Interlude // (re)introductions
New subscriber welcome, what's to come, and a bit about me
In the past few months, The Workplace Strategist's subscriber count has shot through the roof. To our newcomers, welcome! I’m really glad you’re here, and a huge thank you to
, author of The Experience Strategist, for sending folks my way.Free subscribers can access The Workplace Strategist archives for a limited time—concluding on the last day of summer, September 22. If you are a newcomer and curious about the evolution of the newsletter, or want to refresh your memory on an earlier issue, have at it. Consider this my (elective) summer reading program for you all.
Later this summer, my posting cadence will be more frequent as I share pieces I’ve written for other publications…and I will share details about my book WORK then PLACE: Navigating the Future of Work and Where it Happens (co-written with the indomitable Sara Escobar)! Before our mid-autumn publish date, subscribers will receive select excerpts that offer a window into our ethos and mission. I’m equal parts excited and anxious to share pieces of our labor of love with the world.
In the meantime—since so many readers here only know me as a writer—I want to introduce myself more completely, share some about my journey to today, and contextualize why I think the way I do. When Sara and I started writing the book, this is what flowed out of me first, almost instinctively (with some edits and add-ins from today. It was never going to fit in the narrative for our book, so I’ve been patiently waiting for a moment for it to be seen by more than just close friends.
It is, essentially, a love letter to my intellectual lineage and my teachers, weaving all my disparate lessons and experiences into the foundation of my thesis for The Workplace Strategist, WORK then PLACE, and my overall ambition for work in the 21st century to work for us, the people. And, if you’ve been reading along from the beginning of this newsletter, there are easter eggs a-plenty down below.
I often joke that I’ve made a habit of collecting passport stamps from every angle of the workplace and the employee experience. Still, it wasn’t until a friend pointed it out a few years ago that my professional journey continues to be defined by a gravitational pull back toward people and cultural dynamics.
I came into the real estate industry following the 2008 recession as a complete wildcard. Among coworkers with degrees in business, finance, economics, and other relevant fields of study to commercial real estate, there I was with a bachelor’s degree in religion from Gettysburg College, a liberal arts college flanked by the battlefields of the infamous turning point of the American Civil War. I’d spent four years learning about the Abrahamic faiths, existentialism, and the cultural experiences, rituals, and behaviors that religion informs among peoples and within institutions throughout history and how they shape our collective present and future.
My first job out of college was as a market researcher at CBRE following The Great Recession of 2008, so the gearshift was dramatic and bumpy. Still, as time passed, I became curious about people’s relationship to offices and what happened inside them. After a few years of studying the Manhattan commercial market and tracking deal flows, I dipped my toe into the brokerage world. I saw firsthand how technology companies and startups were shaping the new commercial real estate landscape and the (ugh) “hipster-industrial” design trends now emblematic of the 2010s.
It was during this time that I first learned about “workplace strategy,” primarily because I was impossibly curious about what happened once the new tenants we’d signed leases with moved into their new office spaces. Similar to wondering about what happens after the movie ends—just because the cameras are gone doesn’t mean the story ends—I knew I needed to know more about what happens for companies after they move to a new office and what working there is like. The first time I heard the phrase “workplace strategy,” a lightbulb inside my mind immediately flicked on, and I knew I needed to know more.
Following CBRE, I went to American Express. I was part of the team that oversaw the company’s divestment from Global Business Travel—or, as 25-year-old Corinne would describe it, “the dividing of the assets in a mostly amicable corporate divorce.” When that project concluded, I took on my first proper workplace strategy, managing the global flexible workplace program, BlueWork, helping business units navigate the change in behavior and office space that BlueWork entailed, and developing new workflows and processes for operational teams to respond to the more agile needs of BlueWork workers.
AMEX is, in many ways, where I got my practical MBA. I gained a deep understanding of enterprise operations and workflows, how different business lines operate under the umbrella of one brand, and how UX/UI and iterative design translate to the workplace, employee experience, and company culture. While at AMEX, I dove head first into learning about Activity-Based Working and the design dynamics established by Veldhoen & Company in the Netherlands.
After AMEX, I went to Gensler with the intent of learning workplace strategy through the lens of the design world. Instead, I came away with a more profound understanding of how essential change management is to how companies operate, not just in times of transformation but as a company attitude of staying adaptive and evolutionary. I worked with clients as they developed trusting partnerships with their employees and worked to sustain their attention and engagement for the duration of years-long workplace transformations. I challenged executives to develop communication approaches that were more interactive, immersive, and straightforward than the typical corporate comms email to ensure that employees were in the know about organizational changes and what that meant for them and their teams’ ability to be productive and create quality work.
Not long after joining Gensler, I decided to hop on the WeWork hyper-growth rocket ship. In my two years at the company, I lived about four different lives. First, I worked as a consultant, similar to my work at Gensler, running research and insights projects to develop strategic workplace recommendations for Powered By We clients worldwide. These recommendations would then come to life for the PxWe design teams.
Then, when WeWork’s Chelsea headquarters was so overcrowded—due to the aforementioned hyper-growth—I got to put my corporate workplace strategy hat back. With the help of my team, we created a densified Activity-Based Working design strategy that created efficiencies based on the HQ’s average daily occupancy instead of designing based on the traditional measurement of allocated headcount - or “how many people have this location designated as their primary office?”
Against nearly impossible odds, we delivered this project in under six months (a timeline I would never wish on anyone). This project was pivotal for me. More than previous workplace projects I’d worked on, this was about transforming behaviors for the long term, not just about helping teams navigate a period of change and then return to some semblance of “business as usual.” My hunch was that true workplace and culture change couldn’t happen without behavioral change, and behavioral change likely wouldn’t happen without business change, and business change likely wouldn’t happen without unimpeachable data that said change was essential to the survival of any given company. If I’d had more time at WeWork, this would have been where I channeled my focus.
*A moment of silence for WeWork’s 2019 IPO, subsequent crash, layoffs, etc.*
As a teammate once put it, working at WeWork was Dickensian. It was the best of times because I was surrounded by some of the most thoughtful, hardworking, and innovative people I’ve met in my career. It was the worst of times because aspects of the company might seem satirical to the untrained eye because they were so absurd.
After coming back down to earth in the aftermath of the WeWork crash, I led workplace and innovation for a New York commercial landlord that was focused on integrating digital, physical, and experiential offerings within the portfolio. Not unlike the early-day aims of WeWork’s Powered By We, this landlord wanted to help their clients by integrating further into their office and employee experience initiatives with Space as a Service offerings, hospitality, and programming available to all tenants, no matter their size.
When COVID-19 hit, the tone shifted to keeping buildings hygienic and safe. Then, when we had access to vaccines, the overtures for Return to Office began and haven’t entirely gone away, nearly four years after the fact. Objectively, the commercial real estate world was a fascinating place to be at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We began to see, and are still seeing, the commercial real estate business model at odds with what the moment calls for: flexibility, new ways of working, and proximity to everyday life.
Unsurprisingly, I found myself returning to my hunch from my WeWork days before too long: organizational change only lasts if the ways of working and business flows make room for change and evolve with it. As we continue living through all different versions of “unprecedented times” in the 2020s, “business as usual” doesn’t exist anymore, and we must act accordingly.
I left commercial real estate in 2021 to develop my beta concept for productivity and effectiveness, the brainchild of everything I had learned and could not put into action while at WeWork. (I’ve promised “more on that later” in this newsletter before, and I’m pleased to tell you that “later” is within the next two months.) Then, in April 2022, I did what felt impossible and started Agate.
My core mission has always centered around helping companies navigate the future of work and making work suck less— for lack of a more concise and elegant turn of phrase. So much of the conversation these past few years has focused on “where” work gets done, but the more transformative (and lasting) conversation concerns “how” work gets done.
The geographies, designs, and operations of where work gets done will be determined by doing the deep work of evaluating, improving, and implementing new (practical) ways of working and consistently going through the reevaluation and iteration process always to stay nimble and responsive. Just like the services and products that companies sell to their customers, “work” is a product that needs consistent tending to. Maintenance doesn’t cut it in the 21st century, it seems. Evolution is the name of the game.
At Thanksgiving dinner about six years ago, my grandmother congratulated me on a promotion I’d just gotten and followed up with: “Now, tell me, how on earth could the work you do connect to what you studied in college?” I think she was expecting something closer to: “not at all,” with some laughter, but what she got was something along the lines of:
Companies are religions. They have leadership figures, places of worship, rituals, norms, and expectations of their people, and a particular lens through which they view themselves and their space. All that’s different is the context.
It is impossible to overstate how essential my undergraduate studies and all these different professional experiences have shaped me. With these passport stamps, I have built a body of work and a perspective in a way that a cultural anthropologist might. Every piece of the workplace—which is the digital, physical, and experiential environments that employees operate within— has its part, and there are so many nascent aspects of how we work and how companies operate that are yet to be included in the formula needed to craft a comprehensive workplace strategy.