More than a dozen workplace leaders, from companies including Twitter, Uber, and Zendesk, came together in late May at Okta’s San Francisco offices for Density’s VIP event, Beyond Work Experiences: San Francisco.
Beyond Work Experiences is our ongoing events series where workplace and real estate leaders come together for dinner, drinks, and a lively discussion about the future of work.
Guests to our San Francisco event also got a guided tour of Okta’s San Francisco offices.
Key themes from our discussion
Industry leaders Omar Ramirez and Corinne Murray lead a discussion about the future of work. Photo by Khalil Robinson.
Listen to employees
Meet employees where they are. That was one of the biggest themes of our event. If you don’t know the pain points and challenges of the people who use your spaces, you can’t create a better workplace experience for them.
One example: The shift to unassigned seating may leave employees anxious about where they can sit when they come to the office. They have no place to put their coffee cup.
Having open conversations with employees can help you understand how they’re feeling, so you can create solutions (like team-based neighborhoods).
Surveys are, of course, one way to gather employee feedback. So too are roundtable discussions and employee portals.
Density CMO Aleks Strub with Seth Lustyan (Uber/CBRE) and Jeremy Kopstein (Uber). Also seen are Brooke Lierman and Assal Yavari, of Okta. Photo by Khalil Robinson.
Fail Fast
Developing a workplace strategy today should be viewed as a program, not a project. There is no set end date when your work is done. Experiment quickly and often. Some tips from industry leaders:
Work with an MVP mindset. You don’t have to build the final version right now.
Set experiments with specific timelines and project leaders (think DRI, or directly responsible individual).
Make sure stakeholders know, from the start, that your experiments will take time to measure and assess.
Communicate often. If end-users don’t know a design is a prototype or experiment, they’ll likely reject what you’re testing. Let them be a part of the journey.
Make feedback easy. Your end-users are busy, so simplify the feedback loop.
Beyond Work Experiences guests tour Okta’s speakeasy room. Photo by Khalil Robinson.
Get data that matters
Everyone wants data. But not all data is useful or ideal.
It’s hard to get employees to adopt to reservation systems, for example. If employees don’t use the system, you can’t leverage its data.
Privacy-focused data was a big topic during our roundtable discussion as well. Employees have demonstrated a distaste for systems that capture any personally identifiable information, including badge data.
The takeaway from workplace leaders at our event is it’s nearly impossible to rebuild trust. If you don’t need to capture PII — don’t.
Lastly, a key milestone for the next six months is figuring out how to combine qualitative and quantitative data to unearth the story of the workplace. Companies that achieve that will create better employee experiences and more efficient spaces.
The dessert course from Beyond Work Experiences: San Francisco. Photo by Khalil Robinson.
Today is the first in a new series about what our product teams are building at Density.
We plan to give you an early look at the products, prototypes, tools, and technology we’ve been investing in behind the scenes. While everything we share here is subject to change, we believe there is more value in being open about what we’re building than doing so behind closed doors.
Since our founding, eight years ago, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the science of how people use buildings. But we’ve always learned the most when talking to you: our community and customers. You are experts in the design and management of the most iconic workplaces in the world.
Our beliefs about buildings, the hybrid workplace, remote and “dynamic work,” and the ingredients for a sustainable future have all been shaped by thousands of conversations with you all. Building in Public is meant to facilitate more of these conversations out in the open.
We’re going to share and talk about our work openly because we believe it will make our products better. We’ll get more critique, more criticism, more copycats — but we’ll learn faster than we would if we just built in the dark.
We’ve always learned the most when talking to you: our community and customers.
The Atlas Project
Up first is an internal project we call “Atlas.” The project focuses on navigation, labeling, and benchmarking. Atlas was designed to improve on our current analytics platform.
Our customers manage billions of square feet of space. These office portfolios can range from 250k square feet to 50m+. When you’re operating at that scale, the datasets can get overwhelming and it can be easy to lose track of how and why all this space is used.
Customers want fast, data-rich systems, that make benchmarking the performance of any given space or building a breeze.
Labeling & Space Functions
A building is like a nesting doll. Rooms within floors, floors within buildings, buildings within a campus, and so on. The right context can breathe life into these space types. It just requires the right tooling.
In the interface, as an example, you’ll notice a comparison between Focus and Collaboration. These are spaces that have been explicitly designed for those two types of work and categorized as such. The goal is to help users measure the performance of a space against its purpose not just its capacity.
Most software limits context to a space’s name, location, and a generic utilization metric. And we’re no exception. Humans deserve more nuance than “% occupied.”
Atlas is designed to change this. Everywhere you go, you will encounter a space’s context (e.g. team assignment, room amenities, space purpose, relative size, geo-location, similarity to other spaces, and eventually anomalies).
You can also see a snapshot of the most-used desk types or amenities — “traits” inherent to a space. They can be as unique or as general as you please.
The more you use labels, the more interesting your queries should become. Like a video game, the more you play, the more utility you get. Software should be fun.
Navigation
Mini-maps are useful because they provide context and situational awareness. This map is designed to do the same.
First, you’ll always know where you are. In large datasets, it’s easy to lose the context of the data you’re analyzing. If you’ve ever spent any time deep in an Excel sheet building a report about “return to office” spanning a million sqft of space over six regions and two timezones, you’re probably familiar with the hours of painstaking detail and various datasets it requires to normalize and report on even the most basic questions about use.
Second, the map changes with the scope of your question. If you’re wondering if your San Francisco teams are using the office neighborhoods allocated to them, you can select the region and your mini-map and the scope of its associated data (locations, spaces, capacity, sqft, etc) will all adjust live.
We have a number of exciting things coming to this feature that will expand on the map’s native capability.
Benchmarking
Over the years, we’ve learned there’s a simple but often forgotten second part to the question: “How often do people use X?” What most users are really asking is: “How often do people use X when compared to Y?” It seems comparison (at least in real estate) is at the heart of understanding.
We’ve tried to bake benchmarking into as many places in Atlas as possible. Wherever you see a blue ⚡, there is a comparison against a broader dataset. This is a benchmark. The goal is to unearth relative performance everywhere you go.
Although Atlas is designed to have a helpful opinion, you’re able to modify the benchmark at any time. In other words, compare against anything (and as much as) you’d like.
Atlas is also more literal. Utilization, Occupancy, Time Used, Dwell Time, Surplus, Time at Target. These are all now fast, explicit, and pre-defined metrics.
Quality of Life improvements
Atlas is a snappy and forgiving interface. It’s borderline fun. Our goal is to give you tools you love to use. To do that, we’re trying to build tools we love to use. In that spirit, there are lots of little quality of life improvements to Density’s core platform in Atlas v1.
Here are a few:
Response times (on the largest queries) are now measured in milliseconds. It’s fast. Like 10x faster than our current system.
Drop-downs are forgiving. They won’t disappear on you if you move your mouse off-target.
Benchmarking is visible everywhere, editable, and active by default.
Icons are easier to understand and the system has been designed for legibility and comprehension.
And there are tooltips explaining how we did our math, the definition of a metric, or how a widget works.
Availability
Atlas’ benchmarking and API will be available to a small set of customers in July, and the landing or “insights page” will follow. We’ll be expanding access and pushing updates throughout the Summer.
Atlas is in active development with updates pushed every week. If you have any questions or feedback or just want to push our thinking, please feel free to contribute in the comments of our accompanying LinkedIn post.
And if you’re a Density customer and would like early access, you can send us an email at atlas@density.io.
Andrew Farah, Density CEO
ps. At the moment, “Atlas” is just an internal codename but I kind of dig it as a potential product name.
The benefits of onboarding are well documented: higher employee engagement, faster time to proficiency, increased productivity, and lower turnover, to name a few.
But the world of work has changed dramatically in the last two years, and traditional onboarding isn’t enough to support the new hybrid workforce. Pre-employment onboarding is a better strategy for the modern office, especially those with hybrid or remote models.
What is pre-employment onboarding?
Pre-employment onboarding, or pre-boarding, happens between the time a new hire accepts the job offer and their official start day. During this time, new employees tackle many traditional first-day tasks, such as completing tax forms, reviewing the employee handbook, and setting up accounts for company email and software.
Why waste a new hire’s enthusiasm and energy on a mountain of tasks that don’t move your company forward? It’s more efficient to get those out of the way early, so your employee can hit the ground running on their first day.
In addition to being a more effective use of time, pre-boarding can also guard against ghosting. The longer you wait between the words “you’re hired” and the start of onboarding, the higher your chance of being ghosted. Considering that 65% of employers report hiring people who never show up, getting your new employees engaged immediately is essential.
Why hybrid offices need pre-employment onboarding
Pre-boarding is great for all types of companies, but it can be especially useful for hybrid offices. Hybrid is hugely in demand from employees, and it offers many great benefits for businesses; however, it does come with unique onboarding challenges:
It can be harder for new employees to integrate into a hybrid office. With employees’ varying in-office schedules, the new worker may never be in the office at the same time as many of their colleagues.
Information overload is more likely to go unnoticed. In a physical office setting, it’s easy for an onboarder to recognize the deer-in-headlights look of an overwhelmed new hire, and they can slow things down, reassure the worker, and repeat any missed information. In a virtual setting, it’s unlikely anyone will notice that the new employee is feeling stressed or confused, so there’s no opportunity to reset and ensure the experience stays positive.
IT issues plague virtual onboarding. 90% of new hires experience IT problems during remote onboarding. When tech issues happen in the office, it’s easy for a new employee to find someone to help or switch to an analog task. In a remote environment, everything depends on technology, so the worker is left anxiously twiddling their thumbs while they wait for IT to work its magic.
Pre-employment onboarding can address these problems by providing valuable adjustment time before a new hire’s official start date. In traditional onboarding, there’s often an unstated but ever-present expectation to get these tasks done quickly so the new hire can move on to their real work. Tech problems and information overload have less impact during pre-boarding because there’s no time pressure.
Pre-boarding also gives new employees more time to get to know their colleagues before they’re expected to start seamlessly collaborating with them. When done right, pre-employment onboarding provides ample opportunities for new hires to begin integrating into the team well before their first official day on the job.
6 pre-employment onboarding ideas for hybrid companies
Send your team a message about their new colleague. Informing people about a new hire lays important groundwork for team integration. Include a little personal background information about the new employee, detail the role they’ll be filling, and invite colleagues to reach out with personalized welcome messages.
Let the new hire meet their colleagues, either in a physical or virtual setting. The goal is to have them meet the people they’ll be interacting with regularly so they can start to form connections. This can take the form of a team Zoom chat or a meetup at a local restaurant for lunch. This may seem like a small gesture, but it can impact how valued a new hire feels.
Create a welcome kit. Starting a new job comes with countless little questions that can lead to a lot of stress. A welcome kit answers these and helps put workers at ease. A great way to identify the best information to include in your welcome kit is to poll current employees about what they wish they’d known when they first started. A few ideas: Let new hires know how to get into the building on their first day, what time to “clock in” when working virtually, whom to contact if they have IT problems, and etiquette for communication channels (e.g., Slack for quick questions and socialization, email or video for complex discussions).
Create a pre-employment onboarding schedule. During pre-boarding, new hires are likely still finishing their notices at former jobs. It’s important to clearly outline what days and times pre-boarding will happen and whether it will be virtual or in-office. Set expectations by letting them know what tasks and topics you’ll cover at each session.
Get paperwork out of the way. Don’t waste your new hire’s first-day energy and enthusiasm on administrative tasks. During pre-boarding, have them complete their paperwork, set them up with a company email and business tools such as Slack or Google Drive, and go over the employee handbook.
Assign new employees a mentor or buddy. The virtual aspects of onboarding can leave hybrid workers feeling isolated and forgotten. Assigning a mentor to stick with new hires from pre-boarding through the first several weeks of work ensures that they always have someone to reach out to, whether they have a question or just need a connection to remind them they’re part of a team.
Microsoft introduced the “buddy” system and has seen remarkable results; 86% of new hires who met with their buddy between four and eight times during onboarding reported feeling more productive in their roles.
In this competitive labor market, hybrid companies need to maximize the effectiveness of their onboarding processes. Moving from traditional to pre-boarding can help prevent new hires from ghosting, get them up to speed more quickly, and help reduce exorbitant turnover costs. The tips above can help you create a positive pre-employment onboarding experience that will engage workers and get them to proficiency quickly.
Workplace experience surveys give your employees a voice, allowing them to shape their work environment. When you optimize the workplace experience, you raise morale, increase engagement, and improve retention, all of which are crucial to maintaining a successful business.
There are several best practices for workplace experience surveys that ensure you receive quality feedback. We’ve put together a checklist of eight tips to help you create a positive and effective employee experience survey.
8 tips for designing effective employee surveys
A good survey experience begins with your company culture. Your company culture plays a decisive role in how comfortable your employees feel being honest with their opinions. Honest responses are essential to developing office design and effective workplace strategies. Establish an environment where constructive criticism is valued by all levels of leadership. With that in place, you’ll reduce the effects of social desirability bias, which occurs when respondents give you the answers they think you want to hear.
Allow employees to answer surveys anonymously. Even in the most supportive company culture, employees may still feel uncomfortable being completely honest with their feedback. Giving them the benefit of anonymity will help you collect the most accurate and helpful information.
Be transparent about your goals for the survey. Employees will be more likely to provide thoughtful answers if they know how the survey results will affect them. Emphasize that the workplace experience survey helps your team create a work environment that supports everyone.
Provide free-form areas for additional feedback on questions. Allowing employees to provide context about their answers can provide priceless insights and ideas for your team. Surveys with open response areas require more time to evaluate than straightforward multiple choice answers, but the potential for higher quality data is worth the extra time investment.
Include definitions to clarify terms. Everyone must be on the same page about what specific terms mean in the survey. Let’s say you asked, “Do you feel that your manager is accessible and supportive?” An employee who reports to both an assistant and senior manager may not know how to answer. You can address this by stating at the start of the survey that all questions about “managers” refer to your most senior manager.
Be transparent about survey results and anticipated changes. Employees will grow tired of putting effort into survey feedback if they don’t see any changes to the status quo. You don’t have to have a concrete plan before informing employees about the direction you’re looking at. Here is an example post-survey script: “Thank you for completing our hybrid work survey. Your thoughtful feedback allowed us to see that we have some work to do in areas of equitable experiences between in-office and remote workers. We are developing new strategies to improve the hybrid experience for all workers and will keep you informed of anticipated changes.”
Avoid survey fatigue by keeping surveys under 10 minutes long. Surveys longer than this often have high dropout rates. Eliminate repetitive questions or ones you can answer with existing organizational data. Also, let people know how long you expect the survey to take. This makes it easier for employees to work the survey into their schedules.
Do surveys more than once a year. Attitudes and opinions can change quickly in the workplace, and it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of the employee experience. Consider conducting workplace experience surveys quarterly or every six months. This will keep your data fresh and allow you to identify trends more quickly than you could with an annual survey.
Example questions for your workplace experience survey
Your survey questions should be tailored to your end goal, so it’s important to nail down the core objective first. Do you want to know how the workplace is performing overall, or are you trying to determine how certain policies are working out? The specific questions you need will depend on your survey goal; however, you can find inspiration for survey questions below.
Do you feel like you can be your true self in the workplace?
Do you feel that employee well-being is prioritized in the office?
Would you recommend our organization as a good place to work?
Do you have the technology and equipment you need to work remotely?
Are you physically comfortable in the office?
Do you feel empowered to reconfigure a workspace to fit your needs?
Are you satisfied with the number of conference rooms in the office?
Is there any additional information you’d like to share about your workplace experience?
Use these sample questions and the tips above to help your workplace team create an effective employee survey. The more feedback and data you can collect about the office, the more tailored and successful a workplace you can create.
Adopting a hybrid work model isn’t a “follow this playbook” strategy. There are many types of hybrid work — not all types will work for you.
To build the best hybrid work model for your team, your company culture, and your organization’s long-term goals, you must first get familiar with the many options in front of you.
Office-centric hybrid
What: Office-centric hybrid lets employees work from home as long as they visit the physical office space a number of days per week.
Why: To provide some flexibility without sacrificing serendipity and the human touch. It’s the lowest rung on the hybrid ladder and can either be a welcome policy or a dealbreaker for employees, depending on how you roll it out.
An office-centric hybrid strategy can work but your employees need to be able to justify the gains from working onsite several days a week. In many cases, they can’t.
Flexible hybrid
What: An office exists and employees are free to walk in at will but there’s no strict policy demanding that they do.
Why: A flexible hybrid approach is a step ahead of an office-centric model and it offers employees more control over their time.
Digging Deeper
A flexible hybrid strategy works when a company is willing to invest in the technology that makes communication and collaboration possible and as well, design policies to guide the switch.
After nearly two years of working fully remotely, Twitter reopened its offices on March 15, 2022, in a push for a flexible hybrid policy. All employees are still fully remote and they’re not required to work onsite —they just have the option of visiting whenever they feel like it.
Remote-friendly hybrid
What: A remote-friendly hybrid strategy is essentially the same as the flexible hybrid approach we discussed above, but in this case, companies prioritize asynchronous working and there are no strict working hours.
Why: Remote-friendly hybrid work is built on trust and is designed to help teams achieve better work-life balance, whether they choose to meet or work remotely 100%. A remote-friendly model can come in handy when you have a global workforce across different time zones who can’t possibly check in every day.
Digging Deeper
Employees are only required to be accountable to their teams and meet reasonable deadlines so that work can go ahead, no matter their timezone or where they’re located in the world.
Asynchronous work radically opposes the industrial revolution office culture, and as Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic (fully distributed since 2005, with no offices since 2017) puts it, “your customer is not buying how many hours a day people are at their desk. People don’t want a drill, they want a hole in the wall. The old model of work wasted people’s time.”
Remote-first
What: Deviating from a hybrid model, remote-first refers to a workplace where working remotely is the default and companies come to depend on asynchronous communication tools and systems to stay in touch.
Why: Remote-first is the future and it aims to drive productivity without making work the center of an employee’s life. Research shows that remote-first teams are better engaged and ultimately more productive, which in no small part is thanks to an employee-friendly work experience.
Digging Deeper
Notable examples of remote-first companies include Gitlab, Basecamp, Google alternative DuckDuckGo, Toptal, and Buffer.
Gitlab has been fully remote since 2013 when co-founders Dmitriy Zaporozhets (based in Ukraine) and Sid Sijbrandij (Netherlands) started building a company around an open-source project.
Nine years later, Gitlab is a publicly-traded company valued at $6.71 billion, powered by 1,500+ employees across the globe — and still has no physical office.
Likewise, Buffer’s team of 85 is currently distributed across seven time zones spanning 12 hours and crossed $19.7 million in annual recurring revenue in 2021.
The benefits of a hybrid workplace strategy
No matter the strategy you choose, hybrid work offers a variety of benefits.
Increase employee engagement
Hybrid work may reduce the number of hours employees spend on work every day. But it manages to increase productivity while doing that.
Why? If employees can find a balance between their personal and work lives, they can dedicate more bandwidth to their careers and get more done in less time.
Reduce turnover & boost retention rates
Millions of workers are willing to quit if a job doesn’t offer enough flexibility to suit their lifestyle.
Millions of workers are willing to quit if a job doesn’t offer enough flexibility to suit their lifestyle.
Business Insider
Hybrid work helps you compete in a labor market where employees are willing to take a cut in pay to work more flexibly.
Tackle burnout & help staff build better work-life balance
The flexibility hybrid work offers can help your employees take back control of their time, set better boundaries, and achieve more work-life balance.
Save on real estate & onsite utilities
Companies spend anywhere from 2 – 20% on real estate for workspaces.
When you factor in lunches, furniture, gigabit internet, etc. the numbers can look more substantial.
A hybrid workforce will eventually come to rely less and less on physical offices as everyone switches to their preferred work style and as a result, you get to save on rent and utilities.
Making the switch
Be intentional about tackling proximity bias
Proximity bias is the idea that employees who work onsite will be perceived as more productive, responsive, and dedicated, and will have better chances of getting promoted and advancing in their careers.
Hybrid doesn’t work if your remote employees can’t expect fair footing with those working onsite.
Engage employees in the decision-making process
No matter how eloquent your plans to switch to a hybrid model sound, eventually, what matters is the changes it brings about in your company’s culture and your employees’ lifestyles.
Measure your performance and double down on what’s working
Performance assessment starts with asking the right questions to help you understand how your hybrid work policies are affecting your employees (remote workers and their onsite colleagues alike), company culture, productivity, and general employee satisfaction.
This includes questions like:
How quickly are action items getting completed?
Has productivity increased or dropped since your switch to hybrid?
Are employees reporting better work-life balance? Or do you still have managers sending messages over Slack at 10 PM Friday night?
Are employees comfortable unplugging from time to time, or will they face passive aggression for not being “committed enough” to the team?
Do you factor in each team member’s time zone when planning meetings or do certain team members have to jump out of bed by 4 AM to catch up on daily standups?
Invest in asynchronous communications tools, systems, and culture.
The evidence points to the fact that asynchronous communication helps build a better employee experience in the workplace. But there’s more to it than yet another SaaS license.
Signing up for Loom is the easy part, but designing a culture where it’s okay to reply to messages an hour later rather than mashing up your keyboard right away takes more work.
An asynchronous culture includes letting employees design their work schedules, choosing video conferencing and recorded messages over real-time, onsite meetings, and letting hybrid workers optimize for their well-being with flexible working hours.
Stick to the fundamentals of hybrid work
These fundamentals include:
Trust
Assuming good intentions
A commitment to privacy
Giving onsite and remote employees equal footing and opportunities for growth, and
Providing feedback proactively
Build a culture of feedback & set clear expectations
Create onboarding documentation that clearly defines how quickly to manage check-ins, reiterate ideas, reply to messages, take time off, share feedback on projects, etc.
Hybrid work arrangements often fail because boundaries are not clearly defined and employees have to figure it out themselves. As a result, employees and managers have to figure out how to navigate team building alongside their full-time work.
For a hybrid work environment to truly work, you need to design inclusive, yet enforceable policies for how colleagues should communicate, handle deadlines, ship deliverables, and manage their workload, both inside and outside the office space.
