Inside Meta’s Evolving Real Estate Strategy - with Rob Cookson of Meta

Welcome to the Purpose of Place podcast. I'm Despina Katsakakis, your host and I am delighted to have with me today Rob Cookson, Vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. Rob is responsible for planning, acquiring, building and, and operating Meta's real estate worldwide. Rob, welcome to the podcast. We're delighted to have you with us today. Thank you very much, Despina. Glad to be here. If we think back to 2004, over 20 years now, since Facebook changed the way we think about connecting with people, creating communities, leveraging virtual platforms. And of course so much has changed since in the pandemic, we literally relied on those virtual communities and the way we work has changed and the purpose of place we've seen through our data is all about connecting with face to face communities. Really the sort of the counterpart of what Meta facilitates in the virtual world the Office has become in the physical world. So Rob, maybe just starting with how do you see that transformation taking place from your perspective in being in the company that actually bridges those two worlds? Yeah, look, I think the evolution of the Office has been fantastic and very interesting over the, over the past, particularly over the past few years and particularly you mentioned the pandemic. And I think what of the things post pandemic or even during the pandemic is that there is a, there's been an, a much greater and increased focus on the office. And in many ways that has enhanced a lot of existing trends were enhanced. But you know, we are a lot clearer now about what is the purpose and what is the intent of the Office. What are you, what are the office there to do, how is it serving people? And I think particularly post the pandemic, it's also very clear that most employees, office based employees, they have a choice and it's a personal choice. They have a choice between the home, the office, a third place. And so the office really has to have a very clear value proposition. And that's a pretty broad value proposition to a lot of employees because they're making their own personal choices about how they work and what it is they need to be do to be productive in their offices. So the attitude that we've adopted is very much facilitating that and also looking to magnetize rather than mandate. So we're really trying to attract our employees, to attract people to our offices as opposed to saying you need to go this amount of time and, and, and, and be there for a certain amount of time, a week or whatever it might be, but actually to really, you know, to make them places which in high Speed fault. So I think that only that means that the offices, they really have to be, you know, they have to be, you have to, their relevance and is being increasingly called into question or they have to be increasingly relevant. And so we have to be as, as professionals in this industry, I think, have to be really clear about understanding the work and the behaviors that we need to be supporting and the choices that our employees and our community is making about how they work and specifically the work that they're doing in the office. So it fascinates me because you as an organization, of course, were ahead of the curve. You created very compelling campuses that focused on experience, on really creating these unique places for your employees well before the pandemic. So how did that experience of having been focused in that way help you make that transition? And how are you focusing on measuring what it is that works? What are the things that really attract people to want to come to the places you're providing for them? Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of our employee experiences, they evolved in Silicon Valley. So you know, a lot of the programs that we provide, they were Silicon Valley based and Silicon Valley originated and you know, and we, you know, we provide very sort of rich and full programs for our employees, but they're not actually perks or benefits. They all have their origins in productivity, employee productivity, and maximizing the experience and productivity of those employees and making their experience frictionless. So whether it's wifi enabled shuffles, that is predominantly about solving a long commute that our employees have where they might be spending up to four hours a day of relatively unproductive time in a, in their own vehicle, whereas they can actually be working on a shuttle or food. Fostering community, you know, enabling people to come together. If an engineer has a brilliant idea, there are lots of other people around them. So, you know, so, so those, those are the origins of our program. So it's very much through those, those lenses that we are sort of iterating on our, you know, on our, on our program. So the information that we're looking to glean and gain is a lot about utilization and what it is that our companies, how our employees are behaving and what is that we can do more to kind of support that you mentioned, of course, productivity. And I like the examples you use to bring that to life. How closely do you map the real estate data to say, HR data to look at some of these productivity metrics or experience metrics? Yeah, we work really very closely with hr actually. HR and our enterprise engineering teams, our internal IT Teams extremely closely. So there's a number of ways in which we do that. We conduct a lot of employee surveys, so we'll collaborate on both, particularly the outcomes of those surveys. We're also looking very much at when we're, we're just in the process of rolling out some new programs where we're, we're analyzing how are employees in a particular team working, what are the, what are the areas of our workplaces, collaboration space, meeting space, workspaces, etc. That they are using on a day to day basis and then tailoring the programming of their space to match the way that they're actually working. But that is, that is something that we're collaborating very closely with HR because clearly that has a direct correlation to supporting and supporting the work of that team in that location and their productivity. And so yeah, the sort of pre and post occupation surveys, focus groups, et cetera, that is designed very closely in collaboration with our HR team. And presumably Rob, that brings in your technology teams as well. Because of course now collaboration really needs to take into account hybrid collaboration of some people will be in the office, some people will be dialing in from a variety of locations. So we're really designing for much more complex places. Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean a lot of our teams globally, they're very distributed and then we'll find that different teams in different locations have extremely different work patterns depending on where they are and which teams around the world they're collaborating with. So I think the days of having sort of two flavors, you have a sort of fixed heads down workspace and a formal meeting space, those days we're really trying to be much more nuanced of course than that. And so we're trying to provide a lot of informal collaboration space, but it's really easy to facilitate the way that people are working. If you need to sort of jump on an ad hoc meeting, you know, we're providing a lot of solutions around the more sort of ad hoc. But obviously, you know, global collaboration enabled. Because what we do find is that very few of our meetings are actually just a group of people in one location, that typically there's a level of global interaction involved. This issue of managing hybrid becomes incredibly interesting. And one of the things that fascinates me is that Meta was one of the first companies of course, to begin to think about how you can tap into talent in a completely different way by leveraging agnostic location talent, posting of roles. Tell us a little bit more about that because we've seen a lot of Our you know, organizations really look at adapting flexible hiring strategies and that of course impacts the portfolio decisions longer term and the workplace decisions. How are you addressing those issues? During COVID and to an extent prior Basil, during COVID we very much lent into remote working. So we have a number of roles which are not every role, but a number of roles which are applicable for remote hiring which enables accessing talent plant pools which we might not otherwise be able to access in sort of fixed locations. But then the knock on impacts of that. Well, first of all we have to solve for that from a real estate perspective in terms of remote employees visiting our offices because we have to accommodate them. Obviously they're not in the office regularly on a daily basis, but they do visit so making sure that that's a good experience for them. But then from a portfolio perspective what it does mean is that you know, the way that we'd, we'd historically been planning our portfolio based on pre, pre pandemic which was mostly everybody gets an assigned desk, everybody's in the office five days a week, more or less. And that was, that has a very different dynamic now upon, upon how we, how we plan our portfolio both in terms of remote employee, but also the fact that now the office based workers are hybrids so they only have to be in the office three days a week. So we're planning for that. So that's a very big. That combined with a different growth profile that we had post pandemic means that we have a very different portfolio now than we portfolio dynamic than we had five years ago. So we've actually in many areas we've been disposing of excess real estate that we'd taken in anticipation of some of these trends perpetuating. And when that changed we had to be pretty agile and pivot. So that dynamic nature of your portfolio and your workplace is of course really interesting because this is the area where many occupiers are kind of struggling with where to balance growth alongside that kind of inconsistent pattern, let's say of use and demand of space. How are you leveraging the flex industry to help you support some of that? Yeah, we leverage flex a lot. So we've always leveraged Flex. When we were growing fast, we leveraged Flex Software's interim solutions. Many of our smaller locations or locations where we are not expecting to be there for there's a certainty about what the next move is. We all leverage the flex industry. We're also looking at it increasingly into other ways which alongside a lot of our, our my peers we're Looking at how we can use Flex to monetize some of our excess portfolio. So if we have excess space that we may have a need for in the future, but we don't want to entirely come out of, we look at leveraging the flex industry and then increasingly we're focused on what is core to us in terms of what the core provision is for us in terms of the work, workspace, meeting space, et cetera. But what are the non core elements that we can rely upon or at least leverage the flex industry to supplement or complement what it is that we do, Whether that's event spaces, large meeting spaces, swing space, et cetera. Of course, one of the areas you mentioned earlier, the kind of environments that you've provided historically in Silicon Valley and when you go to other markets, to what extent do you expect not just the flex industry but also your, your landlord to provide some of this facilities, curation spaces for you? How has that changed over time? Yeah, I think with our landlords we're always looking to, and we always have looked to just have really strong partnerships with, with sort of like minded aligned landlords. And so you know, particularly landlords that ideally have a great sense of place and create environments and create those environments and create places which will be attractive for our employees to come to work, you know, via, or to come to work too. We're a very sort of data and metrics hungry organization and we drive decisions through data insights and then look to action based on that. And landlord partnership there is super important as well. Whether it's on energy utilization, whether it's on foot traffic, there's a lot of insights that landlords and developers can provide for us that we can use to leverage be smarter about decisions we make. Well, I'm glad you raised technology and data because of course you are a data hungry company that is kind of at your core of your culture. And of course in my experience and in your experience, in the years we've spent in this industry, I think it's fair to say that one of the most exciting areas is the integration of technology and AI in buildings and how that's going to transform the way we think about the built environment, particularly in terms of, you know, predictive analytics and what that, what impact that will have. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you see AI and impacting the way we design and operate buildings in the future. Yeah, I think we're already starting to see it. So I've, I've, there's lots of examples where you know, our teams or my Teams have, have used AI, leveraged AI just to, to save so much time or to do things so much more efficiently, whether, whether it's interrogating contracts or whether it's how we interact with employees in some instances. So, so, but you know, that's sort of very early, early phases. I think what's really exciting and I, I sort of see this through two lenses. One is, is us as real estate and workplace professionals. And then as from an employee perspective, what I think is going to be really exciting is if you have the data in the right place, then to be able to use AI to interrogate your lease data, your real estate data, your occupancy or your utilization data, your operational data, and start to combine insights proactively for you and almost prompt you with, with real estate strategies or suggested actions based on the data. I think that level of sort of predictive analytics is really exciting. It kind of links to what we were saying earlier, the fact that even if you think about that integration of HR data, of looking at workforce strategies, you know, where will your talent pools be to really attract the best people 10 years down the line and being able to coordinate and collate those data sets to predict the demands of your portfolio or the demands of customized experiences of people. You know, in a way, we're treating very much employees like customers and they expect that very personal experience that they have in their lives at the office. Yeah. And then I think the, the other use case is where you have AI, which is, is then, you know, just prompting and nudging and, and your, you know, employee are our employees to say, I see you booked this workstation, I see you've gone for that coffee, I see you've done, you know, like you can optimize some, you can optimize an employee's, you know, work experience or productivity by providing those nudges and again, combining those insights to make them more effective. And if you start to combine that with wearables at some stage in the future, that becomes really exciting. Yeah. So we're now sort of hitting this really lovely coordination between productivity experience and also well being. We already know you mentioned wearables. Our watches nudge us to get up, to move, to do all these things. And that kind of nudging of using different settings throughout the day to enable you to be more productive, but also to have a better experience at work, to make you feel better during your day at work, that becomes really a very, very exciting area. Yeah, 100%. I think that comes back to what we were saying about Choice pre pandemics early to, to a certain extent anyway, we were providing sort of, you know, rather you know, one flavor of, of type of workspace. This is sort of, you come to the office five days a week, it's predominant, this type of workspace. Whereas people are a lot more alive now to, a lot more in tune as to what makes their, them tick and productive. And, and you know, that you know, tailoring the, the options to their, to suit their choices and their preferences matters a lot. Yes. And that iterative cycle, I mean you mentioned right at the beginning about how you're tracking the utilization and the experience of the various spaces that you're providing. So being able to kind of use the data to iterate the space and map the experience to it creates this completely different relationship between the use of space and the design and evolution of that space. There's huge areas for efficiency, but also for insights. I think if you know, from a landlord perspective, so the data that they have access to, if you have an AI layer over that and be able to provide both them and us insights, I think it actually hopefully enables better partnerships going forwards as well. Yes. So that brings me to another question which I think is really interesting that the data begins to possibly enable us to move to new types of metrics. And I'm really, really interesting in how we begin to look at addressing a kind of shift from cost to value of real estate. What is the return on investment of what real estate is bringing to the business by being able to have quantitative data as opposed to simply sentiment based data on productivity, on well being on behavior? Are you beginning to connect any of those threads and what do you see the possibilities of that? I would say historically that we've been focused on data, sort of cost data. So what is it? The, the, what's the cost of a square foot? What's the cost of a workstation or occupancy data? How occupied are our spaces? I think what we're moving into now are much more focused on data or metrics focused on utilization. So inherently that it's a more value, you know, value based. And then from a productivity perspective it's maybe not necessarily what is, what is productivity and the helicing, but what is productivity inhibiting if the, if the metrics get to a certain level or at least a combination of metrics get to a certain level. I also think that our metrics are becoming much more aligned with the business and much more aligned with our employees. We're rolling out a new program which is new for Us anyway, which is very much mapping how our teams in a particular location, how are they working, what are they using in terms of the physical space and how are they using it. And then you know, developing a sort of flexible agile work workplace or so workspace model that lines up with how they're actually using their space. And so and then being being flexible to adjust those program elements over time so that as they're behaviors change or, or as they evolve and adapt, you know, we were flexible enough to be able to adapt with them. And that is a very much more and we obviously that's very data driven in terms of, you know, hard quantitative metrics, but also qualitative in terms of how are the teams feeling about that the space pre post. And so it's a sort of combination of, of being sort of predictive with the constant but also getting the, you know, getting, making sure we're getting good feedback as to what's working and what's not so that we're, we're evolving into the lockstep with the teams we're providing the space for and that, and again it makes the whole role of real estate far more dynamic and aligned to the business than a separate entity. Much more of a partner. Rob, one of the things I always ask of participants in the podcast is what advice would you give to the C suite? What should CEOs, corporate real estate executives, chros focus on to do better to support the changing workforce expectations and evolving work practices to deliver better outcomes for the business overall? Yeah, I would say certainly historically there's been a tendency to focus on the cost of real estate and not the value. And so I think, you know, one of the things post Covid and where we started this conversation around what is the value proposition of the office? I think that is something, you know, focus on the value, not just the cost. And then, you know, really defining what it is that from their perspective, the, the function that the office serves, what is it that they want the office to, to be? What is the intention behind it? From a brand, from a culture, from a, from the experience they want our employees to have. And being very sort of continue to be thoughtful about that and continue to view it through that lens because I think that's where we are obviously as well as the cost and efficiency metrics as well. But also that is very helpful to people in my position who are able then to translate that into to then what our spaces should be and should look like. I'm glad you mentioned the word intention because I think one of the Most important changes in the role and the purpose of the office and place generally is that sense of intentionality. The why, what is the outcome you're trying to achieve so that you can design operate places accordingly? Rob, speaking of intentionality, I think again, one of the important shifts is the changing role and impact that physical place has on embodying the brand values and culture of the organization. What's your view on that? You know, really, really good workspaces, in my view. Yeah, they do reflect the company, they do reflect the brand. So, so we want our workspaces to reflect Meta as a brand. And so, you know, our design is intentionally, it's, it's open, it's transparent, we use natural materials, it's unfinished or it's meant to go unfinished. It showcases our products and it fosters connection. You know, we have a very much a hack culture as a company, so we facilitate our teams locally and in hacking and, and personalizing their space so that it represents them, their team. It said something about, you know, what their team is in that location, in that city. And I think that that generates a pride and an ownership of the space and, and creates. It's a way of creating a sense of community, it's a way of creating a culture and also sort of connects ideally back to, back to Meta as a brand. I love the way you describe that and particularly this whole sense of customization, personalization whilst aligning to the overall Meta brand values and culture. And just the. Almost coming back to where we started the discussion, the fact that Meta is the organization that's creating the environments in the virtual world for collaboration, how you then bring that to life in the physical world for the organization is fantastically interesting. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm sure that our listeners have found this incredibly interesting and thanks again for sharing your insights on the world of Meta's real estate. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Sam.