Thought
Leadership

Office of the future and how to foster an innovative culture, with Brett Hautop Founder of Workshape

December 1, 2022
Borderless Leadership - article

Innovation happens when we are our most productive selves. Recently, we had the pleasure of talking to Brett Hautop, Founder at Workshape. Brett spent a considerable amount of time developing a unique approach to the whole world of virtual work environments leveraged from his experience working at LinkedIn for several years. He truly understands what the work environment means today for businesses, and how it aids the way companies operate. Companies in the current environment have to consider answering the questions: What do we do with our offices? Why do they matter, why is the workplace experience important and why should we even think about it?

In our conversation, Brett mentioned that more and more companies are asking for insight and guidance about where to go from here, knowing that physical proximity in one workspace matters to them. The challenge is most of the time, they have no idea why it even matters to them, nor do they know how to get people together in one place at the same time. Read on or listen to the podcast for our full conversation about the ‘Office of the Future.’

How do we measure productivity?

Andrew Kris

So Brett, it is lovely to see you again. I really want to first of all congratulate you on Workshape and it sounds like you’ve had a busy couple of months since you founded the company. You were saying earlier on that you just can’t keep up?

Brett Hautop 

There are many people asking for some insight, guidance, or inspiration about where to go from here knowing what matters to them – A place where they find time to be physically proximate, but they don’t know how to make that happen or when, and some of them haven’t even answered the question why it matters. And that’s the place where I usually start with: I ask them from an unbiased perspective, why does it matter to you? And that’s the first thing you should always ask.

Andrew Kris

Yes. The question is, what are you going to come back to? And why?

Brett Hautop 

Yes, and I’ve heard a number of people, CEOs and the like, make comments saying, “Well, people can’t keep working this way.” Can’t they? Or you don’t want them to work this way? I think if the answer is that they can’t because of something about the work that you do, or something about your employee population, or where they live, or whatever it is, maybe there is a legitimate reason.

Most of them say you can’t because I’ve never worked that way and I can’t imagine, but what they really mean is, I can’t imagine that you could actually get work done like that. The thing I’m seeing is more and more people are starting to get to this place of being really worn out. There are people who went from going to the office dropping their bags at their desk, and then going and sitting at a conference room all day and hopping from one conference room to another. Now they just walk over to their desk at home, and they get on zoom call after a zoom call all day. But it’s now even more, they’ve gotten to the point where instead of doing nine, now they can do 13 or 14 a day. And I think there are people saying, “I am so productive, and I’ve done so much work.” And there are all these studies coming out saying how much more productive everybody was. Well, how do we know – because we’ve never been able to measure productivity – so I’m not sure how we are now measuring productivity?

Now we’re 2.78x more productive was the latest study? But how do we actually know that? The reality is, being in meetings all day doesn’t mean you’ve been productive.

Andrew Kris

Absolutely, just that you’ve done a lot of meetings. And of course, Zoom and Teams meetings also creates incredible fatigue.

Efficiency has no place in innovation

Brett Hautop 

It’s not to say that fatigue doesn’t happen when you’re talking with somebody in person. But I think there are a lot of different directions you could take on that too. I heard this referred to a few times, but very well stated by some folks over at Genentech, from their perspective on why they say they want people to come back to the office is that “efficiency has no place in innovation.” To them, what that means is innovation doesn’t happen in a straight line. And it doesn’t happen when I plan my day. I’m going to do this and this and this and this and I’m going to march through my day in order. Innovation happens when you get out of order. It’s when there’s an accidental conversation or when something that you didn’t anticipate happens.

Andrew Kris

Some extra stimulation from another direction that you didn’t expect, right?

Brett Hautop

Right and then to that point, what I’m hearing from a lot of people is, fine, I’d like to come in but I’m coming in and basically what I do is sit and I go into zoom meetings all day by myself. I ask myself why should I do that? This is not easy. The thing about all of us coming to the office together was that there were very few variables. I knew it was predictable, I knew when you would be there, unless there were some circumstances that changed it, I knew where you would be and when you would be. So, I could plan around the assumption that you would be there. If I have a situation where all of us are just doing whatever is most convenient for us, we’re a bunch of charged particles bouncing around in space, and we may or may not run into each other.

So, then the solution that a lot of people are throwing out there is to just reduce the space. And then those particles are going to bump into each other more often. And then people come in, and say well, I don’t want to come into this space that is packed with a bunch of other people. And we’re all just doing our own work, and not communicating or coordinating. There’s a lot of decisions that need to be made by leadership about why they’re doing this and give people the tools because I think people when they do come in and get something positive out of it, it’s a really great thing. And they may not want to do it every day, but they say I want to do that again. And I’d love to do that next and how soon again it is will totally depend on the person and the company, etc.

Why are people coming into the office anyway?

Andrew Kris

And it sounds like the first part of your work at Workshape is in fact, that consulting piece on deciding those kinds of elements of why are we coming in anyway?

Brett Hautop 

Yes, and I think trying to first ask questions that you may not have been asking before you develop your own problem statement is the way to go. Okay. If that’s why, if you’re saying, I’d like people to come in because I think they’ll be more innovative. All right. If you think they’re going to be more innovative, how do you solve that? What do you do to actually foster and encourage that sort of behavior that leads to more innovative thinking or more innovations?

Andrew Kris

As you say, it’s not linear, you can’t say, we’re all going to go and innovate tomorrow, right?

Brett Hautop 

Exactly, “Today’s Innovation Day!” And many companies do a similar thing say on one day a year, or a day a quarter where there’s a passion project where you do a certain [innovative] thing on this day. And what that is supposed to do, is energize you, get you out of your normal every day, work on something you’re super passionate about. And hopefully, that will spark ideas and everything else you’re doing.

Andrew Kris

Well, that was the 3M approach, I think, a long time back, right?

Brett Hautop 

Yes, 3M, and there’s a couple of companies that follow suit with them, and I think there’s some value to that. That’s what some companies are saying, and other companies don’t know if they know what they’re saying yet. Other than they keep thinking, “This is crazy. We can’t keep working like this.” And some of that is a remnant of them never having worked that way.

Work escapism vs refreshing your thinking

I think it’s not this clear cut, but for the sake of conversation. There are people who thrive working from home, and they get a whole lot out of it. And it’s this super positive thing, because of their personality, their job description, their role, and it just works.

Then there’s the people who are really good at navigating their way through it such that they feel more productive at home – and I ask what it means that you’re more productive? And they say, “Well in between meetings, I do laundry, and then I do this. And then I’m doing this, and I get all these things done. So, by the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done work, and I’m done with the house. Now I can really relax, instead of doing that when I get home.”

When I think of myself, and those sorts of things happen, those are things that I’m doing a lot of times because I don’t want to think about the hard problem that I’m trying to solve with work. And there’s this easy thing: I can check a box and say I completed something. It’s a task, but I try and keep my brain thinking about the thing I’m trying to do at work when I’m doing those things. And there’s sometimes where I can do that. But a lot of times it just takes me out of any state of flow or any chance I had to be in flow. And then I got to work my way back to it.

And I think for a lot of people, these things that they are doing around the home or wherever they’re working, is a lot of escapism, but in a way that is making your personal life more convenient as it is reducing the overall amount of time spent. But I question is the quality of the work you’re doing getting better or worse? And that’s something that’s really hard to measure.

But there’s a lot of it happening. I had a close friend sent me a selfie the other day from his iPhone. He’s out on a lake on his boat. It was 12 o’clock. And I said, “wow, working hard today, huh?” And he goes, “No, it’s just lunchtime, this my lunch break, I go out for lunch and drive around the lake, and I come back.”

First, I thought, wow, you know, in one way, that’s amazing, what a great thing to do over your lunch break. But then I thought, well, are you really thinking about work? If I’m ever having to work when I’m on vacation, I don’t want to be doing it. I want to be doing the thing that I’m supposed to be doing and be on vacation.

I think there are a lot of people who are doing these really self-fulfilling things during working times. But it does make it hard to be really invested in that thing and also doing this job you have.

Andrew Kris 

This brings me back to a couple of guys who worked with me in South Africa and spent a couple of hours a day in the pub for a few weeks. They say, “Yeah, we’re going there to think about business and to talk about business.” I said, “Yes, sure.” You know, you have to decide is that just an excuse, and [if so] what is a logical way of refreshing your thinking? And that’s always incredibly subjective, it’s difficult to get around that one.

On the other hand, if you create a workplace where being able to refresh your thinking, without deliberately doing so, as you can’t force innovation, so how do you create that environment? I guess that’s what your business at Workshape is about, ultimately?

Does your geolocation matter? Why the head office no longer rules.

Andrew Kris

In the criteria you lay out in terms of creating the optimal workplace – and you did a lot of that at LinkedIn – the top of your list was geolocation, Brett? You know, where actually are you going to be. This is much more important than, for example “where does my mother-in-law live?” which can be the way that offices sometimes get located.

Brett Hautop 

Yes, and that’s a really tough one right now. If you say, we’re based in California, we have 2000 employees and we’ve had 500 employees relocate to Idaho during the pandemic. Well, that’s a number where you’re like, okay, well, we should probably have a presence there. Because there are enough people and there’s some collecting point. It’s not often that clear cut, though, because we have 50 that have moved to Dallas, we have 80 that moved to Los Angeles, we have 100 that have moved to Miami, so they start going through the list. And this is not just in the U.S, this is happening everywhere. When I was at LinkedIn, I would get requests like; “Hey, just wanted you to know, I set up a company group, I try to find anybody who’s moved to this city. This is where I am, we now have 75 people, why don’t we have an office here?”

And so, my question at that point was, well, what’s the value of an office? If none of you even work together? Or know each other? Or maybe there’s a handful of you that do? And if yes, then the question was, will you get enough value out of being together with other people that are part of the same company, even if you’re not on the same teams?

And, you know, there’s a set of people that like to work alone together. I just come in, I like being around the ambient awareness, the energy of other people. And it’s almost better that I don’t know them because it’s like being a coffee shop, but I can start to build relationships with people in my company absorbed some culture that is inherent in our physical space.

But I think for other people, it would be like, I just come in and it’s back to the same problem, I come in and do the same thing I do at home, but I’m doing it from the office.

So, if you think about it as a more distributed model, if I said a company has two locations, and we’re on two coasts of the country. But instead, we’re going to reduce the size of those two locations and open five more locations in places where we know our employees love to live and where we start to hire lots of people. And the idea is going to be that we’re going to have people that go move kind of they spend time in multiple places throughout the year, a week here a couple days there, and then they may report to that same location on a regular basis. But it’s getting away from this idea that everything happens at headquarters.

There’s a lot of companies that do this when they had time zone issues, for example they have people in Singapore, but they have calls that are at 3am Singapore time. A lot of companies were historically pretty bad about everything being about the headquarters.

And I think one of the things this is doing is evolving that issue and saying is we’re more of a distributed model. And we don’t have that many people in one place. And maybe we do come together as a large organization once a year. But otherwise, we create these, outposts, or satellite hubs, or whatever you would like to call them. Similar to the ‘Hub and Spoke’ model people have been talking about for years, but I think this might be a further evolution of it.

And one of the things I’m working with companies on is then, what’s at that location? Let’s be totally honest with ourselves. Nobody ever said, “When I grew up, I want to sit at a five-foot desk in a row of other five-foot desks in an anonymous.” And nobody said “I want to get locked in a conference room with seven or eight other people for the next hour.”

So, what are the environments and what are the things that people will come in for and say, “I don’t have this at home, I got value out of this, and maybe even I came up with some new ideas I wouldn’t have if I was stuck in the same four walls looking at the same space at home.”

Andrew Kris 

Absolutely. We’ve done this for 20 years. At borderless, we are a distributed business, we have one location- a physical location, which is a pretty pleasant location from a classical perspective, in Brussels. And this is a place where we plant our flag. So at least you can go to an associate and say, hey, we do have a flag somewhere. And that’s our flag. So, it goes from being a virtual, virtually a business, to being a virtual business, there is a difference.

But still, we deal with those kinds of things by bringing people together as often as we can, in one place. So we do maintain that social infrastructure, that’s really critical to get people to work together. And that’s at least one way of handling it, that we’ve experienced.

As for the physical location point, which is where you and your business comes in, It’s a different story – particularly for a very small business of course.

It’s a lot harder to be distracted in person

Brett Hautop

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been at three conferences that I’ve spoken at, or participated in. I was leading a session with about 70 workplace leaders, and I started an interactive deep dive into the question “does your workplace bring value to your employees?” And we talked about it and said: Employees or Company? And can it be both at the same time? Because what the employee wants, and what the company wants, are often two very different things. So we started with a poll to see where they were at, and everyone in the room could understand how closely they could relate, and align with, the people around them. And then we did roundtable conversations; we had different topics by table. We were supposed to have 45 minutes for that entire portion, with the first 20 minutes to talk, and then we were going to break out and come back to it. But the energy that happened around these tables! They talked for the full 45 minutes, and I couldn’t get them to stop. We had to turn the lights off and on in the room and say alright now we’ve got to go the next thing.

So many people came to me and said that session was the most impactful thing we’ve done this whole week. Because we had this opportunity to connect, share and learn from each other. I started the whole session and said, “We’re going to do something that maybe you don’t remember how to do. And that’s in-person collaboration. We’re going to work together.” And it’s not like this is anything new, or I hadn’t seen it before. But it’s been so long since I’ve seen that and felt that energy. And it was amazing.

I’ve been a remote worker and probably a lot of your employees, including you, are remote workers. But you are really good at focusing on the person you’re talking to and focusing on the task at hand. So many people that I deal with and see, even when they’re in a very important conversation, are letting themselves be distracted by all the other things, the phone, the other thing on their computer, whatever is going on around them.

And when you put everybody around a table, or in the same room, you see it’s a whole lot harder to do that, and you have to become present, and yes, it’s sometimes more tiring because your full self is there. But I think if nothing else, getting people to see the value in that, and the value in that it’s not just a social thing. It’s not just oh, we only get together when we’re trying to be social. Because although there’s nothing negative about that, I do think you’re missing an opportunity. And you’re potentially missing an opportunity to be better at your job.

Andrew Kris 

Businesses are all social enterprises, but they’re not 100% social purpose. People tend to forget that it is a business at the end of the day too. So, bringing the two together, and matching it up is a critical part of a workplace.

The ‘aha moment’ – Realizing the gap between leaders and teams

Andrew Kris 

I noticed the way you are structuring things [at Workshape], starting at location, then looking at space utilization. In history, there were a lot of concepts around space utilization. And I think the first time I came across the space-time thing was: “The space you need for the time you need it” and that kind of stuff, which made good sense at the time. But I think we’re now in a totally different mood. I think, looking at design philosophy is going to be important in all of this. Not to say the other aspects are not, as I noticed on your website; workplace policies, workplace programs – your ESG profile as a consequence of doing all of these things – These are really critical things, and it’s very nice to see that your new company is focusing on every aspect of this.

Brett Hautop 

And I think that’s why for me, the “aha moment” that happened a couple years ago, while I was at LinkedIn, was realizing that between the people who are leading these functions within large corporations, and all the folks that they bring in who support these activities and these services in these spaces, they’re all kind of individually siloed.

Often there is a pretty big gap between the subject matter expert, and the person leading that function within the organization. And it’s mostly because neither one of them has sat in the others seat before, so they don’t understand the other side.

The service provider and the subject matter expert doesn’t necessarily understand the processes and the things it takes to put those things into place and how decisions are made. And the person leading the function doesn’t understand what it takes to do the work and what is the process.

What I’m trying to do is both fill that gap and be the glue that brings those things together. That more clearly articulates what people are trying to solve for, and then compiles and assemble the best people, the best team possible to come up with even better solutions.

Understanding each business is different

Andrew Kris 

It sounds like that upfront, understanding why we’re doing this in the first place is a critical part of your work at Workshape, which is clearly an enormous time sink, upfront that you need to invest in. I wonder how you cope with all of that personally, because I’m sure your time, particularly in this first couple of months, Brett, must have been so tied up in those activities?

Brett Hautop 

It’s interesting because the clients I have are not all one industry. And they’re not all one kind of prototype: Some are corporations, some are property developers, some are prop tech companies, some are institutions. They all have a different problem to solve, and they all come at it a different way. The conversations are all unique.

There is a lot of time spent in just digging and asking lots of questions and probing. I think people have a knee jerk reaction, of “this” is why we do it. And then you start to break that down. And then they start to realize that they’ve been saying “this,” but actually hadn’t really thought about it. And it’s not actually an adequate answer. Because for a lot of people, the answer really is just “because,” and not “because of these things.” It’s well, just “because this is what we’ve always done, and it’s so hard to imagine doing anything else.”

Is flexible working the new amenities race?

Brett Hautop 

I’ve heard of even more companies recently, and very large ones, now making their employees sign contracts, saying that they’re going to come back to the office. I’ve heard about more companies starting to use AI software that employees are required to have the software installed, etc.

Andrew Kris 

Yes, such as activity monitors.

Brett Hautop 

Which I think these companies are going to do. But they’re trying to find the easy button, and over time, that is going to have a tremendously detrimental effect on them.

Andrew Kris 

No question. But we see this already when interviewing people for some senior roles. And even the most senior people now are saying, “no, no, I don’t think so. This is what I need out of a work environment and this is what I need from the employer.” And it’s often not the same thing [that the employer is offering] at all. And the employers coming back saying, “Well, that’s not the way we work.” So, this is clearly going to be a barrier to employing the best people, or at least enough of the best people with this way of working.

Brett Hautop 

This is going to be for me the new amenities race, you know, the arms race. It’s going to be more about enabling employees to be flexible and work in the way that what makes the most sense for them. I think though, if you’re just saying it, and you can see it’s lip service, people will quickly default to saying, “I’m just going to go the company that says they literally don’t care where I work, and although they don’t have offices, and I’m okay with giving that part up, because I have so much more freedom and flexibility to manage my life the way I want.” And it’s going to be the ones who have a perspective and opinion and are willing to say, “this is why this matters to me, it might not be for everyone. And that’s okay. But this is why it matters to our company, if you want to be part of what we’re doing, this is what to do.”

Because the other part of this is that a lot of people just want something. They want some sort of direction. They’re so tired of the ambiguity of “I could do anything,” and I think in life now, we all have so many choices every single day that we have to make. And for a lot of people just the choice of: “Do I go in? Do I stay at home? If I do go in, where do I meet? Which office do I go to? How.. etc etc” And it’s too much. So, I think people need some direction and guidance.

Andrew Kris 

Yes, some light structure and process is required.

Brett Hautop 

For sure. And if you believe that it’s not right for you, that’s okay. Then find that company that has that structure you are looking for. But I think there’s so many companies afraid to say anything for fear that it will send lots of people running for the door, that they’ve said nothing. And that’s far worse.

Andrew Kris 

And then eventually, they will leak employees over time.

Brett Hautop 

Yes, and they’re sending mixed signals, because then they’re reducing their footprint. And they’re getting rid of services. And it’s like, wait, you’re really just trying to save money over here. Like what’s going to happen? Then and then there’s the ultimate fear that you’re just going to make me come back to the office in a smaller space, and you’re going to cram us all in and you’re not going to give us assigned seats. And this is going to be worse than what I had before.

And that’s why the other thing to say with all this, is this is not something you can solve overnight. And this is a sea change and how we’ve all worked.

It’s all situational

Andrew Kris 

I think by listening to you talking about this, Brett, I get the impression that all of this is really situational, and ultimately does depend on the character, the nature, culture of each company, and his business objectives. No one solution would be identical for every company, right?

Andrew Kris 

I truly believe that. I believe that before the pandemic, and I would talk about all the spaces I delivered, and how each were unique. The reality was they were 95%, the same. And the 5% was the makeup that went on at the end that makes them feel a little different. But fundamentally, they were the same.

And I think this is getting to a place where this is not the difference of 1% of DNA differences. This needs to get to that there’s a fundamental difference. And it may even happen within a company by location, that a location has a very different way of doing things in another state, city, country. And I think people have been so afraid to do that, because of we need to have the homogeneous in what we offer for the sake of equity. I think that the conversation has to change to this is equitable in relation to the people where they live and where they’re at, and not a matter of it being equitable. Because anytime you try and make things equitable, globally, within a company, you’ve already alienated so many.

Andrew Kris 

You sub-optimize everything, of course.

Brett Hautop 

Right. And the culture of one country versus another can be so different that that thing that’s a positive, is a negative somewhere else. Even saying which days of the week you’re going to work; a lot of countries work on Saturdays.

Andrew Kris 

And if you go to the Middle East, of course, you’re working different schedules, different working weeks.

Brett Hautop 

I think it’s a super complex problem. But I’m excited because there’s no shortage of companies looking for help and guidance.

Making what you do repeatable

Andrew Kris 

I wanted to ask you about geography. I can imagine you’re pretty tied up just where you are right now, but are you considering working in different parts of the world at this stage?

Brett Hautop 

Right now, I’m pretty much across the U.S, but I’m trying to have conversations with some folks who are interested in Ireland, Australia, and potentially Singapore. But I’m trying to just get my feet underneath me at first and just have all processes in place. As I try and decide what kind of team I’m going to build beyond the outsource help that I have currently, I’m trying to figure out what about what I’m doing is repeatable? What can I expand to have others help me with, and what are the things that have that I need to stay close to. Because for me, I want to stay close to the work, I want to stay close to clients and I plan to. So, it’s really about finding a balance there.

Andrew Kris 

While finding a balance and being able to scale that wonderful experience that you have is going to be the biggest challenge for you, I suspect.

Brett Hautop 

Yeah, for sure.

Andrew Kris 

But if we can help in any way at some point in future, it would be a great pleasure.

I know that the subject matter is of incredible interest to our clients.

We’ve seen also, for example, just last week, a wonderful candidate who is really top of the game, working with a client in the Nordics. The individual was probably the best person around for that particular role. So they said, “That’s fantastic, I’m happy to work from my current location, I need a couple of things here. But, one month a year I’m actually going to be working from Spain during the school holidays. Is that a problem? If I’m working from there?” And they said, “oh, no, we can’t have you doing that, we will have no provision for that.” So you know, immediately, they lost the best person. And that’s a reality, of course, when companies really haven’t thought through these kinds of things.

Andrew Kris 

Thank you so much Brett.

Brett Hautop 

It’s always a pleasure. Thank you.

 

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