Designing Workspaces That Work With Corinne Murray, Real Finds Podcast #21 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. Corinne Murray is founder of Agate, an experience consultancy that helps companies navigate the future of work. On the podcast, we discuss the future of work, workplace culture, and the biggest challenges and opportunities in the physical workplace moving forward. She walks us through how to measure successful workplaces, how to start the transformation, and why a people-centric perspective is the path forward. It’s well worth a listen. Corinne, thank you for hopping on the podcast today.
Corinne Murray: Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, could you introduce yourself?
Corinne Murray: Sure. I’m Corinne Murray, based in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve been in and around the real estate world my entire career: CBRE, Gensler, WeWork, a big landlord here in New York City, among a few others. Now I have my own consulting company that helps organizations figure out what the future of work, as we understand it today, means for them, and how, even before they touch anything that is real estate, they transform the ways their people work and how the work gets done.
Why Workplace Strategy Matters
Gordon Lamphere: That’s a lot of big names in real estate. The biggest thing being thrown around in real estate right now is the future of work. So let’s start with why workplace culture and workplace strategy matter for the future of work, because that’s a real focus of your consulting.
Corinne Murray: The future of work is a big topic that a lot of folks are still trying to figure out, and even in our own industry, there’s confusion because it means different things to different industries. It hits every industry, not just ours, and figuring out how all our perspectives mesh is the critical piece that hasn’t happened yet. What it means for us and for the workplace is setting up teams to do their best work. Part of why I position myself as helping companies go through the transformations needed before even talking about workplace comes from experience. I’ve done plenty of change management and workplace strategy projects where there hasn’t been that organizational change, that big mental shift in how and where work gets done, before we start changing the environment. We say, here’s activity-based working and it lets you do X, Y, and Z, but none of the teams or managers are trained on what that means. There’s still a lot of opportunity to close the gap between how we create spaces and what those spaces mean, and educating the people who use them on what they’re for, why they matter, and how they can create autonomy for themselves in using them.
The Current Landscape
Gordon Lamphere: Before the future, let’s talk about the current landscape. We’re recording in May, and this will go out near the end of May or early June. Right before this interview, I saw on real estate Twitter that true occupancy in some studies is around fifty percent, give or take depending on how you assess it. How do you see that landscape playing out?
Corinne Murray: Fifty percent is the highest number I’ve heard in a while, so that’s interesting. I’m enough of a data nerd that I’d want to pop the hood and see exactly where that number comes from, because numbers out of context tell a very different story than when you have all the dressings on them. Okay, it’s fifty percent on a Wednesday. Those circumstances are more critical than ever, because we have peak days and off days, and everyone, in real estate or not, knows Mondays and Fridays are light, Tuesdays and Wednesdays are heaviest, and even Thursday tapers off.
Part of why I focus on the organizational transformation side is that hybrid is still a half-baked idea. I’m a proponent of flexibility, so I’m all for what hybrid is about. But so far, hybrid has only solved for the geography of where work gets done. Executives have decided Tuesday through Thursday, we want you in the office. Where the friction comes in, even with that fifty percent number, is that a lot of people get frustrated when they come to the office under the guise of being with people and their team, and yet they’re in back-to-back Zoom meetings. So what’s the point? That’s the big crystal ball question we have to figure out over the next six to nine months. We’ve figured out the migration patterns of the post-COVID work world, at least where we are today, always subject to change. But we haven’t figured out what kind of work we plan for those Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. There will always be Zoom meetings that creep in, but we need to segment the kinds of work we do on certain kinds of days to get the biggest return on investment. That’s why the built environment and the workplace still matter so much. Being together with employees is the first step to productivity. You don’t necessarily need deep relationships with tons of vulnerability; I don’t think that’s the gold star. You need people who know how to be among people they might disagree with or have different objectives from, and still get things done. That’s the gold star for productivity, and the workplace plays a huge role. The way we’re doing hybrid today does not set the workplace up for success.
Getting to a Successful Workplace Culture
Gordon Lamphere: What are the biggest challenges to getting there? We’re clearly not doing things right now, and there’s massive confusion for landlords and occupiers. How do we get to a successful workplace culture?
Corinne Murray: That’s the right question. There was no chance we’d get this right on the first try, and it’s funny that the media is still very binary: this failed, so we just go back to what we know. We’re going to be in a test bed of what works for at least the next five to seven years, and that’s a good problem to have.
My wish list is more practical data on how we measure productivity, because we’re using the same metrics Henry Ford used for a factory floor in the 1910s. We need to figure out how productivity actually gets measured for information and knowledge workers. Creating a deck is not the same as hitting a nail in the same spot on a different car over and over. From a more practical standpoint, companies need to do a better job thinking about and creating programs and systems around the things people can’t get at home that they need here. Right now the conversation has been very hospitality based. We’ll give you free lunch, and if you’re Facebook, we’ll have Lizzo perform. Those are nice to have, fun offshoot things, but none of them contribute to accomplishing work. That’s the pivot that helps us make progress without stepping on what people prefer.
When we think about employee experience and workplace experience, we’ve spent too much time on what people like rather than what people need, and what people need is far more unifying. We all need Wi-Fi, power, and good wayfinding. I’m speaking to the built environment, but there’s a lot around personal interactions. How can a company facilitate the redevelopment of weak ties? The strong ties, weak ties research was done back in the seventies, and weak-tie relationships are actually the most crucial for business. You don’t need to be best friends with everyone you work with, but you need to be able to get work done with all these different folks. That should be the north star for how teams approach hybrid: what moves the needle on building weak ties. It’s not always a happy hour. It could be lunch-and-learns on niche topics, a mentorship program, or scheduling all your company events on one day and saying this is a company day and a learning day. We’ll give you business updates, serve you lunch, and you spend time with one another. It’s a lot more people driven than space and hospitality driven, which is uncharted territory for our industry, and it’s hard to figure out where we fit in. But being able to diagnose that this is not a space problem, or not a hospitality or employee experience program problem, is doing good service for your clients. Just because you can’t do it yourself, facilitating the arrival at a solution is better than anything else they can expect. Pre-pandemic, everything got bucketed into “it’s happening in the workplace, so it’s a real estate and workplace problem,” rather than an operational problem, an HR problem, or an IT problem.
Diagnosing a People Problem
Gordon Lamphere: How do you best diagnose and measure from a people-centric perspective, and determine it’s a people problem versus a spatial or operational issue?
Corinne Murray: A lot of the methods are the same. It’s doing discovery work and not only looking at space utilization data, facilities ticketing data, or booking data. Those are useful. But I’m a very qualitative-leaning person, and I like the quantitative to bolster and inform the insights I get from people on the ground. A lot of companies do the opposite and look at the quant first because it’s faster and easier and there’s usually a dashboard. But you won’t get to the root cause unless you talk to people. To use utilization as an example, you might see that the meeting room on the southwest corner never gets used, so you turn it into something else, but that doesn’t get used either, because the space type isn’t the problem. It’s that it’s the southwest corner and it’s hot any time after eleven a.m. So there needs to be a balance: go to the people first, then look for quant validation. Quant doesn’t tell stories the way people and experience do.
So the first thing is don’t be afraid to talk to your people, and set up a system that says we want to hear from you. Here’s the cycle: you tell us something, we internalize it, we figure out whether and how we can solve it, and here’s how we play it back to you so you know we’re not only listening but trying to act on it. Many employees have felt the burn of sharing insights and not knowing where they go, and then they evaporate into the void. So it’s crucial to create that system of listening, digesting, and actioning, and then rinse and repeat. What’s great about that is the more you listen and validate, and I’m not saying grab their Christmas list and start fixing whatever they say, obviously make sure what you’re doing makes sense for the business and everyone else, is that it takes pressure off operational teams. If you’re listening consistently, you’re developing a co-creative relationship. You’re not building something for them, you’re building it with them. The onus isn’t only on you if something goes bad, and everyone benefits from the win. There’s a lot of benefit from a risk perspective and from a morale, culture, and employee experience level in bringing them into the conversation.
What Good Employee Experience Looks Like
Gordon Lamphere: Can you give an example of designing a positive employee experience and how it’s implemented in today’s workforce?
Corinne Murray: The good thing about employee experience is it’s everywhere. It’s every single touchpoint, physical, digital, and relational, that an employee faces at a company, from the moment they find your job posting to the day they hand in their badge and laptop. For our purposes in workplace and real estate, it can be really good wayfinding. If you’re new to a company and can’t tell which way the meeting room is and you’re fifteen minutes late, that’s bad employee experience. The same could be said for a company having only one nursing room for parents coming back from leave. Experience is a lot of really tiny things snowballed into one.
The ones everyone is familiar with are the parties, the food and beverage programs, and yoga, all of which are nice. But part of my mission is to prove and reinforce that employee experience isn’t just the shiny, Instagrammable stuff. Good employee experience is making sure people have equipment that works, a good team with a good feedback loop so their work is effective, and spaces that actually let them get work done, whether that’s a quiet space anyone in the organization can use without being disturbed, or a million whiteboards, because sometimes that’s what’s needed. All of those things snowball into a constructive, healthy employee experience.
Advice for Landlords and Occupiers
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve been implementing employee experience programs on both the landlord and occupier side for some of my clients. What’s the best advice for someone starting the transition into a better experiential workspace? Are there a couple of key notes, or is it a holistic approach?
Corinne Murray: Good question, and it’s different answers for landlords and occupiers. For landlords, it’s just challenging right now, for a number of reasons. In terms of delivering good experience to their tenants’ employees, it’s still a black box. I remember from working at RXR, a big landlord in the New York area, that when I wanted to do research, the process to get access to employees was: talk to the leasing team, who talk to the broker who represented the tenant back when they did the deal, then talk to a CFO or someone in finance who signed the lease, then maybe the head of HR or the COO. It’s very convoluted and doesn’t necessarily yield anything, because every tenant has the right to say, I don’t want you to know anything about my employees, and sometimes that’s part of their agreement with their employees. So for landlords, it’s an uphill battle. It will get easier once occupiers have a better handle on what it even means for them. It’s hard for everyone because we’re still defining what it means post-COVID, and a lot of the people in charge of these things have long thought food programming, beautifully designed spaces, and parties would be enough to keep people happy. But the workforce, we as a collective, has changed so much over the past three and a half years that it’s apples and zebras. We’re still figuring out what to do with the delta between the employee base we were in January 2020 and the one we are today.
Occupiers have it easier because they have access to the end users and can ask questions. My best advice is to keep asking. Just because you got an answer in November 2022 doesn’t mean it’s the same answer in May 2023. One of my favorite case studies from the past couple of years is Genentech. A friend of mine runs the real estate and workplace team there. When they reopened the South San Francisco campus to sales, marketing, and operations teams, since the lab teams had kept going through the pandemic, they created an employee agreement that said, we’re doing our best, but we don’t fully know the answers yet, and you’re part of our testing. If you sign on to come back to the office, and at that point it was still flexible, you’re also signing on for an hour-long interview every month to tell us what’s been working and what hasn’t. Over time, at scale, they’d have a composite that makes more sense than what they had. They did a great job creating that co-creative relationship, which set the expectation that nothing is perfect, this isn’t finished, and it won’t be finished without your feedback. It’s relatively easy to implement. The answers will differ by company, region, and industry, but the approach is pretty universal, and everyone benefits from hearing from their employees in a constructive way. Anyone who’s run focus groups knows there’s usually one person who shows up with a two-page printed wish list for beanbags and sit-stand tables. Framing it as, what do you need to accomplish the work you do, and contextualizing that it doesn’t necessarily matter what you like, it matters what you need. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, so there’s still a lot of benefit. Landlords have a longer tail.
Gordon Lamphere: That Genentech case study is fascinating. How did employees respond to being asked questions monthly? Plenty of employees aren’t thrilled about divulging information, even to their employer.
Corinne Murray: Not that I know of specifically, but I think because it was tailored so much to “we’re not trying to pry, we want to hear your reactions and feedback,” positioning it as we want the same thing, we want this to be as good as it can be, so tell us what you’re able to make that happen. Being explicit about what feedback you’re asking for, how it will be used, and how it will inform future changes eases employees’ jitters about why they’re being interviewed. And the employee agreement stated clearly that this isn’t meant to track you. We have a collective goal, and it can’t happen without you.
Gordon Lamphere: You mentioned need versus want, or wish-list questions. Is that the key format for asking questions in the post-pandemic world?
Corinne Murray: For now, yes, because wants are so individual and can lead down a lot of rabbit holes. I tend to use Maslow’s hierarchy as a comparative. A lot of how we talk about employee and workplace experience is at the very top of the pyramid, when there’s a lot of stuff at the bottom that will get us good wins. I’ve been doing some research on the remembering brain versus the experiencing brain. Your experiencing brain is instantaneous, so a lot of what we design for experience is actually the remembering of experience, and the remembering brain skews negative. The negative things you experience have the volume turned up louder than the good ones. So we need to skew toward what causes friction and what gets in people’s way. It might not be as visible or glossy, but those are the things that break down the logjams, clear the traffic, and let work flow. Position things around that practical, tactical mentality first, and once you’ve achieved a solid platform of operational effectiveness, you can think about the Venn diagram of what people want and prefer. That’s where you get into whether it’s Taco Tuesday or Burrito Thursday. You can get into the nice-to-haves once you have a solid foundation of the things that should work.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: You talked about remembering, and we’ll certainly remember this interview. But we’re at our Final Four, the questions we ask everyone, with unique answers from each guest. First: where do you see real estate going ten years from now?
Corinne Murray: Real estate is still going to be around. Death, taxes, and real estate. But it’s going to change, because our needs have completely changed. I think we’ll see cities change quite dramatically. San Francisco is probably the best test case. With the migration of tech folks, there’s been a resurgence of artists returning to the city, and it’s becoming a more under-the-radar creative haven. Where else in the States and around the world will that opportunity arise? For me in New York, thinking about central business districts like Midtown, are those sustainable long term, or do we need to think about how each neighborhood or section of the city needs to be self-reliant? Creating live-work neighborhoods rather than exclusively CBDs and work neighborhoods. I’m hopeful to see what happens there. It’ll still be around, just very different.
Gordon Lamphere: Following up on “different,” what do you see being most different about the workplace itself?
Corinne Murray: How they’re designed, or the allocation of different types of spaces, is already changing dramatically. We’ll see fewer and fewer assigned desks, more hoteling desks but in team neighborhoods, and a lot of activity-based working, which for folks who aren’t familiar is like how your house is arranged: you sleep in your bedroom, cook in your kitchen, eat in your dining room, and watch TV in your living room. On the scale of a workplace, you have meetings in meeting rooms, focus work in the library or study space, and catch up with your mentor in the cafe. We’ll see much more unassigned and shared workplaces that focus on people being together, while still satisfying the needs of folks who have young kids or elderly parents at home, or just don’t live somewhere where focusing is a conducive activity. The main change is the flip-flopping of desks dominating how a workplace is designed, toward more collaborative and soft seating arrangements.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s a great forecast, and I’ll be curious to see how the world adjusts. Now let’s step back from the future. If young high school Corinne is looking at what she wants to do in the world, what’s your tidbit of advice?
Corinne Murray: I had the privilege of studying at a liberal arts college, Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, where I studied religious philosophy. There’s a long answer for how that connects to what I do, but at the end of the day, people and culture are everywhere, and that’s no exception for work. I’d say follow the humanities, follow the people. Especially in today’s world, where AI is becoming more prominent and a lot of that work is very technical, I’d focus on humanity and the things that improve the social fabric of everything, including work. What I do, I count as part of the humanities, just in a business context. Those are the things needed most desperately. I think we’ve over-indexed on how important STEM has been over the past ten or fifteen years, and we need to consider where liberal arts and the humanities fit in, because that’s where storytelling and contextualizing information come in, very similar to what I was saying about quant and qual. There’s a big need for the human element.
Gordon Lamphere: I couldn’t agree more. I’m a humanities undergrad as well, before law school, and I rely heavily on the critical thinking I learned then. Soft skills, particularly in real estate but in business generally, are very undervalued for what they produce. In terms of learning outside of college, is there a book or two that’s influenced you from a real estate or business perspective?
Corinne Murray: That’s a good question. I’ve been rereading Atomic Habits and thinking not just about how it affects me as an individual, but how it informs or even validates change management approaches I’ve used in the past, or things I’d do differently, because of his research on habit development. If you talk to anyone who does change management, the typical scope is three to six months. The average person can adopt and internalize change in that range, but there’s a huge cohort for whom it can take up to nine months for change to really set in. That book has made me reconsider how we approach these things and whether there are ways to honor the long tail, because it affects how companies succeed.
I’d also say Blitzscaling has really shaped how I think, but not in the way they intended. It talks about the growth of a business, a product, or an idea, but because it’s not their expertise, what it misses is how much operational infrastructure needs to be built as you scale. It was a book that was really revered at WeWork, which was not blitzscaling; you can’t blitzscale a physical product, but that’s beside the point, and it goes to show what was going on there. This is symptomatic of a lot of the tech industry, and probably most industries, but with so much scaling so fast in tech, it’s more obvious. A lot of founders think, if the product scales, we scale. But there’s no check-in that says, in this past year we’ve gone from a hundred employees to five hundred, and the way we operate is not the same. Operational aspects get taken for granted until they don’t work, and things crash and burn dramatically, and it’s hard to build back. So it’s an important book to read, but it has a shadow that isn’t really articulated.
Gordon Lamphere: I love Atomic Habits, and I’ll have to check out Blitzscaling. The most important question on the podcast: the whole reason for it is to find insightful individuals in real estate, and one of the best ways is to ask individuals in real estate. Who should we reach out to for the next couple of podcasts?
Corinne Murray: You should absolutely talk to Denise Brouder. She’s founder of Sway Workplace. She doesn’t even come from the real estate world, but she’s created a programmatic, systematized way to help companies move from wherever they are into a hybrid dynamic. She and her team help people move from point A to point B, with all the materials, onboardings, and trainings, and they’ve created a really effective product that helps people get a 360 understanding of what needs to be done. She sees hybrid as a business choice, not a real estate choice, which is an important distinction that real estate supports, and she’s really great at that articulation. I’d also say Sarah Escobar from Riot Games. She and I are co-writing a book at present, so I’m a big fan of hers. Prior to Riot, she was independent with her own company, and she’s been working in tech and entertainment real estate and workplace for years. She’s worked at Hulu and Netflix, so she’s been all around the block.
Gordon Lamphere: Those are some very interesting workplace cultures. We have a client in a similar world, and their workplace is always interesting. The last question, probably the second most important: what’s the best way to get in touch with you if somebody wants more insight on workplace culture and the evolution of the workplace?
Corinne Murray: I’m relatively active on LinkedIn, and you can find my website at agate.studio. Shoot me a note there and it’ll go straight to my inbox. Those are my two main places right now, and then when I’m lucky enough to be on podcasts.
Gordon Lamphere: Thank you so much for hopping on today. We got a lot of value out of it, and we hope to have you on in the future. Thanks again to Corinne. We appreciate her insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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