What Makes Office Space Work? Insights from Phil Kirschner

Welcome to In the Loop, where we explore the stories, ideas, and the people behind the world's commercial real estate. I'm super excited Today, we are lucky enough to be here with this incredible view in one World Trade Center in the penthouse floor. We're meeting Phil Kirschner, a workplace strategist and consultant, and he's worked with organizations like WeWork, JLL Consulting and McKinsey. And he advises businesses on how they can adapt to and embrace the changing face of the workplace and how they can work in collaboration with, uh, their facilities teams and their staff and the owners of their buildings to foster a new energy, a new way of working, and ultimately great outcomes for the business. Phil, welcome. Hey, thanks so much. Great to meet you. I think we're about ready, so should we go take a seat and get, I'm so excited. Absolutely incredible backdrop.

You cannot beat this particular Studio. Weather's worked out for us as well. Great to have you here with us. Thanks for joining us.

This is the best possible place to be having this conversation.

It really is. Hey,

I am Phil Kirschner. I am a kind of known for being a workplace strategist in modern work and change management consultant. Um, I cut my teeth in this space after years in technology and cost management, uh, by helping to co-lead and co build the workplace mobility program at Credit Suisse years ago.

So that was let's all share right from static desks and offices to diverse spaces that people are moving through in a very different way.

Which of course is a, a huge, huge effort, not just from a spatial perspective, but also human resources, policies and technology and, and change and everything. And I completely fell in love with it. So I've been on this journey ever since I went from there to leading the workplace consultancy, uh, for the Northeast US for JLL, uh, so including New York City, which is great. Um, taking all my kinda hands on knowledge, doing weird workplace things, <laugh> never like traditional real estate to other clients and helping them on that same journey. Uh, then built and led the global workplace consulting practice at WeWork for kind of the heyday of that enterprise hockey stick moment at WeWork. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Uh, for enterprise growth. Uh, it was also part of what WeWork then called the Powered by We Business, which is often forgotten now. And that was, um, doing design build and community operations in other people's spaces. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. In addition to just them moving into WeWorks. Then, you know, COVID, uh, disrupted that business a bit and my whole team, so started consulting on my own, uh, which is what gave me the muscle for doing it. Now,

There's so much in your background that I wanna delve into, and so I'm making kind of mental notes as we talk of things. I wanna come back and talk about more. I'd love to start with the state of play currently, kind of where we stand today. And it strikes me that a lot of the discussion, particularly around office, is about the return to office debate and almost a kind of moral question, you know, of like right and wrong Yeah. On return to office. Tell me a bit about how you see that debate and how that, how that fits with your way of thinking about workplace strategy.

It's very much, unfortunately, like a bit the political climate, right? You're either A or B, right? There's no middle ground. Right. And I try very much to hold myself, uh, and my clients in more of a liminal like and space. So two things are true.

One, we very much need better places for work to happen

Right? In a city like New York, just completely taking the RTO debate off the table. Right. We have arguably too much office and of the office that we still need in terms of just raw square footage, <laugh>, literally in raw square footage. Uh, a lot of it isn't up to spec. Right? Right. We have, uh, energy efficiency laws coming to effect here. Um, people's expectations around some sustainability and technology and community and can frictionless movement in the building, all that. There's a ton of work to do Mm. To make better places for us to be. And what we learned, especially in COVID, I was that we have to find ways to improve how we work with each other. Problems that existed long before COVID, uh, meeting culture and feeling excluded in certain situations at work, burnout and lack of focus. All this very much predated COVID COVID just made it very obvious.

Because when you put everybody like in their corner all by themselves for the knowledge working industries, uh, anyway, um, it like was ripping the bandaids off of people being managed by the law of averages, maybe like in their office or going most of the time when leaders thought that they were there, like all the time. Uh, or this association with, we have to be together to be productive when it wasn't true before. Maybe the last bas of things that were holding people back in the office was simply, you know, uh, papers still lying around, which COVID got rid of pretty quickly.

Yeah.

Every company that had never thought about digital signatures, like where Zoom just went that way overnight.

Yeah.

Uh, and managerial bias and expectations. So in the moment then when, uh, some employees are saying, I want you back because back is better.

It leads to a couple of problems. One, some employees who maybe realize that life got materially better for them in more of a distributed and flexible fashion are saying, you're asking me to go back to something that you think is better, but I never thought was great to begin with. And I don't necessarily trust your reasons for why you think it's better. You're just saying it's better. Uh, maybe, you know, things were better in the office and mentoring culture and meeting culture for you, but maybe you don't look like me and I can't unsee that problem.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Um, so they're really just saying like, come back for what? And if the baseline answer is because it was better before, that seems not to resonate with employees and creates the tension that we're experiencing today.

And so into that question, steps workplace strategy. So tell me more about, you know, what does workplace strategy mean and, uh, how does it impact or help a company to address like, some of those questions that you just were, were talking about?

Yeah. So maybe the, the simplest definition of workplace strategy, the way I think about it, and I am not an architect or designer, I never was, and a good percentage of the workplace industry like comes that way. So maybe their perspective is different.

Mm.

Uh, but for me it has always been more of a spreadsheet exercise.

Right.

How can you use the built environment in pursuit of things that are good for your company or your people, or both,

Right? Mm.

Um, is there intention in what you are doing, whether it's the, the design, the choice of location, the choice of how you show up and kinda activate individual environments, which means you have to be willing to ask what's not working.

And, uh, let's just say in the 10 to 20 years leading up to the pandemic, uh, most organizations first encounter with someone who defines themself as a workplace strategist was step one, just asking the question Is being where you sit helpful for whatever you do, can you focus when you want? Can you collaborate? Can you host visitors? Does it help you attract talent? I'd say 90% or more of every client that I'd ever had any interaction with from call it 2010 on including as a practitioner, had never surveyed their people prior to that moment, asking them what they thought about the environment

And possibly hadn't even thought about it themselves.

No, we never thought about it. And, uh, it, it does not come naturally.

Yeah.

Um, it's just like, we have offices, this is the place we go to do the work.

Mm.

And it's, uh, it's a default. Right. And that creates the same problem back to COVID where I say sometimes we, we don't go to bad restaurants twice, and this is a city that has some incredible spaces. Mm. But on the whole, most of them are not that

Great. Mm. Like

The building's not that great. The space is fine, and it was fine before.

Mm.

But people didn't love it. They weren't going there for the magnetism of the office. Maybe they like being around their coworkers, but given a choice, they wouldn't.

And so you think there's a kind of shifting a kind of, uh, a shifting balance where, um, it's becoming increasingly important that the workplace does more for the people within

It? Yes. It has to do more. It has to be more of a magnet and maybe another shift that I've realized, like in your, your total run of the mill generic workplace strategy exercise pre COVID with the assumption that most people are in the building most of the time. Mm. Not all of the time. Most of the time it's critical. Right. 'cause we were never at a hundred percent occupancy before, not even close. But the reason for using that workplace effectiveness kind of methodology, is this place helpful for you in your private office? Is it helpful for you in your cubicle? Is it helpful for you in your workstation? Whatever it is, is trying to make the average as good as possible. 'cause we're all here most of the time to do most of our

Work. Mm-hmm.

And now there is an opportunity, I think, to really be distinctive from a workplace perspective. It's the same recommendation I would give to clients, uh, to how to be distinctive from an employer perspective. Like your employer brand, your value proposition, the employee experience. You can't be a triple plus platinum amazing at literally everything. You have to pick the bits that are important to you, double down on them and make it very clear that's what you're trying to achieve. So the narrower the band of activities and outcomes and purposes that you try to solve for in the modern workplace, the easier it is to figure out maybe where you should put it, how it should be designed.

Right.

What should be happening in it, and the easier it is to communicate to the employees, say, these are the a plus factors.

Yeah.

We absolutely want you to be here as often as you'd like. So we are going to support many other factors. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Like general focused work. If you live, and this is very common here. If you live in a small apartment with many roommates or dogs, you pretty wanna get out, right? Yeah. You wanna get out, that's great. We want you here, but we will be honest

Mm-hmm

<affirmative>. About the kind of platinum tier focus of this space, and which ones are more of the kind of silver and bronze

And that platinum not be a, is kind of related back to the, the outcome, the kind of strategic outcome that is most important to the business and how they see the workplace. Right. Tying into that, and it strikes me that it can be challenging for a business to identify that with true focus because, uh, the temptation is to see your workplace as something that can catch all right. Do everything all at once. How often do you encounter that and what, you know, how do you, how do you advise a client through that kind of mentality?

Yeah, I see it all the time in a, a simple anecdote I share a lot is, you know, when I was on the practitioner side with a, like, highly capable and specialized people analytics function, so in the HR organization, the people who were, you know, trying to be predictive about attrition or did all the sifting and sorting and modeling for the annual engagement survey, right? They were the nexus of the intelligence for talent attraction and retention at the company. Like, amazing team, I'd never met any people, uh, ever like them before, but after we had scaled our program to a certain point where there were like some cities with significant portions of people in not just new spaces, but in shared spaces, right. That had been ushered into those environments with a significant amount of change management, new technologies, uh, new ways of working that we were actively looking for. Uh, when I went to that people analytics team at the time and said like, can you help me understand, like, I know the real estate stuff. I know if there are more of them, I know if the density change, I know how they're using different spaces. Like I got that. Mm-hmm. I can't prove on my own if it's affecting engagement or attrition. Right? Right. I you have that.

Right.

So can you please tell me the difference in those core like, years long human capital metrics for the people like in that building versus the one next door or that floor instead of the one above them? Right. And, uh, I nearly fell outta my chair at the time. This is well over 10 years ago now. Uh, when they said no, we can't actually tell you that. We can tell you New York to London.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Yeah.

We can tell you high performers, low performers, we can tell you men or women, we can tell you all sorts of stuff that's in the, the HR database.

Yeah. But

We, this the, the point that really got me said, we never thought that anything lower than the city mattered.

So, I mean, drilling down to even different categories of space within

Building Yeah. Right. Building are you sign, do you wanna sign share? And like again, we had that Yeah. The answer was very simple. Yeah. Once I knew that they didn't know. We just found a way to share. Yeah. What do you need to know from me? Yeah. How do we align people's badges that, like, it wasn't very complicated, but once the, the new information was going into the system that allowed their existing machine to take over and tell us what we eventually learned that Yeah. In the shared environments, there were much higher scores for engagement and enablement of employees, and it was having a demonstrably positive impact on voluntary attrition in particular with younger staff.

Mm. And

I would never have left to say we absolutely caused that, but it fundamentally changed the conversation between HR and real estate at the time in trying to understand what was the role, not just of the built environment itself, but of the behaviors of the leaders and the employees in it that made the difference in the actual valuable metric to the company, which is like talent.

So my temptation when I hear an anecdote like that is to think there is a kind of formula for success here. Yeah. That could be established and applied. Um, but I guess there are no silver bullets, right? Absolutely. You need to apply different solutions in different situations. So tell me more about, uh, common, the, the commonalities and then the areas where you need to come up with something bespoke.

Yeah. It's, I I do find that the workplace industry is generally very good about sharing. Like it's not, they're not trade secrets. We're all playing the same game Right. With the same furniture and the same kind of spaces, little tweaks around the margin.

Yeah.

The simple game is going from very kind of exclusive, and I don't mean exclusive in this sense, right? Like best, I mean like, we only have meetings in meeting rooms. I only sit in this space. Right. Going from an exclusivity based mindset to one of diversity and connectivity between spaces and sort of fluidity and challenging, uh, equitable access to things Yes. Around the space. Right. That is just, is a design best

Practice. Mm.

Um, it is more and more common. It's sort of easier to get that part off the shelf. What then becomes harder are the choices and more maybe bespoke the choices of, of the software over the hardware. Like how you are, again, acting in the space and, and where you are spending money for the experience in it.

Mm-hmm.

Because moving to shared space in particular changes the dynamic of everything. Mm-hmm. And what it feels like to be

There. Yeah.

Uh, silly example might be departments used to buy their own whiteboard markers. They have their little hoard

Right

Now we all share this face. Who owns the markers? Mm-hmm. Who cleans the board.

Mm-hmm.

So where the rubber hits the road is in the sort of organizational choices and the operations, which is very hard I find for real estate and facility teams that may have been either already were before or have been pushed further into the belly of the beast, they will identify as a kind of cost center organization or sit not just within finance, but within procurement. And if you live in procurement and you wanna start talking about, you know, free bananas and more labor to make a space feel more like a hospitality environment, that is a very hard hill to climb.

Mm-hmm.

And becomes a much easier for the organizations that have, uh, moved real estate under HR and think about it much more as an employee relations event than just the asset that they're holding on their books.

Businesses are concerned with company culture and workplace strategy naturally, but, uh, how does this impact on the, the owner, the landlord of the building, and what are they thinking about addressing this, uh, this opportunity?

Yeah. The, the very difficult reality, I think, and it's very easy obviously for me to say this, uh, as someone who is neither an owner operator or investor broker, any of those things,

Right.

But I hear the phrase a lot in particular from the more progressive occupier side, workplace leaders, like our workplace is a product.

Mm.

We think of ourselves internally as a product management team who is on the hook a little bit for whether the people like the product. A couple weeks ago at, at a conference, I was asked to kinda summarize the day. And one of the ways we did that was actually take a load of questions from the audience over the course of hours, pump it through, uh, through an AI and challenge the ai. 'cause you ask a really provocative question and I, I wish I could have come up with it on my own pretending to be the ceo. The AI's question was, if your workplace team and workplace was a startup, like would it fail?

Mm.

And that's very much related to this product orientation. So if you extend that to the supply side, there is almost no supply really that is fully vertically integrated to nuts as a

Product. And what does vertically integrated mean?

Well, I think back to, you know, the WeWork had it in a lot of more hospitality oriented, um, environments have it because they, you know, WeWork at the heyday was making the decision about like everything from where to be controlling the whole like end-to-end entry experience built and manage the application. Mm. Had all of the employees on staff ranging, you know, from sales down to facilities.

And to be in conversations with clients and say, like, especially on a tour, I can tell you exactly why that chair is or is no longer here.

Right. It may have looked beautiful, but if it didn't perform well, all it would take is a, you know, a couple of cleaners to submit a couple of tickets.

And to have the design team be like, great. I guess, I guess it doesn't work. And poof, gone from the

Catalog forever. Right. Amazing. Amazing to think of the performance of the chair.

Yeah. Well, because of the, because of how high the expectation was in spaces that were used so much. Mm-hmm. Uh, but, you know, in a conversation with the client, say, you know, that construction person, that facility person, the designer, the strategist, the set, we are literally all on the same team. We are not trying to make a margin off of each other. We have no incentive to make the next step in the process difficult. That was the idea. You can just come to us, you tell us what you are trying to accomplish, and we will skip all those other steps for you because we are the product.

And so you were saying that there's a, there's a shortage of this kind of vertically integrated

Yeah. Products and, and the mindset. And look, corporate real estate tends to be, or feels like the only bastion of service that non-real estate companies still do for themselves. If I'm annual law firm out here in New York City of which there are thousands, uh, I don't build and maintain my own HR is system. Right? Right. I go to SAPI go to Workday and I say, can I have that please?

And they'll say, sure, I can help you configure it for your use, but you don't get to tell me how to make human resources systems. Right. And the law firm goes like, yeah, great. I'm what? I don't need to do that myself. And yet they would rent an amazing space like this and go, yeah, we'll do It. Right.

Obviously with partners, right. Uh, the people who eventually run the building who design the building, the engineers are not employer employees of the law firm, but the law firm will direct and design and feel like this is ours. Mm-hmm. We have to do all this heavy lifting.

Mm-hmm.

So in more of a product oriented vision for the future of offices and workplaces generally, that I think that does mean we would see the same shift that maybe going from facilities managers being on staff to now being at A-J-L-L-A-C-B-R-E-A Cushman. Right. The large scale facilities outsourcing the design, the strategy, the workplace energy may be coming to the supply side.

Yeah.

I work with you to make sure that this space generates the outcome that you want. Just like the customer success mentality. If you buy Workday, right. Your company contracts with Workday for hr, they are there to make sure that it is working for you, that you are making the most of it, that you are stickiest, that you understand every little nook and cranny and feature to maximize outcomes for you. Because if you don't like it, you'll leave and get back to WeWork. That, that's what creates a very different mentality when everybody down to the person with the wrench knows that that person can leave tomorrow. Right. They're not signing 10 year leases with us.

Right.

We have to operate like a product and operate with their experience first.

And speaking of WeWork, you were talking about the consulting, uh, part of

WeWork, the powered by We Yeah. Powered by, powered by WeWork. You also talk about activation. I'm very interested in this idea of kind of exporting activation tactics into other businesses. And so, uh, what, what about the WeWork formula when it came to activation worked so well, and, and how was it to take that, uh, to other businesses and put it into practice in the, you know, in

Their, in their cultures? Yeah. I, I wish probably we was still sort of in, in the narrative, right? Anyone who's seen we crash, like does not know about it. It's not mentioned, nobody talks about, but, uh, it was an amazing time and many executives were coming to us pre COVID and wanting to know like, what it was that they could feel in, in our culture and how we had stitched that together. So the answer was generally, we can bring that to you.

And they were always often very surprised in those first meetings. Again, saying like, I may be here as the strategist asking you, you know, very provocative visionary questions. What is the role of this space for you? What isn't going wrong today? Are your people prepared for this kind of change? But we would bring, uh, community managers to those meetings, maybe not the exact person who would eventually be, you know, behind the desk in their space a year or two later. But we get the question like, why are they here? Like, because all of this is about curating that we are trying to dig out from you, is it innovating more? Is it creating a sense of urgency? Right? Is it getting your multiple brands or acquired companies to, to act in a cohesive way? We can, we can drive that for you.

A colleague used to call the community manager something like the retail store version of the company's culture.

Right.

And the best cases, and maybe it came just a bit from we were having, uh, a backbone Mm. And a belief system and data to say, we designed pantries this way because you've designed, oh, why, like you've designed 10 pantries in the last year. We have designed 500 of them. Right. For a more diverse audience of members. Like, we know what we are talking about. There's a lot more data behind the scenes than, than maybe you think mm-hmm <affirmative>. So we show up with a design ethos and credibility to say, not you have to do it our way, but you came to us for a reason.

Right.

So we expect that 80, 85% of this is gonna be following a design that we know works for everybody, and then finding the last 15 to 20% that works very specifically for you.

Mm.

But if you say we're trying to, and this is a real example, like get the multiple companies we have acquired over the years to get to know each other more and act more like a unit. We can socially engineer that to happen. It's not just can we, you know, bring out lemonade on a hot day, but we will curate interdepartmental, interagency lunch and learns and the exact kind of event to create the exact behaviors that you want. But it will only work if the person at the front desk, the community manager and lead for this building literally is, you know, text buddies with the senior most person in this building. Because if the senior most person in the building says, my expectation is that the managers, the leaders of this organization come to those events

Hmm.

To encourage junior staff to come and to show that they're leaning into this strategy of building, uh, integration and synergies across like brands and agencies. If the event happens every Tuesday and the leadership band that is visibly in the office doesn't come

Right.

We would say they'll text you. They will tell you that they're not there. They'll keep you on the hook, not for the space that you wanted for the behaviors that you wanted. Right. But you have to let them, and if you don't, none of this is gonna work.

Something I wanted to ask you about was learnings from other sectors or, uh, asset classes, I guess. Yeah. Because some of what we've talked about, uh, it sounds like applying lessons from hospitality, uh, retail. So whilst the majority of your practice, um, I assume is office loosely, what are you learning from other asset types, asset classes, other, other sectors that you bring to bear in that world?

I think all sectors have things to learn from each other. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Right. At a minimum, maybe pre COVID, we started to slowly see the, they call it reserver trend, right? Like the office starting to feel a little bit more homely. And then you could argue during the peak pandemic time, our homes started to feel maybe a little bit too much like an office

Yeah. But at least to these interesting trends, right. The, there are several very new modern like co-op buildings kind of buildings in the, like, which just say residential buildings in the city that have what feels like meeting and coworking space

Right.

In them Right. To accommodate people that are working from the building for the day and don't wanna be in their building.

Mm-hmm.

We are seeing more of the sort of office orientation on experience starting to be applied to frontline and operational sites. Just saw a conference recently from a large food and beverage company that is spending more time than ever understanding the condition and experience of their like warehouses and distribution centers and even, uh, drivers using, you know, what I think of as traditional workplace strategy approach, but just applied to honestly the, the vast majority of their not only space, but workforce population and more representative of the population of workers in this country mm-hmm. Who are not like knowledge workers. And then hospitality certainly. Right. The, the popularity of coworking flexible shared workspace is derived significantly from the fact that it is hospitality

First. Mm-hmm.

You see that showing up. You are from London originally. Right. So there's buildings like 22 bishops gate there that famously, you know, don't have security desk in the lobby. I think they actually publicly said that they're, you know, quote unquote security guards or the people who welcome you into the building were modeled after Apple stores.

Right.

Retail representatives. And those are fabulous examples that we just need to see more of. The person who's running security in the mall has absolutely no way of knowing if someone who comes up to them actually is the CFO of a company upstairs. Right. So we have to train the front facing kinda experience layer to a, to not make any assumptions about who anybody Is

That's moving between these different asset types, much less like how we design them.

So there's a shift from a kind of very utilitarian way of thinking about some of these things to a much more, you've used the word curated, like it's about curating an experience Yeah. Rather than just have it be functional.

Yes. And from the kind of owner operator perspective, the, the term juju I hope to see much more of is coming not just away from mixed

Use

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Like this is an office building next to a residential building, which is the traditional like A to B.

Right.

Then we started to see blending like within buildings.

Right.

But are we designing for, for more neutral use to prevent the situation we are in now? Mm. In this city and so many others where the, the balance of what we need has gone outta whack. Right?

Mm.

Too much office, not enough residential, but it takes her Gillian effort to move from one to the other. Mm. And there are slowly starting to be interesting stories of buildings that are preparing themselves for that eventuality.

Right.

Way down the line. Like, is this building designed to be a hotel one day? No. But should it be maybe?

Google, uh, not that long ago opened a garage in California where they said publicly the base kinda structure of the garage, they thought so far ahead that one day it could be office, home, hotel, all sorts of things about like the deck heights and the ramps being removable. Like, is this gonna happen tomorrow? No. Do they expect it to happen in the future with maybe increased use of autonomous vehicles? Yes. So I think that's an amazing strategy and we just need to see more of that at absolutely every

Class here at One World Trade. They're in a very fortunate position. You know, it's an iconic building with a great brand and I guess you would describe it as a trophy asset,

Capital T trophy for sure.

Right. Yeah. Like the trophy of trophies, really, they're benefiting from very high occupancy, 95% occupancy. Uh, and presumably lots more people interested in moving in, you know, if space becomes available. Um, of course the trend more generally is not necessarily quite the same in in office. So what do you think are some lessons that, uh, that owners or, uh, tenants in different situations around the country or in different parts of the world can learn from a building like this from a city like New York? Like what, what do they learn and take away from that and apply to their own situations?

It is interesting to hear the hear and see the definition of what is trophy or class A or class aaa. And soon it's gonna be, you know, quadruple a quad a Yeah. New, new levels will be applied to describe what is a disproportionate performance of the buildings that are the

Best. Mm.

And uh, I was on a panel a couple weeks ago with the president of a, of a large owner saying, even for them here in this city, used to talk about like neighborhood A works, neighborhood B works, but now with a neighborhood, a, it's like block or two block differences.

Mm.

To me, two blocks is nothing. But when you're shopping for space, now two blocks can be everything. So we're just creating the same kind of disparity. If you are not the absolute best, the absolute most modern right on top of the transit hub with all the bells and whistles you could struggle to attract in particular the kinda highest quality and largest tenants.

And so that process of collaboration that we described and touched on earlier between, uh, tenant and owner becomes a, a net, a kind of important point of differentiation and actually a way that you can compete Right. And set yourself apart.

Yeah. 'cause the employee doesn't care. I used to say on the, the practitioner side, employee comes in and tries to, you know, plug their phone into the outlet that's right there on the desk and it doesn't charge. It's Surprising how often that happens, <laugh>, which

Happens a lot. Um, to me that is a technical problem.

Because it's related to my phone. So you might call it submits, like, ah, the, if they even submit a ticket, which is a problem in and of itself, <laugh> Yeah. And the people tend not to.

Yes.

But, uh, even if they do, it will go, that's not me. That's, that's like Union Electric work. I can't, no, I can't. Maybe the <laugh>, maybe they'll send it on. But to the employee, they have one set of experiences mm-hmm <affirmative>. They do not care whose problem it

Is. Yes.

That there was friction

Yeah.

In their day. Yeah. So is why you're seeing more and more employers from an employee experience perspective, trying to create, you know, one chat bot, one place you go for everything and abstracting away from the employee the need to worry about who behind the scenes will go and, you know, fix the wire, not your problem.

Mm.

By extension, the same thing, uh, exists in the line between the owner, landlord and the tenant.

Right.

The employee does not care if their client, like, whose problem it was that their client was waiting in the lobby for a long time because the past they had like, didn't work or couldn't get in or didn't know how to find something, don't care.

Mm-hmm.

And the higher and higher the bar for those experiences goes, we want to be able to waltz in with the best possible and frictionless experience that we can to the tenant, not want to invest in a better system. Does the landlord not ready to do it? Doesn't matter.

Yeah.

We have to work together to fix it.

I mean, what a fascinating conversation. And so wide ranging because there are principles here, uh, like user experience, uh, psychology, uh, yeah. Human interaction, retail, hospitality. There's so much to get into. It's a fascinating subject. I have three questions that I'm asking every guest on the, on the podcast. Just three kind of quickfire questions just to get to know you a little bit better. So question one, what's your favorite city on the planet? I reckon I can guess the answer <laugh>, but do tell me <laugh>.

Uh, well, I, I may be a little bit biased about this one, but having traveled to a lot of other places, like the ones that have sort of struck me the most, uh, physically were either maybe like Hong Kong or Sydney for reasons that like, New York is an island, we can see so much water. Mm. But the water is not meshed here in the way that I think it is in other cities. Yeah. Sydney, you can't avoid it. Right. There's much more use of things like ferries, Hong Kong having effectively two downtowns on opposite sides of the river. It just felt more present than water. And we, we feel sometimes like it's pushed to the edges here. So that was cool for me to see.

Yeah. So New York is your favorite Si city.

I, it's very hard to, to unwind that from a, from a multigeneration native.

Yeah. So my question too was gonna be why, I mean, what is it about New York that you love so much?

I look New York is, is a melting pot in all the best possible ways and is a small city. At the end of the day, people will come to visit will endlessly find that crazy. Like you find app falling. Yeah. I've run into people all over the city, subways store, everywhere from everywhere. It's an amazing magnet for people to come to visit and you <laugh> like find literally anything you want 24 hours a day. That's why we call it the city that never

Sleeps.

Yeah. Uh, but it's a walking city. We have everything everywhere. Yeah. And that may be what, what saves us a bit, um, versus other cities that are more homogeneous in their downtown structure. Like we have obviously multiple downtowns we're in one, but the density here is so high that like we could poke out the window and count hundreds of apartment buildings. Right. Yeah. Like they're right here.

Yeah.

Even though we think of it as like an office centric place. So

Yeah.

Yeah. I love that kind of blending.

So the final question is, um, what would you do to improve New York? If you could do anything hard to improve on perfection, I'm sure, but

<laugh>. Yeah. Look, I love the trajectory that we are on, on reclaiming our street scape. 'cause that's what makes the city feel like more of a campus. All the things that popped up during COVID without outdoor dining, conversion of the big intersections in ultimately reducing cars. I was, I was pro, uh, the congestion pricing that we have now, which we're used to much more coming from London.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which then allows us to use the streetscape because it is such an amazing place to walk.

Mm.

And yeah, hopefully between reclaiming something like the sidewalk and the use of more autonomous vehicles Mm. And just reducing the congestion and improving public transit. That's like what I'm excited for. Um, because it will help improve mobility around the city while we're working. And yeah, it's be great.

Thank you Phil, very much indeed for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating conversation and just so much, uh, to think about. So, uh, thank you again, uh, to you Phil, uh, Phil Kirschner, our guest today, uh, workplace strategist and consultant here at One World Trade Center, uh, on the In the Loop podcast. So do join us again next time for another episode where we'll be diving deeper into some of the topics that we've discussed today. And I'll just say thank you again, Phil.

Yeah. Thank you so much. I'll do it, do it again here. Anytime.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Wait for the next invite back and I'll be here in a shot For sure. Thank you. We don't want you to miss an episode, so don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel or follow in the loop on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to your podcasts. And while you are there, leave us a review and a rating. And don't forget to recommend the show to a fellow commercial real estate geek.