The State of Work Videocast with Stephen Hargett (Great Lakes & New England)

0:00 — Anthony: Welcome. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day. Take a moment to introduce yourself. Who are you? What is the company? Tell us what you're building.

0:19 — Stephen: I'm Stephen, Co-Founder and CEO of wrkspace. We're building the execution layer for physical space operations. Basically, it's the system that connects all the disconnected tools when it comes to physical space and how buildings run, handling everything from requests to a resolved outcome.

What we've found, particularly in the workspace space — ironically enough, our company name is wrkspace — is that there's a lot of intention on one side, and there are outcomes, and there's this middle that is really messy. It's really arduous, it's long, it's complex. Our platform wants to sit in that middle to convert people's intention when it comes to physical space into executable outcomes. Our types of customers range from facility managers to workplace managers. Anyone who's responsible for the building working is our customer.

I've been doing this for quite some time. Didn't realize it was this particular thing, but I've been doing it for over 15-plus years. I'm the person who's usually holding up buildings — from the time when I worked for Apple, to Tesla, to WeWork, to the cleantech innovation campus, different government-adjacent facilities around Los Angeles. It was interesting that I didn't think I would be an entrepreneur in this space in technology. It kind of found me.

Being able to reflect, seeing that everything I've ever done in my career has really been a micro milestone or stepping stone to what we're doing today. I just realized I kept ending up in buildings and realizing that every single building has the same broken system, and people were being blamed for it. So now I'm like, "I don't want people to be blamed for broken systems."

2:18 — Anthony: I see you've built wrkspace from Los Angeles, but Los Angeles has as many people as Belgium, and we have our own little culture here. So LA can do something, but other markets have their own specific relationship to weather, how and where people work. The region for our study was the Great Lakes and New England — Chicago, Detroit, all these different places that are fundamentally different work cultures. So how do we make sure that our coastal tech operators don't make too many assumptions? What do they get right in other markets, what do they get wrong, what are we just ignorant to with our own cultural biases?

2:59 — Stephen: Before last year, I had a pretty standard answer: you've got to really understand the community, be engaged in the community.

I drove across the country last summer from Los Angeles to Baltimore and back, and got to see how people worked and lived in the areas where this report is focused. What I found is that a lot of coastal tech assumes that everybody just wants a WeWork with oat milk and Slack channels. But when you see those communities and cultures in the Chicagos and the Detroits, the Minneapolises, the Bostons, there is this really interesting personal passion about the communities — not only where they operate, but where they were raised.

I also think coastal tech doesn't do the best job of understanding that time ago, the technology hub for the United States was in that region — with the steel mills and the manufacturing coming off the Great Lakes and the rivers. That Rust Belt was really our technological ecosystem. At some point those people went to the coast. I think those people still have that same understanding about infrastructure and manufacturing.

When you think about those markets — manufacturing roots, institutional employers — the relationship to physical space is about function, not just if it's cute. So the workspace conversation, at least on our side, what I saw was a lot of people were more about how do I come into this space, it's functional, it's designed for function. When we think about flexibility in those communities, it's about shifting the flexibility in how they operate and how they allow for the person to do their job better.

With the coast, we find ourselves selling aesthetics. For the group inland, it's really focused on logistics and access. If you don't really focus on logistics and access, you can miss an entire market. This goes back to when I was at Apple — one of our VPs was saying the success of Apple is because they do a really unique job of marrying design and functionality together. Not only do you get a pretty product, you get a pretty product that works.

I think the coastal influence in this particular market is that we could bring the coastal aesthetic inland, but make sure that it's functional to meet the demand of the markets that they serve. We'll have, let's say, an Apple-like explosion possibly. People in those spaces will be able to appreciate and still have the function that they need.

6:01 — Anthony: Some of the data shows that employers are offering a lot of flexible hours and employees recognize that this flexibility is helpful, but close to 20% of employees feel that their companies are not focusing on this work-life balance. With your facilities management and return-to-work and HR background — there's a difference between how employers view being in the office and how employees view when it's beneficial. Do you have any thoughts or comments around return to work or having flexibility in hours in a workplace?

6:43 — Stephen: I think for people to really understand, we have to retire the notion of "work-life balance." Now it's moving towards "work-life," one thing, fully integrated. That gap you see is an agency shift from mandate on the employer side to mindfulness on the employee side — giving them the ability to understand when they need to go and what they need to do.

Once we retire that phrase — it really assumes that there are two separate things that exist that are playing against each other, which are work and life. Maybe that was true 10 years ago. You clocked in, you clocked out, you balanced. But then we had this thing that happened about six years ago, and that wall completely disappeared. Because we were still working in our space in our homes with our kids, our babies — all of these things were happening, and work has become our lives. It's been fully integrated. From Slack being on your personal phone, to your kid running back and forth in Zoom, to your manager texting you at 9 p.m. saying "Hey, we need to do X, Y, and Z." There's been this really weird blur, and they're doing all that on the same device that you're receiving memes from your best friend.

It's not inherently bad, but it is a fundamentally different way that we have designed this space. And it wasn't designed — it was designed out of necessity. We had a catastrophic thing happen, and we were trying to figure out what to do, and we just did stuff.

Now where we're sitting with everything fully integrated, the question isn't "how do we balance these two things." It's more "how does integration work for me and work against me?" The gap in the data isn't necessarily a policy failure. It's more like the shift in who's making the decisions. What I've seen from my time working in an empty building during the global pandemic is that employees are rightfully understanding where their power lies, and they're not waiting for the company to offer flexibility. The flexibility is not really a benefit anymore — they're deciding for themselves how work is going to work for them.

The way I see it, the perfect scenario in this new day is more about: you get a calendar invite. It shows the VP is traveling from New York to your office in Boston, and you normally are a remote employee. It's like, "I probably should go in." That's where we need to get to. With return to office, remote work, all those things — it's giving the employee the ability to decipher, based off the information in front of them, where's the best physical space for them to do the work in order to be as productive and impactful to the organization as possible. Getting the conversation to start: what does this actually look like for you, and seeing where that ground is to ensure that we're always moving that needle forward.

10:20 — Anthony: Do you have any research on the psychology, the culture, the fraternal benefits of being around other human beings in a workplace versus, "Hey, there are some benefits to this scenario"? Is there data that supports any efficacy of bringing people together for productivity purposes?

10:35 — Stephen: When I first started wrkspace, a lot of ours was back in the day of the loneliness epidemic and why physical spaces brought people together. I don't know the numbers specifically, but a lot of the research we have, backed by science, is that we were trying to build out these different connections to produce this result.

The first part was: with everyone working from home, what's the impact of being by yourself, both in how you see yourself and how you perform? The next: if we randomly bring everyone flooding back into the office, what's the impact? When we looked at the data, what we found is that people need to be around folks for productivity, to work and to move and to do great things and to get work done.

But there was this big caveat we saw when we talked to other workplace managers at really well-known companies. Their challenge with the same issue was: we want people to be productive. People don't want to come in. And it's because the shift was that we're coming in to sit on a Zoom call.

Now you're seeing workplace managers taking the same data and saying: "Okay, if we want people to come in, because we see that human interaction really drives our processes forward, but they're sitting on Zoom calls..." Now you're starting to see people design spaces for them to come in and do something. One of our architecture partners recently did a design project with a really well-known shoe brand and redid their entire office for action. So your designer can go to his Knowing Wall and pick up the right tool and take it to the person, walk down the hall and say "Hey, come check this out." What would have been a series of four or five Zoom calls — the space did something. If you take the physical design out and you're still trying to get these two people together, it's like, "Well, I could just do this on Zoom." But now you're physically pulling the device off the wall, you're touching it, you're feeling it.

With space nowadays, the impact on productivity is about how much of the human experience you can elicit from the physical space.

13:18 — Anthony: I want to talk about design philosophy — physical spaces and layouts and how that affects human connection.

13:25 — Stephen: I can talk about the desired future of a project I worked on, but let me give context of how we got here. I've experienced layout in a couple of different capacities. I was able to open up a WeWork building. That's where I really learned the science.

It's funny — when I worked for WeWork, what I would always hear was "Oh, WeWork doesn't really create community. They just give you a TGIM and some coffee and beer and say 'community.'" That's what I thought. Then I opened the building. Then I got to see that WeWork was intentionally designing their hallways smaller, so that if you're walking one way and another person's coming, you have to look up and have this brief instant human moment. I'm like, "Oh — so instead of the idea of creating community how people think, it was all these micro instances of community throughout the space."

There's the connection there, but we also had these open spaces where you could hear everyone. The layouts really didn't help people figure out what they needed to do in the space.

Then when I worked with a couple of architects, we started to understand the intentional design, the intentional pathways and layouts, how people are actually supposed to move. There's this conversation: how do you move away from how the building is designed to move? We realized that buildings in the layout previous to this incident that happened in 2020 were about getting you as quickly and as fast to that desk as physically possible. Then the open space was trying to break the illusion of freedom so that you felt like you should go to work because "I have freedom." It's like, no, you don't.

What I saw by sitting in an empty 60,000-square-foot building during the pandemic is that the design that's the most functional for people to thrive — like you said, pass through those thresholds — creates two different distinct spaces that when you walk in, elicits the actual intended response.

One space is your community space: your open spaces, your kitchens, your kitchenettes, your throughs — open community spaces where what we're doing today happens, because that's a key important part about work. We don't think enough about the community aspect, the types of ingenuity that come out of conversation, the next steps and impact and follow-through that come from talking to Brad about the Lakers last night. You're thinking, "Hey, did you see this?" "Oh yeah, you know, it's funny because we worked on this one project..." and now you're having this dialogue to push a project forward in the community part.

The other part is, again, very threshold-distinct, the focus part. The hard stuff. Sending emails, looking stuff up — I'll readily admit, throwing an email into ChatGPT and Claude, all the stuff that requires you to have moments of solace to digest and ingest and send emails out.

When we think about design and layout now, in the buildings we've been able to help, what we're thinking about is these distinct spaces — that when you walk in, automatically, without instruction, without signage, just from the culture that is present and how it's laid out, you can say "Oh, this is a community space, I can talk at my normal level," or "Oh, this is a focus space."

One space that does a really phenomenal job of this is the Rivian showroom in Venice, California. They have four very distinct spaces at Ray Bradbury's house in Venice. It's a phenomenal space — I suggest everyone go see it. When you walk in, you're like, "I need peace and quiet — library. Oh, the space that has the desk over there — Zoom call. The outdoor section — conversation. The little park here — relaxing conversation." There's no signage. It's just that you know.

Design layouts are so important because people have so many things on their mind. You need the space to tell the person what to do without them having to find waypoints and signage to elicit a certain action.

18:30 — Anthony: The TriNet State of Work for 2025 in the Great Lakes and New England area showed around 55% of employees are actively or planning to switch jobs. However, just for Gen Z, 75% of those individuals — same region, just different age. How are you seeing aging and culture and generations and their perception of shared workspaces, co-working, going to work?

18:59 — Stephen: I think we're in a really interesting time period when it comes to generation and work, because — I'm not 100%, so don't quote me — but I feel like this is one of the few moments, due to the period of human longevity, that we have so many different generations in the workplace in some capacities. We have the silent generation, we have boomers, we have millennials, we have Gen Z. Now Gen Alpha is, you know, they're older than we thought. We have all of these people in the workplace.

The shift between constantly looking for work and not looking for work is really based off each generation's understanding of access to opportunity. The way previous generations even got jobs — you had to go home and look for a job. Having a job on your mind, trying to scale through that, wasn't constantly in your face. When you think about Gen Z, they have access to job culture insights at their fingertips. They swipe up and see a whole different job, a whole different lifestyle, a whole different way of working than where they currently are. They can fully explore that experience.

I like to say that they're constantly the LeBron James of employment — every summer is free agency, because of the access. In that same breath, access to different spaces can also allow for people to want to bring those elements to where they currently are.

But the constant looking and thinking and leaving is really about: if you see it all day, you can explore it. And because you can explore it, you always have one foot in and one foot out. I don't know if it's necessarily a loyalty issue, but more that if it's at my fingertips, why not explore? I don't think it's grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side. I think it's more, "If it's here, might as well." With Gen Z having that agency of "might as well" versus previous generations having more agency of "if I do X, Y, and Z" — if I do X, Y will happen — I feel like those two polarities are at play.

21:38 — Anthony: The AI adoption in the TriNet State of Work Report shows that employers think their employees are using AI about 68% of the time, but the employees themselves are only using like 38%. So there is a big gap, and some don't use AI at all. There seems to be a big gap, and we're not sure if it's a generational gap. All that to be said, you built a platform that uses a bunch of AI, a bunch of automation in the workplace. Like all things — whether it's a movie, whether it's food — you can make it, but distributing it is a different process. So just want to open this up on the same topic of generational adoption of new technology. In our case it's AI, but every generation has had their variable.

22:38 — Stephen: I think a lot about this, and I feel like the conversation is about two different things constantly at play. From an employer perspective, they see AI as an efficiency tool — automate process, reduce headcount, speed up the output. Where I see employees, it's a slippery slope, because they see the employer's vision.

However, if it's implemented in a way — where does that leave my job? So it accidentally becomes a thing of AI as a threat, or brings their role into irrelevance, because of how it's implemented. It's like "Oh, it's going to do this and this and this" without the reassurance that "I'm still going to be able to do my job."

Sidebar — I'd be really interested to see how bank tellers first responded to ATMs, because I feel like we're in that space right now. Now we see bank tellers and ATMs coexisting, and it's been great, because the ATMs are able to handle certain transactions at a far better rate, whereas the bank teller allows for us to do more things. It might go back to my original point of community and focus work.

When you think about wrkspace, we built AI really to do more of the intent parsing and context enrichment and routing suggestions. But the human, the person, is always in the loop. What we found with the way we leverage AI, and what I think AI can really do, is it's going to be able to make people better at their jobs. It will not replace the judgment calls that people have to make — and those judgment calls are weighted so heavily — but AI is able to parse through so much data to give you "this or that" and a "more likely than not." Having those levers to be able to pull at a quicker rate allows for productivity.

AI really helps in structuring data, repetitive heavy data tasks — where copying and pasting can really hurt your thumb and index finger. Where it does create friction is anything like what we're doing today. In that community space, AI creates a lot of friction. In the focus space of work, it creates a lot of the ability for the person to move faster and quicker.

For wrkspace, where I think we can have the most success — the best AI adoption we're looking at — is: how do we make the boring stuff disappear so all humans can do the human fun stuff?

25:45 — Anthony: With our final question — you're building a company that was designed to make the workplace better for people who use it and businesses that provide it. If you gave one piece of advice for small and medium-sized business owners in the Great Lakes or New England region, someone who looks at data and sees disengagement, flight risk, and a workforce that is seeing things differently than their manager, what's one thing you would change about how they think about physical and operational environments for their employees who show up to it?

26:16 — Stephen: The single bit of advice is: when you walk into your building the next day, walk around like it's the very first day it even opened — not when you occupied this place, when it opened. Look at every small micro detail. The broken thermostat that's been broken for three months. The conference room that no one's booking but is very, very hot. The furniture, the carpets, the smells, the feeling, the "You Can Do It" poster that's been there since 1996.

Look at the maintenance requests. Look at the backlogs. Look at your email inbox. Look at every little small data point that's in that space. Then remember that your employees experience this space every single day in that capacity. The state of the building tells them how you feel about them, how you appreciate them, how you show up for them. In that same capacity, it's a message back to you about how they show up and appreciate and feel about you.

That relationship is so delicate and so dynamic and so precious that you have to be overly appreciative of just the opportunity to share those brief moments together. When you have that foundation, you'll start to realize and stop thinking that physical space is just overhead, and you'll start thinking about it as infrastructure — as the foundational core of how everyone shows up and feels about themselves. It's the foundation that everything sits on.

When you get the space right — the function, the intention, the responsiveness, well-maintained, flexible — you'll start to see that a lot of the engagement and retention problems really start to take care of themselves. Because basically, when people feel like the environment works for them, they work better in it, and they work for it.

28:23 — Anthony: Thank you for joining us today, Stephen. We appreciate your time. If you're interested in learning more about the data in the report, the State of Work for 2025, visit us at trinet.com to learn more. Thanks for joining us, Stephen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV6rUU34JP8