by Cat Johnson
GCUC UK keynote speaker Antony Slumbers is a proptech expert and workspace thought leader. In part one of this two-part series, I spoke with Slumbers about the evolving ethos and aesthetic of coworking, the automation of tasks rather than jobs, and how the way people work is becoming more human.
In part two, Slumbers shares his insights into what defines a good workplace, designing for particular customer segments, and how the workspace sector moves forward with proptech. Here are the highlights of our conversation.
Cat Johnson: How do you see the workspace industry playing out in London?
Antony Slumbers: In the city of London, 70 percent of all occupied units are less than 10,000 square feet, and 50 percent are less than 5,000 square feet. The reality is, contrary to what a lot of people think, most people work for small companies. The interesting thing here is you got all these all these companies that don’t take that much space, but they got expensive people, and they need to be able to provide them with the with good workplaces.
What defines a good workplace now is so much more complicated than it used to be. Say you had a company with 100 employees. Traditionally, what you do is you buy 100 desks, 100 chairs, 100 computers, 100 telephones. You’d line them up, and that’s it, job done. But that doesn’t work anymore.
But these companies are small, so they don’t have the skills to do this. Who’s going to do it, who’s going to sort their space out for them? That’s a really interesting thing. When I’m talking to landlords, I’m telling them they need to be doing this. When I talk to property management customers, I tell them they should be doing it. I tell third party operators they should keep control over all of this. At the moment we don’t really know who’s doing it.
There’s a need for new business models and possibly new sectors here.
If we just use WeWork as an example, with their Powered by We product, they will go into a company and design your space, monitor your space, manage your space, look after it completely for you. That’s a relative niche in their business now, but I think that’s going to be absolutely vast. I think the coworking sector is going to expand out with a new range of operators so there are service providers that can take any company and say they’ll sort the workplace out for you.
Anyone who’s taking less than 5,000 square feet really needs someone to sort their whole workplace out. Maybe the same applies at 10,000 square feet. I am largely talking about major city central business districts. I’m particularly thinking about the most successful companies in the best areas. They have the most incentive to make sure people are as productive as possible because they’re the most expensive. But unless you’re a large company, you don’t have the skills to do this anymore.
Serving smaller companies means niching down a bit to understand different verticals within the larger workspace industry.
Someone is going to continue to develop new products that are targeted at specific verticals or work departments. I can see a lot more places developing that are for specific industries, such as a global brand for fashion—the WeWork of fashion, or the WeWork of music, or whatever. If you split industries up into the different types of companies, they do different things, so they have different jobs to be done.
I was in a developer’s office recently, a fabulous office in London, probably one of the nicest, most interesting offices I’ve been into. They had a big section which was set up for them working on interior fit-outs. They had lots of materials on the walls, they had tiles and paint samples and color swatches and all this other stuff.
If you’re in the interior design business, you need those types of spaces. If you’re in the music business, you need a studio. If you’re in the media business, you probably need a podcast room. My instinct is that the operators of spaces are going to hone in on understanding their particular customer and design their brand and their product for a particular customer segment. And then really go for that and tailor particularly for that.
This is not dissimilar to the hotel model.
Right. Four Seasons know exactly the type of people who go to the Four Seasons, and a DoubleTree by Hilton, they all know exactly who their customer is and what they’re trying to do. Then they provide that.
I see a huge demand growing, but it’s not obvious who’s going to who’s going to fill it. It could be different people. As I said, I tell landlords—the big ones—they need to get in and really get to grips with this themselves. Because if they don’t, if what I’m saying is true, they’re going to end up leaving a lot of money on the table.
Real estate people are not shy about being greedy. This is not an industry that’s going to want to leave a lot of money on the table. Over the next five years, it’s going to be a really strong, competitive market between the people coming from the coworking side and the other side who, just a couple of years ago, were happy to let Adam Neumann from WeWork do it. We know where we’re going, but I don’t know who’s going to win in the end.
With workplace tech, there are already things like automatic check-in, and ordering a latte in your coworking space from your phone. What does next-level workspace tech look like? When you’re talking about big shifts in workplace tech, what will see?
The other day I heard a chap talking about the definition of smart buildings. His line, which I don’t necessarily disagree with, was that a lot of the things we think about as smart buildings are just a high performing building. It’s just a building that performs well.
A smart building, on the other hand, is one that understands what future requirements are going to be within it, and adapts accordingly. It’s one thing being able to go into a room and adjust all the different settings. That’s high performing, but that’s still dumb. When the room actually understands what is going on and does it all for you, that’s much smarter.
How does the workspace sector move forward with proptech?
The real key going forward is that we need much better granular data on how our buildings are performing. We need to know that over there is really warm and over there is cool; we need to know how many people come on Wednesdays, and how many come on Fridays; how many people come in at 10 o’clock in the morning, how many come at four o’clock in the afternoon, and what happened; we need to know when those lights are going to fade; what’s the air quality; what’s the light quality; and all these things. We’re going to need to understand much more about how people really are using the space.
It’s the hardware plus software plus services analogy. The hardware is the building, the software is your standard tracking and utilization stuff, then the services is a layer on top of that where we understand the reality of our space better. We understand the wants, needs and desires of occupants so the building will reflect better for them. All the really interesting technology is going to be about understanding physical usage, and human usage, and really starting to understand how one impacts the other.
The potential impact here—on work and workspace—is transformative on a lot of levels.
A really good workplace will not make a bad company a good company, but it can make a good company better. Real estate cannot affect a company’s volatility. But we do know the impact of noise, we do know the impact of temperature, we do know the impact of daylight, we do know the impact of air quality. Endless research enables us to say there is a direct impact or cognitive function. At the very least, we should be ensuring that our buildings are working at their optimum.
In my mind, it’s all going to be about tech that can help us provide an environment that enables people to be as productive as possible. It’s really a refocusing of the industry around people rather than rather than property. Historically, the focus was on the real estate and the size. But that’s actually the wrong measurements. The measurements have to be whether a building enables employees to be as productive as possible.
All the technology that really focuses on the people side is what’s going to be really interesting. Now, obviously, a lot of that has to start with the real estate, but the real estate is not the output. The output that we’re really after is a productive workforce. The impact on making people more productive, or as productive as they can possibly be, absolutely outweighs everything. You’ve got to have a great brand story around this. You’ve got to be saying, this is why you should be interested in my brand, because we’re the people who can help you do this.
Antony Slumbers is the keynote presenter at the upcoming GCUC UK coworking conference in London 23-24 September. Reserve your tickets now to learn more about workspace AI, proptech and the future of the industry.
[ssba-buttons]