March 26, 2024

The Future Of Work

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In this episode of Talent Insights, Hirewell CEO, Matt Massucci discusses “The Future of Work” with experts Jon Milonas, SVP at CBRE, Dan Michelson, CEO and founder of UnCommon, and Mark Slocum, Tech Practice Lead at Hirewell. 

They delve into the evolving workplace landscape, focusing on shifts to flexible, remote, and hybrid models. The conversation covers challenges like office space use, employee engagement, and creating a culture that supports diverse work preferences while maintaining productivity. They highlight trust, opportunity, relationships, and experiences as key elements for organizational growth and retention. The discussion also includes talent acquisition and retention strategies, especially in remote work contexts and changes in professional services. Insights on leadership, strategy, and data-driven approaches for navigating the future work environment are shared, along with the role of technology in building connected communities and fostering engagement.

Episode Transcript

Hi, I’m Matt Masucci. We’re here with the latest episode of a Hirewell Talent Insights. Today, we’ve got a special edition called “The Future of Work”. So we’ll go around and do some quick introductions. I’m Matt Masucci, founder and CEO of Hirewell. I’m joined by Jon Milonas Jon, you want to quickly say something about yourself? Sure. I’m Jon Malonis, Senior Vice President with commercial real estate firm CBRE. And you are an author, correct? Why don’t you tell us a little about the book you wrote? I am. Yeah. So I wrote a book called Kicking Off Your Office Lease. Which helps executives think through what initially is important to brainstorm with their teams to start the process around office leasing. Great. Wonderful. Also joined by Dan Michelson. Dan, want to tell us a little about yourself? Yeah, I’m Dan Michelson. I also wrote a book called Holy Shift, moving your company forward to the future of work. So we’ll talk a little bit about that today. And I’m the CEO of a SaaS company for HR called InCommon. Wonderful. Mark, why don’t you tell us about yourself? So I’m a Partner here at Hirewell. I run our technology recruiting practice. And apparently Matt and I are going to have to co-author a book pretty soon, so. I don’t think anybody wants to read anything we’ve written, but we stick to short form LinkedIn posts. It’s down to what people want to hear about us. So, yeah, wonderful. Well, I think thanks for joining us and we want this to be hopefully an interesting conversation talking primarily about Dan’s book, Holy Shift, which I will hopefully not missay but I’m sure that’s kind of the, you’ve heard that joke before. But I think it’s a great title. But more importantly, Jon, this was your idea to get together. Talk about what we’re seeing, you know, each of us comes at this from a different angle of the world of work, where it’s been, where it’s going and, you know, where we are today. And I think that’s where we want to start with. So I guess let’s, Dan, let’s let you lead, you lead it off. You wrote a book about this topic. Talk to us about kind of where work was and then where we are today. Yeah, I think the thing kind of binds us all together is, we’re living in history right now. So if you look at the broad lens of how and where we work, this is really the first time in human history where work is no longer defined by a time and place. Right? So you don’t to have to be at this place at this time to do this job. That’s a major shift, right? So work is always really revolved- our life has always really revolved around our work. So if you think of it historically, going back to the time when we were hunters and gatherers, right? You know, you had to hunt to find your food and you’d go wherever it was. Then we became the agricultural age farmers and we were working within the farm. Then, there was this migration towards factories and factory towns. And then even in, kind of the office environment, suburbs really became extended factory towns. That’s really, really what they were. Then shift happened, right? Which is why the book’s called Holy Shift. And that’s why I called it Holy Shift, because I was running a 500 person company. I’m like, Holy shift! Is this like, this is an enormous change for me personally, for us collectively, but then also historically, right? And that’s really what I was trying to capture, is not only understanding that moment and what it means, but knowing what to do about it to help create momentum for your company. Yeah. Wonderful. So Jon, I think you bring an interesting perspective to the table coming up from the commercial real estate side, working with companies as they navigate their space. And I’m sure you’ve seen a lot in the time you’ve done it, but talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing right now, and what the trends are. Yeah. So that this holy shift certainly created a lot of angst for the commercial real estate industry. Yeah, they were saying something else. That’s right. That’s right. And it’s amazing to think it’s been almost four years. Next month it’s been four years since this all started, right? And during that time, there’s been a lot of experiments, right? For the first experiment, which we were all forced to do, is everyone works from home. That became the new normal. And then there were all sorts of announcements. Memorial Day, everyone’s coming back to the office. Didn’t happen. The next Labor Day, everyone’s coming back to the office. Didn’t happen. And you began to see organizations in late 2020, 2021, who had their best years ever. And everyone was working from home. They thought, well, this is working for profitability. This is working for revenues. This is working for our people. And then you began to see a major change, which Dan, you talk about in your book and we’ll talk about. Now, is that you started to see a lot of dissatisfaction within the workplace. And at that point, we started to see a lot of experiments. And it was, well, if you come back this amount of days, you come back that amount of days. And it still seems that there’s a lot, a lot of uncertainty around what is the purpose of office when it comes to the broader health for an organization. Office space cannot be the leading indicator for creating a strong business, right. And when we were thinking about this event, Dan, you said something that resonated with me, which is, we think about space, it’s more tactical, right? And so this is A, an element that can help in overall culture, but it’s not the element. I think what’s happened is that a lot of executives have thought that if I get the right number of days and the people in the right places, in the right space, it will change everything. And that doesn’t happen. And so that’s where we’re at, which is why I loved your book, because it’s really talking about the leadership aspect of bringing people not back, but bringing people together. And I do believe that office space can be a part of that. There will be companies that want to be fully remote, and they’ll be very successful in that. There will be companies that are in five days a week. There will be companies in between. But helping our clients figure out what’s right for them, for their priorities, for their goals, for their culture is what we spend most of our time doing because it is still after four years, it is still a big question mark. Yeah, for sure. So Mark, I think you take a different approach to this as a leader of Hirewell’s tech practice, which is our biggest area. It’s what we’ve done for 20 plus years. And what we’ve seen throughout those years has been a pretty stark switch in contrast. So what are the trends you’re seeing from companies and I think it can start with 2020, what happened, sort of in the early days of the pandemic and then the boom following that. But then also this kind of return to work push. What are the trends we’re seeing? Sure. I think it echoes what you’ve been saying. Everyone’s trying to figure out the right solution. Every business is a little bit different, the size, the industry, whatever it might be. So it isn’t a one size fits all and everyone’s trying to find the one fit that makes sense in then implement that, which is clearly just not realistic. Right? So, so many of our conversations are not how to help you find people. It’s consulting about the process to even figure out the best way to go about it and then how to incorporate that into your culture. And there’s certain things that, hey, if people are in office, there’s a lot of benefits, but you shrink your candidate pool that you can choose from. Right? So it’s not necessarily bad or good. These are just kind of the facts and then you need to figure out what makes sense for your organization. And then build a culture that can sustain that and be supportive. But there’s, hey, we’ve got people in three days a week for the people that are local, but the people that aren’t here don’t need to come in every day. And that creates an interesting dynamic. But that was the way an organization was built. When you have great people all over the place, you don’t always want to penalize for that, but then how do you- you know, there’s just so many exceptions to every rule right now. So it is a big challenge to keep the culture and those rules kind of straight right now and it’s- we’re in extremes and trying to figure out what is the right pragmatic sort of middle of the road you know path forward and we’re still figuring it out. I think that sums it up well. So as we were talking about this in the prep, you know, I think Hirewell takes the approach of trying to use data to make informed decisions and help our clients. And that CBRE is obviously much bigger than us, but I assume it’s kind of the same thing. So I did research with 1,671 CEOs, teaming up with the largest association of CEOs in the world called YPO, 33,000 members. We had a hundred companies represented in 50 different industries. There was three things that came out. So, if you ask an executive team, a board, leadership team, what they really care the most about from a metric perspective, it’s productivity, engagement, and employee retention. So I want people to be productive. I want them to really want to work here and be fully engaged. I want them to stay. Well, then it became pretty easy, right? Which is from a data perspective, what correlates to those three things? That’s all you need to know. It turns out there’s four. And this is Gallup data, McKinsey data, our data that we did, and then whatever every study I can pull together, put it into a blender, pour it out. There’s four things. One is a sense of community. So do I feel a sense of belonging? So you can, I don’t know, live in your neighborhood, and it’s pretty easy to move. It’s really hard to leave your neighbors. You can have a kid in college, it’s pretty easy to leave school. It’s hard to leave your friends. You can have someone who’s working at a job, you know. It’s pretty easy to switch jobs. Never has it been easier to switch jobs, right? It’s really hard to leave people that you build trusting relationships with. So that sense of community is actually a very tangible thing and the data shows the correlation. Why do people leave one job to go to another? Well, hey, I got a great opportunity. I’m sure that’s part of the pitch. So opportunity really matters. Do I have a future here? Third one is relationships. So, I mean, this is huge. And I think you all know the data. But if my relationships are trusting, I’m twice as likely to stay. If they’re toxic, I’m twice as likely to leave. It’s very, very simple. And the last one is experiences. Am I getting tangible experiences that are actually helping me grow? Or am I kind of stuck and am I doing the same thing for this last week, last month, last year, last five years? So that model, Community, Opportunity, Relationships, and Experiences, is what I call CORE. That’s the acronym. And the more people you have in the core of your company, feel those things the more velocity you’re going to get and the more they’re personally going to grow and develop as well. Yeah, that’s wonderful. I think it’s an interesting point. I think of the growth and evolution of Hirewell, I think you’re asking Mark how long he’s been with us and it’s been a long time. There are six people here when he joined and now we’re upwards over a hundred. And I talk a lot about that critical mass and CORE. And it was really hard when there were six of us like, oh crap, we have to do kind of everything and just trying to kind of build and grow this thing. But what sort of changes have you seen sort of in our evolution Mark or kind of, or for the clients as they try to manage community and sort of build that culture remotely? It’s just harder. You have to be so much more intentional about it. And that is managing in-person versus managing remote and bringing people together and building those relationships. I mean, over the- we talked about it, you get off of Zoom, you send an email and that’s what the dynamic is, right? Versus you’re in a meeting. Then you walk to go grab a cup of coffee together. You stop talking work, you start talking personal, and it just, you’re trusting, right? So, even though we’re all Zoom fatigued, one of the things I tell my team is, get on Zooms with people at least one time. Ideally the first time, because you immediately look, see mannerisms, see normal human characteristics, and you just, you build natural trust, right? Just by looking in somebody’s eyes. It’s just more challenging so you have to go out of the way. And I think people that are comfortable in their careers and a little bit more in, like, they can maybe do it a little bit better than people that are earlier in their careers and still trying to figure out that path. But it doesn’t mean they still don’t crave the other side of what they were missing from before. And those are the challenges for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s the evolution and just everything that’s happened in the last four years has made it hard, you know. If anybody tuned in hoping that we’d have the silver bullet, there isn’t one. But there’s a lot of smart things you can do to start to build a foundation. One thing, Dan I liked the book and you talk about these three sort of shocks to the system that these CEOs found, you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So the question is what’s really changed? Right. And there’s really, I was trying to, once again, zoom out and say, okay, what are the things that you really need to address or understand in order to address, or make any changes. And I’ll take a little different of a spin. I actually think this is the best opportunity in history for us to really define how work works, right. Because you’ve had this catalyst for change. And so I’m going to take a little bit more of an optimistic approach. We’re in this kind of weird phase of the workout of what this is going to be, but we all know it’s brought a lot of really good things. So a couple examples, like one is for the last hundred years, whether it was working in a factory or in an office, you had what I call factory mode. So this is, you got to show up at this time and leave at this time. I’m your manager, I’ll oversee your work and I’ll decide if you get a raise or you get a bonus or you get fired or whatever. That was the model, factory mode, even in an office. Now we’re more in a flex mode. Right? And that’s a much more balanced, much more, you know, the reality is every company is going to be different and that’s okay. So trying to figure out the future of work is incredibly easy. It’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed is the quote from William Gibson on technology that you’ve heard of over and over. It’s true here too. Right. So you’re already seeing that kind of flexible model, but people aren’t really used to it yet. And don’t know how to optimize yet. But we clearly have pivoted from factory to flex in terms of how we work. That’s happened. The second one is, you know, just work has gone from this collective experience where we’re all together all the time to a lot of these roles now, 99 percent of the time, somebody is actually alone, completely alone. 99 percent of the time. Maybe more. So we’ve gone from this, what I call collective concept to more of an individual experience. The third one is just the world has changed. Our life used to revolve completely around our work and what I was explaining before in terms of factories and farms and everything else. Now our work and our life kind of flow together, right? So we’ve gone from kind of workflow to life flow. And understanding those three things, those are actually, if you can pick either side or either column, you’d pick the ones on the right for our kids and for our future. The key is what we do now with those, now that we recognize that those changes have happened. That’s what we need to work through. Yeah, for sure. Jon, I’m curious your feedback. You know, you’re spending your time talking to CEOs and business leaders about their challenges and how it relates to space. So what are you seeing? What are your clients coming to you with or what problems are they looking to solve? Yeah. So the first problem was, if I’m going to bring people back to the office in a big way, is this an office that’s better than them working from home? So the last 24 months we saw a lot of clients shifting into oftentimes less space than they had before, but better space. They call it flight to quality, right? And so newer buildings in most cities that are well located with great amenities are doing better than they ever have before. Very low vacancy rates, very, very high rental rates. So we’ve certainly seen that trend. The challenge that I think a lot of our clients are facing is, when people are in how do you create a buzz? Because the greatest amenity in an office, we say, is people. It’s not coffee, it’s not ping pong tables, right? It’s people. So if someone’s going to come in and they’re not rubbing shoulders with their boss or with their colleagues, then why even come in? So a lot of what we’re studying is, and every company’s different, is what is the right mix of the time in the office and what is done in the office? That’s where Dan in your book, you talk about so much needs to happen in small groups where there’s a leader and a team of three, four, five, 10 people. So when people are together, what is happening? Because the old way of working is everyone is in the office all the time. And a lot of it was just heads down work, which could happen anywhere. Now, it’s why are we together? And when we’re together, is there a buzz in the office? How do we create that activity? And, there’s a lot of data going into this. There’s a lot of architectural and furniture and construction consultants that are spending a lot of money saying, what’s the right type of space to create a buzz? And we’re starting to see companies, I’d say, I believe last year and this year, starting to spend a lot of money committing to it. But that’s really the challenge in 2024 when there’s still concerns about inflation’s coming down, about interest rates, about the economy, about what might happen with a mild recession, is making that commitment. And so that’s where, it still feels like we’re in an in between. But how do you create a place that people want to be in? Even if it’s not five days a week. Yeah. I think going back, the fact that you talked about, Dan and I sort of chuckle back to the early days of Hirewell where we started at 8 am every morning. And I’m embarrassed to admit this, but we- if you’re late, we made you bring donuts. And so it’s a funny story because Ali’s still with us, but she was 22 at the time and she had a really hard time getting in- I mean it was 8:30. Regardless, she had a hard time getting it. So she would just, she would just bring donuts. So that was like a long time ago, that was probably 2010. And now you fast forward and as of like March 10th, 2020. We haven’t worked together since. And we’ve evolved and it has worked. You know, one challenge that you talk about Jon, or we’re still figuring out, as you said as well Mark. I think it’s interesting, you know, as our team has become more experienced, they are strong and they can work independently or autonomously. I think the challenge is for the, you know, we were talking a little bit before, like as our kids enter the workforce and for people early in their career, how do they grow? How do they mentor? I think that’s going to be one of the challenges. And then, anybody who watches Hirewell stuff, James has talked a lot about that lately, of the trends for young professionals. What do you see happening there? What do you see? How do companies address that? How do we- if we’re going to hire kids, people fresh out of college, how do we ensure that they grow and evolve within the organization? Yeah. I think you use the word intentional. I think that’s really the key. So there’s no question there’s a gap there and it’s happening right now and people are really feeling it. In terms of making that problem go away, it’s not going to. We learn from experience and experience has two aspects to it. One is our own personal experience, but two is the experience of others, right? So unless we redefine management roles to coaching roles, that’s really not going to happen. And that’s like a big, big shift for people, you know? So this idea of, work for me, work with me, and what that actually means. And so if you, if you kind of think about it, what is a mentor? A mentor is somebody who you trust, right? And who has your back. And how’s that built? So if you look at the one common characteristic between every great teacher, every great coach, every great leader and every great manager. So just put that into a big Venn diagram and what’s the thing that sits in the middle? It’s trust. So I think that has to be a priority from an organizational perspective in order for that to happen. And there’s certain roles that we were talking about before, whether it’s a lawyer, whether it’s a consultant, where you are used to working side by side with someone to learn. And it’s just sort of that kind of like the exhaust that comes out of the experience of being next to somebody is something that ends up giving you energy and help and helps you grow. For remote companies that are maybe in the services industry where we’ve talked about this quite a bit. I mean, they’re not traveling to client sites either. So it’s a double whammy. It’s not just the in-office. It’s also the on the road experience has gone. If you take a look at where people learn. the most though, mentoring is a little bit misguided sometimes, right? So it’s nice to have somebody above you who’s been there, done that. That’s super helpful. A lot of times that’s more like, hey, can you help me get the next job? But if I need to get work done, I need those peer to peer relationships. So what we’ve seen is a huge growth and what we refer to as a buddy system. But those peer to peer networks that are built within a company. And I think people are looking to different applications to help them automate the building of that. That’s happening on the mentoring side too. But I think it has to be a mix of both in order for people to get at the end of the day, both the companies and the individuals, to get what they want out of it. You’re going to have to attack both of these, the peer to peer and the more traditional mentoring. Yeah. I think that’s all super relevant to what we’re seeing and doing internally. We just launched a mentoring program. We’ve talked endlessly about coaching versus managing or micromanagers. But Mark, do you want to talk a little bit about sort of the trends you’re seeing and sort of what we’re trying to focus on? Yeah. It is funny because you mentioned the concept of really coaching versus managing, right? I mean, encourage someone and let them learn from you and show versus telling them what to do, right? Yes, you need to tell someone in a showing manner. But at a certain point, they need to want to do it themselves. But they want, you know, getting somebody to want to get that information out of you and then being accessible for them to get it. I mean, that’s kind of the trick of it all, right? I always joke to people, I used to sit right next to Matt for many years. And when you’re 23 and you start a new job and the owner sits right next to you, every dumb thing you say, he’s going to go, when you’re off the call, let’s talk about it. And within a few weeks, it was just, I was over it and I was used to it and it was good. And then I was like, this is a pretty good opportunity right here. So I just leaned into it 110%, right? And then came a personal bond as well on top of the professional, which when you’re a six person company, it’s a little bit easier to do that, right. And then it went down to everyone else that came in and then they branched in that way. And then as soon as you go fully remote, that becomes like a little bit more difficult. And then people that are new to management, now I have to manage people remotely. People that are good at management are doing that for the first time in a struggle, and we’re trying to build a diverse population or nationally because it helps us to understand different markets so that we’re experts in those, right. So we know that this is our new reality and it’s good for business, but how to do it in the right way and having leaders that understand how to do that. And none of us are amazing at it by any means and this is a learning process. But it’s just one other thing to throw in the mix of challenges and all of this. Well, I mean if I could jump in just for a second. We’re in more of a evaluation mindset versus a conversation mindset when it comes to how we work with people. And because of the traditional structure, this factory mode, people are worried to kind of show their cards or be vulnerable in those kind of situations. So that building of trust that comes with a great coach, you know, assuming that you use a term and then therefore people are going to gravitate to it, it’s pretty silly. There’s just a lot of work just getting into the mindset of what this means. If we do it right, this could be the single biggest change that hits companies if it’s framed in the right way and then people develop underneath it. Yeah. I think we use far too many sports analogies. So do I. So do I, so do I. But it is the perfect example and where we’ve seen it, you know, Mark talked about, all right, back in the day, he was sitting four feet for me and probably annoyed him that I would lean over and say, “Hey, you should have done this”. But the real time continuous feedback is what made you good. And not having to hop on a call and do this and do that. Just like I can look at his screen, he can show me four profiles, he can call and contact him for a search. All right. Yeah. Those three are great. This one, I’m not sure, but ask them, you know, X, Y, and Z. It’s coaching. Bam. You know what I mean? And you do it in real time. And so we’re continuing to trying to, how do we implement those concepts in a virtual world, which is hard and there’s tools and there’s different things that are happening and we’ll probably wrap by talking a little bit about your new organization and what you’re doing to solve it. Like in commercial real estate, it’s a business where it is, you have to be in front of people, right? So what are you seeing there? Whether it be personally, as far as you’ve evolved in your career, or your company has, what are the trends you’re seeing there? Yeah. So, commercial real estate would sit under professional services, and so talk about what are other professional services organizations, whether it’s law firms or consulting, and a lot of that it’s an apprenticeship model. So when I started, what really helped me is when I could just sit in the office while my mentor was having a call talking with a client and you learn. You learn not only the soft skills but you also learn parts to transaction. And so for us, we’re really having to lean into how are we having our younger associates learn by what you describe it as like the exhaust, right? Learn by doing that when the reality is that we’re not always going to be together. And that’s a real challenge. And so we’re hearing it a lot from our law firm clients, our accounting clients, anyone in sort of a partnership model that they’re, many of them feel there’s a real void in experience for their associates that have been in the industry for between one and five years. And a lot of that is because they’re not just learning by that exhaust there. And so the simplest answer is get in the office more often, which by the way, for some organizations may be a suitable answer. But I think there’s a realization that there has to be something more and I appreciate we talked about Dan and your story of being one of six employees. The logic does come down to trust. So how do we build trust so that when someone wants to ask a question? They know who they can go to and they feel they can be vulnerable to ask it. And so the more tools that we have in order to build trust and off the office space is one of them. We have to be strategic about them. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I think that’s a good segue, Dan to talk a little bit about what your new company does and sort of how potentially addressing this and working through the challenge. Yeah. Well, just to start off that point, so the goal is speed to trust, right? So it could take you now five years to get to know someone or five months or five weeks or five minutes or hours or whatever. What if you could do it in five seconds? So that was the challenge kind of coming out of Covid was accepting the reality that shift has happened. We’re not all going to be in the same place at the same time. So there’s going to have to be other ways that that’s created. So we created a SaaS application that basically does that. So you fill out a profile. You can instantly see how you’re connected to 500 different people and the five things you have in common with them. You are then put into communities of people who share common interests, whether those are professional interests, like I have an interest in artificial intelligence or real estate or whatever it might be. Or personal interests, right? Like hiking or biking or the fact that you have kids the same age, the fact that you went to the same school, right? These are the ways in which people connected in the workplace for the last hundred years. Pretty good trend to understand that’s what’s going to be required to be put in front of people for the next hundred years to make them feel connected and to help build that trust. So if you look at relationship science and just even basic social psychology, all relationships are built by understanding what you have in common with somebody. That’s how they start. That relationship, you can think of that almost as the surface level of the relationship. So just because we went to the same school doesn’t mean you guys all went to the University of Illinois. Doesn’t mean you’re all going to be best friends, even though maybe some of you are. You know, it’s going to take more than that. You’re not best friends with everybody who went to U of I, right? But that’s a start. It’s an invitation to a conversation which could lead to a relationship. But that next level, the getting below the surface, the substance, only happens if you start at the surface level. So really that’s what we’ve done. We enable real time conversations so that you can think of what we do as a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn and then an application called Discord. You can bring those all together, pour it into a blender, and therefore you have something that’s kind of like an exclusive network that is meant to help create connections within your company and to help accelerate that speed of trust. That’s what we built. I think it’s a great idea. Over the last few years we’ve worked on in-person events, we’ll have virtual events and they kind of ebb and flow in terms of when we have them and then it takes someone to kind of have the onus to do it and then they get sort of busy with other things and they’re just not as consistent. So I like the idea. I know we’re running out of time. Let’s kind of just do a quick sort of wrap up. What do you see like the trend or biggest challenge companies are going to be dealing with over these next couple of years and we’ll let you lead on that, Mark. Well, I’ll speak to the hunt for talent, but it’s how to build this culture that fits all the different needs of everybody else, right? And knowing and accepting that you’re not going to have access to certain people because they don’t want that, but having enough that brings it together and no matter what it is, there is a loss of that trust and corporate culture because people have gone elsewhere to get that in recent years, but they’re still craving it. So the ones that can figure out they don’t have to be everything to everybody, but figure out who you’re going to be and get that right and then stick to it and bring the people that are craving that. And I think those ones like they’re doing okay right now. I mean, everyone is still on the hunt for talent, it’s tough, right? But it’s not going to be perfect. But if you can do that, you’re seeing, the organizations that are kind of at least moving forward with a game plan there. Yeah. And we’ve talked a lot about trust, but I think like that there’s plenty of data and studies about that. The erosion of trust over the last couple of years is real. As CEO, that’s what keeps me up at night or it’s one of the things. What about you, Jon? What do you see? What’s kind of, what’s a trend or sort of thing you see playing out over these next couple of years? This year in particular, I think it’s balancing the cost of real estate, which costs something to not only rent it, but also certain cases to build it, right. So if you think about the CFO managing costs. And then that against the CEO who’s trying to figure out how do we make sure that employees love coming here? How do we make sure we have great retention? How do we make sure everyone’s on board with the vision and have those opportunities? I think this year in particular, there’s going to continue to be some conflict between those two of where are we going to invest and what role will the office space play without spending too much but also not spending too little, so that people know that they are cared about and that there is a place where they can come together to build those connections that can happen best in person. Anything you’d add to that, Dan? Yeah. Well, listen, I think we, all of us from a period of time, we’re asking the wrong question. So a decision is how often you come in. But once you make that decision, being able to make sure that people feel good about it, right, is a bit of the challenge, right? And then sticking with it consistently is the other one. But once that’s done, it’s done. That’s a tactic. And we kind of talked about this. You can have a really amazing remote culture or a really horrible one. We can have a really great in-person culture, or a really horrible one. That alone isn’t the answer. And so I think we have to start asking different questions. And I think the question, the main question moving forward is, you have to be shifting from this tactic to this strategy, and having that owned not by human resources, where we kind of relied on this in the past, but by the leadership team. I know a lot of incredibly talented HR people who are completely struggling with their CEO, because you can’t have a great culture unless the leader is the one who pushes it and presses it forward. And so I think shifting that ownership from HR owning it to HR being a partner in that process is where we got to start. And then having them accountable and responsible for implementing a strategy that hits on that. Once again, from my perspective what matters most, which is community, opportunity, relationships, and experience. If you can bring that, all those four concepts down to an individual employee level, you’re going to make an incredible amount of progress. And the other things that are ancillary to that will help augment it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s a, it’s an interesting point and the last thing I’d add is that sort of that disconnect between CEOs or executives and employees. And I’ve seen CEOs that are traditionally driven by maximizing profits, results, employees, you know, sure that’s part of what they do, but they want to work what’s best for themselves. They want to maximize their own income. And we’ve seen plenty of charts, which I’m sure we all have, where corporate profits through the years are up, employee wages are relatively flat. And that has been a challenge or a change over the last year is there is a fundamental shortage of talent, and that’s not going away. Our population’s aging, our immigration policies are changing, and there’s a shortage or a skills gap. So it’ll be fascinating to see how that all plays out and will their trust- will that trust be there or not? And some companies have it, and I think those are the ones who will win. And then the ones who don’t, I think are going to really struggle. So. All right. Well that’s great. I really appreciate it. Ending on a high note there. Yeah. But stay tuned and let’s see how this all plays out. So I guess let’s, for those of us who aren’t authors, nobody cares about how to find our books, but for you two that are, I guess Jon, I’ll let you lead off. How can people find your book or get in touch with you? Yeah, you just look on Amazon, under my name, Jon Malonis, or if you look up the book “Kicking Off Your Office Lease”. Wonderful. Yeah. How about you, Dan? Yeah, you can go to the holyshiftbook.com or you can just go to Amazon and look up “Holy Shift: moving your company forward to the future work”. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, thanks. Thanks for joining us.

 

 

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