Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
About This Episode
In this thought-provoking episode of The Future of Work® Podcast, Andrew Farah—CEO and co-founder of Density—unpacks what organizations get wrong about return to office strategy. With experience analyzing workspace data for over 1.25 billion square feet worldwide, Andrew offers a candid perspective on workplace design, policy ambiguity, and the cultural and operational tradeoffs of hybrid models.
He dives deep into the concept of “freedom within constraints,” the connection between trust and team performance, and why many return-to-office policies miss the mark. With examples from companies like Uber and Shopify, and insight into Density’s cutting-edge sensor technology, this conversation challenges leaders to think critically about space, culture, and clarity in a post-pandemic workforce.
About Andrew Farah
Andrew Farah is the CEO and co-founder of Density, a leading workplace analytics company that helps major global brands—including Uber, Shopify, and Pinterest—understand how people use physical space through privacy-first sensor technology. With clients spanning 32 countries and over 1.25 billion square feet of workspace, Andrew brings unparalleled insight into real estate, workforce design, and the evolving dynamics of hybrid work.
What You’ll Learn
- Why ambiguous hybrid policies hurt both flexibility and productivity
- How “freedom within constraints” can enable trust and high performance
- The overlooked relationship between physical space and workplace culture
- How companies can align hiring strategies with their work model (sprint vs. marathon)
- The environmental and economic impact of return-to-office decisions
Transcript
Andrew Farah [00:00:00] And I think organizations have done their employees and teams a disservice by not creating constraints because they think that those constraints are somehow restricting freedom, when in fact, they’re very much enabling it.
Frank Cottle [00:00:12] Andrew, welcome to the Future Work Podcast. Really great to have you and gosh, I really enjoyed our previous conversations and I’m looking forward to today immensely.
Andrew Farah [00:00:21] Glad to be here.
Frank Cottle [00:00:22] Thanks for having me. You’re the expert. You’ve done thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of workstations and track them through a variety of large and small companies. Hybrid has become such a catch-all phrase. What do you believe, how do you believe that ambiguity of that catch- all nature is actually hurting flexibility and hurting organizations overall, trying to figure out exactly what hybrid means and how to create a program.
Andrew Farah [00:00:58] Well, I think that people tend to do better when they have freedom within constraints.
Frank Cottle [00:01:10] Explain that.
Andrew Farah [00:01:11] Yes, I think the teams tend to do better when there’s a lot of freedom, but there’s some type of constraint.
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Frank Cottle [00:01:19] I don’t run real well with handcuffs on.
Andrew Farah [00:01:21] No, no, no. I just mean that, like, if you’re running, you might be running in a race and that race might have, you know, some boundaries in terms of like, you know, maybe you’re doing a marathon instead of a half or you’re doing a 5k. Like, you’ve got some sense of like what you’re doing and the boundaries within it. But like, it’s your choice on how fast or how hard to run. That’s what I mean by like freedom within constraints. And I think that this concept of return to office has been like muddied by organizations unwilling to create clear constraints. And all I mean is these are the days that we’re going to be in, so it’s shared to create a shared experience, or these are hours that we expect people to be so that people can schedule meetings around the same time so that they’re not wondering what each personal schedule might be. And I think organizations have done their employees and teams a disservice by not creating constraints because they think. That those constraints are somehow restricting freedom, when in fact they’re very much enabling it.
Frank Cottle [00:02:27] Okay, I’m going to stick with your constraints comment for a second. You like to run marathons. I like to runs sprints. You work for a company that their constraints are sprints. I work for company who puts out marathons as their constraints. I’m going to go look for a new job.
Andrew Farah [00:02:51] I think that that should be an acceptable outcome. I think companies need to get comfortable with the fact that if they’re going to decide to run a marathon, but they’re gonna decide to run sprint and to make that like a practical metaphor, a large corporation planning over the course of the next three to five years versus a startup that’s thinking in the next 18 months, marathon versus sprint. Yep, I think that that is like a really healthy thing to acknowledge that like this is maybe not the race for everybody. In fact, it is decidedly not the race for every body and we need people that wanted to sign up for a marathon. The last thing that you want to be realizing midway through a sprint is that you’re actually in a marathon
Frank Cottle [00:03:34] Yes, exactly. Right. It’s really true. What’s fun, too, when you think about that is we’re talking about companies and return to office policies for the moment and hybrid and defining that. But when you lay the constraints on it, that’s really an HR employment job description issue in hiring the people that want to be in a Sprint versus the people who want to. Getting the right people in in the first place makes a huge difference in their willingness to deal with a particular group of constraints. And when we look at… Job descriptions and we do a lot of HR companies like you do. We do a lots of HR companies. They’re trying to do a job description that brings them everybody. They have such a wide net. That’s right. They really don’t and then they might pick the person with the most talent but they found a sprinter instead of a marathoner and so ultimately it’s not going to work. How do you deal with that? How do how do you drill that policy down to a hiring process? And still get enough bandwidth to win the battle for talent.
Andrew Farah [00:04:48] Yeah, so I think this is a really phenomenal question. I was talking to about 75 workplace leaders. We were doing this roundtable. And this comment came up, and I thought.
Frank Cottle [00:04:59] Big table.
Andrew Farah [00:05:00] It was three sections, so it was like 25 in piece, and then it was 75 in total, but yeah, a large table. So, and we were the loud table, like they told us to quiet down because we were laughing too hard. So anyway, it was a lot of fun, but there was this wonderful comment that a workplace leader mentioned, which is everyone talks about return to office as though 100% of employees were previously at the office. And the reality is that we hired a bunch of kids who recently came out of college and a big part of our workforce, not maybe 20%, but call it 10, 15% of our work force has never been to the office before. They have no idea of the norms. And so this isn’t a return, this is like a first, you know, arrival. And the point that she was making is that the team that we built during COVID might not be the team that we need post RTO in 2025. And it should be acceptable to have the conversation that the shape and construction of the team might be different. And that shouldn’t just be on the recruitment side, like net new people. But it might mean that being earnest and honest with the current team that has been there throughout the change that the organization and the macro has seen, being honest with them about what the season of work is, post RTO is a major change. You know a lot of people don’t talk about the fundamental driver for a lot of hybrid work is child care. The reason that people left, many people, not all, but many people moved to different parts of the country and different parts of the world was so that they could have child care and corporations largely don’t provide child care, so when you ask people to return to office, you know, they’re weighing it against very real consequences and very real costs of trying to take care of their families.
Frank Cottle [00:06:57] Benefit packages in general in the future of work are going to become more and more elemental to job making decisions overall. I had a really interesting offline conversation with one of the congressmen that put together some of the current government’s benefit packages and different packages are very, very involved with. Massive number of major companies. And it was interesting to discuss not just childcare, but the work decision-making process, what percentage of the, where do I go, company A or B based on their benefits package, which is focused on healthcare and maternity leave. And childcare are two of the major elements within that decision- making process. So, I agree with you overall, and at least half the workforce, at least have the workforce. That’s a key decision in everything they do. Yeah, that’s right. Which means, will they go back to the office or not?
Andrew Farah [00:08:18] Yeah, and I think that if you’re going to create clear constraints, first off, I think all organizations should create clear constraints about what type of work they expect from their teams. They do it in every other, every other facet, right? They do it through OKRs, and we do it through goal setting, and we do through performance reviews, we do it through PIPs. We do this in every other form. We should do the same when it comes to the physical behaviors. Are we physically in person? Are we mixed? Are we fully remote? And I think the very next thing is that you need to live with the consequences of those constraints.
Frank Cottle [00:08:50] Well, we used to do that. We used to call it the time clock. That’s right. Everybody hated punching it, by the way.
Andrew Farah [00:08:55] Sure. Well, they got their buddy to punch it. Now we have that thing called coffee badging. It’s the same. It’s like the equivalent. It’s a modern equivalent.
Frank Cottle [00:09:04] No, I think that’s true. But when we talk about the purpose of return to office in a lot of companies and I’ll quote or subquote Jamie Dimon or JP Morgan is to help preserve our culture. So here’s my question. If that’s But if… 25% of the employees in the next five years are gonna be replaced by an AI element of some sort. And each one of us is gonna show up like we show up with a laptop today and a mobile phone today. We’re gonna show with a lap top, a mobile phone and our AI assistant. How will the change in cultures be impacted by those AI assistants even more than returning to the office.
Andrew Farah [00:10:03] You are asking a compound question.
Frank Cottle [00:10:06] Near darn right I am.
Andrew Farah [00:10:10] I, okay, there are, maybe, if it’s okay, can I break my answer?
Frank Cottle [00:10:15] Oh, good. Break it down. Yeah, break it down
Andrew Farah [00:10:17] So there’s like two core things that I think are worth talking about. Uh, the first is this question of, you know, how does AI impact culture? It’s a great question. Uh, The second is, um, the relationship between physical space and culture that you pointed out at the top of the example with Jamie Diamond, I, I want to do like maybe the second, I’m going to work backwards. So I deeply believe that the purpose of physical buildings and the purpose of specifically humans being in person with one another is to build trust.
Frank Cottle [00:10:55] I would agree with that completely.
Andrew Farah [00:10:57] And I think that the size of the trust tank of an in-person team is several times larger than the size the trust of a remote team. And what I mean by that is you can build trust remotely, but there is a limit. You can build more efficiently when you are in person and not a digital avatar in two dimensions. There is something about body language. There’s something about three dimensions. There’s something about not timeboxing every interaction to 30 minutes, 25 minutes or 60 minute increments when you’re on your schedule on your calendar, when you log in and log out. There’s some thing about that that fundamentally changes how much you trust another person and it’s very hard to replace. And the closest thing that I’ve seen to replacing this is actually Google’s most recent Gemini presentation where they showed a presence-based system that felt like you were in the room with the person. I’m really curious how that affects remote trust building.
Frank Cottle [00:12:02] Well, you know, it’s funny, I’m going to go way back in the time machine. In 82 or three, maybe it was 83 or four. Um, we actually built in one of our facilities, a holographic receptionist. Um, it was literally in a box. It was like old, really old, old styles in a box, uh, and it was still really cool and everything. And, uh the reception was actually just in the next room, but she was also handling three buildings. So the primary building and everything, customers hated it. Yeah. They knew who she was. They had met her. They had dealt with her face to face. They hated seeing her holograph. Yeah, they were. Now, this is like an early 80s, so I think nobody even had a PC, okay, so this was very Disneyland stuff that we were playing with, but still the fact that everybody said, no, we want the real person back, I think that that begs a little bit of what you’re saying, and I’ll also add a comfort point to it. When you talk about meetings where trust is developed a lot of times in teams and such, you spend almost 20% more time in a meeting where the meeting is in a conference room with couches as opposed to chairs and tables. Yeah. Okay. Now, does that mean you’re more productive or less productive? To your point of trust and relationship building and to Jamie’s point on culture. It’s more productive. To me just on the agenda and blah blah blah it may or may or may not be more productive but to the cultural elements it is much more productive
Andrew Farah [00:13:55] But I want to talk about why the reason that trust is so important is not in an abstract sense. It’s in a deeply practical one, which is that all great high-functioning teams, it is how they resolve conflict that produces great products. It’s the argument in the debates in the The thousand knows that you put into a product It’s in all of the conflict and getting through the conflict that a great product comes out on the other side and a great Product can be a service. It can be physical product. It doesn’t matter whatever you make It is it is it runs directly through conflict and and teams that are the highest performing In my opinion tend to be very high trust So if you want a high performing team you need upstream of that is high trust upstream of high trust is essentially just like, how do you build it? And it’s more efficient, in my opinion, to build that in person than it is distributed. So when he says, like, preserve our culture, I think there’s a practical application to that, which is just like we can debate with one another around the great ideas that we think are gonna make our organization better, and we’re gonna do so in a way that preserves the relationship between the people and allows the idea to sit independent of the person making it. It’s like, how do we get to the best thing, so.
Frank Cottle [00:15:22] If you say, and I agree with you, the high trust is critical to a high performance team. It’s not just being in person. I can put together a high-performance, highly trusting team by bringing in people that all have known and proven capabilities. So when one says something, the others go, yes, this person knows what they’re talking about. I know they know what they’re talking about. And I think that that comparable capabilities, if you’re gonna put together a trusting group on opinions or performance on a specific, anything, you’re going to build anything. Your architect has to know the engineer, knows what he’s talking about. The engineer has to that the architect has put together good design, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t have trust unless you know someone’s capabilities because you can’t ascertain whether their representations are accurate. So I think that’s an element you have to have.
Andrew Farah [00:16:28] Yeah, certainly. I am presuming capacity and aptitude of the individuals. I’m just saying all things equal. If you can run the experiment of an in-person team or a distributed team with the same capabilities and same backgrounds with the purpose and goal, you’re probably going to see the in- person team outperform, is my assumption, outperform in terms of quality of product largely because they’re building from a foundation of trust. But it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to build great products distributed. And I think that both things can be true. You can build great product remotely. It’s just, there’s a lot of coordination cost and companies don’t like to talk about the function and work of remote is not the same, like the norms and routines and the rituals that you apply to a remote team are fundamentally different to those that you do in person. And we’ve gotten so wrapped up in trying to recreate this like apples to When I just think that they’re both fruit, but they’re different fruit. That’s an uncomfortable truth, but like it just is. It’s like some things are better in person and some things you know, like documentation for instance is substantially better distributed. The how much it forces people to be thoughtful about their asynchronous communication. There’s a bunch of stuff to learn from that that you could apply elsewhere. But right now we’re like babies. We’re like infants at doing distributed work. It’s just barely beginning. I’m interested in what happens over the next 25 years.
Frank Cottle [00:18:05] Well, we’re doing distributed work on interstellar basis. We probably will have figured it out. Yeah, right. That sort of thing. It’s like our company is a distributed work company, but it was formed with that. In our C-level executives who are scattered all over multi-nationally, mostly in the U.S., but also in Latin America. Because we came from the same industry with the same goal, there was a recognition factor. But still, when we have to argue something out, we’re very good distributed. I think we are better in person too, which is why when we have big decisions, we come together physically. That’s great. Little decisions, ongoing things, we’re just fine. The reason we’re distributed though is because I wanted to find the best people with the highest capability and I made a decision I did not want to disrupt their families. I did not want to say. I choose you, but you have to choose to move your family and your kids and everything. You have to break your family up really from your grandparents and all that, move to California. I chose that. I felt I would not get the best talent if I put that constraint on it. So meeting everybody in the same room a lot of time means everybody has to live in the geography. Or travel extensively, which is both of which are a huge economic and psychological, emotional burden on the individual, which transfers to the company oftentimes. So that’s another, that’s a bigger challenge. If everybody lives in Manhattan, it’s easy to get everybody to go to the…
Andrew Farah [00:20:10] Can I ask you a question, can I ask a hypothetical? If tomorrow you had a, the ability to do, uh, speed of light travel. Physically right now, no, no. I mean, I mean physically, like you walk through a door, person walks through
Frank Cottle [00:20:37] I’ve seen that movie, yeah.
Andrew Farah [00:20:42] Do you think that you would have your team, let’s say you get perfect access to everyone in the world who is the best in their particular function. Do you that during the day, some portion of the day do you think you would choose to be in person working on what it means to build your business? Or would this be the medium? If there was zero cost to travel, zero cost in time, would you be in?
Frank Cottle [00:21:08] Well, if I were a God, it could do that. Yeah. That would be pretty interesting. But the reality is the difficult truth of you, as you put it earlier, is that that’s not a reality, that you can’t do that
Andrew Farah [00:21:27] Yeah, I know. But what my interest is in why not so much that you can’t. It’s like, why would you choose to bring people together? What is,
Frank Cottle [00:21:36] I don’t know what I would, except I know that I can.
Andrew Farah [00:21:40] I see. Okay. We can go back to AI maybe, but…
Frank Cottle [00:21:43] Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting question. Like I said, I don’t know whether I would bother or not if I could. Certainly not all the time.
Andrew Farah [00:21:55] Why don’t we do this conversation in person? I would like 100% do this conversation in-person.
Frank Cottle [00:22:01] Well, most people do want to hang out with me, that’s true.
Andrew Farah [00:22:04] I want to know what’s on the books, the rest of the books behind you. Oh yeah, yeah. I want you to get the shape of your working life.
Frank Cottle [00:22:11] All you have to do is come visit. Plenty of room, you know. So that’s not a problem. Okay, we’re going down a rabbit hole here, and it’s my fault. I apologize. But it’s an interesting take to consider some of these things. What do you think the most common mistake leaders make with a return-to-office policy mic. Constraints, you’ve already talked about constraints, and I’ve already brought up HR issues, recruitment issues. What do you think of else that we need to consider?
Andrew Farah [00:22:48] I think that they don’t do top-down decision-making. I think they distribute the decision- making. And I think in some organizations that can work, but at least in the customers that we work with, and just to give you a sense, 61% of our customers now have employees in office at least four days per week. Um, you know, we have a
Frank Cottle [00:23:13] To find your customer, my recognition is the majority of your customers are Fortune 1000 companies.
Andrew Farah [00:23:19] Yep, that’s right. Fortune 1000 companies.
Frank Cottle [00:23:21] And my company is not, unfortunately, running a 5,000 company, but that means I’ve got a hundred odd people scattered around, okay? I’m the more typical employer than yours. The small and medium-sized enterprise employs more people globally or nationally than the corporations. Overall. So, is this return to office only good for larger groups or is it equally good for smaller groups? And how do smaller groups adjust to return on office structure in the same way?
Andrew Farah [00:24:08] I actually, I don’t, I think painting with too broad a brush sort of is probably not. I don t know that my recommendation is the same for everybody.
Frank Cottle [00:24:20] If we’re talking return to office in this context, we’re talking return the office as it relates to Fortune 1000.
Andrew Farah [00:24:26] No, if you really pressed me, I would be like, any company that is small is going to benefit more meaningfully from being in person than a really large company. But that aside, I think the thing that most organizations, regardless of the size of the organization, get wrong is they distribute the exec team doesn’t take ownership over the policy. At least in this present moment, the executive teams that take ownership of the policy and then are very clear and transparent with their team as to… Why they’re making that change, credibly, those things tend to work out rather well. And I’ll give you a practical example. Companies that we’ve seen companies sort of describe like why they’re doing the return to office policy and if you use one in particular, you know, uses the language that about 80% of the policies that we implement as an organization of any kind are going to be in the best interests of both the company and the individuals that work here.
Frank Cottle [00:25:27] Says who? All right, the claimant. Says who? And I say, only the company. Well, that’s actually the point. We’ll have to vote on that also.
Andrew Farah [00:25:38] Well, that’s actually the point, is that I think the organization explicitly saying, hey, some 80% and maybe it’s 70, but let’s call it 80% of the policies that we make, are going to be in the best interest of both the individuals and the company. But there’s going to a percentage of policies, call it 20%, maybe it is as many as 30%, or as much as 30%. Where that diverges, where it is not in the best interest of the individual and the organization. And in those cases, we wanna just be really clear as a management team, we are always going to choose the company. And like that is an extraordinary statement. If you are willing to tell your teams, look, on the vast majority of the policies that we make, we are totally aligned. And when we diverge, we’re going to make the best decision for the company It all of a sudden allows for a transparent discussion about whether or not a person wants to opt in.
Frank Cottle [00:26:36] To that. Exactly. No, I think that’s what I said. What I was saying is, does who?
Andrew Farah [00:26:41] You get to go with your feet.
Frank Cottle [00:26:42] Company says that 80% of the decisions are in the best interest of both. That’s what the executive team says. If you were to have put it to a vote of all the employees, would they in fact, 80% say yes, or would it be 40% of total workforce says, yeah, not really overall. So it’s very much like a government saying all decisions the government makes are in the best interest of its citizens.
Andrew Farah [00:27:17] Maybe, but I don’t know that the percentages matter. I think saying that out loud is what matters. Saying that there is going to be a divergence is what really matters.
Frank Cottle [00:27:26] That’s what matters.
Andrew Farah [00:27:26] It could be 40%. But companies don’t like saying, they don’t like conflict. They don’t like the fact that they have to say the words out loud. And the reason they get neutered is because you go through legal, you go through comms, you go through PR. And all of a sudden, like everything gets like distilled down into like a form that’s an anodyne, you you know, and then you get these. Articles in the news about these companies doing RTO and having really like terrible policies and the reason they have a terrible policy is because it got watered down. They probably started off with something really declarative and direct which is what frankly adults who work in companies would really appreciate. It gets filled down into something that essentially makes people feel like they’re being talked to like children because they are and then all of a sudden you’ve reduced the trust that the individuals have in the organization. So that would be like my… My primary flag on failure modes for when they give.
Frank Cottle [00:28:27] I would agree and then from, I’ll distill that just down to honesty. And honesty based on a known value, which is shareholder value in this case, which is the company and the company. So I would extend that statement. We’re going to do what’s in the best interest of the company, and its shareholders, as opposed to just the amorphous company. Sure, yes. Because that’s really what the company represents is its shareholders. No, I agree with you on that, that that’s important and I think, again, I’ll go back to the HR issue, I don’t think companies are hiring on that with that clarity in mind. That creates its own set of confusion. I think that can happen. But, you know, when we talk about space, we talk of return to office. Office is space. Most people think of it as fixed. Why isn’t it fixed? Why is fixed space broken? That’s the concept.
Andrew Farah [00:29:40] Most, and I may be misinterpreting your question, but my, I think it’s like an excellent question about fixed space. If you talk to most organizations that are dealing with large teams, they are making real estate decisions monthly, quarterly. They are growing and shrinking at the same time. And if you talk to a brokerage like a JLL or CBRE or a Cushman, they often have a line item called feed-to-value ratio, where they look at the consolidated. They’re like, here’s the real estate, the square footage we consolidated in the last quarter. Here’s our costs that you pay us. Here’s the feed-of-value ration, the conversion of how much we saved you. But at the very same meeting, they will be discussing a new building that they’re investing in. And so to assume that space is fixed is actually to assume the company itself is stagnant, when in reality, all companies, for the most part, as a realization, are either growing or shrinking at any given time.
Frank Cottle [00:30:43] Well, and I think the addition, we’re looking right now at a major city that wants to reanalyze its return to office policies and have a lot of remote workers. And in doing that, they’re reestablishing a percentage of their space as flex space are basically going to run three or four floors in the city hall, as if it was a giant co-working center, and track. Very much like density does, like your company does, track utilization and manage utilization for its efficiency as well as for its attendance factor, so to speak, both of those things. So I think that is a model that we’re gonna see become the norm as opposed to the exception that it was in the past overall.
Andrew Farah [00:31:39] You’re also putting your finger on something that doesn’t get talked about very often, which is corporate headquarters have agreements with city governments and states that give them tax breaks for having their offices and headquarters in those cities. What do you think happens to those tax … Do you think the companies are returning the tax breaks when people decide not to go into the headquarters anymore? Like there’s a whole bunch of really interesting commercial relationship, like this like underbelly of like return to office. There are like real financial motivators for city centers. And I don’t know what is happening in many of those conversations, but I know they’re happening.
Frank Cottle [00:32:22] Well, I agree with you. We see some of those happening, but I’ll bring up another point of sustainability and environmental impact. Return to office has a greater environmental impact by some standards than remote work, okay, because you’re causing people to go into a motion or a commute set. And the further you have to move them, obviously, the more impact it does. So to your point, when a company relocates its corporate headquarters from California to Texas, fairly common these days, pick any brand name. When that happens, think of the disruption that happens to the people in California making that decision, their families, etc. Then they have to relocate to Texas. The company got a good tax break, but the employees didn’t necessarily, or actually they would have. There’s a whole bunch of other dynamics that are employee related, not just company related to that. And commute being one of them. On the one hand we say we want to address climate change, on the other hand we want everybody to return to the office and we don’t care if they have to commute or not, that’s their problem. Whether it’s public, which has less impact, or private. Has more impact, it still has impact.
Andrew Farah [00:33:56] We can take this in so many different directions. I mean, I think that this has a lot to do on the climate side. I think this has lot to or the sustainability side has a lot to with if you believe in abundance, like if you believe abundance is possible, like energy abundance is possible, or if you believed that energy stores are fixed and that we need to reduce growth. And so, like, if you assume that, if, if you assume, that, um, energy abundance is achievable. So like 30% of US energy is nuclear. I didn’t know that, but like a little while ago, but apparently some 30%, maybe it’s a little bit less, of all energy used in the United States is nuclear, which is amazing. It’s just hard to build nuclear plants.
Frank Cottle [00:34:42] Well, and what’s weird is in Texas, 50% of it’s renewable, and you think of Texas as an oil burn.
Andrew Farah [00:34:48] Totally. Totally. And if you look at the cost curve on kilowatt hour for solar, there is a solar decade coming. We are wandering into a really interesting territory where if we get storage right, some incredible companies in Texas actually with really innovative storage mechanisms. We get solar and storage, correct? You end up with like energy and. Independence and energy abundance, and if our fleet of cars electrifies, I guess my point is this concept of should people be commuting can contribute to some discussions around sustainability, but that sort of presumes that the underlying carbon footprint of commuting remains static and doesn’t change.
Frank Cottle [00:35:42] But whether there’s a carbon footprint or not, there’s still a cost, and let’s use your electric car model, a Tesla costs more than a Corolla. Okay, so the cost of a lot of these… Sustainable technologies in layman’s term is actually higher and in some cases not affordable. But you can buy a model. But the cost of the energy. So that’s another approach. We could wander around this for days and everything. I’m going to ask you one last question. What’s the most popular opinion you hold about the Future Award? Unpopular, I should say.
Andrew Farah [00:36:34] Oh, the most unpopular?
Frank Cottle [00:36:35] Unpopular. What’s your most cringe-worthy concept?
Andrew Farah [00:36:42] Um…
Frank Cottle [00:36:47] You’re embarrassed to say it now, I can tell.
Andrew Farah [00:36:53] I want to first say like, I am A, biased because we build systems that measure people in buildings and B, I don’t run a, you know, a 500,000 person organization. And so like the things that I might believe are obviously colored by my personal experience and biases, so attempting to set those.
Frank Cottle [00:37:19] Yeah, you’re probably closer to every man in that regard though than being on the extreme.
Andrew Farah [00:37:24] We’re definitely closer in terms of size. Like our organizations, our problems are very similar as opposed to Fortune 1000. But trying to set aside my biases for a second, I think hybrid is a cop-out. I think that we should decide, I think companies would do best to decide if they are a remote team that does off-sites periodically, or if they’re an in-person team that has that periodically works from anywhere. And I think that like those two ends of the distribution curve are the most likely to succeed. And I in the middle is where mediocrity goes. And I a lot of organizations have wandered towards mediocrit, largely born of fear of retention and fear of recruitment, of top talent. Instead of deciding what is the mission or what does the organization stand for? And in your case. Based on a lot of your answers and perspectives, it sounds a lot like you deeply value the shareholders that are your employees, that like the company and its team are synonymous. And I think in some other, in many other organizations, the team is a meaningful portion of the company, but the company has these divergences in the thing that it’s gonna decide. And sometimes that’s not in the best interest of the individuals. And both of those things are good, and both of these things should exist. And the fact that you are clear with your team about the rules of the game that they’re going to play at your company, that, in my opinion, is the ingredient for success. And I think an organization deciding to be four or five days a week in person and is very clear about it, unequivocal about it is an ingredient for successful. Neither of those are wrong. What’s wrong, or not wrong, but like… Most inefficient is like not choosing and just sort of like, well, it’s hybrid.
Frank Cottle [00:39:29] Agreed, you know, we could we could argue, I think hybrid is great, by the way, because I believe in
Andrew Farah [00:39:34] You’re hybrid. A policy. A POLICY.
Frank Cottle [00:39:36] I believe that we’re all in a state of flux. You’re talking about that as related to space. I think that all jobs, industries, companies are in a stage of flux, and that requires a variety of work models, not a single work model. If I were to go to a single model, a single word model for a company, I’d have to get rid of 100% of all outsourcing, and all offshoring and nearshoring also. Um, I would have to, if I was going to be pure, 100% pure, I’d have to say, well, you know, I can’t put that call center in the Philippines. I’ve got to put it in Philadelphia. Uh, you, I, I will have to do those things too. And we know that companies aren’t willing to do that. Um, uh, so, you we’re, we’re stuck in a dilemma. So, you’re in a interesting, same values, same goals. Don’t agree on the best way to get there always. That position, I think, today, but between. And, but gosh, you have amazing data. I’ve seen your data sets and looked at some of your reports and stuff, amazing data from which to draw your opinions, and I’d love to be able to publish one of your report, if that’s okay. Share it with our audience. Because the value of that in making individual company decisions, I think is very high. Sounds good. Well, Andrew, thank you again. Next time we meet, my place or your place, you name it.
Andrew Farah [00:41:18] I’ll come to you. Have a great day.
Frank Cottle [00:41:20] Okay. Tequila’s on me. I’m in Texas.
Andrew Farah [00:41:22] Great, can’t wait.
Frank Cottle [00:41:24] Adios, my friend. See ya.
Andrew Farah [00:41:26]Bye bye.
