Welcome back to Bookmarks. This is Collective’s weekly newsletter about the world of work and place.
We’ve got an interesting roundup of insights from the past week, another fantastic product, and one of our favorite people to share with you. As Cal Newport recently shared with the New York Times the adoption and integration of new technology can take decades. We believe we’re just at the beginning of building our new ways of working as a greater community. If you were to adopt that mindset and believe that we are just at the beginning of creating the new methods and ways of working for the future of work, how would you operate differently? Pacing ourselves and being considerate about what we build and how we build it is required. We’re glad to have you here to build with us.
As a reminder, we’ll be sending these weekly and if you have feedback shoot us a note at hello@collectivewp.com. We were overjoyed with your feedback and support from our initial launch, so keep it coming! It’s our hope as always that by helping to share information, and brining resources to the community we can help everyone to build that future more quickly.
Lastly, if you want to sponsor, support, or partner with Collective you can reach out at the link above. Now onto the good stuff.
Three Things You Should Know
From The Past Week In Work & Place
The Future Forum Winter Pulse Survey Points Towards Record Burnout And Potential Solutions
Burnout reached an all-time high in this Future Forum Survey of 42%. This surpasses the previous high of 41% which was reached in March of 2021 during the first phases of the pandemic. While this trend is unfortunate, the report from the Future Forum also highlights how leaders can increase flexibility around where and when employees work to combat burnout. People who don’t have flexible work policies were 43% more likely to report experiencing burnout. Brian Elliott of the Future Forum does a great job of summarizing these points as well in a recent LinkedIN video post.
Workplace leaders are uniquely placed to help advocate for more flexible work policies. It’s important for leaders in workplace to be in tune with the latest research and resources to provide hard data to create the case for a progressive future of work at their companies. By digging into data like that of the Future Forum and other institutions we can help educate internal leadership and create a more flexible future for everyone. Not all heroes wear capes, some deliver insights.
IFMA Experts Assessment Points Toward A Need to Build Resilience
While we hear a lot about RTO and mandates in the news cycle, we thought it was interesting to share this report from IFMA which surveyed 222 leaders in the industry. In it one of the key points they highlight is that,”remote and hybrid work have become the norm in most offices.” This simple acknowledgement of what is happening might not seem profound, but in the context of what we hear in the news cycle it’s exciting to see IFMA acknowledging this reality. In the report from the survey they also highlight the need to increase sustainability efforts, increase leasing flexibility, and for FMs to adapt to the changing requirements of their roles.
Workplace leaders should be encouraged to see one of the stalwart professions of the built environment looking toward the future and wanting to make bold progress. In the report they also highlight the importance of partnering with the other internal orgs that touch workplace experience. We hope you’ll share this report with your teams and discuss what the relevant points might mean for your teams.
NYC Closes in on Union Deal That Would Include Remote Work
As pointed out in this Forbes article NYC is potentially losing 12 billion annually due to the adoption of remote and hybrid working. What makes up that number? Lost revenue from business travelers, less people dining out locally, and much more. The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has been pushing to get employers to bring employees back to the office five days a week. For city workers he has been pushing a 5 day a week agenda as well. However, in recent negotiations with the city’s largest municipal union he has been forced to agree to create a “flexible work committee” and to run a remote work pilot beginning in June of this year. If the deal goes forward as written it will be a huge win for flexible work advocacy.
For work and place leaders this push by a municipal union for more flexible working standards should signal that the desire for flexibility isn’t bound by specific industries or job roles. This will affect all industries and workplace leaders in all sectors must be prepared to update skillsets and adapt their teams to these changes as well.
One Big Thing
“There are jobs in this union and in this city that cannot work remotely — our police officers, our nurses, our fire fighters, our transit operators — so as we make this shift into the post-pandemic reality, we must do it in a thoughtful way in partnership with the union,” NYC Mayor Eric Adams
Someone you should know
In The Collective World of Work And Place
Elfreda Chan is an experienced global strategy leader based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Born in Hong Kong, she spent her formative years in Canada, subsequently returning to Hong Kong where she, ironically, picked up Mandarin as an expat through the British education system. She moved on to study architecture in England where she kicked off her career in the built environment.
Starting out in sports architecture and urban design, involved as an architectural assistant in both the Wimbledon Centre Court redevelopment and London Olympic and Legacy Masterplan projects, she began her career thinking about and designing for people at scale. During the 2008 recession, she overcame a mental health crisis and returned to Canada to work in retail as both she and the economy healed. It was there on the Apple Store shop floor that she learned strategic ways to approach people and the everyday problems they were trying to solve.
By 2010, she landed in workplace strategy where she drew on her combined experiences and spent over a decade working with corporate businesses around the world to develop high performing work environments for their people. When the pandemic hit, she refocused her work and joined Twitter to develop technologies, programs, and policies to provide people with individual choice while ensuring inclusive experiences, no matter if they worked at home or in the office.
With this major shift in quality of life, and a renewed focus on how we live and work, Elfreda recognizes that the challenges businesses now face have exploded. As she moves on to the next phase of her career, she is committed to drawing on all that she has learned, and so much she has yet to find out, to make an even greater impact on the future.
In Her Own Words: “I’m what they call a Third Culture Kid—someone who never quite understands the mainstream, and always seems to find a way to thrive in the in-between. It has helped me look and think about things sideways, and be unafraid to ‘poke the bear’ at situations and difficult problems, ultimately getting me to where I’m at with my career today.
Being comfortable with almost never knowing where I’m going next has gifted me with curiosity and wonder about what lies ahead.”
A product we’re into right now
NomadGo
About Nomad-Go: Nomad Go’s mission is to transform the supply chain by digitizing physical spaces. They aim to power decision making and drive automation across inventory management to unlock value for businesses, employees and their customers.
Their core product METAshelfTM leverages computer vision and augmented reality (AR) to create a digital twin of any environment. Whether streamlining inventory counts or transforming the supply chain with automated ordering, Nomad Go’s innovative platform powers business decisions.
What We Think: Workplace utilization having a variable pattern can be a nightmare for any workplace team trying to predict inventory needs. Having a simpler, quicker, and more intelligent way to manage inventory could help lighten the load of any team. We could definitely see technology like this helping teams that are resource constrained in both time and people as well. It’s great to see artificial intelligence and augmented reality being used to solve some really practical problems.
That’s It For This WEek
You Did It!
We’re glad you read all the way to the bottom! We appreciate you reading our newsletter. We’d love it if you checked out our resources page as well. It’s full of books, templates, and other great stuff all related to the worlds of work and place.