is a coaching program, or you can think of like a mentor program. So every new employee who comes in as part of your onboarding, you’re giving them an opportunity to select someone to be a coach. And so we’ve built out this internal platform where you can go and you can see bios of the different coaches. And I should also throw out that if you’re a coach, this is not a paid thing. It’s just that you want to help employees, you’re invested in our culture, you want to see people grow and do better. And so people sign up and volunteer to do this. So I can say I am a coach. And so you meet with these new employees and you just get to know them and it’s more of somebody who’s not their boss. It’s somebody typically outside of your team. Who comes and talks with you, and you can share concerns or anything like that you can ask for help or, you know, I want to learn more about marketing or I want to, you know, step up in this area of my job or career, and they kind of coach you up and give you insight of where to go, who to talk to offer training, things like that. And then those notes, then that those conversations are private with just you and your coach, then the employee has the option to either share those notes that are typed up with their managers, which then usually prompts further conversations with your manager and helps keep that open dialogue. Or you can elect to keep it private. And then literally just our small HR team at the company is aware and you know, keep tracking. So if there’s anybody who may be struggling or need some extra support, they’ll step in, but it’s definitely a volunteer program, and employees don’t have to have a coach. But I can tell you just from my own personal experience that having a coach I’ve been before now for almost eight years, and having a coach has been great, because it’s something I can go to outside of like, hey, I’ve seen that check. This is going on, on my team, I would like some other insight. And it’s been really wonderful of helping to mentor me and other employees. So that’s one way that we have done to try to help people grow and learn it and feel more comfortable, especially knowing that I mean, of the 100 plus employees we’ve hired, I guarantee most of them are in that younger demographic. And so we want to bring them in and make them feel a part of our culture and feel comfortable that they have somebody to go to ask questions and help coach them up. So it’s worked well. 

Ben Wright: 

That’s great. Eric, I’d love to hear your answer on young talent and career growth. And, that part of the company, you know, in the days of COVID and where we’re LiveRamp is heading. 

Eric Nelson: 

Yeah, it’s what it’s, it would be tough to start it whether you’re new into the you know, for one to two years into the you know, industry or even a few years 3-5 like we hire more mid like the three to five year experience. But we also hire you know, more, you know, new Junior people as well. But it’s so hard like you start a company, you’d never get to meet anybody your team live like I cannot even imagine trying to navigate. Who does what even with like ,love the buddy system. And we used to do the LiveRamp and then just the scale got to be too much. We’re sort of rethinking that process. What is really a mentor, what’s a coach? What’s a buddy? You know, how do we help navigate like, I mean, we’re getting a new internet, better connectivity we do, certainly, it’s just got to be so hard, like to know where to go, what to do. Like when you go in office, you talk to the front desk person, typically, they’ll know everything today, where do I find this? Well do check, check, check, check, check, boom, you know, your guests Guest Services person would get them sorted really quick, don’t have that. So we have, you know, we use our ticketing system as an AI system. So it’s called out spoke. So it really helps them we have a lot of content on our knowledge base. But that’s hard to navigate, like, it’s not the easiest thing to search. So hence for this new internet, which would be a lot more interactive and engaging. But you know, ultimately, I think that the first 90 days, again, is so so so important for any new hire that comes on board. So a lot of tools around that from leaders. So what we tried to do is quote on quote, “train the trainer”, making sure that all the leaders have the managers have the right tools to like, here’s, here’s some structure, here’s the 90 day plan you would use, here’s who they should be meeting, here’s every IT workplace collaboration tool, like, here’s all the things you would need. So we tried to make it really simple, but it’s a lot to handle. And again, when you’re just virtual, it’s just not easy. So I applaud those who started jobs in this virtual stance in this remote stance, because, you know, and then hopefully someday soon, you get to meet your team, which we’re starting to do a little bit here and there. And it’s, it’s pretty amazing to watch. But so you know, I would say, you know, a lot of it is just a lot of structure. And then. And then we also one other little thing we do is just to help with some of the connectivity like to fill the culture a little bit as we do a lot of like events, a lot of virtual events. And we also do what’s called donut, which is basically a tool that you can use slack that’s like, just random. It’ll just randomly pick three people for you to meet. And then you get on slack and you schedule a meeting and you’re either like the facilitator and ask some icebreaker questions. So again, a little bit inside your org and hopefully your team’s working out. And then there’s some connectivity to kind of feel some of the culture with events and other engagements like that. 

Ben Wright: 

So we’re getting we’re getting some questions around technology, which I’m going to we’re going to come back to in a bit but there are there are two really fundamental questions that I want to I want to pose to the group. First one is who decides where work is being done? Is it the top executive? Is it the team leader? Is it the employee themselves. Eric, I’m gonna start with you. 

Eric Nelson: 

We started the process of tagging all the roles okay by roles only, not by people, it’s really hard to do. Every role in the company got tagged, like it was based off data we’d received in the past, surveys. And then we try to educate each of our what we call our management team. So LT is like the top 9-10 people in the company. And remember, 14 out of burst company then MT their sort of lieutenants. So try to get it started from there. But it was all based on research and data from the employee base. So main, making sure we understood like both qualitative quantitative metrics, brought that to the table. Here’s what your team saying, here’s what type of corporate saying, here’s what these sort of subset groups are saying, Here’s, you know, here’s some data to work off of when you’re making these decisions to move forward of where you’d work. Are you going to let them let this role be remote? Maybe that’s right for you like, Well, here’s some data for you to hear and you want to be more flex. Do you want them in the office? And it’s interesting to see like that conversation started last February, and with the data and as we work for our workforce location strategy, like what that would mean, you definitely saw a trend and we push pretty hard. Like to make sure that they were looking at the data, like if they if we weren’t aligning, like we would keep pressing like, well, this is what your employees are saying, like, you know, think you got to think a little differently. Like it’s it’s the old ways are sort of gone, which we were trending towards anyway, pre COVID and so this really ramped us up to really get them to think differently, but then the macro to like what other companies are doing? Like what is what is all the tech rolled up to. And if, if everybody’s like moving this way, you know, you got to keep pace you know keep up with the Joneses, right? And that’s not an easy thing, when you don’t have $20 billion in the bank like Google does. or Apple, it’s hard to keep up with the Joneses of what they’re offering, and flexibility or perks or you name it, right. So, you know, we saw this trend, like they tagged and some people that were rock, yeah, they still need to be at office, right? Like, as we trended through into like, probably, you know, July here, and we’re really starting to plan our capital budgets, and we’re designing things like, we got them, they changed, like the people that were more out office were, again, sorted to be more flex, and really come down to the data, which was like both macro and micro for us where people want to come in two to three days a week. They like to office because they appreciate it for those that that was part of the culture part of how they got stuff done. Happy to do it. But no more than that, like, like the bulk of our people like to do three days a week. That’s it, there was some that were like Yeah, I would love to come in every day. And there was 5% that love to only do one day a week or be fully remote, fine. But yeah, so we sort of trended one started one way in the trended towards more of a flexible model as we just continued to drive at home. And we saw a lot of the macro things happening, good and bad like, you know, people that were out front of the gate that were making decisions that, you know, the boy super big backlash, you know, like, okay, let’s not do that. So it’s nice to try to be like right in the middle of the pack. 

Ben Wright: 

So it sounds like it’s not, you know, a LiveRamp. It’s not, hey, every employee gets to choose. It’s a company wide decision informed by employee input. 

Eric Nelson: 

That was a much more succinct way to put it, Ben.  

Ben Wright: 

Well, no, it’s great to hear the details too, Eric. Thank you. So, Shannon, how about at a culture where one of the values was my favorite value at Motley Fool, is be motley. So how about how does that calculus change at a company that has that value? 

Shannon McLendon: 

Yeah, so it’s funny, when we first, you know, when the pandemic first hit, and employees first went home, we got a lot of like, I can’t possibly do my job from home. But I think we’ve seen a shift now that there’s very few jobs, I think that you have to be in an office to do at The Motley Fool at this point. And some of the jobs really are like the people who manage the office. So like my team, or the IPP, who if we have an office space, they need to be there, obviously, to manage that. Outside of that, I think, there’s very few jobs that require you to be in an office. And so we’ve said to employees, you never have to come to the office again. We said that very early in the pandemic, and let employees choose what they want to do. Obviously, we’re still working from home. But we’ve seen employees are having these conversations with their managers, and they’re moving to places where the cost of living is cheaper, be closer to family, you know, to make their personal lives happier. And I think you know, when you have that balance of you’re really happy in your personal life, you tend to see people who are performing better. And so we’re currently open in 15 states. And you can request to move to another state, that’s not the state you’re currently in. And, you know, it’s more of a conversation, obviously, our finance team needs some notice, so that they can, you know, file the proper paperwork and some tax stuff there. But, yeah, we said, you never have to come to an office again, we’ve done a shift to virtual first, that’s what we’re calling kind of the next stage of our culture. And we’re gonna continue to have conversations about, you know, is it important to open additional states to give people more opportunity to work from wherever they want to work. But I think this is the future for us at the Fool is, is that extreme flexibility. And, you know, we’ll figure out what that travel component is, you know, when you’re coming together and how that works. But for now, it’s you can work from wherever you want to work that makes you happy, knowing that if you’re happy, you’ll be performing and doing so much more for the company. 

Ben Wright: 

That’s great. So I want to shift the conversation a little bit towards what this means for real estate. So Ryan, you sit atop this kind of mountain of data and you have ways for your clients to look at remote work, on premise work,  hybrid work. At a high level before we get, you know, specifically into how real estate’s changing for our other two panelists, what are you seeing that maybe goes beyond the headlines or beyond the expectation that’s surprising about how portfolios are changing? 

Ryan Turner: 

And I think the big shift is we would think we’re all dancing around the fact that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next, and how we’re going to really interact with the real estate, the physical real estate that we occupy. So I think the biggest change that we’re all aware of, I’m seeing it on such a granular level is the color of information centers. You know, Eric, that you know, slack, and you know understanding how employees are collaborating, that major data collection is happening right now. And everybody’s asking the same question, what’s our demand for space going forward? I think that’s, that’s something that, you know, just hearing you and Eric and Shannon talk. That wasn’t on your job description, probably 18 months ago, the things that you talked about this isn’t either. And so that’s, that’s a big thing that we’re seeing is now everybody’s having to become experts on how do we get to information because we just don’t know, it’s not we’ve got, you know, 120 people in Denver anymore? What’s, what’s the real answer that we need to get to? 

Ben Wright: 

Right? So let’s, let’s go into some things that we’ve, you know, prepared. I think, I think, Eric, you’ve kind of talked about the remote work reality as you put it at LiveRamp, and explain a little bit the, how you think that’s gonna start to change space, even if it hasn’t? Already? 

Eric Nelson: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so we went from 10% remote, in pre COVID. Maybe it was even like, 8% is pretty, pretty low, up to about, you know, 28%. So this is more US of globally 28 majority are and then us, obviously. So what that makes you think is like, this is our now second biggest site, like San Francisco being the first remote being the second New York remember? Like you think about it from a site? Like what? Like, and then how would you approach that either, like from maybe not necessarily logistics as a physical site? But like that experience? Right? What is that remote advance, they all have, they’re all out there. They’re doing their remote thing fully. They may be traveling to do offsides once a quarter, once a year, twice a year, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, 95% of their time is remote. So how do we create an experience for them with their other remote fellow employees? whether they’d be you know, sticking with like live events, and then sticking with virtual events and engagements, but really thinking of them as a site? And how do we help support that, which is a different they’ll get different tools and a ramp remote experience, then someone who’s hybrid, right, so they should and they should get a different experience? Because they are fully remote. They don’t have an office within commuting distance. Right? They, you know, those are hybrid, they can pop in if they want to get lunch, guess what it gets your get your booty into the office to get lunch, they don’t have that option. Right. So what is the you know, how do we again make it equitable? Only from a perks amenities experience? But then also like, what is their career path? And what is their learning and development path? Like do they get the same options as those that might be in office seeing a leader or their manager on the day or the LT team things like that. So again, that is and that is where the hard part is like, I can send food, spend some money, we can do all the right things there, we can create events, the hard part is managing through that and giving them the right experience from a learning and development career path. That’s hard.  

Ben Wright: 

Yeah. I love thinking of remote as a premise or as an experience in itself, and that its second biggest so let’s talk about the same question for you, Shannon. You shared your kind of pre-pandemic office space, and we’ve got kind of the next iteration. And you’ve alluded to it with hotelling. But let’s talk a little bit more about what your plans are. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure. So like I said earlier, you know, pre-pandemic, everybody had their own desk, their file, Kevin, all their little knick knacks and things that made it so unique. And so we just saw in all of the surveys, we’ve been doing that more and more employees are not wanting to come in five days a week, I think in the last survey that we did in June, it’s only 8% of employees that want to come in five days a week. So which is a super small percentage, you know, looking at our company size. And then the other situations we’ve seen in the last year is that our fully remote employees, we’ve more than doubled the amount of fully remote employees we have because people are moving further out. So we decided to make this shift to hotel testing just to maximize the amount of real estate we had. And so we’re shifting to that you can see now we’ve set up you see on the right side there that picture that’s the hotel desk we set up there’s you know height adjustable desks and trying to you know, systemize everything so that it’s the same experience for everybody coming in. We also built a work from home store so that employees who are working from home can order things from this that the company is providing, whether it’s you know, a height adjustable desk or if you need an external monitor or whatever. Make sure you’re set up at home so that at home or in the office, you have the same it’s a kind of a level playing field. We also set up these different areas you can see in the pictures for teams to come and meet together. and brainstorm and things like that. So we’ll see how this works. Obviously, when we start returning to office, the one nice thing is, we’re using this platform called Robin, there’s a number of platforms out there, we did multiple demos, before settling on Robin. But the one really great thing about Robin is, not only is it a way for employees to see a map of an office, if you’ve never been there, like over 100 new employees who’ve never been in our office, they can get an idea of what the office looks like, where things are located and reserve their desk. But also on the back end, there’s analytics. And so we’re hoping that, you know, once we start returning to the office next year, that these analytics will give us real time data that we can constantly be checking on instead of waiting for the next survey, we can constantly be seeing this and use that to iterate on how we use our space and make changes, you know, we’re always the more data, the better. And so we’re not blindly guessing. And obviously, we have some ideas and that you can see in these photos, we’re testing some stuff, we’ve got it ready to go. But I don’t actually know how people are really going to react, I see what they say in the data, how they actually act, and do their work will be a whole new thing. So the data from the the analytics from the Robin platform is going to be huge for us. 

Ben Wright: 

So this topic, as we were preparing for this, was really interesting to me. And so I’m going to set up the you know, the concept here that there’s some different IT investments. And so we have a question that’s related to this, which is, the question is, do you see more creative technologies or practices playing a role? And so let me tee this one up a little bit. When we talked about this, we talked about things like Robin and we talked about HR analytics, we talked about business intelligence, we talked about a new fancy term that I’m sure originated in, in Silicon Valley, called the collaboration stack. Right. Right, Eric. So we now have collaboration stacks, and everything else. So let’s talk about how IT spending is changing to enable this. What are some of the surprises? I think we probably don’t need to talk about the obvious ones. But what are some of the surprises? And maybe Eric, where do you and Shannon, maybe differ? You kind of said I don’t want to go the Robin route, and the desk booking route? So talk a little bit about that. 

Eric Nelson: 

Yeah, I mean, there’s there’s a, you know, well, there’s a couple things that they got, there’s like, again, I just thought of this, right? The data stacks, like what are all the pieces of data that you’re trying to, you know, capture to like, think about and analyze together, then there’s, so that’s one. So like analytics get from Robin, whether, you know, you’re gonna have people booked as or not, or, like, you’re gonna use sensors, like, how are people occupying the space? But then the biggest one is, how are they utilizing the space? Like, sure they’re in there, you’re building and that’s great. That’s just occupancy, you want to know that they use that particular setup like that Shannon showing there? It’s like, because if they, you know, they use those a lot, you probably want more of those right there. They’re super useful, like, how do they use zoom? Are they aren’t entirely these conferences, and so on and so forth. On the collaboration side, which should sort of come hand in hand with your sort of data stack, and again, how they utilize the space. So how are they utilizing zoom in conference rooms? In the work physical workspace versus at home? Like, how do you combine those two booking tools? Like, can you book the room and you use zoom, or VC? All that matters, right to agree, you might book a room and not use zoom? Well, that matters, too. So. So from a collaboration, then I think the biggest question is, is sure what is your stack in what you know, and we’re not using virtual reality or anything like that we’re not getting crazy with it by any means. I think that, again, we want to push the like we invest in our office there’s a very good cultural and productivity tool that we fill in and LT feels it’s really important. So we want to continue to make sure that performs well and hope that people want to come in. But from a collaboration like it’s the integration, like, What does slack and or Miro in zoom? Like? How are G Suite whatever use what’s your stack is like, how do they work together? How does their UX and UI make them all work? And what are the use cases? For each? I think the biggest one, it’s hard for us, it’s like, well, what should you use slack for? What should you use mural for what should use zoom for So on and so forth, then how could they potentially integrate which to get that’s, that’s, again, where the beauty is, in my mind, right? Because again, like, how do you minimize that stack? So they all sort of work together in the use cases for how people collaborate either asynchronously, or synchronously or from a physical platform, you know, across remote and the physical. So? Yeah, it’s again, it’s a question we’re trying to answer right now and really become more refined in that process and what that what that how that how they employees could use that. 

Ben Wright: 

Fantastic Shannon, anything you want to add? That’s been surprising in the tech stack data stack collaboration stack, just stack world. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Sure. So we’ve leaned really heavily into virtual first. We actually released a handbook a few months ago to really help our employees understand what we’re meaning by virtual first. And, you know, we’ve felt this level playing field, how do we continue that when the office reopens? So we’ve really heavily leaned into trying to find collaborative tools that work virtually for everybody. And then we can implement that in the office. I mean, if you think back to when zoom was before the pandemic zoom was like a new thing. And we were setting up zoom rooms in the office and people like this is kind of cool. We’re now leaps ahead of that now. I mean, we’ve definitely Miro and Murals is another one different whiteboarding collaborative tools. We’ve also, you know, we’re looking for those cutting edge new, what is the way to help teams feel that they can come together in the virtual world. So we’ve investigated virtual reality, there’s a number of apps on Oculus that you can try, and we’ve done it. And we’ve actually, we’ve seen in the pandemic, that when you get a team together in, you know, one of the Oculus collaborative tools, the first thing they want to do with their avatars is they want to go hug the other person. Which is not really real hug. But I mean, you know, that’s how much they’re missing that inner, you know, interaction. So, but yeah, we’re leading heavy into what are the tools that we can do to keep this level playing field, we’ll figure out how to make that work once the office is there. And then kind of similar, I guess, in line with the the collaborative factors, we’ve also looked at, from an IT perspective, our security, and knowing that more employees are working from home or other locations, we’ve definitely beefed up our systems, and just making sure that we’re monitoring all the potential threats and the new things we’re not thinking about. So we’ve got a team dedicated to that. That’s just looking into how somebody could maybe infiltrate and steal data. So 

Ben Wright: 

I love it. Well, we are about time, Ryan, I’ll give you kind of a last word. And then I’ll kind of talk about the open questions, and then how to stay in the loop. But Ryan, any anything you want to add on the technology conversation or the conversation in general? 

Ryan Turner: 

I’ll be succinct because I know we are at time. So thank you, everybody. But I think that what we just described in what we’re continuing to see is, all of these points solutions just create another set of challenges. They’re great. They do what they’re supposed to do. And that’s fantastic. How do we aggregate this in use and wield information to actually drive decisions? And that’s something that we’re really focused on. So that to me is the big takeaway is that our jobs are getting infinitely more complex, our systems are more complex. How do we get to simplicity, so we can actually use this information to drive decision making and support what we’re here to do, which is, you know, support the business with the real estate function. 

I love it. So I want to thank our panelists. So Shannon, amazing to hear from you. You know, Eric, amazing to hear your perspectives. Ryan, thanks for kind of giving us the broader view across enterprises. We’ve gotten a couple questions about, will the recording be available? It will, we’ll post it on LinkedIn, there are two open questions that I think we’ll probably have to answer on LinkedIn, which is, how does this impact pay? So we’re not going to talk about that now. But I think we’ll talk about it. It’ll be great to talk about that and move that to a LinkedIn conversation. And then how often should we seek feedback from employees? I think that’s another great discussion that we’ll move to LinkedIn afterwards along with the recording. So I want to thank everybody for joining. I hope it’s been really useful to you and, and look forward to future conversations with all of you. 

Ben Wright; 

Thank you, everybody. 

Shannon McLendon: 

Thanks. 

Ryan Turner:  

All right. Thanks, everybody.