Turning Commercial Around: Enhancing Employee Experience with AI and Workplace Design

On Wednesday 15th January, Tom Dixon , Head of Workplace Strategy at Lloyds Banking Group , Corinne Murray , Chief Change & Transformation Strategist at Agate, Adam Simmons , Global Workplace Experience Lead at 荷商葛蘭素史克藥廠 , and Tom Whitty , EVP, Head of Workplace Solutions at Upflex joined us to discuss the strategies to enhance employee experience and to turn commercial around.

It was a pleasure hosting our fantastic speakers and the highly engaged audience in this session! In case you missed it, here are some key quotes from this week's webinar.

The session recording can be accessed through the link here:

https://global.proptechconnect.com/42cr5H3

Webinar Highlights

1) Current Outlook

Adam: "As a pharmaceutical and vaccines-focused organisation, we have a dynamic view on the topic of work models. Our R&D technology development team for instance is required to be in the office due to the nature of their work. We are currently focused on investing in technologies that can streamline experiences for remote, hybrid, and in-office teams. Important requirements and areas that we are looking into include collaboration, information sharing, community building, as well as the health and well-being of our employees, which can be driven both by technology and ways of working."

Corinne: "A key challenge is that, over the last five years, many leaders have had to think explicitly about workplace strategy for the first time. Often, the focus has been solely on in-ffice experience however, the reality is that workplace strategy is the entire end-to-end experience of being an employee at the firm, which is a much larger multi-dimensional problem to be working with. Companies that are remote first or geographically flexible got a leapfrog experience in the past five years, but other companies are now also coming to this realisation. It is much more than just what the built environment offers. Education and collaboration between HR, FM, and IT is needed to enable business success."

Thomas Dixon: "There are three important questions to consider about our work together in the office: how, where, and when.

In terms of the how, we are thinking about the layout of the office and what we do when we’re in the office. Although there have been some changes over the past year, this still feels recognisable to what was in place pre-Covid. It feels more like an evolution than a revolution.

The where and the when are much more complex to address. We need to think about getting people together and ensuring that they get the benefits of that time spent in the right space at the right time. However, this is hugely challenging as there is a flight for quality which implies higher rents in the city centre, while hybrid work has enabled people to move outside of cities to find better living conditions, which means longer commutes. This creates questions around how to attract talent, whether companies want to create flexibility, and what kind of spaces to invest in."

Tom Whitty: "74% of companies are now adopting flexible work policies, but these policies are still being developed. There is trial and error, which means that the way they use technologies is evolving, and often technology can help companies capture the right data to continue to define the models that will ensure that you have the right people at the right time in the the right place, as Thomas framed it. Overall, we continue to hear from our clients that the North Star is to deliver the right experience when employees do come in, and this is what we help them define. It is all about increasing the value of bringing people together."

2) Challenges in the adoption of AI and data-driven solutions

Thomas Dixon: "I have some interesting experiences to share on this. For context, we have always made data-driven decisions in what it comes to property, and we were early adopters of IoT and sensors. In Q4 last year, we looked into opportunities to use AI in desk booking. Today, this system doesn’t work very well, and the challenges we face are actually around data quality. Although we have had good data historically, there is a huge step between having data that you can work with at a remedial level, and having something that is scalable and of sufficient quality to train AI on. So, business readiness for AI is an interesting problem to solve."

Tom Whitty: "This is very aligned with what we see in our clients. There is often a misalignment between organisational goals and the underlying foundational data strategy behind them. Firms often lack clean integrated data for those AI tools to optimize work effectively, and more importantly, there is not a perfect internal alignment on what the goals are and what the tools should be optimising for. It is also important to note that 70% of AI adoption fails due to a lack of strong employee buy-in, so strong technology needs to be paired with a robust human-led change management effort to enable results."

Corinne: "Overall, AI adoption is like a seed popping out of the ground. There's so much under-the-ground work starting to establish itself before we see any of the above-ground movement. To summarise, what we have been discussing, you need:

• Strong and unified governance strategy and maintenance strategy for the data that lives within your organization. AI is only going to be as good as the data that goes into it.
• Cultural shift. You need workplace strategy transformation work to ensure that everyone understands the context, impact and behavioural changes required for the AI implementation project you want to do.
• Individual readiness: People internalise information differently and expectations for different people in the organisation will be different. Organisational readiness is not enough."

Tom Whitty: "The most successful approaches to get buy-in at scale are a combination of top-down and bottom-up. Creating is the first step, you are building muscle. This starts with understanding what the organisation requires. Then you need to build from the ground up, make the tools easy for everyone to use, and demonstrate value on an individual level. You need to be able to demonstrate value based on what each stakeholder cares about. This will then create positive noise around that value, which is crucial to build an overall organisational habit around new tools nad collaboration patterns."

3) Data in the workplace: What can we gather from office usage data as an indicator of how CRE will perform in 2025?

Corine: "Although there is data that can be used for commercial real estate to inform its developments and design, I don’t think that most companies have established really solid understandings of their ways of working so without clarity, it is hard to make projections on the commercial scale.

However, there is an opportunity for corporates to understand what actually works for their workforce. Year by year, companies are finding the weekly or yearly events and practices that deliver great value for them and are great use cases for their spaces. I think hybrid work has become the norm, and it would be hard to change something that has been so socialised at a global scale."

Adam: "We always look at things from employees’ perspectives. When we look at data usage for instance, we don’t want to use it just to manage peaks and make real estate decisions, but instead we like to flip it back to the team and allow them to use this to get a better sense of choice. They can improve their productivity and make health-related choices based on data around air quality, occupancy, and other data points that matter to them and their personal use case."

Tom Whitty: "We work with companies that are in the office five days a week, and also with companies that are fully remote and plan to stay that way. This means that we are totally agnostic to where people are brought together to collaborate and do their best work. We start by understanding the goals of the organisation we work with, and then using the right data to understand their built environment use case. This often means creating something that works almost like an insurance policy, whereby companies can access on-demand space in the case of overflow. This enables companies to optimise for means, not peaks as we mentioned previously."

4) Action Points: Immediate steps to optimise workplace experience and achieve sustainability goals.

Find the answer to this question from all speakers in the recording below.

https://global.proptechconnect.com/42cr5H3

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