Creating Flexible Work Environments that Support People and Innovation

Joshua Vitulli, Strategy Director, Gensler New York

As a Strategy Lead in Gensler’s New York office, I have an eclectic background that informs my day-to-day. I’m product managing an AI-infused platform for commercial real estate portfolio intelligence. This is about relating spatial, behavioral, and experiential data to understand workplace performance in a more meaningful way. Data talking to data. It’s sometimes read as an efficiency play, but it’s really about funneling interactions to maximize the time we spend together.

I also focus on the built environment for workers beyond the work walls, those other parts of life and living that sustain communities and support equitable economic development. This is about identifying not just the highest-and-best-use for specific properties and spaces but identifying the highest-and-best-opportunity for our clients and communities. We’re really focused on anticipating the aftershocks of the strategic decisions we’re making today – how we establish preconditions in the built environment to catalyze development beyond the project.

First, we need to prioritize thinking about teams when designing for hybrid interactions. If the function of the hybrid workplace is to maximize proximity to people and knowledge, then teams – not individuals – are the core consumer of workplace. The single most important thing for teams in hybrid settings is agency over their environment, the ability to both modify space to enhance collaboration and customize space to support culture. Lived experience has taught us all that teams develop unique patterns for work and subcultures establish insider routines and rituals – but there’s not an Eames chair for that.

This is a massive challenge for human resource departments and corporate real estate leaders alike because precedent and budgets drive toward standardization. In this view, non-negotiables are scaffolding for a team’s agency, and act as a container that allows teams to continuously adapt space to nurture their work patterns, routines, and ritual. A people-centric workplace provides the space and grace to incubate hyper-local cultures that deliver interpersonal and social benefits to incentivize attendance beyond mandated minimums.

Further exacerbating this challenge is a current corporate preference for innovation by acquisition. Organizations are constantly weaving new teams into the tapestry of their existing culture – whether hedge funds recruiting smaller funds, or pharma buying basic research – and integrating new properties into their portfolio. Legacy properties from acquired organizations usually deviate from workplace standards. Rather than impose standards through corporate guidelines, granting spatial agency enables new teams to author a future that blends their history with their present.

Where HR and CRE leaders have an opportunity to deliver a people-centric workplace is events and social activations. People-first organizations are making the pivot from amenity abundance to curated hospitality. Hospitality models deliver tiered levels of service and scale across the portfolio, creating destinations that serve the global population – think Disneyworld – to high-touch offsites catering to executives and high-performing teams.

Talent attraction and retention is undergoing a rethink since the heady days of follow-the-early-stage-tech-company. Trends are fragmenting along identity - it feels more like matchmaking with talent than being the best employer for all talent. Three of the more prominent identities we’re seeing across the spectrum of hybrid environments include:

“This is about relating spatial, behavioral, and experiential data to understand workplace performance in a more meaningful way. Data talking to data”

Workmaxxing - Borrowing from social media trends, these multigenerational organizations believes in-person work correlates to productivity, profit, and career development and benefits from calibrated amenities that maximize working hours, but provides relief and support for mind, body, and soul, at a high level of service.

Weekday(ish) Warriors - Some hybrid organizations with hourglass demographics attract both young talent and retain career professionals, but struggle with the missing middle. For these organizations, workplace and amenities support families and work-life balance (childcare and flexible hours are key considerations). They also benefit from access to technology and people that they wouldn’t have at home.

Digital Nomads - Off-sites are the lingua Franca of remote-first organizations. Whether these are hosted social events or curated work sessions depends on the culture of the organization and intent of the event. Most organizations invest in the off-site experience to amplify the impact of the engagement.

HR needs an AI policy. Despite the hype cycle, the infusion of AI into the workplace introduces potential dangers. While AI might excel at administrative functions and email replies, early experiments have demonstrated chaos results from relying on the technology too early. When researchers Carnegie Mellon staffed a fake software company – TheAgentCompany – entirely with AI agents, the limitations become obvious:

• The highest performing model struggled to finish 24 percent of the tasks assigned, requiring 30 steps on average, and costing a prohibitively expensive $6 of energy per task.

• During one task, an agent couldn’t find the right ‘person’ in the company chat… so it decided to rename another ‘person’ to the name of the intended user.

• The agents also struggled navigating the internet.

The first step of infusing AI into the workplace is data management. The most significant advantages come from proprietary and unique training data. Most companies we work with have vast amounts of data, but lack the structure to use the data without refinement and enrichment. When the data has been cleaned, the AI models can begin training.

Once the model is ready, it’s time for a conversation with the workforce to share the vision. It’s not about how AI is going to take your job. It’s about how AI is going to make your job easier and probably more meaningful. Nobody loves getting paid to answer the most emails. Instead, we should focus on building custom agents that augment human ability and become superpowers. If I train AI on my search history and annotate my research, I want the agent to replicate my results and save time. If successful, I want to develop a collection of agents across my workflows.

Without defaulting to science fiction, other emergent technologies that might affect the workplace include spatial computing, adaptive sensory experiences and regenerative wellness. Access to these emergent technologies and experiences could attract people to the office.

• Spatial computing might allow teams to collaboratively manipulate information to create new products or services.

• Adaptive sensory experiences would respond to team interactions and adjust lighting, scent profiles, or soundscapes to elevate collaboration and creativity.

• Regenerative wellness supports the health of the workforce while delivering spa amenities to teams on the edge of burnout.

Build a data foundation – Calibrating the workplace experience requires data that capture the utilization and performance of teams in relation to space. Buildings must learn from their occupants. This requires installing “eyes and ears” to sense activity so that AI and other systems can “know” the adjustments that should be made.

Hire an agentic vibe coder - In fact, hire lots of them and embed them in teams. Everyone, on every one of your teams, should have access to a suite of AI agents - that have been personalized and tested - in their workflows. Lowering the cognitive load for rote tasks reserves mental energy for collaboration and creativity.

Don’t forget the human-in-the-loop – Generative AI is a black box – even to the researchers and scientists building the technologies. Already famous for hallucinations, invented languages, and glazing, humans are needed to verify the outputs AI produces.

AI

Data Management

Human Resource

Cognitive