Hybrid as Mirror: Why Mandates Fail (And How to Make the Office a Destination) | Workspace Design Lab Ep. 15

What if hybrid work is not the problem, but the mirror showing leaders what was already broken?

In this episode of Workspace Design Lab Episode 15, Sylvanna VanderPark speaks with Sam Sahni, Founder and Principal of Work Transformers, about hybrid work, return to office mandates, workplace strategy, and how to design offices people actually want to use. Sam is a global workplace strategy consultant, technology entrepreneur, and author of Destination 2.0: The Playbook Every Executive Needs to Master Hybrid Work.

Together, Sylvanna and Sam explore why proximity does not equal productivity, how workplace design can support focus, collaboration, wellbeing, and performance, and why the future of office design depends on creating workplaces that act as magnets, not mandates.

Sam also shares lessons from more than 20 years in consulting, design, and construction, including his work across 16 countries and his experience helping organizations rethink how work really happens.

Connect with Sam Sahni:
LinkedIn
Work Transformers Website

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Transcript

Sam Sahni 0:00

Prior to COVID, we did a lot of online surveys. In those environments, people said that they took about 10 to 15 minutes to get their chain of thought back every time they were disturbed. And then we asked them how often that happened during a day. And they said at least three to four times a day. Take the lowest number three times a day, multiplied by ten to fifteen minutes. You're talking about thirty to forty-five minutes per employee per day, simply lost in untracked, non-productive time.

Syl VanderPark 0:28

Sam Sani, a global workplace strategy consultant with more than 20 years of experience advising boards and delivering transformations across 16 countries. He's the founder and principal of Work Transformers and the author of Destination 2.0, the playbook every executive needs to master hybrid work. He believes the workplace crisis is not about furniture or floor plans. It's a failure of translation between a fast-evolving workforce, a slow-moving infrastructure, and outdated thinking. And he has written a framework to fix it. In this episode, he'll learn how hybrid work reveals hidden assumptions about productivity, trust, and presence. How the 11 pillars of destination 2.0 align people, place, and platform to make the office a magnet, not a mandate. I'm Still Vanderpark, and this is Workspace Design Lab. Welcome to Workspace Design Lab, the show where architects, interior designers, and workplace leaders explore the future of workspace interiors. Each week we dive into ergonomic office design, modern workspace trends, and sustainable furniture solutions that improve well-being and performance. I'm Sylvanna Vanderpark, and together we'll uncover the stories, strategies, and innovations that help you design offices that truly work. Let's dive in. I'm glad we could uh we could connect today. This is great. And your book came out.

Sam Sahni 1:51

Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's it's been released in the US in July, but across UK, Europe, and Asia, it's gone live. Um so no, it's been it's been a great response so far. Can't complain. Um it's interesting. You think you've written a book and it's with the publisher and it's all good, but a lot of work happens even after you've published it. And uh the there's been a lot of requests for conversations, um, there's been a lot of requests for attending panels, and uh it's just uh work you have this work you have to do to be able to spread the word, right? So it's an interesting one which I had underestimated in all honesty.

Syl VanderPark 2:38

Now you're popular. Now you gotta deal with the fame associated with it.

Sam Sahni 2:43

I I I'd say yeah, I mean it's a domain specific book. If I would have written something for the mass market, or if it was like a non-fiction piece of work, then that's different. Whereas this is very specific and you've got to have interest in the world of work and how do you want to make it better? So I think it's still a professional series more than anything else. So yeah. Yeah.

Syl VanderPark 3:08

That's good. It's tiring, but it's good. You launched a specialist firm called Work Transformers in October 2024 with a mission to provide companies with an innovative, people-first approach to workplace strategy. You have 20 years of experience in consulting, designing, and construction. Uh you've advised boards, mentored leaders, and delivered workplace transformations across 16 countries spanning Europe, Asia, and North America. And you are the author of what we were just talking about, Destination 2.0, the playbook Every Executive Needs to Master Hybrid Work. So it was released, um, well, it'll be released here in the States in July, so we'll look forward to that. And uh just going over, because I'm I'm enjoying, you know, details about you, and then I'll start to ask you some questions. You were the former head of strategy uh at Unispace, the CRO at AIS, and the head of consulting at Morgan Level, and you worked directly with Frank Duffy. I don't know if you would consider him the the godfather of workplace strategy at DETW on South Bank Center. So take us back to where it all began. Uh you said your um you've said your introduction to workplace strategy started at the University of Greenwich before you even knew what it was called. Walk us through that journey.

Sam Sahni 4:32

Yeah, I studied architecture, and I think the architecture education um back in the day when I was going through it was all about sort of form finding. And it was almost, I would associate the education uh to almost like sculpturing of how you would experience things and different architects take different views on it. But when I graduated and I started working with some of the larger architecture firms, I think a lot of our focus, I realized, predominantly was sort of outside in architecture on how um the buildings were designed and perceived in terms of how they appeared on the cityscape. But I think uh a lot less thought had gone in in terms of how people would experience them internally, especially from uh the perspective of work. Uh I know we all focused on kind of grandeur receptions and circulation and efficient floor plates, but I still felt that there was a gap in terms of how things were experienced inside out, especially in the whole ecosystem of work, which has been rapidly evolving for decades. It's not just now. And um, when the global financial crisis hit, I had the opportunity to go back to School of Architecture at Greenwich and uh co-lead an MA Urban Design uh diploma unit of architecture. And I worked with the same professors who had taught me, and I started to kind of apply a slightly different approach towards kind of uh the briefing stage of how architects were being taught, and uh started applying a lot more kind of scientific methods to really decode uh how architects would develop briefs rather than ask people what they wanted. Could we collect more data? Could we uh kind of define that data with much more storytelling to change mindsets and really develop something that is much more robust as a starting point, as a brief, which could then be used to as much kind of think about inside out uh design as much as outside in. And I think the core objective was if we can make the best of both happen, the buildings and the spaces would look beautiful from a distance as much as they would work for the users internally and be adaptable. So at that stage, we developed a number of different techniques which were sort of innovative at the time uh for the students. And uh some of them even said, hang on, this is not architecture. We said, No, you your starting point must be robust. You should really understand, think of a product design approach. You wouldn't be designing a product or a software without really understanding uh what users want, how they flow through it, how they use the product. So, why would you just make assumptions on multi-million pound schemes and just start form finding without really getting that part right? So that's what we were doing at the School of Architecture. And when I joined DGW, it was amazing to see that there was a global boutique organization actually doing that very well at the time. I think from memory, we were two, three hundred consultants spread out globally uh in a boutique studio started by Frank Duffy, John Worthington, uh, some of the known names. And uh I remember uh we didn't have a sales team or anything like that. The phone would always ring. We were working with some of the major corporations globally applying that approach. So it was really refreshing and somewhat kind of convincing that what I had been working with the university at was actually a commercial, commercially viable uh thing out there. So that's where I really enjoyed working with some of the best in-class people who are known as the DGW alumni today. And uh they are spread across the world today, delivering great work across organizations. But working with Frank was fun. Uh, it was hard at times because Frank's always been a perfectionist. Um and uh yeah, we we learned a lot and we delivered amazing methodologies in terms of how science, data, storytelling was combined into a beautiful brief. And we also had a design team working with us, translating that, which was another part of our job to work along with designers, to let them pick up all of that and translate them into great solutions, as much as work with the users, the clients, to explain to them how they would adapt to a different way of working so they could deliver their core work better, and then track all of that once we would deliver the solutions in terms of what we call post-occupancy evaluations, not just from a space perspective, but also from a business perspective. What results were kind of being shown uh in the business as they adopted a different way of working? So it was a full cycle that we applied. And uh yeah, the career started from there and grew from there.

Syl VanderPark 9:53

Gosh. It's um I love how you describe it. It's um it's artistic, you know. My next question was you had the privilege of working with Frank Duffy. Uh, what did that experience teach you about the relationship between strategy and design?

Sam Sahni 10:10

I think you kind of Yeah, I mean Frank recently passed away, which was very sad for all the alumni, and uh may he may he rest in peace. Um Frank Frank was a perfectionist. Um I remember one time Frank asked me to write the same paragraph about 20 different times and in 20 different ways, till he could pick up the best of the 20 and formulate his own paragraph. I think he had a very unique way of conveying critical messages to key audiences, which were most of the time senior stakeholders. Uh, and he said words were as important as much as the data was, as much as the form was. So I think he changed my thinking that perhaps just not giving a physical solution is the way forward. You've got to back it up by the data, the engagement, as much as the right choice of words to influence people. That's what I learned from Frank. Uh, and uh that's always stayed with me.

Syl VanderPark 11:13

I I think it's um it's sharing the vision, right? And being able to articulate that. After two decades in major firms like Acom, Morkin Level, and Unispace, you launched Work Transformers in October 2024. What was the breaking point that made you say, I need to do this on my own?

Sam Sahni 11:32

Oh, there were several, and uh they're still being uh refined as we've been on this journey for the last, I'd say, year and a half. I think the world in the last, I'd say, five years, especially post-COVID, has changed a lot faster than we all had imagined. Um if you see sort of COVID brought about the biggest working experimentation in our lives where everybody was forced to remote work, which opened up a Pandora's box for many in terms of questioning the power of place, right? That was a big, big change that had brought about. Um, no longer were we sort of connecting proximity to performance. Uh uh in parallel with that, I think everybody started adopting technology in different ways. I think for Zoom and Teams and all of these types of tools, it was the biggest adoption because this is the only way we could kind of see each other, even albeit two-dimensional format. But it brought about a technological adoption curve, which has only been sort of uh catapulted by the launch of AI, as sort of AI has been around for a long time, but with the launch of Chat GPT, everybody started to experience something different. And right now we are kind of, I wouldn't call it a tidal wave, I'd call it a tsunami of technological changes that are coming about. All of these types of factors started raising human expectations, but also human anxiety to a different level. And uh, we started seeing that with our clients as well, who were kind of thinking about how does that impact the world of work, what changes. Uh and in hindsight, as a lot of us like what we call ourselves the future of work experts, go back a decade, none of us could have predicted that this would be happening, COVID would be happening, AI would be happening. So all the futurists back in 2015 were projecting what say 10 years later, 2025, 26, maybe even beyond, would look like X, but it's looking like Z because the delta is massive, unexpected changes have kind of come in. So I wanted to kind of reflect on that and have the freedom to be able to work with organizations without the red tape of the organization I'm working for. And that was the starting point in saying what gives me the most freedom, what gives me the most freedom to experiment, what gives me the most freedom to break certain rules and test things to push the thinking forward. Like take one example, uh, we picked up AI and machine learning heavily in terms of what we are doing as an organization and how we are applying it to projects. And uh we started that through experimentation with some clients who were happy to do so with us at the same time. And that would have been only possible if we would have started like a boutique firm like Work Transformers to work with world-leading thinking clients uh to develop kind of world-leading methodologies, applying world-leading technologies to really catapult things forward. And that's the experimentation we've been doing. And by the virtue of that, we've discovered certain amazing things where the methodology itself, which is the combination of best-in-class thinking, data, and technology, is able to kind of cover our own blind spots as consultants. And it's saying, hey, you missed out something that was sitting in the data because I captured that as I was augmenting your methodology as AI. And that makes a huge impact in terms of the recommendations you're giving. So that's the first thing it started doing. In parallel with that, we can process large data sets now by the virtue of technology, which were less possible before because either the technology wasn't there or the fee models were different because we were time-bound. So that gives us a much better bandwidth on projects. We're able to hand pick the best teams we are working with in terms of if we wanted to extend it into design, furniture, or other types of solutions. We're able to hand pick the right talent and bring them on board. For example, we're working on a project right now where the vision is high performance. And it's a large investment company. That investment company is also deploying world class technologies, but they've understood that they need to kind of get to a level of high human performance by actually giving everything that people would need to sustain that performance. So as a team, we are thinking like an Olympics team. So we are focusing on environmental factors, uh, well-being factors, food, you know, all of these elements are coming into the care quality, all of that. And uh here we are not time-bound by a fee uh level. We are working with them on a long-term basis. So we are kind of discovering new models of contracting with each other to ultimately deliver what matters to that business. So being independent, being boutique, uh being unbiased, uh, not being tied to uh a huge structure, uh, less internal reporting. Uh, all of those have enabled us to be able to do these things. And these are the things we are discovering, which is why doing what I've been doing was the right thing uh to get things right for the clients who deserve best-in-class projects.

Syl VanderPark 17:13

Yeah, and it sounds like you can tweak as you go along. It is a long-term um project, you know, ongoing, it's living, breathing. It's not like you deliver a project and it's done. You keep saying, okay, um this either something new is coming in or there's some feedback or something like that, and you respond to it.

Sam Sahni 17:33

Yeah, and I would say that destination 2.0, my book, is actually based on that principle because uh working environments are living and breathing things. Um, meant to support businesses who, in the current context of the world, are constantly changing and adapting. Where a technology business used to take months or years to ship a product that's now happening in days, uh, if not weeks, right? The geopolitical climate is changing rapidly, which means certain businesses have to adapt their strategies in terms of how they're fulfilling the needs of their customers and their business. All of that context changing in the business landscape means the way work is done is also changing, which means the environments that support uh how that work is best done should also be adapting. So it's it's a very different way of looking at it compared to the corporate real estate cycles, which are sort of six to eighteen months of a project, there's a start of a project, there is an end of a project, following that you invoice the client, you're done, and you walk away. But the best workplaces are the ones that kind of continue to evolve on day 30, day 360, and beyond to support that changing context as we see now. And that's what we are able to deliver. And that's what I've written in Destination 2.0 on what workplaces need to do to continuously evolve as a living organism, which it's what the underlying philosophy is.

Syl VanderPark 19:07

Yeah, yeah. It's um it's a body that you're looking after and feeding and growing. Um in your book, you write that hybrid work is a mirror, not a medicine, and that it magnifies whatever assumptions already exist. Unpack that for us.

Sam Sahni 19:26

Yeah, I I think I'm a big believer that um hybrid work uh it doesn't fail or succeed. It exposes the cracks that are there in the organization and brings them out. For example, I mean take the concept of proximity bias, which in very simple terms would mean that if I can see someone working, that means they must be working. And if I can't see somebody around me, I don't know what they're doing, irrespective of they might be producing the best output my business needs right now, right? Apply that to the context of hybrid work. A lot of the businesses who have kind of implemented hybrid work and are now going down to what we call RTO, which is return to office. I want my people back five days a week, have not demonstrated any stats that that return, physical return to the office five days a week has improved the business outcomes in any form or way. So moving away from hybrid work exposed a crack, that it was much more a cultural concern from certain levels of leadership or middle management, could be anything based on the organization, that it's actually a trust issue, not a performance issue. So when certain people say hybrid work doesn't work for us, my next question is explain further as to what's not working. Oh, I don't know what my people are doing. Uh so I would like to bring them back, but bringing them back isn't a metric to test whether people are being productive or not. Because we've all experienced people who come to the office five days a week but have not produced enough. Uh actually, there are different metrics that should be used to test productivity, to test performance, to measure those. So I think that's what I mean by the fact that it's basically those factors were always underlying. The companies who are doing hybrid work really well have really understood the metrics. It's a different way of managing people, it's a different way of measuring outputs than by actually presence. And those cracks are kind of showing what was already underneath there better. It's not the concept that has failed. It's it's just the business that has not managed to evolve along with the changing concept of how work is done. That's what I mean by that.

Syl VanderPark 21:53

You know, I just think about how I've known business and a lot of it, you know, there's intuition, there's people who are natural leaders, natural. Managers, but then you add a layer of metric systems. That's very powerful.

Sam Sahni 22:07

Yeah, in one of the chapters in Destination 2.0, especially The Last Pillar, Next Gen Leadership, I particularly talk about it. And people said to me, Sam, why write about that in a book about corporate real estate? This book is about work, and work happens in organizations. Organizations are typically laid and structured. So there is an element of leadership. Everybody performs to a role. And when it comes to hybrid work, the way you lead and manage is very different compared to how it was done when everybody was in the office, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Having done some research, we've discovered that the servant leadership model, which is basically simply asking people, how's your day been? What's blocked you? What's really made you perform better? How can I remove your blockers? What can I do for you to make you perform better? These are simple examples of what the complex concept of servant leadership means. It's not around show me the work or you have not done your job. It's more around how can I help you perform better? How do I remove your blockers, right? That model itself makes hybrid work perform better. So I write about it in terms of how do you manage a hybrid workforce, the one that you cannot see all the time, but you can definitely see the outputs. How do you enable them better? That's a different way of thinking completely.

Syl VanderPark 23:35

I like that. You identify seven things that forced remote work illuminated from proving productivity is not tied to attendance to exposing inequalities in home environments. Which of those revelations do you think leaders are still most in denial about?

Sam Sahni 23:52

Biggest one is kind of the concept of proximity bias, that actually when people are present, they must be working. We've already covered that. The other element is uh we need people together more, but I think there's a balance in everything. If if you're kind of together more, doesn't mean that that enables best in class focus. I think it also comes at the risk of over-collaborating, which we were talking a lot about pre-pandemic, which a lot of people have forgotten about, where it still happens where people's diaries are full of meetings. But is that the best metric of productivity? And uh as we engage with certain organizations, we are even realizing they have the meetings to decide the agenda of the meetings. Uh so over-collaboration is basically anti-productivity, I would say. Uh, that's another myth. I think all in all, we've identified those factors in the book, but what I'm trying to say in terms of the concept of coming together and working is important. That's not gonna go away. Humans need that. But why are we doing it? We are doing it to problem solve in businesses, where we need different expertises of people coming together, looking at a problem from their own perspectives, expertise provide inputs. We are coming together to innovate, where we are looking at something and say this could be better. Let's collaborate on how this can be. And we are coming together to build a community, which is very important because people all need to feel a shared sense of purpose. So when you apply those concepts on top of the concepts of collaboration, focus, individual work, and socializing, you start to see workplaces very differently. So, give you an example what is problem solving? Problem solving is step one, we are coming together, collaborating to understand what is the problem we are seeing, right? Agree how do we break that down into steps to find solutions. Then we go away and we focus on those steps, right? And then we come back and collaborate again to say what were our findings and what should be the next steps be. Perhaps it means going back out again and focusing on a second series of focused activities to then come back and collaborate again. So it's a mix of collaborate focus, collaborate focus, right? Compare that to the age-old thinking of people sitting in meetings, then you're over-collaborating. Then it doesn't really resolve the problem.

Syl VanderPark 26:34

That's right.

Sam Sahni 26:34

Innovate is very similar, where you might be kind of coming together and sort of co-learning on something, how things could be better, then you're collaborating, but then you still need a focused set of activities to go and do those tasks. So that's what we mean by the fact that where the myth is people must be at their desk or people must be in meetings over collaborating, and that demonstrates work because you are twiddling at your desk or you're in meetings, which is a sign of productivity. Those are myths. That's not how work actually happens. Yeah, people do need a balance of focus. And I think during COVID times, home did a lot of heavy lifting of focus work and also provided us with the most personalized environment to be able to do it. So prior to the pandemic, we were talking about personalization of the workspace. What's better than home?

Syl VanderPark 27:33

Right.

Sam Sahni 27:33

Where you can control your temperature, you can control the lighting levels, you can move about, you can even control the food you eat, right? You're not reliant on the offers of where you are. You can you have a lot of choice. So, in that case, what we're saying is in the context of hybrid work, if home does a lot of heavy lifting of the focus work and the workspace is well designed to innovate, problem solve, and collaborate, which actually means very different things from rows and rows of desks and some meeting rooms, then that right balance starts to happen. And that's why the six, seven myth prior to COVID start to really break away.

Syl VanderPark 28:12

Yeah.

Sam Sahni 28:12

It's a very long-winded answer to explain, but we have to sequentially look at it.

Syl VanderPark 28:18

Yes, no, I understand. Um, you know, I it's more goal-oriented and um the freedom to follow the time to really follow through and think things through and continue to let that seed grow, you know, and then say, yes, we come back and talk about it again. Because sometimes you think, oh, well, I wanted to follow up on this. Well, there is follow-up, you know, providing those follow-up opportunities.

Sam Sahni 28:43

Yeah, prior to COVID, we did a lot of online surveys and especially I used to call these binary environments. Binary mean you work at your desk and you meet in a meeting room. Yes, they have a reception, a storage area, et cetera, a little uh cafe kind of area to make your tea or coffee, right? In those environments, when we did online surveys, people said that they took about 10 to 15 minutes to get their chain of thought back every time they were disturbed. Yeah. Disturbed by another human or disturbed by some sound could be multiple causes of disturbance, but they're trying to focus something, took their chain of thought away, disturbed them to really get back in the rhythm, takes 10 to 15 minutes at least.

Syl VanderPark 29:30

Yeah.

Sam Sahni 29:30

And then we asked them how often that happened during a day. Yeah. And they said at least three to four times a day. Take the lowest number three times a day, multiply it by 10 to 15 minutes. You're talking about 30 to 45 minutes per employee per day, simply lost in untracked, non-productive time, and you multiply that by average number of employees you have, and then multiplied that by average salary you're paying, you can do the financial mathematics as to what that's costing you. So when you have the right space to focus, and I'm not saying home is the only place, there might be different spaces within the office or third places, and you gain backpack time and you measure it by what the team is producing against their KPIs, then we are having the real conversation on what workplace environments need to do rather than mythical conversations around sort of I've always done it that way. So that must be the formula moving forward. That's what I mean by that.

Syl VanderPark 30:32

Sure. Um, it just makes me think like sometimes something whimsical, uh, a break, even though it's not um it's one in one of these things that you know breaks your concentration, but there's you know, there's some kind of inspiration that comes in during that time. Sometimes that can also be beneficial, I guess.

Sam Sahni 30:56

It is, it is. I think uh after about 45 minutes or so of heavily concentrated time, your cortisol levels start to differ. And that's where you do need a break because otherwise your performance starts to go down.

Syl VanderPark 31:12

Yeah.

Sam Sahni 31:13

Compare that to a simple question if you ask anybody where people get their best ideas, which place? Nobody says a desk or a meeting room, is during a walk, in the shower, in the toilet. These are the answers we get.

Syl VanderPark 31:30

Yeah.

Sam Sahni 31:31

So so I think uh the the formula needs to be very personal. You need to recognize what how long can you concentrate. Definitely, some people are bound by deadlines and there are realities to life in terms of the work we are delivering. But definitely in terms of the work environments themselves, if people have choice and flexibility, or tomorrow, I've really got to get this financial model done. I've got my two screens at home, I'm available for my team. But guys, I'm gonna be really focusing deep diving. And I give a lot of exercises in Destination 2.0 on how you do that. But then you're you're kind of doing that sprint. But at some stage, if you do want to take some time out, you've got to have a self-recognition that I think my concentration levels, decision-making levels are gonna dip after a time. So I might just go for a five-minute walk around the block, maybe grab a coffee, or go for a run, even come back and then carry on. That's a very self-kind of diagnosed solution in that way. But within the context of an office space, but we're talking about you need to balance collaboration with focus. You could design the office environments to support something similar. It doesn't have to be identical. For example, certain focus spaces could be much more library environments where people are kind of co-focusing, uh, subdued by the right lighting, uh, it has the right acoustic treatment, it has the right environmental quality. So you feel you're in a bit of a premium space. There are it's it's got protocols that no phone calls or talking is allowed. And then you might dip out of that space and go to a nice coffee shop either out on the road or something your office begins to offer to replicate something like this, but with the added advantage that you've got to jump into a physical meeting with your colleagues, you can do it at the same time.

Syl VanderPark 33:20

Right.

Sam Sahni 33:21

Then then couple that with the provision of hybrid working is the best of everything. Then I've got three or four choices of how I focus and how how I break that focus, recognizing my cortisol levels to ultimately increase my performance. What could a company ask more for?

Syl VanderPark 33:38

I don't know. I'm sold. Really, though, it is because I know you know when you're on the spot and you're anxious, you know, you you answers don't come to you, you don't respond to your best ability. But as soon as you can, just let it kind of flow through and you you're you give yourself that space, you know, free of judgment. Like sometimes I need to turn on the TV to have that noise going on, and then all of a sudden it unlocks everything, you know? Um and some people may say, oh, well, you're just watching TV, and it's like, no, no, no, no. That's my brain doing something different.

Sam Sahni 34:14

Yeah, yeah. Some degree of white noise, brown noise, as they say, works for certain individuals. Some people want pin drop silence to kind of focus. And again, with destination 2.0, I talk about those attributes. And I covered in the chapter of um kind of personalization, where you don't have to personalize spaces heavily per individual, but you could have the same focus environment uh in three different ways. Could be the same footprint, same space, but change the attributes of white noise, lighting, acoustic treatment, choice of furniture, uh, space footprint if you were wanting to experiment with it, and just roll that out and track the usage. And you may recognize that one space is used more than others, then you know what to double down on. Or you might recognize that all three are being used. So go and ask users why they prefer one or the other, and you start to understand that even focus preferences vary by individuals. And that's what I mean by offering a degree of personalization.

Syl VanderPark 35:19

Yeah.

Sam Sahni 35:20

If you apply that, then the office becomes much more valuable for people. So they have three environments to focus in the office, one at home, maybe one in a third space, and they choose the best space available to them against the task at hand.

Syl VanderPark 35:35

Yeah, I guess it, you know, you I think about you know, if you join a gym and some gyms are just very basic. Um, they're open 24 hours, and then you have other gyms that have a lot of more different activities. There's a cafe, and then you have another gym that's got a spa in it and that kind of thing. And you say, well, you know, where am I gonna feel the best? You know, where am I feeling I'm gonna um, you know, become the person I want to be, you know, at this gym or something like that. You say the average employee is a statistical ghost. What do you mean by that? And how should companies design for demographics and differences instead of a mythical middle? And we we've been talking a little bit about this already.

Sam Sahni 36:17

Yeah, we have. I think I I refer back to sort of a decade ago where we were kind of creating these personas and designing for these personas that this person is sort of a resident at desk, they're a keyboard warrior, this is how they work, this person is internally agile, that person is externally agile. And we were creating these personas to define what the workspace design, the workspace model should look like. But I call those personas as the average employees. Now, none of them have had considerations of simple things, um, neurodiversity requirements, um, caregiving. Like right now, I might be in the persona of, I don't know, an externally agile individual, but I belong to sandwich generation. I've got kids to look after and I've got old parents to look after. And my considerations are very different to that kind of average profile persona of an externally agile person, but none of them were considered in the mix. Same thing we've just been discussing on focus requirements. And if you are a resident, some people may prefer to focus within the noise because they like a bit of ambient noise. Some people want wind drop silence. So there are many, many, many attributes like that. So I call it kind of one size many misfix. And if you just design on that, there is no such thing as that average persona, average employee, because people say, Oh, I sort of belong to that bucket, but you haven't considered 80% of my needs in there. That's the nearest bucket I recognize to. But then we are designing on those bases, which means we've missed out 80% of the brief in terms of what we are working towards. And what I'm not suggesting is that you go and profile every single employee and you you kind of go into their profiles and design for them. What I'm saying is go a bit more deeper into certain other attributes, and then you might realize those three personas turn into about 10 or 12, which broadly cover 80% of your organization, and then start to work up a design layout, like we were talking about three types of focus rooms just now, which basically cover 80% of the 80%. That's a much better approach to achieve a high degree of satisfaction in that employee base than just to assume an average of an average and then apply an average design on top, and then really wonder why nobody's really satisfied with my workplace that I've just delivered millions of dollars.

Syl VanderPark 38:51

Well, that um that kind of leads into the next question. One of the striking arguments in your book is how that beautiful offices can still feel empty. You call it the experience deficit. How does a company diagnose whether they have one?

Sam Sahni 39:06

Uh, you would know, definitely. I've I've been to a few offices where they've spent quite a few million and actually satisfaction levels have gone down rather than gone up. I think the designer has done a great job, in all honesty. But I think experience isn't a kombucha tap, experience isn't uh kind of pizza parties on a Friday to just bring people back to the office. I think experience is something around a cognitive feel that you get that this is the place where I sort of do my best work. And this is where I go for, say, for a younger staff. I learn by osmosis in this place, but then the place also gives me enough opportunity to go and self-learn and focus on what I've just learned. And I'm not sitting in the middle of a floor plate all day long. So I think these are the elements that contribute to the overall employee experience, and you've got a profile. Like we've been working with a few law firms, and that learning by osmosis point is very critical for associates because they're sitting along with senior partners. So senior partners have now come out of their offices and they are in nicer environments where associates and sort of mid-level fee earning staff feel that they're learning from each other. But at the same time, all of the workforce in terms of fee earning and non-fee earning have spaces available to them where they can go and focus and work on case files or work on us, work on self-learning. And that's all supported by a nice kind of coffee area where if you're working from there and you're having a nice coffee, it's not considered as you're taking a break. Uh the culture is that fee earning time could be happening from a cafe-style area where somebody's working from a different environment. Right. Now they don't have kombucha taps and beer taps, but that's what people classify as a high experiential environment for them. So I think we've got to go away from the misnomer of uh experience as amenities. Experience is a better cognitive feel around what that workspace means to a particular role. It helps them grow, it helps them learn, it helps them socialize, and it helps them deliver their best work. That's what experience is. And that's what is missed out in quite a few offices today.

Syl VanderPark 41:28

I have a simple, well, it's a it might be a silly, off, very off kind of topic question, but in terms of punctuality, people being on time, I mean, we're we're saying we adjust to how people work best and adjust to who they are. How do you adjust for somebody who is late?

Sam Sahni 41:49

Or, you know, is that is that a gonna be a real problem in the future, or is this always going to be talk about that because I've written a real kind of case study in the book about a team that was kind of spun across five generations of people. Not that I kind of like bucketing people by generations, but that was one of the attributes of the team. Across those kind of generations, let's pick a bucket. There were also variations in terms of the preferences around a person in a particular generation had a large family, children, etc. The other one didn't. Uh, where they lived was very different. One lived the one in the family lived in the suburbs. Uh, the same person in the same generation bucket lived actually in the city center. So uh transportation times and caregiving responsibilities varied within the generation. This is why I say I don't like bucketing. But what what we did with them was we we had a team day where literally um everybody honestly talked about uh their personal situation, uh their preferences. Like you're talking about like how you like to focus with the TV on and you like ambient noise. There were discussions like that. And we started tracking that on a spreadsheet. So we had the team leader who was of a senior generation who said, Look, I'm used to my nine to five. After five o'clock, I have a different type of kind of attitude towards I want my evenings. And we said we respect that because they grew up in a generation where uh all of those kind of cycles mattered more than perhaps they matter as much now, right? The team was joking around that actually getting to him uh to make a decision at 4 30 then is the worst time because he's about to like switch off. He's tired. Not that he doesn't want to work, he's mentally not in a state where he wants to consider the whole thing. Perhaps sending something to him at 8 30 in the morning where he's in the top of the form is the right thing. So those are the type of things that came out. Of the females in the room, she was a single mother, and she said, Look, I've got to drop my kid to the daycare at certain time. There are moments where I get a call at about 12 o'clock, one o'clock in the afternoon that my kid might be unwell. And I'm the only one who can go and pick my kid up. Uh, and and she was honest about it. And uh we said, okay, so the best windows are between say 10 to 12, and perhaps from 3 to 5. And and what she often did was even when she brought the kid home at 4, 5 o'clock, fed them dinner, and the kid went to sleep, she started working from there on. So she was often active from say 8, 9 p.m. till about 12 p.m., 1 a.m.

Syl VanderPark 44:46

Right.

Sam Sahni 44:47

Because highly dedicated, highly talented individual. Yeah. So the team understood that dynamic and we mapped that on a very simple Excel-style board. So we then got the team very familiar with who was active when, what were their preferences. A, it bonded the team, but B, it really broke this 9 to 5 notion and really stopped kind of this whole expectation that if they're not at their desk Monday to Friday between 9 a.m. and 9:15 a.m., they must be skiving. This is not about that. This is about getting the work done and understanding who's at their best form and when, and measured by weekly and monthly KPIs of that particular team. Right. So I think you've got to start breaking some of these notions up by doing exercises like these. And I actually have written like uh a full chapter just on this part in the book on how to do it.

Syl VanderPark 45:41

You're passionate about the idea of magnet, not mandate. Give us a real example of an organization that got this right and what they did differently.

Sam Sahni 45:50

Interesting. Um, I always said that you can do mandates and you can mandate bodies, physical bodies, but you can't mandate engagement. People who would probably come into the office five days a week, they would even say that they want to do that, but doesn't mean that they're highly engaged or they fully agree with it. And there are many data points out there that kind of show that. We've worked with a number of different organizations who've talked about the power of presence, not about mandating that presence. They've kept the rules fairly loose. Yes, they see less people in the office on a Friday, and some of them kind of gone as far as saying maybe we shut down the offices on a Friday. Friday office isn't operational. Everybody's working from home. One has even gone as far to kind of give half a Friday back to their people every second week to say we understand people are actually overworked, and that might even work much better if you want to uh take up a hobby, do a weekly activity, look after your health, look after your family, caregiving, feel free to use that time to do that. And and those organizations are actually seeing a stronger presence in terms of its effectiveness when people are together, because the psychology changes where people are saying, if I'm quite flexible to be able to focus or do individual routine work from the office or anywhere, when I go in, I want to go in with a view to collaborate with my team. And actually, I don't want to use a desk the days I'm going in. Of course, I'll have to use a desk or a touchdown to be able to check my emails and take a break or whatnot. But I'm going in with the core purpose of problem solving against X today. These are the people I'm gonna meet. That drives their purpose to go in as well, because that's why the team is coming together. The office has multiple collaboration environments, not just meeting rooms, but brainstorming areas and team zones and stand-up meeting areas, opening up into kind of more food and beverage offerings as well. And those are the companies that are finding that actually physical co-location and synchrony is working much better for them, not the ones who are mandating. The ones who are mandating are also possibly discovering, and we've seen this through some desk utilization surveys, that their actual desk utilization hasn't moved. It was always average 54% pre-pandemic, and it's still circa around the same in those who are mandating people back to the office five days a week. So actually, people are already much more agile uh than sitting at their desks all day long. They're doing these things. But the clever ones have understood that perhaps non-mandate approach actually treats people like adults and encourages self-productivity, self-sense of purpose of what they're going in for, and they're capitalizing on that more.

Syl VanderPark 49:04

Yeah, it you know, from personnel kind of um HR hiring practices that will help to facilitate, you know, having a team that can also behave properly, you know, and and you know, and and be responsible in in uh kind of a looser arrangement and uh and appreciate that.

Sam Sahni 49:25

I was with somebody last week, uh a senior client at a tech firm, and uh they have moved, they had a 17,000 square foot office, which was hardly utilized. The utilization, this back swipes, the engagement surveys, the general observations of their team were showing that it wasn't the best use of space in any form of way. They've now gone down to 5,000 square foot, uh, where they had uh say 150 odd desks in the previous office. Now they will only have 20, and the space is actually designed as a full collaboration co-working zone. Interesting. That's how radical they've gone just to increase the overall effectiveness of that space for the business. And the metrics they're gonna be applying to measure the outcome of the space isn't space utilization, but actual metrics that speak the business language in terms of what it does for their business.

Syl VanderPark 50:32

Right.

Sam Sahni 50:32

And so far, it's it's kind of going into a build sequence now. It's not been fully built, so we'll see how the results come out. But so far, the engagement they've done with their people who are going to be the core users of the space is showing very strong signs of positive adoption in the future. This is just one example of what mandate versus magnet approach is doing right now in the world.

Syl VanderPark 50:59

I love it. It's inspiring. Well, the last one was about the next generation leadership, but we already covered that. So, you know, what does that look like in practice when managing a hybrid team? But I think we already covered that.

Sam Sahni 51:11

So yeah, I think it's the servant leadership model. I mean, it's about it's next-gen leadership point is pretty critical because what you set as a leadership example in how you approach work is also carried forward because you're not just creating a sequencing for the your time in the company, you're also leaving a legacy behind. And I think that's something that many leaders need to think about in terms of applying that servant leadership model, because when you're the receiver of a servant leadership model in practice, you then learn to give that when you get to that stage. And that's where I kind of write heavily about that aspect.

Syl VanderPark 51:52

Yeah. The 11-pillar framework that you you share in your book presents a strong vision for human-centered workplaces. In your view, does it comprehensively address the core human drivers of engagement and success, or are there still critical aspects of the human experience that remain beyond its scope?

Sam Sahni 52:12

We purposely identified pillars in there which were not often discussed about but felt about. So, for example, there is one pillar in there called team-driven connectivity. And when you really start to define that, who does that belong to? Does it belong to HR? Does it belong to real estate? Does it belong to IT? The real answer is it belongs to all of them. Uh, because it talks about the fact that A, you've got to have the right spaces or say a hybrid meeting set up where some people might be in rooms, some might be remote. Remote doesn't mean at home. They might be traveling for work, they might be in other offices that you own, and they're actually doing work from there for some business trip. Uh, and they're dialing in into that space. So technology is important, physical space, technology. Now add to that that if the culture of the company is so hierarchical that people don't feel safe to speak, even if you've got the right space and the right technology, but safety aspect is in there, the collaboration doesn't really happen the way it's supposed to be happening. So that's where we've purposely tried to include pillars that kind of sit within the interstitial element of uh three or four different work streams. So I would say we've done our best to kind of create a bit of a roadmap of what are the minimum viable factors you must consider. So you've got limited to none kind of blind spots in your approach. And we're monitoring this. It's 11-pillar framework is applicable today. And there might be a destination 3.0 when we discover that the world is moving on, something else has added in, or something else has been replaced. And that's why the numbers like software 2.0, 3.0, 3.1 start to kick in.

Syl VanderPark 54:09

Sure. It's an ongoing conversation that I it's um, you know, I love conversation and I believe in it. And being able to build on ideas and always be open to it. I guess the the thing that it comes down to as well is kind of that knowledge retention and vision retention and how to continue that forward as you know people retire and um you know new people come on and and all that. So sounds like you've got it covered. Um and uh and people can can find you to to get your help as well. And um and we'll have all that information uh you know included. And I really appreciate your time today. Sorry, I've probably overspoken, over-talked, but it's been really, really fun to talk about all this stuff. I've enjoyed reading your book and uh, you know, especially the uh the anecdotal, you know, examples um are very, very helpful and uh and they're enjoyable to talk about. They're they're a good water cooler conversation that spark ideas and say, hey, I haven't thought about this before. Um or I didn't realize, yes, I'm I'm uh not a victim, but I I'm experiencing this as well. And how can you know you do things? So thank you very much.

Sam Sahni 55:29

Thank you for having me on, Silvana. Really appreciate it. Enjoyed the conversation as well.

Syl VanderPark 55:33

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