The Office Crisis & Why Work Feels Broken With Cali Williams Yost – RFP 84 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:04): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Cali Yost, CEO and founder of the Flex+Strategy Group. Cali has been a thought leader in hybrid and flexible work since the late ’90s. We take a deep dive into how companies can drastically improve workplace productivity through intentionally redefining their work models, effective space utilization, and the importance of engaging mid-career employees. From Cali’s perspective, the future looks bright, but most businesses have a lot of work to do to fully optimize their workforces and workspaces. If you’re a CEO, COO, or HR director, today’s podcast is well worth a listen. Cali, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Cali Williams Yost (01:11): Gordon, I am thrilled to be here.
From Banker to Work Flexibility Strategist
Gordon Lamphere (01:14): I wanted to start with what got you into the workspace world, the world of productivity, and the world of real estate.
Cali Williams Yost (01:25): I’m in the world of real estate by way of flexible work models, and I got into that, believe it or not, back in the late ’90s. I was a banker with a team of bankers working for me. I was a junior manager in training, and I didn’t have any kids myself. We lent to closely held companies, so the banker-customer relationship was really important. We were in Manhattan, and I was losing bankers to what my late-twenty-something mind saw as a lack of flexibility in the way they worked.
It just made sense to me, because I had no preconceived notions of how it should go down. So I suggested to my leadership, “Why couldn’t they just work from home a couple of days a week?” You would have thought I was speaking another language. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Cali.” So it got me thinking, and I realized there was a nascent group of people rethinking work at that time. I hooked into what they were doing and read about them, and finally I decided, “You know what, this is the future.” I went to Columbia Business School to become a work flexibility strategist. I was probably the first person to walk through the doors of Columbia Business School in 1993 saying I’d be a work flexibility strategist. But it was there that I pulled a lot of these pieces together for the first time. They had a wonderful real estate program, a wonderful operations program, and a wonderful management of organizations program, so I started to thread the needle across all these different ways of working. That’s how I got into it, and here I am today, all these decades later.
Three Changes That Reshaped Work
Gordon Lamphere (03:13): A lot has changed between the ’90s and today. What do you think the biggest change has been, and what are you seeing in the workplace right now?
Cali Williams Yost (03:28): I think there have been three main changes since the late ’90s. Obviously, technology has made a big difference. It allowed us to untether. I used to say that before the late ’90s, clocks and walls told us when work ended and life began. After that, with mobile phones and laptops, we could work wherever and whenever we wanted. That was a big, big change.
The second big change is demographic. As technology became the way we do things, each successive generation has had different expectations about where and when work needs to happen. So you have this interesting meshing of different contexts for what work is.
And finally, obviously, COVID. Never in my wildest imagination would I have imagined that a pandemic would hit and, within literally days, the entire world would transition from a pretty much place-based, traditional work model mindset, which by the way was already becoming much more flexible, to one where we weren’t going in at all. And I had no idea it would last so long. Now we’re coming back and saying, that was a crisis response. It wasn’t thoughtful or intentional. So how do we do this on the other side? That’s what I’m excited about.
Redefining the Operating Model, Not Just the Policy
Gordon Lamphere (04:56): So how do we do it intentionally on the other side? We work with a wide range of clients, on everything from five thousand square foot deals to thirty or forty thousand square foot deals, trying to help clients get their employees back into the workplace. How do we readdress work in the post-2020 world?
Cali Williams Yost (05:19): I like to say it’s about stepping back, because we’re being very reactionary. We’re trying to do this by policy, and really this is about redefining our operating models. That’s a different approach. I think of it as taking the best of what we learned over the last five-plus years, because not everything was horrible. There were good things. Then you add back the things that are definitely missing. What I consistently hear is missing is development, collaboration, maybe some innovation, and culture. Those are pretty consistent themes.
So what does that look like in a high-performance, flexible work environment where people perform at a high level across places, spaces, and time? You define those parameters for your organization, because everybody’s going to be different. The problem is we keep thinking that a one-size-fits-all mandate is going to work. Then people get into the office and don’t do anything different than they did at home, so they think, “This is a waste of my time.” We have to look at this as more of a work transformation approach, and that definitely includes real estate, because real estate is an important enabler of a flexible work model.
I’ll say one more thing, and then I want to hear what you have to say. I think there’s a new math for space. We have to look at the calculation around space a little differently, because people have to move through that space effectively to optimize their work. That might mean there’s more unutilized space for periods of time in that model, and it’s still valid and worth the investment. We just have to think about it a little differently.
The New Math of Office Space
Gordon Lamphere (07:12): Can you expand on that unutilized space model? That’s something our client base has a tremendous amount of interest in. You go into their offices, and some of their spaces are as crowded as can be while others look like a ghost town. What are you seeing?
Cali Williams Yost (07:33): There are two things. First, you have to start by defining the model. What are you going to do when you’re in person, and what are you going to do when you’re not? Then you begin to see the type of work you’ll do when you’re in the space together. If you organize and design the space to support and enable that work, it will help make sure the space you have is being used as well as it can be.
Second, I’ll give you an example. I was on a panel with the global workspace strategist for LinkedIn, and he told me something that really made sense. As an organization, they’ve found that different groups come in two to three days a week, and they’ve essentially removed Fridays from their space utilization calculation. Fridays are just how it is. What they’re doing is adjusting the support services in the space on Fridays, but obviously they’re still carrying the space itself. He explained that their flexible work model means Fridays are going to be light, but the way people use their spaces on the other days provides an ROI that allows them to carry that space.
Gordon Lamphere (08:59): It’s interesting. Fridays and Mondays tend to be ghost towns in offices generally, and then you show up on a Wednesday and think, “Are we back in 2019?”
Cali Williams Yost (09:09): I know, right?
The Clash of Contexts
Gordon Lamphere (09:11): So there’s a disconnect between days of the work week, but there’s also a disconnect between how C-suite executives see work and how everybody else does. What do you see in that gap, and how is it playing out?
Cali Williams Yost (09:27): I call that the clash of contexts, and we’ve been in it for literally years now. C-suite leaders grew up with a context for work that was on site and in person, doing your work and exchanging ideas. They don’t necessarily see the workplace as an enabler rather than the core.
Then over here you have another group, which is super interesting. Anyone who’s entered the workforce in the last five to seven years almost has no context for what the workplace can support and enable. They’re very tech focused and know how to use technology, but it’s almost like you have to reintroduce them to what happens when you’re in a space together.
So the challenge, and the opportunity, is to find a C-suite leader who’s insightful enough to say, “There are things about being in person that still matter. But I’m not going to worry so much about getting bodies in an office and counting days in the office. I’m going to worry about how we optimize the in-person interactions that matter, wherever they happen.” Then build back from there to ask which aspects require an office and how to support them.
There’s a great professional services organization that went through this exercise. What was super interesting is that post-pandemic, they found that many of their clients, where they’d usually go on site for periods of the year, no longer had adequate workspace for them. So they ended up using their own space for the client work they used to do off site. And instead of saying, “You’re assigned to this office,” teams would work out of different offices in different regions depending on where their clients were. Again, it’s about starting with the in-person interactions that matter to achieve the outcomes you think are important: quality, culture, innovation, collaboration, efficiency.
Cali Williams Yost (11:49): Then you figure out how the space supports that, bring everybody together, your C-suite and the younger part of your workforce that doesn’t necessarily understand it yet, define the parameters, and pilot it. What’s so fascinating is that younger people kind of want to be together, but they don’t know what that means. When you bring them in and show them what’s possible, they’re so willing to buy in. Also fascinating is that they start helping other employees who aren’t quite as tech savvy adopt the technology. It’s a true win-win, and that’s what I hope we see more of. But it takes a C-suite leader willing to say, “Yep, that’s my context. It worked for me in a different era, and parts of it still matter. But how do we create a new reality?” That’s the next frontier of how and where we’re going to work together.
Winning Back Mid-Career Employees
Gordon Lamphere (12:49): Have you seen businesses do that effectively and make an effective move back? We’ve seen some great stories in our client base, and some clients who are still struggling.
Cali Williams Yost (13:03): Yes. I’m curious to hear what you’re seeing in your situation too.
Gordon Lamphere (13:09): I think the biggest gap we’ve seen in our practice is a lot of clients struggling to get mid-career employees to come in. It’s a ghost town in the middle. You’ve got your C-suite there.
Cali Williams Yost: Yes.
Gordon Lamphere: And you’ve got your first-, second-, and maybe third-year employees there. Then everybody in the middle says, “I don’t really need to come in. I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to work from home, hang out with my dog, and spend extra time with my kids.” We all get that. But the big gap is that the first-, second-, and third-year employees don’t get to learn from the mid-career employees, who are your institutional and cultural capital.
Cali Williams Yost: Yes.
Gordon Lamphere: So I’m curious how you’re seeing that play out in your practice.
Cali Williams Yost (14:16): In the process I just outlined, those people would play one of two roles: manager or subject matter expert. The manager would be the one leading that interaction. They themselves are involved in defining what’s prioritized when everybody’s in person, how that’s going to work, and what we do when we’re not in person. So they’re really the fulcrum of that change process, and they get bought in by being that leader.
The subject matter expert is part of that process too, and what it shows them is, “I’m not wasting my time by being here.” That’s the top intolerance: “If I’m coming in, and when we’re here I’m basically doing all the things I did at home, this isn’t worth my time.” So again, it’s that change management process, or what I call the change magic process, where you involve people in defining what it looks like and how, when, and where work gets done, and you get alignment. That’s really important.
First you have to assess where you are. You want to know how people really feel about what they’re doing, where they’re doing it, and what’s missing. So it’s about clarity on what you’re trying to solve for, first and foremost. Then you have to align everybody, and alignment is a process. And then, always important, you want to activate: experiment and iterate. You’ll think you have it, then you’ll start doing it and realize you need to make adjustments. It’s all part of a process, but if you involve people and approach it that way, you’ll see a lot more buy-in.
Experimenting Within Parameters
Gordon Lamphere (15:58): What’s the most effective way you’ve seen companies experiment? We’ve brought work strategy experts from WeWork onto the podcast, and the work strategy expert and head of operations at Hulu, and a bunch of other people who’ve experimented in the workplace in various ways, with various degrees of success.
Cali Williams Yost: Yes.
Gordon Lamphere: Where do you see the most effective experimentation in implementing positive culture change?
Cali Williams Yost (16:29): The experimentation has to happen within a set of parameters. You want to define how and where everybody’s going to work, and once those parameters are set, they give people a structure within which to experiment. When people say, “Let’s experiment with everybody picking their own day,” that’s too random. It’s not anchored to an outcome you’re trying to achieve or the work you’re trying to do.
So it requires some initial setup and alignment around where work is going to happen, what’s going to happen where, when, and how. That covers not only on-site work but also remote. You clarify when you’re working. A lot of organizations now work across time zones, so how are you handling time zone fairness? When are you connecting asynchronously versus synchronously? Then there’s technology. You want to pull in the communication and collaboration tools people need to use and make sure adoption is consistent, and you want to make sure any AI transformation that’s happening is pulled into this process as well.
Then you want to make sure people have the competencies to do this well. Make sure senior leaders understand how they’ll have to approach work if you’re going to be effective in this model. Make sure managers know how to lead high-performing, flexible work teams. We only train 44% of our managers globally, and we’re moving toward this whole delayering thing. If you’ve got a super great, well-trained manager in this flexible, high-performing environment, great. Make sure they know how to do it. And we also have to train individuals. You as an individual need a different level of intentionality about planning what you’re going to do when you’re in person and when you’re not, and making sure you’ve adopted all the technology. Then you experiment. You can’t just put a policy in place and experiment. That’s not what this is about. It really is defining that model, experimenting with it, and adapting as you go.
Moving Past “Hybrid” and “Distributed”
Gordon Lamphere (18:48): You mentioned distributed teams, and that’s probably been one of the biggest challenges we’ve seen in helping people find offices and workspaces in general. Where have you seen success stories with distributed teams and the hybrid model? There have been a lot of mixed results across corporate America.
Cali Williams Yost (19:15): This is my opinion, and what I’ve seen work: we stop saying distributed and hybrid. It’s all part of a flexible work model. People are just working across different places, spaces, and time. The hybrid people are still working with the distributed people. So we have to say that this particular group has the ability to be in person with each other on a regular basis, so let’s optimize that. But they also still have to be effective when they’re not in person. How does that loop in the distributed people they have to work with?
So it’s really about setting up the broader model around how and where people work, using technology, and communicating with each other in real time when they’re not together in person, while adding back the in-person interaction that matters, based on the configuration of the team, how much talent and experience it has, and the work it does. Some may be very office-centric and meet on a periodic basis. Others may be like that professional services firm I described, picking the office closest to wherever their engagement is and working there.
And of course you have other models. One global nonprofit I worked with decided, “Every quarter, we’re all coming to one location for a home week.” People from across the globe would come and be in person for that week. Even though a whole portion of their workforce could have some of that in-person interaction on a regular basis, that’s how they decided to roll the distributed part of their workforce into having in-person time as well.
Flexibility Beyond the Office
Gordon Lamphere (21:12): We’ve talked a lot about office workers, and we could dive in even further, but one unique thing I’ve seen in some of your content is flexibility in manufacturing, R&D, and more industrial contexts. I was pretty blown away by that, honestly, because it’s not something we typically see, at least in the Chicago market. How does that play out? Can some of our lessons from remote work translate to the manufacturing world, or is this an office problem with office solutions?
Cali Williams Yost (21:49): That’s why I’m really encouraging us to widen the lens and talk about this as a flexible work model, performing at a high level across places, spaces, and time, and really look at the particulars of each job. It’s interesting: one of Nick Bloom’s most recent research reports found something like twenty-five percent of manufacturing or construction jobs are done remotely. And I’m thinking, see, this is what’s happening. We’re starting to deconstruct jobs. We’re starting to see which part can be done from a remote location and which part requires us to be on site. Whatever little bit can be done remotely, that’s fine. That’s part of the flexibility you can have in that job.
So what I’m seeing is companies starting to deconstruct the work and ask: do we really have to have three sets of shifts in this manufacturing facility, or could we rotate the shifts? I’ve seen teams picking their shifts based on their personal realities, and more part-time work. I’ve seen part-time shift work coming in. It’s thinking creatively not just about where work happens, but when and how. That opens a whole world of possibilities for jobs where people have historically had to be on site. You now have nurses monitoring remote locations where people are hooked up to different monitors, notifying the nurse on site when something changes. Being creative about what work could look like, and how, when, and where it happens, is where I think we need to go.
But here’s the challenge with the word hybrid: it’s very where-centric. It says, “Sorry, if you have to be there, there’s nothing we can do for you.” That’s not right, and it’s not true. Hybrid also implies two locations, and a lot of people work across multiple locations. So when you define the parameters of the model, you have to be able to say, when are you on site in our workspace? When are you out in the field? When are you working from home? What does that look like?
Cali Williams Yost (24:12): Hybrid is just too limiting for that. So I’m encouraged, because a recent Conference Board podcast for the HR community said exactly what I’ve been saying for years: we have to move past hybrid. I was sitting in my car saying, “Yes!” That’s where I think we’re evolving: what is our flexible work model? How do we perform at a high level across these different dimensions? What does that look like for our organization, and how does workspace enable it? That’s the key piece: what is workspace, and how does it help us be successful?
Change Magic
Gordon Lamphere (24:47): So how do workspace and HR enable this? No one was trained for this. I’m a millennial, and a lot of this is relatively foreign to me. I’m trying to learn and educate myself on the possibilities. How do we move forward?
Cali Williams Yost (25:08): This is where I’m really encouraged. I’m hearing more and more conversations about change management, but I prefer to call it change magic, and here’s why. When you engage in this process, I’ve seen it happen every single time: you unlock so much more engagement, innovation, productivity, and well-being. It really is worth it, but it takes time. The historical model of change, where you assess, align everybody, experiment, and iterate, can feel like a lot and can feel like it takes too long. It seems so much easier to put a policy in place, call it a day, and move on.
My message is that I’ve been working with clients since COVID who have moved on. They don’t even need me anymore. They say, “Thanks so much. We’re not talking about this anymore, because we’ve moved on to our high-performing, flexible work model.” How many people are still talking about this? Honestly, are you just not ready to move on from RTO? Because you can move on from RTO if you approach it in a deliberate, thoughtful way.
One thing we add to this is AI. It’s the same process you go through to define your work model: you look at the work. What makes sense for AI and humans together? What makes sense for humans alone? And you integrate that into the whole. There’s so much change management theory, and our work is based on change management theory that’s been around since the ’40s. This isn’t new. We just haven’t really embraced its power, because we haven’t had to. Now we’re in a moment where work is so undefined and overwhelming that we really have to be deliberate about executing change. And workspace is part of it. Actually, that’s where I got most of my business before COVID: organizations saying, “I don’t need all this space.” People were already saying that. We’d go in, define the model, and then optimize the space, and that’s exactly what has to happen today.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere (27:26): I know we could dive into that even further, but let’s get into our Final Four. It’s always a nice way to wrap up the podcast, learn a little more about you, and hear where you see the world of work and real estate going. The first question, and one of my favorites: what do you think will have changed the most about work ten years down the line?
Cali Williams Yost (27:49): I think what will have changed the most is that organizations will have taken the time to define their high-performing, flexible work models, and there will be clarity about the parameters within which people operate across places, spaces, and time. Technology will absolutely be enabling that work, but I also believe workspace will matter. Being in person and interacting with people, in whatever form that takes for each organization, will be important and will matter, but it will be very intentional. And I think we’ll have new math around workspace. Organizations will understand that you may have to carry more space than you thought to facilitate that model. But there will be all sorts of different types of workspace. It’ll be a combination of many things.
I also think we’ll have gotten clarity about which aspects of our work really have to remain human to be real and true, which aspects can be augmented by AI, and which can be AI alone. That will be part of this process as well. We’ll have identified the competencies leaders need to lead these organizations, and how to train managers to lead teams working across these different dimensions. And finally, I think people will be more comfortable and will know what skills they need to be successful in this model. So I’m very optimistic, because we’re at a point right now where we know what we’re doing isn’t working, and that’s when we open up and ask, “How can we do things differently?”
Gordon Lamphere (29:33): One thing people sometimes worry about doing differently is improving their own lives, and some of the best interactions on the podcast have been the advice our experts would give their younger selves. If you had one tidbit of advice for your younger self, what would it be?
Cali Williams Yost (29:59): Trust your vision. I saw this in the, let me think, early ’90s is when I first saw it. It just made so much sense to me, and I kept following that vision. Each step along the way, I found like-minded people and was led to the next thing. So if you see it and believe it, trust yourself and follow it.
Gordon Lamphere (30:27): Beyond trusting ourselves, we love to trust the knowledge of others, and that’s the whole point of the podcast. We come from an industry, real estate, that has a lot of progress left to make. A lot of our industry is way behind, sometimes ten or twenty years behind other industries. One way people can catch up, besides listening to this podcast, is to pick up a book. What would be your top book recommendation for somebody looking to improve how they work, their productivity, or their business?
Cali Williams Yost (31:01): Can I give you two? Is that okay?
Gordon Lamphere (31:03): That’s totally fine.
Cali Williams Yost: All right. I’m going to give you an oldie but a goodie, and then a new one. The oldie but goodie is Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason. It came out in the ’90s, and in it he really projected where we are today in many ways. There’s the shamrock organization, where you have a group of core people on staff and on salary, and then people around the outside
Cali Williams Yost (31:28): working in different ways. I remember reading that book at Columbia when I was in business school, and it was the first time I saw written down what I was seeing. I think he offers a lot of insight and wisdom for this time. You see that this has been coming for a while. It isn’t all that new. It’s just been accelerated, and now we have to meet the moment and do it intentionally. So, The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy.
The new one that I love so, so much is Maggie Jackson’s Uncertain. There’s a lot of uncertainty right now, and I think her book frames uncertainty as a superpower. Instead of running away from it and wanting to have the answer, she shows how data and science tell us that holding that uncertainty is where we unlock our creativity and see the possibilities. So, Uncertain by Maggie Jackson. I highly recommend it.
Gordon Lamphere (32:22): Beyond reaching out and learning from those two books, one of the ways we love to learn on the podcast is by reaching out to other experts in the world of work and real estate. Do you have one recommendation for who we should have on next?
Cali Williams Yost (32:39): Phil Kirschner. He worked at WeWork, and he was the corporate real estate person for Credit Suisse for a long time. He’s doing a great job talking about change management right now. He’s on LinkedIn talking about it and giving speeches about the process of change, and I think that could be really, really beneficial.
Gordon Lamphere (33:04): We’d love to reach out to him. But if someone wants to reach out to you, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Cali Williams Yost (33:10): The best way is to go to our website, flexstrategygroup.com. Also follow me on LinkedIn, and I have a new Substack, The Now and Next of Work. I’d love to connect.
Gordon Lamphere (33:23): Cali, thank you so very much. We really appreciate it, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Cali Williams Yost (33:27): I would love that, Gordon. Thank you so much.
Gordon Lamphere (33:29): Thanks again to Cali. We appreciate her insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find 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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