You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Well, safe to say one of the most talked about topics as we move beyond the pandemic is how we work hybrid working from home business travelers. So many questions about how things look post pandemic, how much of what we had to do during the pandemic, and how much really stays with us. Looking into that we work, which is out with a new blind survey of US employees and sea
level execs. Here with what they found. Sham get them all. He is president and chief operating officer we work, and Sean joins us on the phone in San Francisco. So, I'm nice to have you here on Bloomberg. How are you. I'm doing great. Thank you so much Carol for having me join you. Well, it's great to have you here and listen. You guys have a great window into truly how we're all working and how we expect to work. Tell us about this survey, who you talked to and
what you found out. Sure, we ask a market research company to reach out to a thousand C suite executives as well as a thous and not C suite executives and talk to them about what the future holds in
terms of hybrid work environment and like. And what was fascinating is you saw that employees want to have some control over the mix they have of coming into a headquarters office working from home, we're going into a satellite office or remote office of some kind, and that match suite executives said the same thing, that they're willing to
give that degree of control really part of it. Yeah, that's I find that interesting because there were some other research that we've been talking about over the last couple of weeks where you know, there's some disconnect between kind of what employees or what companies think how well this working from home is going versus employees who want the flexibility but they also want that face time. I think
that's absolutely right. But there's a lot of common ground as well, and a lot of it depends on the nature of the job, the nature of the company, what kind of culture they have, and how they deliver the
value to the to the end user. One thing that you have a lot of commonality around is you're starting to build the consensus in many environments where you'd look at it sort of there's a one third, one third, one third kind of model where you're hearing a lot of people say, what we'd like to have is one
third in the headquarters office. What I'd like to have is one third or something like that working from home, and what I'd like to have is about a third where I'm working from a satellite office or a disparate office. And in fact, two thirds of employees are saying that's what they like, which is to spend a good amount of their time moving between multiple locations, and you have
sev C suite. They're saying, absolutely, we'd be very happy with our employees operating in some form of a hybrid model, depending on what's appropriate for my particular kind of environment. Well, I want to just say to kind of add on to this um anecdotal evidence, but not really it's actual evidence.
One of our market watchers came on early in and said, we set off, we set up our shut offices excuse me, in New York City, moved out to Connecticut, and then decided that when we need space, will just rent it, you know, whether it's we work or something else. You know, when we need our employees to get together. Are you
seeing this translate into you know, future business. Are you seeing numbers to hire a people who want to tap into we work offices because they just need it temporarily to bring their their teams together, who have been working from home and who are maybe expected to continue to work that way. You see, is that part of its temporary and part of it is it's a permanent flexibility. And I think that's the part that actually is going
to be even more interesting. So you have some people that right now large companies are turning around and saying, Okay, we need to bring our people back because we believe that productivity will be higher if we move away from a complete work from home environment and bring our people together, have them collaborate and be able to work together in a more traditional kind of environment for at least part
of their day. But then you have a lot of people who are looking at the world and saying, because the way that we're working is evolving as quickly as it is, we're not really committing to the next fifteen years to commit to an office space. So what we'd really like to do is commit to something for three
to five years. Is we can kind of see that far and so let's do that and then as as things play themselves out a little bit clearer than we can decide if we need to accord you into bigger, we need to accord you into smaller, and we want to have that kind of flexibility on an ongoing basis. So you have that that's going on. And also the nature of the space that people want is change it.
You know, if I'm going to bring people in, what I'd like them to do is collaborate, which means I need to configure my office in a very different way than I used to when I had people come in just to have head down space where they're working on their own. But does that mean you guys are seeing um science. I want to talk a bit more about the survey, and we're going to take a break, do
some news and come back. But in terms of we work, are you you seeing people kind of reach out to you increasingly because they need your services, because they've shut down kind of on their their own workspace because they
want they're going to have this hybrid environment. Absolutely. So, I think one thing that people oftentimes don't recognize about the footprint that we work at roughly half our business comes to large enterprises, and so we've hit historic We've done a lot of work with them, and they in particular are coming to us and say, because we're changing this environment, help us design a footprint that works in a different way than the footprint we used to have.
We also have half our business coming from small medium sized enterprises and traditional single person operation and they're coming back in in much more rapid where than the large companies are right now. So we're seeing them come back into a more normalized work environment in certain geographies, and we're seeing a geographically business. You know, we have a thirty eight country footprint and we've got about fifty million square feet around the world. We're getting to see it
in a lot of different environments. From the same time, Hey, sham I teased with our news anchor Charlie Palette about what he would be willing to sack office in terms
of a benefit or perk. You guys have some research on that tell us a little bit about it absolutely so that the answer is six of employees would be willing to not only trade off something, but they'd be willing to actually pay out of pocket to be able to have some control and be able to actually get another space that they could go work at that's different from their headquarters. Pay out of their pockets, pay out of their pocket. That's how valuable people find this flexibility
to be. And the other stat that that jumped out at me is employees would be willing to give up at least one benefit or perk, including healthcare coverage, cash bonuses, paid time off for the freedom to choose their work environment. Absolutely. Absolutely, So it's a very different environment we're talking about than
what it used to look like years ago. So you know, it's interesting too because one of the findings is that the majority three quarters of the C suite saying that they're likely to give their employees a stipend to work from home or coworking space. I mean, when it comes down to it, for a company, if they don't have to house as many employees, I mean, that's a big line item on the balance sheet. That's a big out
line item on the balance sheet. The other thing that people are really interested in is engagement, royalty and being able to build that that culture. And one of the things I found most striking is when we looked at what the mix was and asked employees, How engaged are you and how how highly do you recommend your company?
The ones that were more engaged and the ones that were less engaged tended to want to be in the headquarters about the same So I was a little surprising, but both of them wanted to be in headquarters about a third of their attack. What was interesting is that people who were more engaged wanted to be homeless and preferred to be in either in a coworking space or in some sort of satellite office, versus the people were less engaged who tended to want to be home more.
So it's interesting is the ones that want that are actually engaged tend to want to be in headquarters and in satellite office or coworking environment at home less, and the ones who want to be home more tend to
be the ones that are less engaged. So let me ask you something, because I'm just thinking folks are going to be like, well, yeah, of course we work is going to be saying, you know, showing a survey where people you know will rent space to get together and that they'll want the flexibility because this is certainly your book. So what would you say to something like somebody like that although you know, to be fair, we've been seeing kind of this trend happen over the last decade, this
flexibility in the working environment. But what would you say to somebody's like, well, of course you guys are going to be, you know, talking about something like this. It's something that we're very interested and that's what we're talking
about before the break. We obviously have this big foot that we've been able to see what's happened in China, We've been able to see what's happening in the Far East, what's happening in Europe, and what's happening in the US, what's happening in Latin America, and how this is playing
itself out. And what we're seeing across the board is that people want to have their right now on So from our perspective as a business, if somebody wants to lease a headquarters from us, will lease in the headquarters. If they want to have flexible space, will lease the flexible space. So work from home or work from not in headquarters is to our interest. So all of those play out in the same way, and that's been sort of the macro trend that the company has been built on.
So this particular thing I think is more informative about what we're actually seeing. It's very consistent with what we're seeing of the marketplace, and and what you're going to see is that people are increasingly interested in how do I retain my people, how do I do it in a way that's consistent with the value that I need to deliver to my end user, and how does that different bite department and create much more a custom model than everybody comes in nine to five every day into headquarters.
And that's what we're seeing. And this is just sort of a a more refined view so that other people can see what we're seeing in ourselves. Just go about thirty seconds left. I think that's really important that you, like a lot of other Mobile CEOs that I've been talking to, said, you know, listen, we saw the virus in the Impact early because we were over in Asia. We've also seen the recovery earlier because we are in Asia.
But what you're seeing in China is showing that people want this flexibility and they want to do it differently. And just got about thirty seconds here. Well that's what we've started to say, right, So in China, we've got the people back in Asia, if we've probably got seventy percent of people back in general. In Europe we're probably
seeing something that operates a little more like fifty. And in the US it's in the high thirties that we're back to kind of normal and and you're starting to see things like we have a set of offerings where people can go into any building, and that's where we're seeing a lot of pick up on as well. So people who say, Okay, I want to be able to choose where I go at any moment in time. So
I think this is something we've been building to. Technologies played a tough out and now we're started to see it come to a head, right, the innovation, the disruption, it just kind of continues here. Hey, Sham, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Sham, get them all. President, Chief operating officer over at we work, joining us on the phone in San Francisco,