 a subject dear and near to my heart, office design, office flow charts, office maps, if you will, with Robert Wilkinson. He joins us from the mainland, and he is going to tell us about his work on office maps and office trends and all the changes in offices that we have seen during COVID and that we will see going forward. This is very exciting because so many Americans, so many people in the world spend their occupational lives in offices. So this is not a small subject. This is universal. Hi, Robert. Thank you for joining us today. Good day, Jay. Thank you very much for having me. Much appreciated. So how did you get involved in this kind of study? Because this is a challenging study, and more than that, it's a changing study because it's always changing. It's the world in which we live and spend our time. So every day, you've got to get up in the morning and say, how is this changing? It's so true. The last couple of years has been a massive shift, as everyone knows, due to COVID. The usual nine to five, everyone goes into the office every day, does their bit and goes home to this huge change, to more of a hybrid work environment. And I think it's not quite as dramatic as you think. I think it was already happening prior to COVID on a smaller scale. Because of technology changes and the fact that you could actually work from home and still be productive, quite a few companies were moving in this direction already. But it's just over the last two years where it's been forced upon absolutely everyone where it's exploded. And you're seeing this huge change in how workplaces are being put together. And it's everything from how HR works, to how your facilities team works, to how much real estate you need. There are changes across the entire organization. And it's pretty spectacular. I was telling you that I practiced law for a long time. And I guess the plurality of our clientele were downtown office buildings. We represented a lot of them. And we found that over the years, and this is an over long period, that the national companies, the big tenants, were reducing the size of their spaces. You're right. This is something that has been taking place for a long time. And they've decided as a matter of the bottom line, they probably want to pay less rent. And they have to design their spaces differently. So an awful lot of redesign and reorganization of employees and staff members and equipment and all that. It's been really remarkable to see how they have changed and how much better it is. But let me ask you this, Robert, to look at the dark side of it. There's something you lose too, isn't it? It's the smell of the grease paint and the roar of the crowd, or maybe it was the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd. I mean, you don't have the eyeball to watch the emotive qualities of the person you're dealing with. Don't you lose something? I mean, it's a really good point. And I think there's been a few studies already around this. And I think the answer is yes. Is what you lose, though, offset by what you gain? Well, that remains to be seen, I guess. But I think the thing you're talking about is those chats around the water cooler. A lot of work and a lot of innovation happens in those chats around the water cooler. It's not so much that you get together and you have a meeting and that's kind of your work day. It's about going around, going to the office, having a coffee with your friends. And then during that conversation with someone from a completely different department, you might have this genius idea that the two of you come up with and it becomes something bigger. And that's the type of thing that's going to potentially be missing going forward if everything becomes a remote work scenario. And I think this is where companies and businesses need to be very careful in how they design their back to work. You can't have it so that people never come back to the office. I don't think that's ever going to work. Sooner or later, the innovation of the company is going to go down because people aren't having those spontaneous conversations. But by the same token, I don't think anyone's ever going to go back to the office or not many people will go back to the office full time either. There's a trade-off to be had. And I think what I suspect what's going to happen is you're going to end up with most businesses where it's possible having people come in two or three days a week and work from home two or three days a week. And it's that striking that balance, which is going to be the tricky thing going forward. And it's funny you say you were in law. Lawyers are really interesting from this perspective as well because we work with a lot of law firms. And what you find is in the past, a lot of law firms used to differentiate themselves by having offices not so much in the city centers anymore, but in let's call them nice areas. That's totally true. It's true here in Hawaii. Yeah. And this is the thing, and they were using that as a differentiator to attract talent. You don't have to go into the city every day of the week. You can come out to a really nice office on the beach or wherever it was. And those type of businesses are now finding it harder, I think, to attract talent because no one needs to go to the office anymore anyway. A lot of people are working from home most of the time. So there's a bit of a downside to those people who were forward thinking previously. They're now finding themselves in a bit of a spot because they're not being able to attract that talent that they were going to attract because they weren't in the cities. Whereas the city-based law firms are doing great. They can downsize their office spaces because they're only having people come in one or two days a week. I mean, everyone knows that office space in cities is ridiculously expensive in most cases. So they're saving a fortune. They're getting easier to hire in talent because they've got more flexible work spaces. For most of the city-based law firms, it's a bonus. Moving to this type of scenario. So let me give you a scenario that I wonder about. So if I have a conference room full of people and they are the roar of the grease paint and the smell of the crowd, and they're looking at each other and arguing with each other, and they're engaging on a personal level. It's not just one or two people. It's a conference room of people. There's a certain social dynamic in that and a certain atmosphere that allows for creativity. Even lawyers can be creative. As a matter of fact, lawyers should be creative. So many options and possibilities. So that's one scenario. The other scenario is, oh, by the way, that conference room has a big whiteboard at one end of it. And law firms are doing that now or a monitor or both. All kinds of fantastic technology is coming into that live conference room where they're connecting by various broadband connections to have conferences with other people in other cities and states and countries to handle global issues Okay. So that's one scenario where they're meeting in a room. And I'll give you a second scenario where they're meeting in a room, but other people are not. Other people are on electronic. And then now you have 20, 30, 50 people. I mean, it's unbelievable how many people can participate in this kind of thing. Okay. And then I'll give you the final is that nobody is in the room. They are all in little screens and they are everywhere and they are collaborating. Some of them get better connection than others, but they all can see the, what do you call it, share screen. They all can examine the same documents, which gives me one of those three possibilities gives me the better result for my business. Forget about the cost of rent. You know, forget about parking all that. I want the best, smartest, most creative result. Yeah. It's a an interesting scenario that you bring up. And I think I hate to say it, but I think the answer is all of them, depending on what your company culture is like, you know, what one of the issues that has been brought up previously is this idea of proximity prejudice, which is just a fancy name for, you know, people who are actually on site and talking in person may have an advantage over those people who are not on site. You know, they might be coming in by resume session like we are today. It comes down a lot to whether the business has put in place processes to ensure that everyone's voice is equally heard. When you're talking about those, when we're talking about meetings, I don't think it's such a massive issue. You know, if it's coming together for a specific reason to have a conversation about something specific, I don't think it makes too much of a difference whether you're there remote or whether you're there in person. I think that where the problem comes in, though, is where, you know, you might have an employee that is always remote, who is always connecting via a Zoom session or team session, and they're missing out on the in-between conversations. I think that's where the difficulty is going to lie in the future. I think, you know, your three scenarios would work equally well depending on what you were trying to achieve and what your company culture was like. But the bigger problem is going to be where you do have people working remotely who aren't being involved in those chats in between. That's when you're going to start seeing problems, interpersonal problems, I guess, where people are going to feel left out. They're not going to, their voice isn't going to be heard as much. And you need to be very, very careful about how you structure that workplace and how you make sure that those people who are remote are heard. So it's not just that the people turn up to the office every single day, if they want to, are going to make all the decisions and have all the input into those decisions. That's going to be the big trick going forward. I mean, technology's great, you know, technology can do anything. And these days with, you know, decent broadband, pretty much everywhere, the advent of Teams and Zoom and all the other technology we've got, it's not really a technological problem anymore. Now it's more of a people problem and it's managing that people problem. Right. So the whole, the whole professional technique of management has changed. And I want to, I want to ask you about that. You know, now in ThinkTek, our company, right, we used to do, first we did Skype and then we had a studio. So we did both, we went sort of hybrid. And then we got into Zoom because we, Zoom we found was more appropriate for us. And then we were hybrid. And then COVID came and we became completely, you know, Zoom. Nobody comes to the studio except the engineers who operate the broadcast machines, which is, you know, has worked out very well. I mean, I feel I'm getting to know you more better than even if we had a lunch together, honestly. And I really appreciate that. But you're right about the gap, the vacuum between the meetings. And my question to you is, has the role of making an old fashioned telephone call changed? Has the role, has the role of email changed? Has the role of texting and other kinds of, you know, social media connection, has that changed? Because it seems to me that if you want to fill the gaps, those are ways you could fill the gaps and keep everybody on the same page, even without having a virtual video experience. Yes, it definitely has. I mean, I don't know about you, but in my personal experience, I found that in the past, I used to find that, you know, chat, email, those type of methods, you were always expected almost to be replying instantaneously. And everyone used to complain about that because that's not really how it was meant to work. I think what's happened, though, is over the past couple of years, as we've gone to this completely electronic means of meeting with each other and interacting with each other, it's changed slightly in that that immediate response is mostly going to come from the video meetings. Whereas there's not so much a requirement anymore to be on the email two seconds after it's been sent to you. You can sit there, you can have a think about it, you can reply back to it. And this has become something that is common across a lot of companies that I've come across. The best thing about this is that, yes, it email is becoming and chat is becoming a way of filling in those gaps to a certain extent. The good thing, though, is that because you're not really expected in a lot of cases to be replying to it immediately, you do have that time to consider what you're going to say. And you get much richer and deeper interactions, I think over email and chat as well. So yeah, to a certain extent, you're right, those mechanisms are going to fill those in between gaps to a certain extent. I'm just not sure, though, that you're ever going to have that exact experience, though, of sitting next to someone and just leaning over to say, oh, can I just ask you that blah, blah, blah, because that cost you nothing, right? It's a spur of the moment thing that you can just do whenever you want, whereas even writing an email or sending a chat message requires that you sit there and type something. So the volume of those interactions is going to go down regardless if you stick with only electronic methods. Now, this being said, though, I guess we're still in the early days, right? I mean, it's been two years. And people are probably getting a bit sick of working from home after two years completely. But in two years is not a massively long length of time to figure out what the impacts of this are going to be moving forward. And it could be that as we adapt to the new, well, hybrid work environment, I guess, that there'll be other changes to how we interact electronically. That mean that how we used to work with teams, I can say, maybe completely different. Maybe it will turn into that type of scenario where I want to ask a quick question to my friend over here. I'll just press the button and just see if they're there. Maybe that will happen. I haven't seen it yet, but there are still changes happening. I think we're still going to see an evolution over the next couple of years at least as to how people are going to work. And as companies make the decision to move back into their offices, either part-time or full-time, I don't think that those changes they're making are going to be set in stone either. Now, this is a giant experiment. We're going to be experimenting with this for the next few years or so. And it's going to be really interesting to see where the vast majority of companies end up. I suspect that it is going to be a hybrid where people are only going to go in two or three days a week. And we're going to try and fill in all those gaps electronically, but it's really hard to say. After 9-11, the U.S. government wanted to do a more robust attempt at finding terrorists. And they went out into the corporate community and they hired a bunch of fellows who had been, and girls, who had been involved in something called social network analysis, social networking analysis. And these people were adept and developing skill in examining keywords in emails. And the federal government, expressing the Patriot Act and all those black box snooping things they did in the early 2000s, they hired these fellows, they hired these fellows from the business community to do the same kind of technology. They were good at examining a corporation, looking at the original schematic for management, and then looking at the email that was going back and forth. It's sort of an invasion of privacy here, I think. And looking at all that email and then doing an alternative schematic of the real way, the real management of the company. And I suggest to you that that's where we are. I mean, whether you snoop or not, if you do an analysis of the communications going between people now as opposed to a few years ago, you find out that the real power, the real management action authority in a given company, same company, is different because of the technology. And you can identify how it works. You can see who the real influencers are. Am I right? Have you seen that? Oh, 100%. And I think this is one of the interesting side effects of remote working. Because we're doing everything electronically, everything, I wouldn't call it really tracked, but everything can be put in a box. And you can say, well, this box has grown from this to this. And you can get a much better grasp on what people are doing and who is doing what as well. So you get a better idea as to who the best communicators are in the business. You get an idea as to, a perfect example is we can see from our software that there are really strong preferences for when people do and don't want to come to the office, which you would never have known before. You can guess this type of stuff, but who would have thought? People don't want to come to the office on Monday and Friday. It's kind of intuitive, I guess. But now there's a lot of data that actually says, yeah, people don't want to come to the office on Monday and Friday. They're really happy to come in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Thursdays, a little bit. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Finding out people's preferences from the software that they're using is one thing. But also looking at how those communication streams work is another. You look at the volume of email that's going backwards and forwards and who that email is going backwards and forwards to. You can start making a lot more inferences that are a lot more correct, just based on looking at the things that people have used, how they've changed using them, and what sort of productivity you're getting out of them. There's a wealth of data out there that's going to make a huge difference going forward. Exciting, isn't it? It actually speaks to greater efficiencies. Oh, 100%. The efficiencies that you're starting to see, you know, the perfect one, as I say, I'm always focused on the real estate thing, because this to me is enormous. Two years ago, I don't know about where you are, but where I am, rents in the city were absolutely huge. And going through the roof there is very little. This is Brisbane or all cities in Australia? Yep, in Brisbane. Well, it is all cities, but specifically Brisbane. But the rents were huge. Now what you're seeing is that because a lot of businesses are coming up to the end of their leases, they're saying, well, you know, I don't need five floors in the middle of the city anymore. I'll keep one floor and we'll get people coming in here and everywhere. And you can see the huge changes just based on the differences in rent pricing. The rent price doesn't know any what they used to be because there's a lot more availability because a lot of businesses are reducing their sizes. And the reason they're doing that is because they now have data that they can look at that says, well, you know, my office has only been 30% full for the past two years. We don't anticipate changing too much in the next two years. So why would we keep five floors when we can do with one? But that's just one example of where looking at the data that's been generated recently gives you some actionable insights that you can then go and make decisions around the business that make the business much more efficient. And whether that's efficient from a financial point of view or from a people point of view, it's that there's tons and tons of things that you can now see that have been revealed, I guess, because of this one event. You know, following the real estate market here in Hawaii for a long time, the play was, well, we have to have a lease for X feet, but we have to be able to give you back some footage if we don't need it. And we have to take some additional footage if we need it. So we want options. We want options to give you back, options to take more space. And it was, you know, it was part of the process of negotiating a lease in the first place. And everybody paid a lot of attention to that. But it strikes me that now, although certainly, you know, as somebody on either side of the transaction, you want to be concerned about the amount of space and make sure there's the right size. But if you grow, or if you shrink, it's not necessarily in the space. If you grow or shrink, it's in the equipment. It's in the technique and in the communication systems. Am I right? It's just not as the same as it was. Yeah, it's, it's exactly right. The, when you look at when you're growing and shrinking, now you're talking more about people rather than the people is the primary thing and the things that are attached to the people, you know, real estate is just one of them. But it's a hard one usually to sort of grow and shrink over time. I guess it's much more difficult than having to go out and buy a couple of laptops or even rent a couple of laptops. Everything's going towards this as a service model, I guess. And whether that's employees or the things that are associated with employees, I think real estate is one of the last things that is going to go to the as a service model. But yeah, you're right. It's real estate, while it's a huge investment is not really the focus anymore. The focus is more around what people you have. And the best thing is, is that now that you're not tethered, I guess, to a geography, to a certain extent, you can go looking further afield for someone who fits perfectly with what you're looking for in your business. And I think that's the other big change. You can, you can go down the route of becoming more specialized in your recruitment because you don't require someone in the office five days a week. You might only want them there a couple of days every month and they can fly. I can get on a plane and be in Sydney in a couple of hours from here and it costs me next nothing. So you're getting a lot of people who are doing that almost. I think it's called a nomad existence. They come and go to the office and they want almost. And it's a benefit to everyone. I honestly, I can't see too many downsides to where we're going at the moment. And that's worldwide. The US, Australia, Europe, it's one of the only trends that you're seeing absolutely everywhere is this trend towards the hybrid environments where you can hire people wherever you want. And it turns out that it's generally cheaper than if you would hire them and keep them in an office. So if I have my systems worked out, and if I'm able to communicate, say around Brisbane for a number of my staff, you know, I haven't worked out. It's simple and it's mobile. It's modular in the sense that, okay, well now I want to have an office in Cincinnati. Okay, the same system would apply. And so now I can recruit worldwide. I can expand my business without even standing up. I can have in Cincinnati and Oklahoma City and Toronto. I can have all these people. So that means that if I have a mind to expand my company, the cost of expansion is the same as the cost of reaching across to the next neighborhood. And this makes the development of global corporations a lot easier. Am I right? Oh, for the most part, yeah. I think with the caveat that we talked about before, you have to arrange the business and the interaction so that the people who are working remotely still get enough face time, for lack of a better word. Apart from that one caveat, you're exactly right. There's no reason why you can't go out and find someone in London to do a job for us in Australia. And in fact, that's exactly what we've done over the past couple of years. You know, we have an employee in London who does the exact same thing as what that employee would have done in Australia. Because of technology, we catch up very regularly. As long as you've got the processes in place to ensure that those interactions with those people are going to be valuable and that they're not going to feel like they're an addendum to the business, then yeah, you can hire anyone anywhere, and it doesn't really make much of a difference. Now, I'm looking forward to the day when I can just head over to Hawaii for a few days and work from Hawaii. That sounds wonderful to me. Yes, and why not? Absolutely. I know, and there's literally no reason why I couldn't. All of my work is done on a laptop or an iPad. I can chuck it in a backpack and I can do exactly the same thing that I'm doing now from Hawaii or from London or wherever. Well, we alluded to this before, but that means, doesn't it, that the role of the manager in this new office world has changed? There were certain things that perhaps weren't as a high priority before that become high priority now and vice versa. Can you talk about that? Can you talk about how the role and the life, if you will, the daily existence of the manager has changed the new office work? I think that the major difference is the manager needs to be more cognizant of having those valuable interactions. When everyone was in the office and it was easy enough just to lean over the cubicle next door and say, hi, it's not quite that spontaneous anymore. I think as a manager, it's important that I'm aware of what everyone's doing, obviously, which is quite easy to do these days. There are a lot of tools that can keep you up to date with where someone is on a particular task, but you also need to have some sort of relationship with the people who work for you. You have to make sure that they're happy and that they don't have issues that they're keeping to themselves that are stopping them from completing their tasks. I think that's the trick. That's the thing that managers are going to have to get used to is putting conscious effort into having conversations with all of their employees. Whether that's in a group Zoom session or whether it's in a one-to-one conversation on teams or whatever, it's going to depend on the type of environment that you're in, but that's the number one change that needs to happen. There are also a couple of other things. You need to make sure that workplace health and safety, for instance, it's much harder to do workplace health and safety when everyone's at some other site. You need to make sure that you're aware of where your employees are working and how they're working with their safe. There are issues around if you've got new employees as a manager, onboarding a new employee as a manager can be significantly harder, especially if they are remote. I remember when I first started here, it was a good few weeks before I got to understand who everyone was and where everything was. It's that much harder now that you're working remotely to create those links between people. That's one of the roles of the manager as well, is to make sure that when you are hiring someone new, that they're aware of who's who in the zoo and that you make those introductions and that people are having those conversations. Otherwise, you might end up after a couple of months, the person who's just started, which you might leave, because they don't feel part of the team. That's probably one of the hardest things as a manager, is to make sure that when you are bringing new people in, they feel that sense of connection with their colleagues. Not a day goes by these days and we don't read about all these people who are leaving their jobs these days. I don't fully understand how that works. I have to say that sometimes it sounds silly to me, but they are and that's a culture point of our times. It seems to me that the manager has to see everyone as a part of a group and make sure that the connections are not only between the manager and the individual, but between all the individuals outside that they should have, what do you want to call it, a collective cultural social experience, because that's what holds people, doesn't it? Yeah, 100%. I think the French call it a spree decor. It's the group spirit. I think that's the hardest thing to maintain when everyone is remote. There might be a lot of additional productivity when people are remote. You don't have people bothering you every five seconds. You can get through a lot more work, but by the same token, you need to maintain those relationships and you need to build those relationships with new people. I think it can become a little bit tiring, I guess, to try and do that by electronic means, which means that you have to put a conscious effort into doing it. If it's not driven by management, then I suspect that what would happen is that it will just fall apart. You'd have some people who are naturally outgoing and who want to have those conversations and who will make the effort to talk to their colleagues over electronic means, but there are a lot of people, and I'm not criticizing them because I'm one of them, who in their natural state is that they're not that chatty and perhaps they'd rather just get on with their work, but they lose something over the long run if you don't have those interactions. That's where I think management does need to step in and make sure that that esprit de corps stays within the business, and that comes down to making sure that people are having conversations and they're forming those relationships and bonds within the workplace. Different set of skills, a different set of objectives. One other thing in terms of looking at a case study, if you don't mind this, and by asking you this, I hope to examine all the other things that you deal with in terms of new trends and directions in the office design development world. I'm your client. I come in and I say, look, I'd like to establish a new company in Brisbane. Let's say let's make me a tech company, and I need a certain number of staff, and I need a certain amount of computing power and so forth. I need to meet with clientele downtown, maybe, who have not yet learned the benefits of virtual meetings, and so I have to have a presence. There I am sitting in your office, face to face, or possibly on a virtual connection, and I say to you, Robert, advise me. Tell me what my choices are. Tell me what your advice is in terms of establishing this brand new business. I think there's two obvious choices here. The first one is there's a proliferation of WeWork type arrangements. There's a lot of them. WeWork is probably the biggest example of this, where you've got service offices, and what I've found with service offices is that they're actually really good value in a lot of cases. WeWork is great because they've got a beer fridge over in the corner on that sort of stuff, so your employees love that type of stuff, but it's a very professional setup, and for what you're talking about, if you're opening a little branch office in another city to either test the waters or just hire a couple of people, service offices are perfect. You get all the benefits of a proper corporate office with a fraction of the cost, and they usually look good. The other example is, though, you can actually go out and get much smaller tendencies, so you could get yourself a sub-tenancy or something from someone who's downsizing and still has a bunch of years on their lease, and you can get a sub-tenancy with them. I think that's the other thing that we're seeing reasonably often, is you are seeing a lot of big companies who are downsizing their tendencies, and they're sub-leasing to other companies who are trying to get into that market. It's a win-win for absolutely everyone. It comes down to, I guess, how permanent are these people that you're going to have in those offices, but from the perspective of what you used to do 20 years ago, where you'd have to go out and negotiate a long lease, and then fit it out with absolutely everything. I don't think anyone does that anymore for that type of scenario. It's more of a, you know, I'll take a sub-lease, which is probably already fitted out for me. I'll send some people in there, and it's very flexible. Flexibility is the big thing that's going to come out of all of this. You can even see this with some of the big building owners. They're adding a lot more flexibility into their contracts these days, because companies are demanding it. They're not going to go with the old-fashioned types of contracts where you're set for a specific period, and it's going to cost you this much and so on and so forth. Flexibility is the key, and that's the way it's going to keep going. Anyone who sort of enters into a long-term, expensive contract for real estate without really thinking hard is probably doing themselves a disservice. But yeah, I would say in your case, we work. It comes with a beer fridge. Interesting, because we have that in Hawaii. We have that, yeah. And there are companies that do that. Yeah. Last question, because we are running out of time, Robert, and that's this. So, an office map. Interesting idea. And from the points that we've discussed, the possibilities, the options, the problems and situations and scenarios, it's all very interesting. And Quiri, are you alone in the field or in Brisbane and in other cities in Australia and elsewhere, do we find a new generation of professionals that are doing exactly what you're doing? And if we're not, will that happen later? Look, there are a number of software vendors like us who provide similar services. I think the difference between office maps and some of our competitors that the type of software that we do has been around for a reasonable amount of time. But what we found is that it was only really the top end of town. The big fortune in 500s, the people with a lot of money who could afford the software to manage their environments and allow that flexible working, they were the only ones who could afford it. Where we come in and where we're slightly different is that we focused very much on specifically managing hybrid work environments, helping businesses to understand how their environment is being used, helping their employees to manage themselves, I guess, when it comes to coming into the office and when they come and when they don't, at a very reasonable rate. So we don't have the million and one extra bells and whistles that some of our competitors do simply because most small to medium enterprises don't need them. So yeah, look, there are others in the market that we're in and there are more coming all the time. I think with COVID and this rush to go to a hybrid environment, there will be more companies like us over time coming in. But at the moment, we're in a pretty good spot. We have a very defined target market. We've got a product that works for them and we can't complain at the moment. There's a lot of business. There's nothing so constant as change. Thank you, Robert. Robert Wilkinson, really appreciate you joining us today. I enjoyed meeting you and I don't think you're shy at all. Thanks, Jay. I've been practicing quite a bit and it was great to meet you too. Thanks very much. Thank you, Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.