What CRE Leaders Can Learn About Workplace Strategy from Slack

If you’re a CRE leader and feel like the rest of the company thinks your mascot is Mr. Monopoly, times are changing. CRE’s role in workplace strategy is shifting from a company cost-reducer to an experience-creator. 

Industry analysts from JLL, CBRE and the like are saying the same thing, and this shift is happening whether CRE teams are ready or not. To make this shift successfully, workplace strategy needs a rethink.

And as Jane Young covered in last week’s webinar, the models and methodologies for this new strategy already exist. Tech companies like Slack have already developed and perfected these over the years, with the growth numbers to show for it. 

Slack reached a $1 billion valuation just over a year after its 2013 launch, had over 10 million daily active users by 2019, and was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. The not-so-secret secret to this explosive growth is the product-led growth model.

Here are four product-led growth concepts CRE leaders can steal from Slack and apply to their own workplace strategies.

1)The same shift that disrupted enterprise tech sales is coming for your workplace strategy too. 

CRE leaders now need to keep reducing costs while also proving their strategic value in delivering a workplace experience that’s worth the commute. The focus of the role and the bar used to measure success have both changed. They used to be cost per square foot and workplace efficiency, but they’re now measured on intentional attendance and overall experience among many others. 

Similarly, when Slack was launched in 2013, tech companies used to focus on enterprise sales, with success measured through licenses sold. This model worked just fine when tech sales relied on captive users and top-down procurement cycles. 

Hybrid employees aren’t a captive audience anymore. And research by workplace experience research organization Leesman confirms it with a finding that most employees score their work from home experience as better than their in-office experience. 

The question CRE teams are asking themselves now has shifted from “How do we reduce this space’s cost per square foot?” to “What value does this space create that nowhere else can?” 

That’s a big shift in workplace strategy that tools and operating models haven’t evolved to support yet. 

2) Workplace strategy needs to be obsessed with end-users (aka employees). 

Slack is the epitome of product-led growth because they realized years ago that adoption skyrockets when employees choose to use a solution. Creating software that’s enjoyable and easy-to-use makes it worth choosing. This reality powered the exponential expansion of revenue, with companies using a product-led model growing twice as quickly as their competitors. 

Let’s take a look at Slack versus its older but clunkier counterparts. Slack embodies user-centric design and growth. It’s far nicer on the eyes, instantly navigable and keeps getting better the more of your colleagues start using it. If you’ve experienced it in a previous job, whatever messaging platform you use next is an automatic downgrade. 

Something like Microsoft Teams might be the go-to for organizations deeply entrenched in Office 365, but it’s far less easy on the eyes and tougher to start using without prior knowledge. Anecdotally, users experience recurring issues despite the platform’s behemoth size and integration with the entire Microsoft platform, like difficulty with screen sharing and not being able to send GIFs. 

Let’s apply these two mentalities to workplace strategy. 

When you have a product-led workplace strategy, workplace experience is the product. Employees are the users. The commute is the subscription price. 

When you have a traditional workplace strategy, the cost of office space is the product, employees are just the occupants and mandatory attendance is the subscription price. 

The key question for CRE leaders here is “Would employees choose our current workplace experience over working from home?” 

3) There are four steps to product-led growth that CRE leaders can steal. 

Slack’s explosive growth works through a four-step infinity loop of acquiring new users, activating them through how easy-to-use the platform is, retaining them because they’d never want to use another platform ever again, and organically prompting users to refer colleagues and friends. 

Apply this framework to your workplace strategy and it looks like this: 

Acquisition: Getting people into the office. 

Activation: The moment the workplace experience becomes worth the commute. 

Retention: Where the quality of workplace experience is so consistent that coming back becomes a habit employees don’t have to think twice about. 

Referral: Workplace experience is so good that it gets talked about and attendance becomes a collective movement instead of an individual decision. 

There’s far more detail in the webinar recording about how to actually apply these steps to your workplace strategy than we have space to get into here. 

4) It’s the behind-the-scenes capabilities that make product-led growth possible. 

Slack has the systems, tools and operating processes in place that create the desired output – a user-centric product that powers its own growth. 

Obviously these tools, systems and processes are going to look somewhat different for CRE teams, with the exception of measuring user behaviour through data. 

Here are four behind-the-scenes capabilities that CRE teams can implement for a product-led workplace strategy: 

Space management that provides an accurate view of places, people and policies. 

Space planning that dynamically adapts to how employees are using the workplace in real time. 

Workplace experience execution that makes the office easy to use and worth choosing. 

Occupancy intelligence that measures what’s working, what’s not and what needs to be changed. 

Implement each of these capabilities, and your workplace strategy will be on its way to securing an employee-centric experience that grows itself. 

There’s lots more detail on the specifics of each of these capabilities and the tech you’ll need to implement them in the full webinar.