How to Motivate Return to Office

Speaker 0: your recent survey uncovered insights about what motivates canadians to return to the office. can you share some of the most surprising findings?

Speaker 1: yeah. absolutely. okay. so i'll just i'll just read a couple of these out to you. so we did this survey. what we wanted let me tell you why we did the survey. so there's a lot in the paper about people not wanting to come back to the office and, you know, like, the fed and, know, amazon. and there's a number of large occupiers that have said they wanna have everybody back to the office five days a week. and there was a lot of people saying that they didn't wanna do it for a lot of different reasons. but what we hadn't heard and when i looked in the media, i just did not see a lot of tangible, quantifiable information that would lead us to understand why. like, why do people not wanna go to the office? you can make the assumption that's because they wanna work out of their pajamas or walk their dog in the middle of the day and all those sort of things. and, like and maybe that's true to some extent. but i believe that there may be a supply side issue, right, that we're not recognizing here. and maybe there is a way to get people back to the office, and maybe may when office, assumptions that we know why they're saying they don't wanna come back to the office. and i think it's easy to jump to conclusions on that. so we put this survey together to understand and ask people, what is it about your workspace? you're coming back to the office space, mandated, whatever the case may be. what is it about your workspace that makes it attractive, not attractive? what would get you there? so we did this. it was an independent survey. we commissioned it and a couple of things. so fifty four percent, said of of the survey respondents said that their workspace was outdated, and forty seven percent say that it's out of touch with their existing needs. so when you look at that, that's, you know, the fifty four percent that is outdated, and it doesn't work for their needs. you're you're essentially cutting out half of your workforce saying that it's a supply side problem. the workspace doesn't work. you're asking me to come back to the workspace, but the workspace doesn't work. in addition to that, when you when you take it a step further and say, like, what would okay. fine. but what would draw you back to the office? what are the elements? we talked about going back to the earn the commute. like, what is it that would draw you back to the office? and this was really interesting. so seventy six percent of canadians say a well designed office space with perks, snacks, beverages, central location, and amenities would entice them to return to the office. so over three quarters said, yeah. i would go if it was worth going, basically. right?

Speaker 0: yeah. you know, it funny. i just wanna interrupt for a second. it yeah. i've talked about this on several occasion, and there's always listeners who come at me when i talk about food is one of the most motivating things to get people in the office. you know? it's not money. it's food. and i because, you know, you assume you're already getting paid a certain amount. right? enough to make you work and stuff. so there's at that level. but yeah. the donuts, the snacks, so this and that. and your survey just proves my point yet again. but a lot of times people come out and say, no. money is not gonna motivate me whatever, but maybe there's a case individually, but what makes people happy is that shared experiences, and that food brings people together.

Speaker 1: so you nailed it, craig. so that is one of the things that was surprising to me. like, it wasn't intuitive. like, the, you know, the people that we have in our space, these are all high income earners. okay? so a free sandwich doesn't really matter to them. you know? they don't care about saving ten bucks. right? but i will tell you that people congregate around food. so we have a breakfast offering in the morning where we put out, you know, bagels and pastries and and juice and, and yogurt. and people go because they want the food, but the food becomes what connects the people together because everybody comes down to get the food. right? the, you know, it's the concept of breaking bread together. right? you connect with someone when you break bread together. right? and it it takes that and multiplies it into, like, into a community where people are getting together around the food. so when you create this curated food experience, it is really interesting to look at, like, the human behavior, like, how that works. so we have snacks, like, like, healthy snacks that we put out in all of our kitchens, and we call them, like, a trail mix snack bar. so people can get these things all day long. so you can so if you're you're a little bit hungry in the afternoon, you can grab that or throughout the day, that's not what does it. like, not the snacks. what does it is when we put the food out in the morning, we say breakfast is available in the morning, come on in the morning. what does it is when we do happy hour on thursdays, it's for one hour, and we have everybody come down between three thirty and four thirty, and our lounges are bumping. right? and it's because we have food and we have, you know, we have we have couple of drinks available to them when they come down. and peep again, people congregate around that. the food and beverage offering is just so important, and it's something that we have very much invested in heavily, especially on the other side of covid, even more so. so you talk about trends and the future, the food and beverage offering very much is is very important. and markets that are leading the coworking industry, like london and sydney, two places i've been in the last year, they all have extensive food and beverage offerings. at our new location at three zero two bay street, we have a full time barista at that location that provides complimentary coffee and and snacks. and and we have a full time barista in montreal, and they create this really connected, really great experience.

Speaker 0: yeah. every time something like it where there is a full time barista there, there's a lot of conversations happening in the line waiting for their coffee. people don't mind waiting that five minutes or whatever it takes for because one, it's the experience, and two, it's a connection. they're not walking up and walking away. it's taking the time to connect with people and having that experience. and, honestly, i think people really haven't analyzed this enough. it's the multisensual experience of the food, the drink, the people, the emotion that really gets the endorphins flowing for humans and makes that connection matter and happen. and it's a combination of those things. people don't realize it's not the food. it's the endorphin rush you get from having that, the bite of that first donut as well as, you know, talking to these people and the good vibe and all this stuff happening connects you to that workplace and that culture.

Speaker 1: a hundred percent. and, like, you talk about all the things together. i like, i always think about five senses. right? like like, all these things. and to relate that to events, craig, like, think about all the things that you have going all they do is they walk in and they see lots of people there. that's like as an attendee to an event. right? i walk in. i see lots of people there. i thought, oh, you know, the organizer did a good job on this because they got so many people here. right? that's it. what you don't realize is that there's a huge budget on av, right, to create this music, to those big screens that you see. they, know, and then and then, you know, in some instances, like, you're piping in some custom sense into the to the area, like like, they do that at hotels. right? and there's so much going on behind the curtain. it's not one thing. it's all the things, right, that create that experience. then when you put on one of these events and in iq, we're putting on that event every day. and it's always about, like it's a lot of times, it's what you don't see that that creates that cultivating environment, right, in terms of, like, bringing that food in. but designing spaces so that they're you don't have choke points and where people get left out on their own and, you know, creating spaces so that they encourage the connection when people get into that space. so there's just all those elements that you really have to put together to make it a, you know, a successful event and for us to make it a successful workday.