Business
In this spectacular episode, our host Kevin Steinberger, has an informative conversation with Sameer Pangrekar, Director of Global Design & Construction and Strategic Projects, Real Estate and Workplace, at Twitter! Listen as they discuss the major focus Twitter has placed on their culture in their offices. How has Twitter effectively taken an understanding of both culture and real estate to better the functionality of their spaces? Is it easier to measure culture nowadays given the amount of industry services/solutions? What are Sameer's "must-haves" for his ultimate workspace of the future? Dive in now! Finally, it's not too late to book your pass to #FutureOffices Winter 2020 at Convene's brand new spaces at 225 Liberty Street, New York, NY and Convene at 530 5th Avenue, New York, NY from January 22 - 24 for even more discussions on the workplace as it relates to culture, sustainability, HR, leasing, coworking and more! Follow us on Twitter @OfficesOutlook for more real estate and workplace gems! #LoveWhereYouWork Full Transcript: INTRO: The Future Offices podcast, a series that brings you an all encompassing approach to the future of work. My name is Kevin Steinberger and as your host I will be speaking to the real estate leaders and workplace visionaries that are changing the way we think about where and how we work. KEVIN: Welcome back to another episode of the Future Offices podcast. You can find past episodes on our website at futureofficeswinter.com/podcast or you can search the future offices podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or whatever your preferred platform i s for podcasts. We are everywhere. Subscribe, rate us, give us reviews, let us know. Let me know what you think of it. I've received an influx of LinkedIn messages concerning the podcast. Please feel free to reach out to myself via LinkedIn, but very excited for this episode because we had an all star guest here and it is my pleasure to introduce Sameer Pangrekar, the director of global design and construction and strategic projects with the REW, the real estate and workplace team at Twitter. Twitter is what's happening in the world and what people are talking about right now. As most of our listeners do know, if it's happening in sports news, TV, entertainment, it's happening on Twitter. KEVIN: The platform's purpose is to serve the public conversation and Twitter works to make sure their company reflects their services. And this means ensuring that their team makes Twitter as diverse as the people who use it. And I love that right there, but enough of me talking, Sameer, very excited to talk to catch up. I know it's been a while, it's been a couple of years, but welcome to the Future Offices podcast. SAMEER: Thanks for having me, Kevin. Super excited to be here. I'm going to talk a little bit about what Twitter's doing, both for our office space and how it impacts our culture and just, I personally actually have really gotten to a podcast lately. They're a really great way to, you know, if you're at the gym or commute to work or whatnot, throw one on and try to learn as much as you can throughout the day. So thanks for having me. KEVIN: Absolutely. And you kind of nailed it there. You man, you can take my job at this point. No, you're right. They're really short podcasts. They're micro podcasts. We've been pushing out only between 15 and 20 minutes. So again, just like you said, it's something you can catch at the gym, on your commute to work, whether you walk, drive, whatever it might be, maybe on your lunch break. It's definitely something you can just pop in and grab some really insightful and great information from some of the rock stars in that real estate and workplace space from some of the biggest tech brands, you know, and Twitter is one of them, some of the biggest brands in the world. So again, thanks for jumping on, but I would say the biggest reason I'm stoked about having you on this podcast and what we have learned from even past speaking engagements with yourself and your team at our conferences and even actually some of our past speakers on our podcasts is that culture has been a major, major focus when it comes to workplace strategies, real estate strategies, overall corporate real estate strategies and Twitter as I've seen firsthand within multiple offices of yours and what I've seen from even some of your thought leadership directly and some of the folks on your team, you guys are doing some really, really awesome things in your offices, especially aligning those types of strategies with the culture piece of the puzzle. KEVIN: Before we dive into that, please, first things first, tell our listeners maybe a little bit about yourself specifically in your role, do you have a very unique title and awesome title and sort of how you fit into the real estate and workplace part of the Twitter team? SAMEER: So my main focus is to head up all of our office projects around the world. So that's building out new space, modifying existing space and really providing workspaces that allow our employees and we call them tweaks here at Twitter to do their very best work possible. And I also focus on strategic projects that help our team real estate and workplace as a team and partner with other functions across Twitter or to help make our team more visible across the landscape of the tech environment and making sure that we do everything we can to support the business. As you mentioned, our our, our vision is to serve the public conversation and we want that to reflect in our company and in its diversity. Just like our service is super diverse, we try to make sure our employee base is like that. And I think when we talk about the culture piece, that's a big part of what drives our culture. And one of the things that I'm really focused on is how can we help our employee base continue to redefine how and where we work at Twitter and we partner both within our real estate and workplace team and with other key stakeholders across the business to further that goal. And company wide initiative that we're focused on this year. KEVIN: Amazing. And just right off of that. Another thing I wanted to to ask is, and this has been an ongoing trend within our podcast series from our first episode to even our last episode with with Don Watson from Merck and we dove into this with with Ruben Gots and Michelle Caldwell from Avanade as well in some earlier episodes. What other stakeholders does your team, the real estate and workplace team at Twitter work with at the company and has that changed over the years? Because we're starting to see folks, you know now working hand in hand with their HR team and now working hand in hand with their finance and their IT guys. Whereas in the past they may not have worked so often with these teams. Are there any other teams at the company that you have seen a growing relationship with? SAMEER: What I'd say first and foremost is that I think what we've done a really good job of is even within our real estate and workplace team working as one team, so we have five different functions within our real estate and workplace umbrella. We have planning and leasing, design and construction, workplace operations, food and beverage and internal events, and I think what we first did a few years ago when Tracy Hawkins took over the team and it was work that had started, but we continued to build on which really focused to ensure that within our own group, we're first working as one team and we don't have silos because I think it's important that all five of those functions work seamlessly together to deliver the workplace experience. And then we've since iterated on that and continue to evolve that into ensuring that we have strategic partnerships across the business. SAMEER: And it really is every business unit, it's not any one specific business unit because I think when we design and build office space, we have every type of function that sets in within that space. And so we need to understand what those different business units need. And I think why we've been so successful is it's not any one group that's responsible for that, but we tap into all the relationships across our global real estate team that they built. So if that's the office coordinator in Dublin or if it's the person that runs events in New York or San Francisco or Tokyo, you know, we leverage everything we can to understand how our employees use the space in order to help guide us, how we can continue to improve and what we design and build. And we also leverage those relationships to understand what the business units in those respective markets need to be successful in what they do. SAMEER: And also to understand the culture of that market. And I think one things that you know, you've seen when you visited a few of our Twitter offices is none of them are the same. And we really strive to make sure that they one feel like Twitter, but to represent the local culture. And one of the ways we've been able to do that is leveraging all of these relationships. And that takes time. There's not, you know, a one-stop thing you can do. You have to invest the time, you have to build the relationships and you have to continue to work on them as people, you know, maybe join Twitter, and leave Twitter, you know, you're constantly meeting new people and building those relationships. KEVIN: Absolutely and it was very noticeable and actually very refreshing being able to see the Twitter office in New York and then even being able to see the Twitter office in San Francisco and seeing the difference and the different style of the workplace strategy and design purely as it relates to the culture of those offices, which was something a lot of people who attend our conferences. A lot of people who I talk to have a very hard time understanding and look for a little bit more information because going back to that culture piece, it's something that has recently become a very important part of the workplace strategy, but it's also been, as you know, as anyone will tell you in this space, quite hard to measure sometimes. Now going back to the culture piece specifically, how has Twitter effectively taken understanding of both culture and corporate real estate or workplace to better the functionality of their spaces? SAMEER: We invest in those relationships and partnerships and we really tried to understand local needs. I'll give you a good example. We recently opened, opened a new space in older, some ground floor space and existing building and instead of just continuing what we had done before, which is traditional open office, we really partnered with the site lead to understand how his team works, and they had a very unique way in which they do something called pairing. And so people in the engineering group will work together and sit next to each other and work in tandem. And so we decided to not just build open office space in the ground floor, but we actually built these kinds of flexible team rooms such that you have maybe five or six people that sit in this room and it's not quite an enclosed conference room, but it allows for the flexibility through various materials to kind of open up the space should they want to be. SAMEER: If the want to have a little bit more openness throughout their environment or if they wanted to have a little bit more heads down focus, work and work on this kind of pairing exercise, they can kind of pull that material closed. It's essentially like an acoustical felt panel and they can, they can do their important work and so we're taking this approach across a number of projects that we are working on this year and we're not just applying Boulder situations to other offices. We're really taking the time to understand the local needs of how those employees work and how those functions work. And I think when we're able to do that successfully, we can then positively impact the culture because employees feel energized about what they're doing. I'm a little bit of what you talked about. More and more people have choice of what they can do with their employment. SAMEER: There are so many great companies out there and there's so many mission driven companies and you know, I'm actually celebrating my sixth Twitterversary again, another Twitter acronym for you. So it's like my work anniversary today. But I've chosen to stay here because of the mission that Twitter has and what it is doing for the world. And I think you see a lot of people really reflecting on themselves and picking companies that align with their value, personal values so that they feel like they're having an impact in the world. And so it throughout our office design, not just in the functionality, but again going to that local design, making employees feel like that they're immersed in their local culture. We recently actually today opened a small space in Korea that again, very much honors tradition of what Korea is as a culture and doesn't just have a cookie cutter Twitter feel. And I think blending those two things has made us really successful. KEVIN: That's amazing. First off, happy anniversary. That is very exciting. How long have you been at Twitter as of today? SAMEER: So six years internally, but I actually worked three years as an external design vendor and loved it so much that I wanted to get a job. Twitter applied an d was lucky enough to get a position and I've been here ever since. Wow. Wow. Long time. KEVIN: Wow. Long time. That's fantastic. Quick question, going off of what you just said, are there any, would you say specific metrics that you think companies should be very focused on tracking within their workplace, maybe with their employees to understand maybe their culture or their locality a little bit better. Are there any maybe specific metrics that you think are an absolute go-to for better understanding your culture? SAMEER: You know, I don't think that there's one specific metric and I think that's because culture is such a dynamic thing. It's always evolving and changing. And so I think you have to look at a number of different things across the board to evaluate your culture. Some of that, you know, is within our EDW and some of that might not be, but I don't think you can just tie one number to something as important as culture and something that it's not made up of any one thing. It's made up of your entire employee population and that employee population is constantly changing with people that join your company. And so I think it's important to consider when you're evaluating something like culture and and thinking about how the office space can affect that, ensuring that you're thinking about the people and not just viewing it as a metric because at the end of the day we're providing office space for people and it's important to understand their needs and what they need to be successful in delivering the product that is Twitter to the world. KEVIN: And it is. and Culture, and we've spoken about this at the conference a lot. I know Twitter has even spoken about it at the conference, which has actually been some of our top attended sessions from our San Francisco iteration, which is always very excited. But we hear that it's a challenge nowadays to effectively measure culture. And this kind of brings me to my next question as it relates to workplace strategy could be a push pull method of of yes it's harder and yes it's not. But do you find that it's harder nowadays to measure company culture because we're at a point in time where our workforce does encompass four different and distinct generations? Or would you say maybe it's getting a little bit easier to understand because of the amount of industry services now you know, surveys, workplace solutions. I know a lot of folks are coming out with different types of measurements for culture. Do you see the understanding piece of the culture for real estate and workplace strategy getting easier or harder? SAMEER: I think it's a balance. And the reason I say that is I think all the data that we can now collect is super insightful, right? I think data is a positive. I think whether it's surveys or you know, workplace occupancy sensors, whatever it may be, data is inherently a good thing because it helps as one input. And I think that's what I would stress from my vantage point, especially when you're talking about four different generations. You can have all the data in the world, but you have to know the people and you have to build those relationships across the board and I think that's what our team has done a phenomenal job in globally is that we understand our people and we understand the vision of the company and we can then try to ensure that we are being good stewards of that. So I don't think it's just about data. I don't think it's just about not having data. I think it's using both in tandem to make good decisions for your business and for your real estate and for your culture that hopefully enact positive changes. KEVIN: I couldn't agree more. It was a trick question. Onto a lighter question that we have been asking all of our podcasts guests. What we're doing is we're asking if you could create your ultimate dream workspace dream office, what things or what thing would be an absolute must for you...and I'll just let you know right off the bat. I have on past episodes requested for my dream office, a chocolate milkshake machine on tap. I've requested a planetarium where I can go and regulate my chi on stressful days. So with that being said, if there's, if there's anything that comes to mind that would fit in your ultimate or dream workspace, what would it be and why? SAMEER: Yeah, I mean, I, I think, we do a pretty good job here at Twitter of providing some amazing space. But personally I'm a really big sports fan, so TV's everywhere. Showing sports is never a bad thing, but honestly, I think we're doing a good job of providing optionality to our employees and I think that's really important. So many people have so many different interests and different things that they want to achieve within the workspace and even outside the workspace. And how can we support them in those endeavors that I think, you know, we do a really good job of balancing that. I think, you know, we always have things that we can research and do differently, but I think we do a good job of balancing that and an occasional sports TV here and there wouldn't hurt my feelings at all. KEVIN: Big sports guy myself. It would be nice to have some sort of dedicated sports room within our office to take a break and watch some games, especially around March madness. That would be amazing. KEVIN: Sameer, that concludes our podcast, but thank you so, so much for the insights to you and the Twitter team. You guys have been phenomenal speakers at our shows in the past, had multiple site tours at your headquartered offices, which have been absolutely phenomenal. You guys have been just, just amazing attendees, speakers and hosts all around and even supporters and even chairperson, you know, I know we've had some folks on the team as chairs in the past as well. So thank you so much and we appreciate you being on the show for this episode. SAMEER: Really appreciate you having me and been been really thankful to have attended your guys's conference and speaking. And I think you guys are doing some great stuff. You know, having a podcast. I think you're the first group that I know that's doing this, just been so appreciate all you guys are doing for pushing office environments and you know, having speakers on and sharing knowledge across the industry. OUTRO: Absolutely Samir and again thank you for tuning in with us. Ladies and gentleman Sameer Pangrekar, the director of global design and construction and strategic projects with the real estate and workplace team at Twitter. So that concludes our episode. Again, if you missed any of our last episodes please feel free to go listen at futureofficeswinter.com/podcast and again you can find us on any other of the podcast platforms we are on everything. Feel free to follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn at future offices...but even more so feel free to follow us on Twitter @officesoutlook. But thanks for tuning in and we will see you next time.