9 Key Takeaways from HubStar’s Latest Workplace Connect Roundtable in London

On October 24th, we welcomed 28 workplace, real estate and facilities management leaders to London’s prestigious Royal Automobile Club for our second ever dinner and round table discussion on the future of hybrid work.

During a wide-ranging and free-flowing discussion, our attendees shared their thoughts on everything from the purpose of the office to the real reasons for RTO mandates. 

Check out the event recap video below:

It was pretty tough, but we’ve narrowed everyone’s insightful contributions down to 9 takeaways. Here they are. 

1) Hybrid work has changed the purpose of the office. But it’s a multifaceted one that’s difficult to define. 

Our attendees all had slightly different viewpoints on the purpose of the office – over four years into hybrid work as the status quo. There were a few main groups that perspectives fell into, including: 

• The office as a place to inspire, grow new and existing connections and coach

• The office as a place to be immersed in the company’s brand, experiencing it physically 

• The office as a place where interactions are more transparent, since we can’t always gauge body language with only shoulders and up appearing on a Teams meeting. This transparency makes it easier to build connections and boost wellbeing, which is especially valuable for people living alone

• The office as a place to come together for better performance and delivering better outcomes for customers

Each of these perspectives had the same thing in common – connection. However, the purpose of the office isn’t constant connection. Even the most outgoing employee doesn’t want workplace interactions 100% of the time. 

So what’s the purpose of the office for introverted versus extroverted employees, or for departments with different collaboration frequencies (for example, marketing vs finance)?

And how do you communicate those multifaceted purposes in a way that resonates with each individual and team, regardless of ways of working? 

2) Everyone expects a hyperpersonalized office experience at this stage in the game. Workplace leaders are still figuring out how to provide it. 

One thing everyone agreed on is that employees expect a workplace experience that gives them exactly what they want, whenever they come in. But workplaces are still playing catch up. The result of this mismatch in expectations and capabilities is commute regret – in other words, immediately realising you’ve made a huge mistake coming into the office because what you get is not what you want.

So why the disparity? The reasons fall into two categories – the wrong mindset and lack of data. Most workplace leaders, as one attendee aptly put it, lack the “experience-driven ethos” necessary to personalise the workplace for individuals and teams. 

Most workplace leaders also lack the data to personalise workplace experience. Where the data comes from and how to make sense of it came up several times in the round table, but that’s for another takeaway. 

Our attendees were all in agreement, though, that the days of “feature bloat”  – a natural byproduct of amenity wars – is over – for example, ping pong tables, beer fridges or free pizza Fridays that exist just for the sake of having them.

3) The workplace now is exactly where marketing was during the transition from analogue to digital.

Over the course of the round table, our attendees brought up the parallels between the workplace and marketing as disciplines. The workplace is around seven years behind where digital marketing is right now in terms of transitioning from analogue to digital. 

Back in the day, marketing was about printing brochures and getting ads up on the tube and the sides of buses. Today, data powers complex inbound and multi channel campaigns that personalise individual experiences with the brand. 

The workplace is going through the same journey. People now have a choice (hopefully) of when they come in and whom they work with. They know what they want from their workplace experience. But workplaces don’t yet have the means of collecting the right data, or the right systems to manage the complexity of hybrid work patterns and preferences. 

Eventually, our attendees predicted, workplace systems will guide people to their ideal experience and provide nudges so their office experience is as fulfilling as possible. 

4) Getting useful feedback from employees isn’t a given if all you do is ask.

Employee surveys are often cited as useful sources of feedback for designing everything from hybrid policies to office floor plans. But multiple attendees rightly pointed out that survey answers aren’t reliable because employees only give the answers they’re expected to, rather than what they actually feel. 

So, asking for feedback isn’t enough if your goal is an employee-centric workplace. The real prerequisite for success here is the employee perspective that leadership cares about their opinions and isn’t just asking for the sake of it. That’s far more complex to get right than just shooting out an anonymous survey. 

Indeed, attendees who had success with surveys said the first step to successfully bringing in employee perspectives was to ensure employees felt listened to. One attendee’s team started by asking each employee to describe what the workplace meant to them, for example. 

5) Is the right way to boost office attendance working out what draws people in or what stops them from coming in? 

A key point that emerged was that boosting attendance for the sake of it shouldn’t be the goal of the office. The reasons why we need to come back into the office vary by department. Forcing the finance or development teams to come back in four days a week for “better collaboration” when they really only need to be in once per month, for example, will elicit eye rolls and commute regret every time. 

Often, systems unintentionally create friction between employees and the office. One attendee experienced a challenge with their existing booking system because it wasn’t fully adopted by employees. The best way to address this challenge – preserving operational controls and autonomy – is to communicate the advantages of the system to employees. These could include signalling intent to be in the office to make team days easier to coordinate, planning schedules around team agreements, seeing what events are on in the office and being kept in the loop on mentorship and coaching opportunities. 

6) Talking down a CEO on an RTO mandate mission is both an art and a science. 

Everyone was in agreement that despite their increasing frequency, mandates damage productivity, performance and engagement. CEOs tend to use remote and hybrid work as a scapegoat for other organisational issues that could be completely unrelated, such as a dip in sales. 

When this happens, HR, workplace and real estate teams bear the brunt of countering hardline mandates. What’s needed is data that shows the objective advantages and disadvantages, so decisions are based on evidence and data rather than gut feel. 

7) Brave leadership teams give employees more autonomy. 

One attendee shared an example from a previous role where the CEO implemented a policy giving everyone the autonomy to decide when they come in – a brave decision in a time when other organizations were doing the opposite. 

These decisions improve more than just employee morale and culture, though. One attendee commented that shifting their portfolio strategy to on-demand coworking helped them reduce square footage by 400K and save two million pounds a month. 

Employee autonomy, culture and even office attendance all stem from leadership attitudes and values. Everyone agreed that most leadership teams still don’t understand hybrid work, aren’t properly trained to manage hybrid teams and don’t realise the extent to which their presence in the office increases attendance, because people come in to be seen. 

This all makes CEOs willing to go the autonomous path less trodden really stand out. 

8) There’s definitely a link between workplace experience and talent, but we don’t yet have the systems to measure it. 

There’s a war for getting and retaining talent going on, and the evolution of workplace experience is a valuable battle tactic. One attendee shared a shocking statistic – 46% of employees don’t show up for their first day. This opened up a further discussion about when workplace experience actually starts, and most agreed it’s before employees set foot in the office. 

But can a great workplace experience make people more likely to accept a job offer or less likely to resign? It’s a universally accepted saying these days that employees don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers. A fantastic workplace experience makes a difference in preventing employee churn, we just don’t know exactly how much. Even the cost of employee churn is almost impossible to nail down – we just know it’s too much. 

One thing is for certain though. We need more data and information from HR, specifically when it comes to measuring the impact of the workplace on productivity. Some attendees mentioned working towards metrics like profit and experience per square foot, as opposed to the default cost per square foot. 

And speaking of data: 

9) The workplace data we need is all there, it just needs a concierge. 

It was fairly unanimous that all the takeaways from the night have some form of data at their core. From providing a hyperpersonalized workplace experience for each department, team and individual, multipurposing office design through to giving CEOs hard evidence on the right approach to mandates, we need the right data to make it happen. 

The problem is that even if this data exists, it’s housed in disparate systems across teams that don’t yet work cross-functionally. If the workplace is going to successfully transition to its own version of digital marketing, teams need new systems to aggregate and analyse data, and share it with the right stakeholders. But whose job is it to gather data and act as its concierge? 

Data isn’t everything, though. All the data in the world means nothing if an organisation doesn’t have the right mindset and culture to act on it. 

That’s why the roles of real estate and workplace leaders are so complex and constantly changing. Bridging the gap between data, culture and communication isn’t easy, and we’re always seeing new data coming into the picture to fill in the missing puzzle pieces. 

One thing’s for certain though – there’s never a dull moment for workplace leaders.