Tim Reitsma: Phil, we are here on the Future of Work podcast for FlexOS, and we're really talking about the future of work for HR professionals. The world of work is changing every single day, it seems. Every time you open up the news, you think of technology; you think of remote work, hybrid work. Everyone's going back to the office, and your expertise or your work in people and places is something we need to unpack because we don't have a magic eight ball.

We don't know what the future of work is going to look like. What's your take on this future of work in the context of the work that you do? 

Phil Kirschner: That's a great question. Thank you, Tim. Look, I've spent my whole career going to be at the intersection of people, place, and technology only because my background is technical.

So I guess I have a keen eye on the tools that we use to get things done. And I fell into the place component early in my career—not that early. I Credit Suisse when getting involved with helping to build a workplace program that became a very large-scale workplace mobility initiative of let's all share things.

It wasn't at the time provocation about remote work. It was; you're not here all the time. The space isn't that great. When you're not here, it's none of my business for all the reasons that you might not be here. But we know that the place that you're in doesn't suit most of the needs that you have.

And I fell in love with that personally and really saw how quickly you have to bring all these different personalities to the table to have that conversation. Because from the employee's perspective, this is just work. They don't care what's an IT conversation. They don't care what's a space conversation.

They don't care who, like if HR owns the policy to them, it's just friction in their day. So we have to collaborate in a new way. And, fast forward, all that COVID has really done is rip the Band-Aid on the lingering, largely managerial concerns around giving employees more autonomy about, in particular, where to be.

And that is where we are now. Like the employees have gotten a taste of the good life and find themselves fighting against an organization that largely as managers are still used to a dynamic that is outdated now, but it's easier to push people back than to have to change the way they work in order to accommodate this new feature.

Tim Reitsma: It's this new future, but it isn't that new yet. And yet we're seeing and hearing all this resistance. And I dabble in this world of HR. And so I know firsthand how hard it is. It's on HR folks where we're responsible for so many aspects of the business.

And an HR person's going to be listening to this and going, Yes, I'm responsible for the entire employee life cycle. And now I'm responsible for the place we work at. And that's something I've been seeing a rise in these types of titles. If I'm perusing LinkedIn jobs, I see the director of people in places or head of people in places.

And so now HR is now. We're seeing it even more added on. How do we manage that? 

Phil Kirschner: Yeah, it used to remind me of an anecdote. I find myself saying that lately, especially when you say HR knew everything and was managing everything before. At Credit Suisse, that program, when we were at scale and finding that from a change perspective, it was going to be much more powerful to get HR executives and all the executives really on board with the outcomes we were seeing by getting them to want to pull to be more curious about what we were doing as opposed to us pushing on them.

I found a path to that through the people analytics team who at the time when I met them they were very impressive right like a couple PhDs and I'm sure it would be even more so today, but they, ran the engagement survey, and did all the sort of attrition forecasts, and I asked them then, this is amazing, and how many ways can you, do you sift and sort and slice and dice the employee population for these human capital measures, and the guy said something to me that I've never forgot, which is that, we know all the things that you think would be obvious, your level and your tenure and your gender and your manager's performance because we have all the HR data, but we also know things like your favorite color that you've never told us.

That was his sort of confident swagger about all the things I said. Amazing. I would like to know, are there any differences in the engagement or attrition levels? For the significant portion of some populations in certain cities at that time who had been moved into this very different way of working in the office, like you must know that because you've just made this favorite color joke, but the fact was that they didn't.

And he said, We've never really considered place to be a variable. Of course we know the difference between London, Singapore, and New York, but we can't tell you building to building, or certainly new floor, old floor, shared floor, signed floor, someone who does or doesn't avail themselves of flexibility out of the office.

Like that profile just was not in the data. And surprise, it wasn't very hard to put it there. And even more that we could show significant improvements in engagement and enablement levels and also lower attrition, in particular for early career staff. But they had never thought of it, which was really eye-opening to me that you're all at the table, but people are still playing their own game.

I am not responsible for this building, and broadly speaking, I therefore won't see the potential impact of how we move through it. Could have any influence on HR data.

Tim Reitsma: That's interesting. You say that it's actually bringing up some memories of when I was working at a big tech company and I had a beautiful office. It was great. No complaints there. But we did a big remodel, and the team was so excited that they were engaged, but HR, I don't think, was involved in that. It was a facilities person.

And we had picked out amazing colors, and we came in after a weekend after renovation, and the walls were white, the lights were brighter, the cubicles were just off-white, everything was white, and my team and even myself went. What the heck, and I think back to that, and that was way pre-covid, and it was not; it was the best place to work.

People were finding other places in the building to go and work just because it felt less hospitally, less sterile. And what I'm hearing is that connection to the data and creating a space for people to actually be tied directly into your engagement, your retention, and all the metrics that matter. 

Phil Kirschner: Even if you knew it was one of the other preconditioned challenges and maybe getting to your question about HR finding themselves having a new role in this world, your average HR team listening strategy pre-COVID.

And even now it may have consisted largely of an annual agent survey or twice a year, big people survey. I think it's more common now to see like pulse strategies, McKinsey publicly, has for the last two or three since before I joined, even though I've left now, had been asking basically, How are you feeling?once a week.

It's all through COVID. Just, how are you feeling? Thumbs up, thumbs down, smiley face—that basic. But it's so powerful to have that kind of heartbeat all the time, just out there, maybe sponsored by HR, but allowing other programs to take advantage of, did the heartbeat move? We did something; did it change?

In the little corner of the world where it shouldn't, right? While you've got HR, pushing the envelope a bit over time into how to listen to employees, most corporate real estate teams don't survey. Don't ask people questions. Even this pre-Covid now, they don't like to ask questions because if they ask and then they know that you know that they know that something isn't great, they can't fix it.

They're like, Oh, we just did; we spent all this money on this renovation, and that's like a 10-year lease or 20-year lease, and we can't; we have no money to fix things. We don't even want to know, and it just perpetuates this, like users don't like something, and maybe it's not even the color of the wall or the chairs.

It's just that we're supposed to be able to do this kind of function. This kind of collaboration. This space does not provide that need. You didn't ask, but now I'm telling you. And our real estate teams are just like, I don't know what to do. So don't ask. And now they find themselves a lot increasingly reporting to HR.

That trend is moving forward pretty quickly. It started in the IT world, but we're seeing a lot across industries. And that is at the most extreme, or maybe most positive, as you said, forcing some HR teams to rethink their own names to be like people and places. But they come with radically different starting points on the idea of listening and responsiveness to that feedback.

Tim Reitsma: So what I'm hearing is if you just don't even ask for the feedback, I'm just kidding. It's, just don't ask, right? It's oh, we don't have the budgets. We're not even going to ask. We don't care if people aren't happy; if the workplace is terrible, we're just no; that's the opposite of what you need to be doing.

I love that. It's, when we think of the context of workplace experience, this is a term that might be new to some people, even though it's been around forever, but we think about employee experience, and when we think about workplace experience and then employee experience, you brought in the data aspect and interviewing and asking and serving. How do those two things relate to each other? 

Phil Kirschner: Yeah, it's really interesting watching the realization that an employee's experience holistically, completely independent of place, is both like influenced by places that they're in. That's a lot, especially since we spend so much of our time in the office, but even in the most beautiful office you can have, two teams on the surface are the same.

You're both in the same building. You're doing the same thing. Learning the same way, comprised of mostly the same people, but one group will have, would report like radically lower engagement or a much worse experience than the other. And it boils down to the boss being a jerk. And so they say, Oh, like, my experience is terrible and real estate will go; I can't fix that. Boss is a jerk.

But it will start to show up in the conversations today about workplace experience and real estate, then being held almost to a standard of contributing to fixing. And this is, I think, a real bind that a lot of real estate teams in particular will find themselves in. At their core, their responsibility is to source, design, and build locations as they have been directed to by executives.

Like we want to be here. They will try as best they can to apply some sense of standards and guidelines and rules for how they do that. So it's not complete chaos. They will be held to a pretty rigorous standard for managing the costs in those environments, because other than your people spaces, they are most often the second biggest expense for companies.

So we are right up there at the front of the line every time management comes around or a consultant comes around and says, Hey, you should look for cost-efficiency spaces very quickly put under the gun, but because in other parts of the organization they all hear say like the employee experience is really important. The workplace experience is really important.

We are competing with tech companies now, and they have very highly sized offices, so we've got to compete. So we develop this sense of being responsible, but we have conviction for the workplace experience. But when push comes to shove, a lot of these departments are still buried, not just in finance but even in procurement.

It's tough to say to colleagues and friends in those groups. I know you say you're responsible for workplace experience, but your organization is not positioning you or resourcing you to be able to actually do that. Experience isn't free. Nowhere else in our lives is experience like free. And that's the challenge that we know, unlike at restaurants and hotels and anything, we're not paying for it.

In fact, the company is paying us, so groups do what they can but are not positioned to really lead from a point of open discovery about what is not working for you either in this place or as an employee independent of the places that you go to; the line blurs too much. I don't think leaders will interrogate the pieces enough independently or position themselves to think of the whole as it relates to business objectives.

Tim Reitsma: You bring up a good point, right? It's got to tie into the business objectives for sure, right? If, especially as we're seeing more organizations and higher-profile organizations saying, No, you're not working at home anymore. You're coming to the office. And if you don't want to come to the office, then maybe you shouldn't be here.

But yet we're still hearing about successful organizations that've gone hybrid or fully remote and are very intentional with that space in the context of somebody in human resources or your people team or your people in places team. What I'm hearing is a directive coming from the leadership or the executive team. And you might not have a seat there.

What is something that actionable that somebody who's now tasked to go? Make this a place that people want to come to, even though people don't want to come here and do all the other tasks that you're supposed to do. 

Phil Kirschner: That is like the bazillion-dollar question, isn't it? The question I hear often from clients would be, What's the best version of hybrid? We have to say hybrid because we can't make you, and even the companies that are trying to do that are not succeeding.

Let's just assume it doesn't work. Not for nothing, like even in the companies that are most currently like you have to be back here like we were before. We're never in the office five days back then, just wasn't, but still say that's a perfect version of hybrid. It goes back to your question about employee experience and workplace experience. No, two teams overall experience will be the same because it's influenced so much by non-spatial factors.

And in the kind of practical advice question, I'll share one bit of research and come back. Something I'm probably most proud of my time at McKinsey was doing work with GitLab, who's the world's largest born remote, natively remote company, and putting them through an instrument that McKinsey calls the Organizational Health Index, which is a 20-plus year measure of aligning business practices, like literally how people work, what employees observe around them, not just how they feel, to business objectives.

And you can see that over thousands and thousands of companies with higher levels of organizational health do have higher, forward-correlating business performance, not in the past, but looking ahead, will be more sustainably successful than peers and really surprised to see the GitLab in their full remote state.

Taking this organizational health survey. They've talked about this publicly. We've talked about this publicly. McKinsey has a survey that did not, at the time that they took it, have a single question. About where you work. It's not a workplace, organizational behavior survey, but everybody at GitLab works in their house.

That has been true since day one. They signed up for it from day one. It's not a surprise. COVID changed. They scored off the charts. And the same thing has been seen with other, fully remote, born remote companies that have a benchmark-busting performance on management practices that a so-called normal company, a traditional company, often finds really hard.

And that's because, like when you operate in a completely remote environment, no one's ever over your shoulder. You have to be really explicit about everything. This is how we lead. This is how we use Slack. This is when we meet. This is the expectation for meetings. This is how we document decisions.

This is how we write or collaborate around policies. Everything is brutally specific. And that's a choice if you want to join an environment like that. But surprisingly, it leads them to better and more consistent management and leadership behavior than the traditional companies, where you can leave it to chance.

You come into the office and you are then managed by the law of averages. Some good managers, some bad managers, but osmosis takes over and information sneaks in and you get mentored. When you're never together, you have to be really explicit. This is how you get on board, how we assign mentors, how often you should meet, and all these things.

And it works really well. So there's a huge amount that we can learn from those management practices: really removing ambiguity about how you work with each other, being clear on performance expectations, promoting ultimate transparency, especially for decisions, fostering trust, and then just testing and learning as you go. We all should be doing that instead of just assuming that the one thing that changed to moving out of the office broke our culture. Because I can say from my WeWork experience, the number one question that I would get from executives coming to tour WeWorks in headquarters back in the day or observation was like, Why does it feel like it does here?

What are you doing gives a very palpable sense of culture, connection, and energy because we, in our pre-COVID office, struggle to maintain a sense of connection and community. It was a precondition to COVID. It would just make it worse. It's not the reason for it.

Tim Reitsma: There's a lot in that. It's, for me, as I'm listening, it's hard, it's challenging. It's not easy just defaulting to looking at what's changed. Oh, we were in the office when COVID happened, and we're remote. Now we don't see the performance we're seeing. That must be the issue. We're not looking at, are people clear on their objectives? Do people have clarity on the goals and how they tie to the performance metrics of the organization?

Are people clear on how they're being measured and how they're being held accountable? I've talked with numerous organizations about this who struggle with this. It's how are our individual goals being tied to the corporate goals? How are individuals being held accountable? Some people don't like that word.

But it's what we got to do in organizations. We hold people accountable. I don't care where you work; this is what you got to do. And we agreed on this, and you're going to get done this quarter, because if not, then we have a different conversation. We're going to have a coaching or performance conversation out of that.

And so regardless of where you are, I'm biased to this, and it's coming out and talking, but whether you're in the office, sitting on a beach with your laptop, we're coming to the office one day a week. It's got to come down to that, and you can have the fanciest office in the world, but if people don't know where the company's going and how I'm contributing, you now just have an expensive office. 

Phil Kirschner: Yeah, and that's exactly right. I'm no survey scientist per se, but my McKinsey experience in particular is very eye-opening with that instrument on the difference between asking in an engagement survey context, like, do you agree or disagree that you have clarity on your objectives, right? How we decide if you're performing well.

It's subtly but importantly different to ask a group of employees, like, How often do you see leaders around you and the organization clearly articulating roles and responsibilities, and using that in performance management, using that in coaching conversations? You tend to get a little bit less of a biased answer when you're asking about what you seek, not how you feel, because everybody's expectations are different.

As you said, so many variables get called up. Oh, no, our social capital and our kind of connection have taken a hit in COVID. Like, okay, how do you know? Were you measuring that before? The answer is almost always, no, we weren't. Same thing with productivity. And I've seen some clients do what I think is really engaging to employees.

To say listen, we're going to go; let's say fully remote for some function. As a client, I've learned about a client who moved a like an Asia-based call center function during covet fully remote. For many reasons, they did it and they stuck with it, but they also said to the employees we have a strong suspicion that in this model your kind of social capital and connectivity with each other will erode as we hire new people.

And that's our concern. So instead of just saying, But we're going to, we're going to bring you all back in all the time. They developed a rubric for how they would measure social capital and engagement, looking at email and Slack traffic, who's on calls with whom, and are you attending certain events?

And they could be pretty transparent about the rubric. This is our definition. It's not perfect, but it's a way of trying to identify variations in activity fingerprints between groups. And even if the results are low for group A versus group B, we're still not just going to kneejerk back; it has to be physical.

We'll share that this measure is important, so we're going to measure it. We're going to tell you how we're measuring it and show you the results, and then do something about it. But coming without that bias is so engaging to staff, I think. And there's such a difference between executive teams who approach the post-COVID employee experience with, gosh, everything's different now.

All the expectations before are off, so let's just start trying to make tomorrow moderately better than yesterday was. And test, and learn, and pilot, and admit where we tried things and didn't work, and leadership getting involved instead of saying, This is the way. We thought about it for five minutes; it's got to be this way.

Because employees, their radars go up immediately and say, Ah, that's not right. You don't really know; you're saying it because it's more comfortable for you to go back to the way you were taught than to embrace newer possibilities.

Tim Reitsma: I think maybe a new term for me is just measuring social capital. And I'm going to play maybe a little devil's advocate here. Okay. You're a CEO. You say, Hey, Tim, you're my HR leads. I want people to be in the office three days a week. I know people don't want that. Make it a good experience for people.

Don't push back on me. Go and do it. What advice would you now take you out of that CEO role, and now I'm going to come up with a plan. I'm going to measure social capital. I'm going to present this plan of the way we work. Where do I start? Because I feel that there's some of that resistance in the market right now when I talk to my HR friends. 

Phil Kirschner: And just answering that question of making them come back. I don’t care.

Tim Reitsma: Just make them come back. I don't care. So as an HR professional, what would you say to someone who's in this situation aside from maybe this isn't a good place for you to work, but where would they start, measuring the social capital and providing that data?

What's a logical place for someone to say, Hey, okay, we need to plan for this podcast, The Future of Work? And I want to leave my mark here. I want to do something right on behalf of the employees and the team. 

Phil Kirschner: Yeah, you implied, like, maybe quit. I think employees certainly are, but I have most appreciated the mandates that we've seen that come in the executive letter.

Like this is my choice. This is my system. I'm owning it. And I will do it in a way that provides some transition period with as generous as can be expected. runway out for people who are just like, This is not the role of the game. Do I think that's right? And do I think it's limiting long-term talent pools?

Yes, but look, companies are not in companies the same. They're entitled to put the conditions in place that they think will allow them to grow and sustain competitive advantage. At least there's transparency and honesty. That's step one, just. Don't say, Oh, because it's like connection or because you have to collaborate more, and the employees are like, What do you mean, we've been doing this for three years, and the ship hasn't gone down.

Someone like, be honest, make the choice. This is the operating model for this company that we are choosing. And we recognize all of the things like that means, but this is what we're choosing. And if it is no longer aligning with your personal sense of fulfillment or the life that you have created for yourself over these last couple transition years, that's fine.

And not to use the Oh, we're going to fire you tomorrow language. We've seen this; we're going to maybe close offices in areas that we don't want to be anymore. It's the same for a location strategy, actually, as I say that, right? Like pre-COVID, Oh, we used to be in New York, and now we're moving to Florida, or we used to have high-paying jobs in some place, and we're outsourcing them halfway around the world.

That change is not new, and there's just a big difference between leadership teams who embrace it as a change to be managed and are honest and don't try to get around the existence of Fishbowl and all these insane gossip networks. I'm like, they exist. So acknowledge that they exist, be transparent with employees, and tell them why you're doing it.

And explain the whole roadmap, the whole transition of, what you wanted to feel like to work at that company, inclusive of the place and the systems, and how you're getting talent. And yeah, like employees are radars that I mentioned before, like super sensitive to being lied to or just like feeling like it's not authentic anymore.

And maybe that's because COVID, I would rip the Band-Aid on us being like work selves and home selves. Like we're all humans now. We all saw our kids. We all felt people suffering and struggling in this moment. So you can't put that back in the bottle. And we expect it from leaders.

Tim Reitsma: I've got an image in my mind of this framework document; over that, that last couple minutes of you speaking, I was thinking that is right there, a framework, right?

Be honest. You got to own it. Whether you're fully remote going back to the office, whether you are in the office and you're going hybrid or fully remote, it doesn't matter which way is, be honest. Communication—you got to communicate it, and people value that honesty. It's coming from a place of authenticity, right?

Phil Kirschner: Yeah. Especially for new talent. I don't think it's trade secret stuff to show a little bit more and share a little bit more of the internal workings of your company. People will join and then find that there's a medium mismatch, which is how stuff is done, and the fully remote set again wears that on their sleeve.

Like these are the hours that we have collaborative, like these are core collaborative hours that we have overlap at times of these are the tools we use. We're like a full-slack shop. If that's not cool with you, if for whatever reason you hate Slack, don't work here. I think we follow these kinds of cultures.

We're a Google shop. We're a Microsoft shop. We're just like, This is your choice. It's your tech stack. It's your management stack. Here are the, not just like culture page website version of the language of what we expect from people, but the fingerprint, the persona, the kind of company that we're trying to run, and if that's not for you, that's fine, but we want you to know as much as you can, because then you self-select much more, not only to the purpose of the organization, but to a working model that makes sense, and being really transparent about that, talking about just a future of work.

Pre-COVID If you googled Future of Work and McKinsey or Deloitte, any consulting firm, you probably would have gotten two main topics, which are automation and gig work. And that, those trains have not stopped moving. COVID, like hybrid, has dominated the narrative of what we think of as future work, but really the bigger question is who does what work and why.

AI is obviously all the rage right now, but that's the transparent model for how work gets done, a greater culture of writing things down, and a greater sort of centralization of documentation, handbooks for whole companies, as opposed to just having people with scattered PowerPoints everywhere.

Not only is that behavior more friendly to someone who works flexibly, but it's also AI friendly. The machine knows where to look, so to speak, in order to help your teams be more productive. To the extent that you get to a model where you maybe need seasonal support for a couple hours or a couple weeks and you want to go to the market and say, Oh, I just need some writers, for a little period of time, you're going to be most attractive and successful with a gig or flexible workforce.

They also can just very quickly read what is expected in how you work. We have our core meeting hours here. We use these technologies, not those technologies. This is how we share material. This is above it. They go great; I can plug into that. I'm in.

Tim Reitsma: You bring up an interesting point for me. Anyway, when we think about workplace experience, it's not just that physical space.

It's not just that office that looks nice and is fancy and has good food and all that stuff. But it's that documentation that ease of information. I'm somebody who is in that gig space. I take on contracts. You know, and I love it. I'd have a hard time going back into an office right now. But when I jump in and I'm working on something for ease of information, ease of understanding the tech stack, ease of everything just sets up somebody for success, right?

So if you are bringing on writers, if you're bringing on a developer, if you're bringing on a part-time or temporary HR, whatever it is, spend that hard time documenting. And it's not fun. It's not Future of Work stuff, but it's future proofing your business, if you will.

Phil Kirschner: Yeah. Future proof. Someone reminded me yesterday that it's almost framed as the future is the thing we have to fear and we've got to be ready for. It's supposed to, future forward, future ready, future excited, whatever it is. But, yeah, you're right, creating the documentation feels so oppressive.

But I try to say, Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. You can at least message people; we are trying to build this up as we go, because that maybe is another piece of advice, in particular for HR, inclusive maybe of real estate to the extent that they run it now. So few, if any, let's just say real estate teams in isolation or HR teams in isolation or together have a bit of a charter.

For what they think the likely future is going to be like, do we talk about gig work? Do you think that's a thing? And you may say, Look, we, the smart people in the room who run real estate and HR, like we think, yes, it is coming for the world. Does that mean it's coming for us tomorrow? No. But we should probably start to have an answer for it because, just like GenAI or anything else, maybe one of our competitors overnight starts doing something crazy and then we're on the back foot.

But having a view, at least that you almost keep up on the wall. Here's our version of a plausible five- to seven-year-out future, not the 2040 crazy, minority report feature movie flying car version, but greater work flexibility, even more support from AI, like possible gig workforce, really async AI remote first, like ways of doing things, new ways of managing people like that's coming.

We believe it. So, a, we're going to start piloting as many little things as we can to get us armed for that. And policies or guidelines in place that at least prevent us from rolling back downhill.

Tim Reitsma: I love that, as I look to wrap up the conversation, that's such a good place to wind down. I can just picture that, and maybe on my bookshelf or behind me, if you're watching this, I need to have, just even, my little consulting company of one. That future, somebody asked me recently, it was like, Tim, what's your vision?

Because I'm saying yes to way too many things and I don't know, just to get by, and that's just not a good vision. If you're in a big workplace, if you're in HR, think about that for your team, think about that for your company, get curious with your leaders, and think about that holistic view, that workplace, that workplace strategy.

One last question. Somebody who's listened to this there, maybe they've just got that title, the chief of people and places title, or the head of people in places. What is one thing that they need to know or that they can need to think about to help them go into this future of work? 

Phil Kirschner: Yeah. If you're a Chief Place Officer, my first recommendation is to just have a good, hard think about the clear and authentic purpose for the places that your company likes consumes in the world.

Pre-COVID, and I'm as guilty of this as anybody, like, why do you have an office in Chicago? Oh, we have a lot of people in Chicago. Therefore, we've made the box for them to work in, like it's not great. It wasn't great then, but it worked, but now we don't have to be there, so now it doesn't work.

So you have to say that we have certain kinds of places that we take up, and obviously, if you're maybe a consumer goods company, you have factories where you make the things that you sell. That one's obvious. You have stores where you sell the thing that you made. Also obvious. And in both of those cases, the metrics for deciding if the place is living up to expectations are pretty clear.

You could almost imagine yourself having a performance review, not with the people—have you come in enough—but having a performance review with the building, which we basically do for retail stores. Was enough stuff sold here last month? And if the answer is no, then the place is not living up to its purpose.

But for the office, generically, it's harder. And you can't just say we want to come here to collaborate. You got to come up with something that resonates with employees, your culture, your industry—say, being here should make a couple of things better, or possible, or faster, whatever it is. And they're not aimed at the person.

The purpose of this place does not have to be a box for you to work in. The purpose of this place is to make sure that we're writing the things that we have to do faster, that we solve bugs faster, and that we close client issues faster. Which then means you're holding yourself accountable, saying, How do I prove that when, for the people, for the groups, or when people walk into this box where I've now given it a label, purpose, two or three things it's supposed to do really well?

How can I prove that it is happening better there than it is elsewhere, or like at home? And to the extent that people want to work for you or engage for your overall organizational purpose and you have clear accountability and incentive systems, presumably if I'm in a development group and you tell me that issues get resolved faster by the teams who show up so often to this box of space where we are specifically curating activities and spaces to make it easier for you to do that.

Maybe like the command center, right? Which doesn't exist in your house. I'm going to go where I'm going to want to go because the organization should be signaling that when you close things faster, like those people perform better, they get promoted faster, that good things happen. So it's up to you.

You can stay home if you want. This place has a purpose. People who come here, that purpose goes better. And there, I've told you what you need to know, right? But so it's a clearly and authentic definition of why you have places generally and then for each of them individually, which signals to people, Why should I come here?

And then measure it and hold the building accountable for it more than the people.

Tim Reitsma: Love that. Purpose, intentionality, accountability, all wrapped up in this conversation. 

Phil Kirschner: Easy,

Tim Reitsma: It's easy right now. It's no; just go and implement it. which brings me to my last question. Somebody's going to be listening to this and going, Wow, Tim and Phil made it sound so easy.

I don't know where to start. So Phil, how does somebody reach you? 

Phil Kirschner: I'm very chatty on LinkedIn. That's easier. I'm a top voice there for these topics. So you can find me there or on my website, philkirschner.com. But very easy to find and love talking through this problem with anyone who's trying to just make tomorrow better.

Tim Reitsma: I love it. And we'll make sure all the links are in the show notes as well. If somebody's not quite sure or didn't quite catch that, Phil, pleasure talking to you.