DALLAS — One of the key ways CBRE’s Lenny Beaudoin works with companies is by helping them rethink their employees’ relationship to in-person work, especially when it comes to return-to-office mandates.
It’s the best of both worlds when companies can give employees the autonomy to make good decisions, but also to treat them like consumers making choices about showing up in person at the office, according to Beaudoin, who leads the company’s Workplace Strategy.
“It’s just like any great hospitality experience, hotel or restaurant. People are making a choice to be there because they want to be there,” he said.
Beaudoin, based in New York, recently played a role in putting together the vision and execution for CBRE’s new global headquarters in Dallas at 2121 N. Pearl St.
Given that CBRE is the largest commercial real estate firm in the world, the locally based company had a breadth of the best clients and data to pull from for envisioning its base of operations.
Three core tenets, or “truisms” as Beaudoin termed them, emerged that were woven through the office space overlooking Klyde Warren Park, with the first being that the greatest amenity to employees is other employees.
“Nobody likes to go to an empty restaurant, and nobody likes going to an empty office,” said Beaudoin.
The other truisms included creating a feeling that there was activity in the office and connecting workers by having sightlines of visibility throughout.
The motivation behind the truisms is to create a workplace that employees want to go to — without a back-to-office mandate.
Beaudoin shared three further learnings that are big with the firm’s clients right now.
While some of these items may seem obvious or intuitive, they are the needle movers in getting employees back to the office, he said.
These are the top things that are standing out with CBRE clients right now:
- Commuting: “Commute is No. 1 because that’s a huge thing. In most jobs and in life, time is a precious commodity, and commuting takes a lot of time. We talk a lot about earning the commute.”
- Environmental factors: “A distant second (behind community) is the environmental factors in the office. By that, I mean when working outside the office, people have a lot of control over environmental factors that surround them, like acoustics. Most traditional offices don’t afford a lot of privacy. That was a big issue. What we do see — and it goes back to our thesis that having choice and optionality really matter — is that people working in the office want control of those environmental factors. I believe it also has a big impact on people’s productivity, meaning their ability to create flow, to be focused.”
- Synchronicity: “The other big issue with return-to-office has been synchronicity. Most employees work as part of a small cohort or part of a large department or function. They have a smaller set of people they generally work with more than they do others. Unless there’s team synchronicity on when people come into the office and what they do within their office, it becomes problematic.
“Part of it is making sure the team works in sequence, but the second thing is when people come into the office — and this is a huge thing — is people’s mindset around organizing their day is different than working remotely. Time between meetings, white space in your calendar, availing yourself of the ability to have informal, impromptu interaction only is possible when you’re proximate to the people you work with.”
