Susan Freeman
Hi, I’m Susan Freeman. Welcome back to our PropertyShe podcast series brought to you by Mishcon de Reya in association with the London Real Estate Forum, where I get to interview some of the key influencers in the world of real estate and the built environment. Today, I am delighted to welcome Despina Katsikakis. Despina is Global Head of Workplace at Cushman & Wakefield. Over the past 40 years, she has consistently pioneered the science of evaluating employee priorities and the evolving trends of office users. This has led to the transformation of workplace environments for global corporates, including Barclays, Google, HSBC, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and Unilever and improvement in the design of real estate developments worldwide. In her role at Cushman & Wakefield, Despina inputs across the firm’s global business on the rapidly changing context of work and its impact on employee engagement, productivity, wellbeing and the future role and purpose of the office. She is the current President of the British Council of Offices (BCO) and the host of the upcoming Purpose of Place podcast. She lectures, writes and contributes to media research and publications on the future of the workplace and serves on various advisory boards including Delos, the founders of the WELL Building Standard. So now we are going to hear from Despina Katsikakis on what’s going on in the workplace, the future of hybrid working and what landlords and occupiers are going to want from their offices. Despina, good morning.
Despina Katsikakis
Good morning, Susan. Thank you for having me.
Susan Freeman
Let’s start at the beginning. I know you were born in Greece, you studied in the United States. What brought you to the United Kingdom?
Despina Katsikakis
Well, I studied architecture in Chicago in the ‘70s and I had these really high expectations that I would be able to influence the design of buildings to impact people’s experience and of course needless to say when I finished it was very disillusioned to find out that commercial office design was really all about cost efficiency and standardisation, especially when you finish architecture school and you do a standardised detailing and basically, a lot of simple solutions and there was very little interest on people and the impact that the building would have on them. So, in that kind of disillusionment, I decided to take a year off and come to London to do an MPhil at the AA and during that time I met Dr Francis Duffy who was one of the founders of the visionary design and consulting firm, DEGW, and Frank and I started talking and he was just starting work on this project in the City of London which was the redevelopment of Liverpool Street Station and he asked me to come and work with the firm for the summer and as I always say, it was you know, it was a very long summer, a very long year, forty years later I’m still in London but it was this eye-opening experience to meet Frank and to meet DEGW because the whole practice was established on the principle of understanding the user and ensuring that the design of buildings is purposeful, it’s based on evidence and data to demonstrate the value of the buildings to all its stakeholders. So, basically, those kind of coming into a practice that literally embodied everything that I had aspired to doing architecture school was just extraordinary, so I spent the next 28 years building and leading the consulting practice and I became chairman in 2000 and then moved on from the firm when the firm became part of Aecom in 2012.
Susan Freeman
What an important encounter that was. I mean, you know one talks about serendipity but if you hadn’t met up, none of this might have happened.
Despina Katsikakis
Exactly, exactly. Transformational in every way.
Susan Freeman
So you worked on the first phase of Broadgate, I believe, and as we discussed I also had my small part in that on the legal side and did you realise, you know at the time, how groundbreaking it was?
Despina Katsikakis
Yes and no. I mean, what I did realise was that it was completely different to anything I had encountered in terms of the approach of a developer in the US and it, it’s interesting from me because as we moved on, I’ve continued to work on every office building Stuart Lipton has developed since Broadgate and what was interesting is that that original question that was posed to us which is, “What will corporates want? What is changing? What is next? How do we futureproof buildings that we design, based on evidence?” Was so fundamental and you know it continues to be the question that he asks of every development that I have done since but if you think about the timing and it’s lovely that we have that connection in common, Susan, is that you know, at that moment this new thing called the desktop computer was introduced and one of the first pieces of work I did was to ask key occupiers in the City in London, in New York and in Tokyo how many of these desktop computers are they likely to introduce into their business? And they would say oh you know we might end up with one for every four people in the next ten years. Well of course, by the time they moved into Broadgate, everyone had a computer on their desk and by the time Phase 2 was developed, the laptop was invented. So that shift, the accelerated speed of technology really made you consider what is the impact of that kind of work process and how does it influence the kind of buildings and resiliency in buildings that we design.
Susan Freeman
It’s a very, very interesting point and we will, we’ll come to that because you had I suppose visionaries also like Mark Dixon 30 years ago saying, “You don’t need to work in an office,” you know, “You don’t need to commute” and it’s taken us an awfully long time to get there but we’ll get to that in a minute and I just wanted to ask you, I mean you said you’d worked on all Stuart Lipton’s projects, which is pretty amazing. So, you were involved with 22 Bishopsgate which is the latest project and I just wondered, how, I mean obviously it’s different in lots of ways but how is it different?
Despina Katsikakis
So, the timing of 22 is really interesting. As you know, it was a redevelopment of an existing partially constructed building. So in 2015, Stuart asked me to write a vision for what this workplace of the future would be about that would inform the design of 22 and he has usually asked, “What’s next?” “What should I go and see?” in terms of innovation. So, I invited him and Karen Cook, the architect of the building, to join me to come to Australia to look at the innovative buildings that I had worked on for about fifteen years with various financial services organisations and at first he was very sceptical and said you know “Why do I need to go to Australia to look at banks?” And when he talks about it, he always says that the moment he walked into those buildings he understood the importance of a social workplace and this, this word ‘social’ becomes really, really important in terms of the vision of 22. So 22 is designed for people. It is designed with the concept that if you were occupying a building as a single occupier of 1.5 million square feet, what would you do to connect your organisation, to create a community, to build connections across people? So the building takes the role of a vertical village and the idea of distributing you know about 200,000 square feet of amenities across the building was a fundamental part of that design concept and you know, 100,000 of that is now being let to Convene bringing Mark Dixon’s concept forward to have co-working space, event space, meeting space on-demand but also the kind of unique activities that happen within the building. The other thing that’s really important is how you treat the way you enter the building so that it is welcoming, it feels humane, it has art, it has plants, it has colour. That was a very, very important consideration in 22, so it’s a building that is at the same time incredibly humancentric and incredibly technologically advanced so it has facial recognition, it has intuitive interaction with technology, it has the first open platform technology capabilities so that you can plug in and have your data on the Cloud if you are an occupier. So it’s doing both at the same time and I think that is what differentiates it so significantly because I think we are at a place where the ubiquitous technology almost reinforces us to reconnect with our humanity in a more fundamental way and 22 does exactly that.
Susan Freeman
Yes, I mean it’s a fantastic building and I’ve been to Convene and I’ve been at events at Convene and I think it’s so interesting what you say about the human centricity and the technology you know coming, coming together and it just seemed to me when I was preparing for this conversation that you know as a pioneer of evolving trends in offices and how you know employees like to work, now is absolutely your time and there are so many things that you’ve been talking about for the forty years that you’ve been involved in workplace and suddenly I think you know it’s all clicked into place for people, they realise quite how important it is. So, your role at Cushman & Wakefield as Global Head of Workplace presumably involves advising property owners and occupiers of what’s happening and what, you know what people are going to want going forward.
Despina Katsikakis
Absolutely and one of the most interesting aspects of what’s happened in the last few years, in the last three years specifically, has been people’s own perception of their ability to work. So we’ve always had flexible working and certainly you know enlightened leaders leveraged that very effectively for many, many years, you know I did flexible working and activity based working programmes since the early ‘90s but what happened in 2000 was really fundamental so, as you probably know Susan, we collect a lot of data at Cushman & Wakefield through our experience with Square Foot surveys and we pivoted the survey to, to track employee experience at home at the beginning of the pandemic and we found something incredibly interesting which is that people’s sense of productivity in terms of their ability to out focus individual focus and to have planned collaboration remained completely stable. Obviously, their ability to connect with people really dropped but the big thing that changed was that their sense of feeling trusted by their employer to work remotely went from something like 35% in 2019 to 95% in 2020 and that sense of trust is a kind of fundamental driver to everything we are seeing at the moment in terms of resistance to coming back to the office because that sense of empowerment that people feel is fundamental in really driving their desire to have autonomy of when you work, that scheduled autonomy and also where you work and it also begins to drive a new purpose with the office, so I tend to say rather than the return to the office, the RTO acronym, I use in our team as the ‘reason for the office’ because I think what’s important is, it stresses the intentionality of what is the role of the office, why do you go to the office and what we find consistently is that people had not missed their offices because for the most part offices have been uninspiring for many, many years. What they have missed is people and they want to go back to connect with colleagues, to have those social connections, to learn, to be mentored, to be inspired and be part of a community. So, there is this really interesting push as to what does the office provide that will really allow us to enhance that experience, to compete with the home and to create memorable places that people want to come back to.
Susan Freeman
There seem to be some interesting dynamics going on, there was a KPMG survey quite recently of CEOs who seem to think we’ll all be back in the office five days a week within three years.
Despina Katsikakis
It’s extraordinary to me, it’s almost as if we’re creating this ostrich affect in senior leadership and in part of our industry. You know, we are not going back to how we were working, you know the genie is absolutely out of the bottle. What is important though is you know I will give those CEOs the benefit of the doubt in that what they’re really hoping for is that people will come back to create that mentoring, that learning, that collaboration, that in fact they themselves, the employees, crave. What makes it really complicated is that when they put out these mandates, they don’t actually address the why, they don’t address the benefits of coming back together, so the mandates are being used almost like in a reverse way and you know we’re hearing from a lot of companies that will be tracking how you come back and you know it will impact your career progression. Well that’s not very inspiring, is it? Now if you look at that against the context of probably the most alarming piece of data that we’ve been collecting is how employee wellbeing, sense of wellbeing has been deteriorating year on year since 2020. So, whilst productivity has been maintained and employee connections have increased as we’ve come out of lockdowns, wellbeing continues to deteriorate because people feel an enormous amount of stress, they’re asked to come into the office, they commute to sit in front of back-to-back, virtual calls, so they’re craving to be connected with their colleagues but they can’t really do that so, I feel that the office is being positioned as the fall guy or at the same time trying to solve what essentially are management transformational issues because what we need to address is how work has fundamentally changed through the tools and enablement that technology gives us, you know, how are we going to use a synchronous working intentionally and use physical place intentionally? We’re not doing either at the moment well and that requires us to change management behaviour, management beliefs, so it’s a much more complicated issue that we’re simply trying to resolve by are we going back to the office or not?
Susan Freeman
No, it is complicated and it still feels as if we are in many ways feeling our way so, in that scenario, if you’re a large corporate, how do you decide how much space you need? I mean, we’ve seen you know in the press, you know some of the sort of bigger organisations saying right, we can reduce our footprint by 30% because people are working flexibly but how do you know, how do you advise those clients on how much space to take?
Despina Katsikakis
So, first of all, there is not a single answer and I think that’s a very difficult thing for our industry to accept because you know, we are in an industry that’s based on specification, on you know getting the right answer all the time and that’s become very complicated so, one of the things that I advise clients to do is to embrace an agile and iterative approach for multiple reasons. First of all, it allows you to engage your employees in the process, it allows you to pilot, to test, to measure and to iterate solutions that actually bring people along the journey of change. So that’s quite an important piece of the puzzle. In terms of how much space though, there is another element that becomes very interesting and it almost comes back to 22 Bishopsgate and that concept that I think the role of the occupier and the landlord and the relationship is changing dramatically, so the occupier without a doubt, if you look historically pre-pandemic, we had consistent underutilisation of space, you know, most office buildings were never utilised more than 65% during a typical workday, so this is not new, right. All that’s happened, it’s now really obvious because that utilisation has dropped even more. So, we had underutilised and over specified space for years so, occupiers are now looking to their landlord to actually partner with them in the way that they provide the right mix of spaces. So, if you look at the Convene solution in 22, the occupiers in the building leverage Convene so that they don’t need to create as many of those types of spaces both in terms of meeting, event space and if you want to bring teams together, you can actually bring them together and expand into the building in a seamless way. So I think we’re seeing that shift and what that means is a different business model that might mean slightly less space, you mentioned 30% and that’s a number that comes up time and time again, that actually is higher quality space that you pay more rental for and you pay in addition to that a service charge for the amenities and services that the landlord provides, so a lot of the responsibility then comes back to the landlord to manage to operate, to activate, to curate the space and it becomes more of a seamless partnership rather than “I sign a 25 year lease and see you again when the break clauses come up”.
Susan Freeman
So, what are you seeing in terms of the most important amenities that people coming back to the office want because they have you know by and large the technology to work at home so, what is important? I mean, we hear quite a lot about, you know, outdoor space being important but what are the most important amenities?
Despina Katsikakis
So, again, that will vary by the organisation and the location of the building because obviously leveraging the city and the surrounding environment of the building becomes really critical so, if we’re having the conversation and the client is in the business park, it’s a very different situation than if you’re in the centre of the City of London. However, almost universally, you need to get the basics right so, first and foremost you need to have seamless and frictionless technology enablement and we forget that. So, in my home office and in most of our home offices in the last three years, we have created a completely frictionless environment and in the way we live our lives, we are used to relying on technology in a one-click basis, you know I can order something from Amazon in one click and it’s here in an hour. If I need to book a meeting room and book the technology in the meeting room, it could take me several hours and it might still not work so, frictionless technology interfaces are critical. The ability to have a variety of spaces to be able to support social engagement but also to focus, to concentrate, so this issue of concentration is something that we’ve lost, ability to focus, to be uninterrupted, so we’re seeing new types of environments like libraries coming to buildings and be very successful because people want to be able to have spaces where they can go and have a protocol of being uninterrupted, to think, to concentrate but without exception, the primary driver that people want to come to the office for is to connect with others, so the ability to have spaces that facilitate social and effective collaboration, the curation of events, learning and areas that support your wellbeing and allow you to renew throughout the day become really, really significant.
Susan Freeman
That’s so interesting because one of the things we talk about a lot is the importance of those random encounters, which aren’t, they’re not planned meetings but you run into somebody and it sparks an idea. The challenge is with flexible working, you aren’t all in five days a week so the chance of you running into that person is that, does technology help us with facilitating those random encounters and how?
Despina Katsikakis
So, it comes back to the intentionality and this is why I find it so difficult to understand why so many companies are using universal land aids because it really has to be defined by teams. What is effective in terms of the cadence of when teams come together and how they will work to allow them to have the optimum outputs, I think is not something that can be driven by a mandate and that is where you can leverage technology, you know, I mentioned a synchronous working. Almost without exception, our clients are global corporations and therefore individuals are part in one way or another all international global teams, being able to use video to leave messages in a very different way, we only need, I think we probably use less than 10% of the capabilities of Zoom and Teams for most of the employees. We’re really not actually enabling the technology to enable us to do.
Susan Freeman
And why is that? Is there a reluctance to embrace everything that technology has to offer?
Despina Katsikakis
Yeah well, we went into the pandemic in kind of a crisis mode, right, and we thought it would be a very short timeframe but it actually became much longer than many of us expected and I think that was part of the issue so we sort of fell into behaviours that simply adapted our typical behaviours by leveraging video in another way. And one of the things that we hear almost consistently from clients is that they’ve invested in incredible new technologies but the majority of their managers are using new technologies in old ways because they haven’t had the training, they haven’t had the change, the behavioural change, so we’re still talking about managing people by seeing people in person but actually, you know, if somebody is sitting at their desk and are on social media, what is the actual value of them utilising the desk? That really brings no benefit to the business or to them personally. So we need to realign our belief of what work is and where we do it to be able to make it effective.
Susan Freeman
So, we hear about algorithms that are going to sort of nudge us on you know when we should be in the office, when our team members are going to be there, I mean is that the sort of technology that’s going to help us with the serendipitous encounters?
Despina Katsikakis
Absolutely. I think it will be and I think it is you know as we look at how can AI work for us, the ability for buildings to collect data and to have an interface, an intuitive interface with the users, for me it’s probably the single most exciting thing that’s happened in recent years and I really hope that we will see much more of that so, if the building knows that I tend to come in on a certain day and it also by the way knows through the technology who my network is, so a lot of the work that my team’s been doing is around network analytics to really begin to understand who are the people we really interact with and then be able to think about how you make sure that those people are able to collide with one another in physical space, in similar ways as they’re trying to collide with one another in virtual space.
Susan Freeman
That seems a very important part of this evolving way of working and so you need the redesigned offices but you also need the technology to you know help you use it to its best advantage. One of the things you mentioned was our wellbeing and how that had plummeted. Is one of the issues that the way we work now, it is really difficult to have a division between work life and personal life because it just all merges in together?
Despina Katsikakis
100%. And what we’re seeing that’s very interesting is that people that have the choice and they choose to come to the office 3+ days a week, their sense of wellbeing actually improves. And there are three reasons for that, one is that they feel more connected to their colleagues, they feel they are creating boundaries between work and life and therefore they feel that at the same time they’re moving more and they’re not simply sitting in front of a screen all day.
Susan Freeman
That’s interesting. I think we thought that at the end of lockdown everything would slot into place really quickly but it’s you know, it’s actually looking at this sort of data and finding out the effect on people that we’re learning.
Despina Katsikakis
Absolutely. And I think we’re going to see, you know I really believe were already seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms to the whole wellbeing piece. The last three years have been seriously impactful for people but again, to make it positive, what’s exciting about buildings and the whole issue of buildings and wellbeing is that we’ve known for years that you know physical space, buildings, impact our wellbeing more than our DNA does because we spend over 90% of our time indoors and I’ve spoken for years about the quality of air and how that impacts cognitive performance and it was always about “oh it’s a dollar a square foot, it’s two dollars a square foot, we’re not sure if we can invest in that” because it was seen through the cost lens rather than the output lens. Well, of course within three months of the pandemic, we all became air quality experts and suddenly, the demand for fresh air in buildings completely transformed which is a tremendously positive thing because you know my idea has always been that we should be thinking about buildings as places, offices, that I come to work, I’d like to leave work feeling better than when I arrived because the specification of a well designed building should be a higher quality than the average home in terms of you know quality of light, quality of air, the ability to move throughout the day to connect with people, so we should feel inspired and that’s, that is I think a more fundamental social impact that the office can have and again, we’re not talking about that as much.
Susan Freeman
No, I’m really pleased you mentioned air quality because it was something that I was also quite fixated on during lockdown and I assumed that coming out of lockdown people you know looking for new offices would have that as one of their number one priorities but it seems to have sort of slipped down the list a little bit.
Despina Katsikakis
Well, I think how we measure the value of buildings is a very, very interesting equation and one that I think has shifted dramatically and as you know I do a lot of work for occupiers that choose buildings and one of the important elements that almost all occupiers are looking at is how can a building be used to attract and retain talent? And therefore, the ability to validate how the building is delivering wellness, so we’re seeing much more demand for certifications that demonstrate that the building has WELL Platinum, WELL Gold, you know, going back to 22 was the first building to actually have WELL core and shell accreditation so, that would seem very unusual in 2015 but today it’s an expectation. ESG credentials, you know, are absolutely necessary and very important for clients particularly in Europe where we have much higher focus on climate and environmental issues. So, we’re seeing that cost which was a historic driver, so if you think about efficiency and how to, how to minimise the cost per square foot was really what drove the decision, is actually shifting to how can a building improve the health of my people, retention, concentration, productivity, those are elements that are now creating a much weightier part of the balance and increasingly, as you will be aware from any corporate real estate executives are beginning to report in to HR because that is where the majority of operational expenditure sits, is, is really on people, not the building, and I used to say that the sort of the 10% which is at the high end of the cost of real estate is actively working to completely undermine the 80%+ of the cost by cleaning you know uninspiring environments where people don’t want to go to. So if we can reverse that.
Susan Freeman
No, it’s, it’s good because it’s much more joined up now and it makes, you know, it makes an awful lot of sense. So, let’s turn to your, your new role at BCO. So you’ve recently become President. Congratulations. Can you tell us a little bit about the BCO and what you hope to achieve.
Despina Katsikakis
Well, it’s, it’s very, very exciting moment I think generally at the BCO because the BCO has transformed over the last few years and I think that’s one of the most important elements, you know, we have over 4600 members and what’s really interesting is that many of those members are actually under 35, so over 1200 of our members are under 35 and growing rapidly and I think that’s thrilling, you know, just for those that don’t know what the BCO is, it was established about 30 years ago to really represent the full spectrum of the office sector from investment, design, agency, construction, fit out and operations and its purpose is really to bring the industry together, to connect the industry and champion best practice and deliver you know optimise the product that the industry delivers to inform, to inspire, to spark discussion and to really be the, the definitive place for research, guidance and provoking new thinking, so that’s why I’m so excited about taking on this role.
Susan Freeman
Are you seeing more women coming into the sector, can I ask you? So, what proportion of your members are women?
Despina Katsikakis
Err, yes, absolutely. Well, I think there are only about 45% of our members are women but I joined the BCO in 1990 and I do remember the first dinner at the Grosvenor House and there were three women in the room, so, you know of over a thousand people so I think, I think we’ve come a long way as the old 38.56 not, not enough but we are definitely, you know the industry has transformed for sure since you and I first started working in the City.
Susan Freeman
Well, I have to say 45% is not bad is it and hopefully a lot of them are amongst the, you know the younger members that you mentioned.
Despina Katsikakis
Yes, exactly.
Susan Freeman
So, you recently had the BCO ESG conference. I wondered whether anything sort of particular came out of that and really what offices can possibly learn from other asset classes when it comes to addressing ESG?
Despina Katsikakis
Well, I think that what was really exciting about the ESG conference, so that was last week in London and we had over 200 people across all the regions of the UK that BCO has members and huge enthusiasm and vibrancy for the topic and actually, it’s, it’s worth me noting that this year was the first year that we actually gave any ESG award at the national awards but we can come back to that. But what really differentiated the discussion at the conference was the focus on people, so putting people at the centre of an ESG strategy and not just people in terms of the people within the building but also the ability to engage the community and to really be able to go beyond carbon and to think about how do we create social impact and really think about buildings as resilient to environmental and economic drivers. Actually, as I say the term ‘resilient’ I think you might know that the annual conference that I chaired in Dublin this year for the BCO, the themes were resilience and inspiration and I think those are absolutely fundamental both in terms of ESG, in terms of office design, you know as an industry we need to stop focussing about the financial cost of ESG and look at actually the outputs and the impact, so we need to start measuring the impact. So one of the outcomes of the conference was that we definitely need to reach an overall consensus or a common language, common metrics, to be able to demonstrate that impact because that gets in the way of many investors and occupiers really taking a stronger role with ESG.
Susan Freeman
And do you think there is a prospect of the industry coming together and coming up with some common language?
Despina Katsikakis
Absolutely. I think there is a real desire across the industry for collaboration and certainly in all the years I have worked in this industry it’s the first time I am seeing such openness in terms of wanting to have joined up thinking, new indices, new metrics and also to collaborate with new types of partner, so one of the important aspects that came out of the conference is that we need to move beyond just thinking about sustainable buildings and focus also on the operations in buildings so the facility management aspect of it and therefore really educate clients on operational carbon and operational aspects of the building and what impact they have. So, I think this theme of collaboration becomes really, really important.
Susan Freeman
Yes, because you can build the most you know technologically advanced building with all the systems but if people aren’t using it in the right way and getting the benefits of it, what’s the point? And I wondered if you had any thoughts on the future for existing stock, the older offices, we’ve talked about new offices and how to attract people back but what’s going to happen to the unsustainable old stock, I mean it can’t all be converted to residential or life sciences, what’s going to happen to it?
Despina Katsikakis
Well I think rethinking buildings and reimagining buildings is really interesting. I mean, you know take a slightly different example and I’ll come back to it. If you look at what happened with the concrete crisis with schools, suddenly we needed to think where could schools be relocated and all sorts of innovator ideas came up, so we need to think much more imaginatively about existing buildings but also I think it’s how we recognise what is, what is best in class in the industry becomes really important. So, I was incredibly proud this year that the awards I mentioned that we just had, the national awards, and pretty much every building that received a national award had ESG at its core and if you look at kind of the Best of the Best award that went to Barclays Campus in Glasgow, that’s a really, really interesting scheme that kind of addresses some of what you were saying, right, it’s, it’s 400,000 square feet, three new buildings but also two completely Grade B renovations, it’s a brown field site that was regenerated, it brings light to the community, it’s inclusive design, it’s doing all of these aspects of how we should be thinking about buildings as, in real estate, as an active agent for change and that’s what makes me very excited and the other award that was I think in a way surprising because usually, as you know the President’s Award is an award that usually goes to an individual, sometimes a programme, and this year the President’s Award went to the HMRC Locations Programme which is a very different approach to how you think about real estate, so it's over three and a half million square feet of sustainable offices that you know transformed the estate into an inclusive model that supports local communities and that’s really driven around positive social impact and bringing jobs investment into the regions, reinventing and reimagining existing buildings alongside new buildings. They had this amazing thing called an inclusive design guide which I had never seen before. So, very, very different way of rethinking what the opportunities are for real estate.
Susan Freeman
And what does an inclusive design guide contain? What’s it aimed at?
Despina Katsikakis
It looks at the impact that light, that colour, that noise, that materials have on different people. We are not all the same and you know when we talk about neurodiversity and you know we tend to think about spectrums of people but actually, the reality is that you know we might both be women of similar backgrounds but have completely different sensory reactions to space. So being conscious of the fact that we really should be able to design more for individuals and support individuals of diverse needs to be able to do their best work in buildings is a critical responsibility of the industry, so you know I certainly was incredibly impressed that they have addressed that directly.
Susan Freeman
No, it sounds pretty impressive. And do you think we’re going to see more mixing of workplace with residential and with hospitality so that we’ve not just got like the office building in one place and the sort of residential building in another?
Despina Katsikakis
I sincerely hope so, Susan. I think one of the fundamental problems that we have is monofunctional zoning and investment thinking and we need to stop thinking about asset classes in the way that we have done historically. And this is not a mixed use argument, it’s an argument of blended uses and I think in order to create vibrant cities we need to really erase the idea that work and life are now blended and we have to design, fund, value spaces for lifestyle and not for these kind of historic definitions that are completely obsolete in the way we work and live today.
Susan Freeman
And tell me, you’ve obviously been looking at all this for forty years and we’ve seen this really accelerated change over the last, last few years. What do you think the next ten years is going to hold? What is the direction of travel?
Despina Katsikakis
Well, you know it’s very interesting, we move at a very fast pace and at the same time we don’t change at all. I do have the sense with a lot of what has been happening in the last three years that I’m almost living groundhog day, you know it’s the same discussion that I’ve been having in the industry for at least 25 years. Actually, something to make you laugh, just to give you an example of that, I mentioned the HMRC award, what I didn’t mention is a quote that’s used very, very frequently from a piece of work that I did in 2008 for the UK Government and this is a quote from Gus O’Donnell who was at the time Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service and he said, “Work is what you do, not a place you go to and the next generation of workforce will know that and will be able to work from anywhere.” So, in 2008 they UK Government was actually looking at how to embrace flexible working and today, the UK Government is still having arguments about should we have flexible working or not. So, when we look at ten years forward, part of me feels we have this incredible opportunity to embrace the opportunities that technology gives us, to create places that are resilient to economic and environmental factors, that are inspiring to people, that improve our wellbeing, that make a positive social impact or we might continue to have these circular debates. Are people going to work at home or the office? Are we going to have flexibility or not? You know, is productivity going to be up or down? So we can choose to embrace the opportunity or we can stay stagnant and still have the same debates.
Susan Freeman
Well Despina, I hope we choose the right answer and that when we look at this in ten years’ time, we will have moved on from these circular debates but that’s been so, so interesting, thank you very, very much.
Despina Katsikakis
Well thank you Susan, it’s been a great pleasure talking to you.
Susan Freeman
Thank you, Despina, for some inspirational insights into the fast paced change in the workplace which has been triggered by the pandemic and what we may see going forward. Hopefully, not more circular debates.
So, that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. Please join us for the next PropertyShe podcast interview coming very soon.
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