Welcome back to Collective Bookmarks. This week’s newsletter is 1,423 words and a 5 minute read.
This week we’re diving into research reports and sharing four of our favorites from the world of work and place. With the now announced shuttering of The Future Forum, we think it’s more important than ever to highlight interesting research and share information to increase it’s discoverability. If you’ve seen a research report you loved from a great firm or company – send it our way. We’d love to check it out and share it further too.
If you’re a company that’s sitting on heaps of interesting data that you could share with the world as insights, we implore you to do it. Obviously, do it well. But the world of workplace really needs good quality information on what is happening now, and where things are trending to over time to help make informed decisions.
In This Week’s Issue:
- Four Things You Should Know
- A Person You Should Know: Corinne Murray
As always if you have feedback, want to sponsor, support, or partner with Collective you can reach out at the link below. Now onto the good stuff!
Four Things You Should Know
From The World of Work and Place
1.Who Gives A Schuck: Oysters Report On Employee Disillusionment
In their most recent report, Oyster provides a peak into the concerns of knowledge workers and some important advice on how we can address them. They asked knowledge workers to rank their priorities and the results are pretty astonishing. For most knowledge workers surveyed, work wasn’t even in the top 3 of priorities. They also dive deeply into what other factors are causing employees to feel disillusioned and distracted.
Why this matters: As workplace professionals it’s important for us to understand the context with which our teams are coming to work. With so many external factors taking up headspace, it can be easy to understand why many people feel burned out. If mental well-being and physical well-being are the top two priorities of knowledge workers we should be thinking about how we can build programs that support these needs and enable our teams to be more effective and enabled. The full report is linked below.
2. The Future of WFH
By now we would think that Nick Bloom and his teams’ research on WFH would be pretty ubiquitous. However, we often run into individuals who have never heard of them and so we will continue to share their studies until that’s not the case! Their latest quarterly report is full of interesting data, but one piece we wanted to highlight is the slow forming of three distinct groups of workers. As you can see in the snippet below there is a strong distinction between the model being used by these three broad groups of workers in the United States. These differences will continue to make efforts by workplace and people teams more complicated.
Why This Matters: For workplace and people teams the role of enabling employees can be fairly difficult. If you have more than one of these 3 groups of workers at your company – that can make things even more complicated. A good company example of this might be Doordash. They have their corporate employees, and a high amount of other employee types for their respective services. For companies with multiple types of workers or work arrangements, it can be difficult to set a “standard.”Creating a workplace experience that enables more than one subgroup is complicated and will require an incredible amount of coordination by the cross functional teams in workplace and experience. There’s lots more great data in the report which is linked below.
3. LiquidSpace’s Hybrid Work Index
In their latest Hybrid Work Index report LiquidSpace’s team highlights some interesting movement in how people are using spaces and how costs are shifting for those spaces as well. Adjusted for a pandemic baseline the use of collaborative spaces (meeting rooms, huddle rooms, and team spaces) has increased growing 4% over Q3, to 77.7% and continuing it’s upward trend in Q4. Their report also highlights a vast difference in usage city by city in suburbs vs CBD bookings. The city by city data is definitely worth a look.
Why It Matters: Understanding the working patterns of knowledge workers in different regions can provide interesting data points for workplace teams advising their executives on how the general market is operating now. The fact that collaboration spaces are being booked should not come as a surprise to those who have been following workplace research. As we work in more hybrid and remote ways, when we come together it is more often to collaborate than do heads down work. Planning how to offer / provide the space teams need to enable those collaboration moments is important. The full report is linked below.
4. Relogix’ Latest Benchmark Report
We may have saved the best for last. For workplace professionals a constant conversation over the past three years has been, “what is utilization.” Does it matter? Is 2019 the benchmark? Should we reset? We’re very happy to have seen this latest report from the team at Relogix. One important thing they highlight at the beginning of the report is the difference between occupancy and utilization. That small distinction can be a huge driver in the confusion when discussing the future of place in workplace circles. They go on to share some pretty incredible insights but we thought we’d highlight the snippet below to entice you to read the rest of the report. The average occupancy in 2022 is a full 25% lower than the same time in 2019. While we may often see 50% touted as the average by other groups, it’s good to see a dose of reality being set here.
Why It Matters: For workplace professionals who are fretting about utilization and occupancy (or whose executives are), it can be comforting to know you’re actually average. Constant questions about what other companies are “doing” may persist but at least this gives you some data to have a realistic discussion about the state of occupancy & utilization in 2022. As more teams produce data and insights we can utilize to build internal cases we can start to make real data informed decisions about how to manage our workplaces. The full report is linked below.
One Big Thing
“Knowledge Workers care about their careers, sure. But in the order of things workers give a schuck about, work isn’t even up there. Not even close.” Oyster’s Employee Disillusionment Report
Someone You Should Know
In The World of Work And Place
Corinne Murray is the Founder and CEO of Agate, a strategic consulting studio based in Brooklyn, NY. Agate works with companies to transform how, where, and when work gets done successfully in the post-COVID era. With nearly 15 years of experience in workplace and real estate – with stops at brands like WeWork, American Express, RXR, and CBRE – Corinne partners alongside other workplace and real estate industry experts to design the places, systems, and tools people need to be successful and effective.
In Her Own Words: I often joke that my career is like a passport with stamps from nearly every corner of the real estate and workplace world. But it wasn’t until a friend recently pointed out that a gravitational pull toward people and culture, rather than an array of disjointed experiences, defined my career.
I came into the real estate industry as a wildcard with a bachelor’s degree in religious philosophy and started as a research analyst at CBRE in New York. On the surface, the real estate and workplace disciplines couldn’t be further away from studying religions. But, my education is at the heart of how I think about company culture and employee experience; there are more commonalities than meets the eye. I charted a path that covered the occupier, flex, landlord, services, and consulting sides of our industry and didn’t stop until I got as close to the real (for me) challenge: make the experience of work as good as possible for as many people as possible.
It took several years and blunders for my practicality to catch up to my idealism. During my time at WeWork, I came across an Arthur Ashe quote that I call on often that helps to ground myself in reality and zero in on how to approach significant, sweeping organizational change that can withstand the chaos: Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can
That’s It For This WEek
You Did It!
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Until next time – Omar and Kayla