How COVID Accelerated Drastic Changes in the Workaday World and the Future of Work

Post-COVID, we've seen a rise in working remotely. In this video, we discuss how this trend affects companies and what it means for the future of work.

WhiteSpace is shaping the future of work through an innovative and cost-effective sharing-space-across-time business model. Their flexible meeting spaces are proven to increase productivity, collaboration, and innovation.

WhiteSpace works with landlords worldwide to utilize underutilized office spaces to provide an amenity to tenants and a new revenue stream.

How China’s Business Equation can Be Advantageous to Startups

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How COVID Accelerated Drastic Changes In The Workaday World And The Future Of Work

Tell me, where are we with this trend? Some might say it's a bit too late. Some might say many things. One philosophy is it's too late to start a company in this space, and maybe that's true. I felt that about my industry when I was maybe 5 or 6 years in. I was like, “It’s too late to start a company in the space. The current companies that started have been here for a while. They're going to own the market completely.”

Another view of the market is that this space is about to get reinvented and there will be new giants emerging, and the old ones will just be version one. Version 2 and version 3 are about to come in and they're going to be giants. The other one is that nothing is going to happen. COVID was a temporary situation and people are going to revert back to normal. Where do you stand in your belief with where the trend is going regarding the future of work?

I would say that it’s the sum of all of those aspects but none of the above. COVID was a temporary situation. The world is going to return to something more like a new normal, but COVID didn't create this change. COVID accelerated a trend that was already going to happen, which was remote work. The technology that enables us to be having this conversation across the world is not going to go away, and the ability of knowledge workers to be flexible about where they work.

I've been working remotely since 2005. I was an early user of Skype. I had to be because I was in China and my home office was in London. It's going to keep growing. The desire of people to have spaces that cater to the way they want to work isn't going to change, so I don't think it's going to go away. At the same time, WhiteSpace is not, in any way, competing with or substituting for all the varieties of solutions for office work. We're a collaboration space. We're an on-demand collaboration space, which is a different category.

I don't want to be arrogant, but we're creating a new product category. There's where you work, which could be the office, a remote spoke office, working from home, using a co-working space, using a coffee shop, or some combination of all of that. There's this other thing, which is when you need to get together in a group for some business purpose, you need to do a workshop. You need to do a training course and have a quarterly sales review with people who don't necessarily all work in the same office. You need to do team-building, which you can’t do remotely.

You want to have new employee induction. You want to do it in batches and you want to do it face-to-face. All of those activities have to happen in real face-to-face interactions in a group, but that space doesn't need to be in your office. We're adding a new network node to this locus of where the future of the office is. That category is going to be part of where we work.

What is the difference between how you would explain co-working and co-meeting spaces? Explain the idea of this new category.

Co-working is part of the solution to day-to-day, where you do the main thing that you do, what you consider work, the thing you clock in and clock out of, and the things that you do as part of your daily activities. Collaboration space happens sometimes, and how often that sometimes could be once a week, once a month, once a quarter, or once a year.

It's that occasional need to get together with people who you're not interacting with on a daily basis like creativity workshops, brainstorming sessions, and quarterly review meetings. Accenture is in our space doing a new batch intake for their technology certification programs. They’re three weeks of the year using this new class intake for certifying them as technical excellence professionals or something like that. That's different from day-to-day work. It's that occasional, sometimes professional event.

An article came out saying that startups now spend more on Airbnb than office spaces. Companies are now getting used to the fact that we need flexible spaces for events and meetings. It's a growing segment. It is a new category, one that doesn't strike you as intuitive. We tend to categorize things into certain areas like co-working, offices, hotels, etc.

The human behavior, the need to meet and collaborate together, is an innate need that we have that's been drawn out during COVID, and there hasn't been a way for us to do that. We've been stuck in our routines. A meeting is a two-way street. I need to be available and you need to be available. Virtual is one way of doing it. VR is another, by the way. We are so early.

Having a place you can get to and do things is interesting. What type of spaces are people craving now? People left heavily populated urban dense areas, mainly because rents are crazy in these places and people don't want to pay those rents. They want to be surrounded by nature more and more. People want more breathing room.

The desire of people to have spaces that cater for the way they want to work isn't going to change. It will just keep growing.

Over time, we’ve historically seen this reversal of the de-densification trend where we're cramming more and more people into smaller and smaller spaces. It's almost like we're going back to this cubicle type of environment where there are more people per square foot or less space per person. That's now reversing, it seems. What are you seeing? What are people craving?

That’s one area where the Asian market and the North American or the other geographies market are different. In our experience here post-COVID, the Chinese government controlled COVID well. People feel safe. They're not deserting the big cities. The urbanization of the population here in China is ongoing. The cities are as dense as ever and probably still growing, and that's why WhiteSpace is a business that’s very much focused on the Asian market.

These are densely populated urban centers with well-defined commercial districts and a young white-collar growing professional class that doesn't have cars that are relying on public transportation to get to their work situation, whether that's an office, a co-working space or a collaboration space. Our spaces are in commercial office buildings that are within five minutes’ walk over the metro station where access is easy. It may or may not be close to their main office, but it's going to be easy for them to get to it that occasional once a week, once a month, whenever they need to come and collaborate at WhiteSpace.

What do people want? Do they want aesthetics and functionality when it comes to even the market that you're targeting? I'm curious to dive into the differences between North America and the Asian markets, or China specifically even. What are you seeing people crave? Do they want lots of space and maximum utilization, or do they want specific types of designs and open types of concepts?

What people want and what they're willing to pay for a product are often two different things. Ultimately, what they want, as in what are those required features, they want affordable. That means they need value for money. In a city as expensive as Shanghai, providing that is an art. That is part of our competitive advantage is we know how to find the bargains, and we know how to operate in an efficient way to provide that value for money.

That's where my engineering background comes in. This is a utilization and efficiency play, making the best possible use of space so that people can afford it. They want affordability, convenience, accessibility, and a smooth booking experience. Here in Asia, it’s mobile everything. It's mobile-first including mobile payments.

I haven't touched money in six months. You do everything from your phone. That whole interaction from the search to interacting with us booking the room, arranging all of the services, and then finding the place all has to happen on mobile. When you come to the space, they want flexibility. Those old boardroom-style tables don't work. It looks great in the brochure, and then nobody uses it or under-utilizes it.

What does flexibility mean? Does it mean having a variety of inventory in different types of spaces, or does it mean the ability to configure the space for the individual? Surely, it’s not that because that would be quite intensive when it comes to the fixed assets in place. The furniture, for example.

It does mean that. In our rooms, we have flexible dividing walls like what you see in hotels, so that rooms can be divided in half. We have a variety of sizes from a 4-person meeting room to a 150-person training room or workshop room. We have light tables and chairs that our operation staff can turn around a room from classroom style to boardroom style in half an hour between bookings.

This is the trend when we talk about introducing even what you do is flexible. You mean flexible in the nature of the real estate that exists. Flexible that I can change the size of the room, and the decor and furniture in the room, and turn it over quickly to make a customized space. The way we describe it, in the future, someone reading this will probably laugh at this show and say that's archaic. I know you're thinking ahead. You're a visionary. In the future, what will flexible mean? Let's get a bit crazier. What future do you envision? You're also listening to a bunch of people who are crazy. My audience is. Throw it out there. How far can you push the button?

VR will eventually become a mature enough technology that instead of you and I having this conversation over Zoom, Skype, or any of the video conversation platforms, more than 20, 30 years from now, maybe we will be having it through VR where we can interact.

Do you think we’re going to wear the device or we’ll go to a place, in a room, and we'll be in a little pod? Which do you think is more likely for the future?

What people want and what they're willing to pay for in a product are often through different things.

Certainly in the short-term, being within the next decades, we'll go to a place where there will be a pod. The equipment is so specialized and expensive. You put your finger on it. The heart of WhiteSpace is our vision is we help people come together to create. That is what we do. Right now, that's offline but if VR gets more mature, we'll be providing VR.

In some ways, it's like the internet cafe movement, where people used to go to internet cafes to do their thing, and then technology grew out of that to our homes. Do you think VR is going to go that way too? You're going to go to a location for these high-end devices and experiences, and it will filter back to the masses?

It's quite possible, I would say likely.

Let's talk about some of the potential PropTech innovations. Do you think there will be modular buildings that can be arranged robotically where walls can be moved automatically? Right now you're talking about dividers, but do you think we'll get to a point where there will be these dedicated meeting rooms of facilities, which will have the ability for the walls to be more robotically moved so there are fewer human beings involved? Did you see a future where that's going to be the case, or do you think we'll never get there because of the sheer complexity of doing that?

That could be possible, but I would see it the other way round. It's the revolution that has allowed WhiteSpace to create this new category. It’s not a revolution in the hardware that's applied to the building. It's a revolution in communications. The fact that we can communicate seamlessly through these apps or many programs on our phones, allows me to move the people to the location. If you think about it, why do hotels have meeting space? A hotel is somewhere you stay and then they started growing these conference centers.

In part, because people were coming to conferences, but then they had this meeting room and they would market it externally because that was the one place you knew you could go to book a meeting room. It came out of a pre-internet era where the search was difficult, so the category you knew had space was a hotel.

Now, the search is seamless. You can find and book a room in any commercial building and get that information communicated to you and to all the participants instantly. You've decoupled the need for the space to be a fixed space that everybody knows about, to now be a flexible space that could be anywhere in the city and you move the people to it. We're reversing the assembly line.

I'm using a 50 or so year-old technology to manage our operations called Enterprise Resource Planning, which was developed for assembly lines where you had to make all the parts come to the right point on that assembly line as it's moving down. What you need to picture is we're moving the people to the rooms and we're moving all the other services, the coffee and tea breaks, the lunch boxes, and the room decorations to the rooms. It's reversing. You have a fixed room and you're moving people and services through time to that point.

Everything goes towards a more on-demand marketplace style where you can have things delivered to you. You could have vendors appearing instantly to satisfy the need. Communication is logistics. You're not talking about more advanced furniture that can adapt to your needs, whether it's a lovely chair that knows your setting or a desk that knows your height. Your thing is getting people and moving people around, and of course, the space has to change a little bit to allow that. What about access control? Do you see access control being physical-based?

I'm sure China is extremely ahead when it comes to access control. Is it cameras? Is it key cards? Is it fobs? Is it sensors? Is it a mix of everything? Where do you see access control? How do you ensure that someone is supposed to be there? You don't want to be in the situation like Barbara was where she can't even get through the door because the system won't let her because she's got a booking at exactly 2:00 PM, and she's there five minutes early. Access control is smarter. We’re more concerned about the future of access control.

It's interesting because China is an extremely advanced country in some aspects of technology, but it's also old school in terms of what people want is personal service, so our spaces are manned. One of the ways we differentiate ourselves from the inevitable copycats is through our service layer. What people want is a person on hand to help me connect to the Wi-Fi, help me make sure that my presentation shows up on the screen, to be able to call on if there's a problem with the air conditioning.

We're providing that front-level service so that they feel that their event is going to go well. There is someone there to help them. At the moment, our access control is front desk staffing. In the future, will that be 100%? Probably not. As we expand, we’ll probably follow what I call the Starbucks Model where you have the main stores and then you have the kiosks.

In the future, we're going to be in hundreds of commercial buildings across all of Asia where you go into a building and you look around the lobby, it's like, “Where's the coffee stand? Where's Starbucks?” If it doesn't have a coffee shop in the lobby, is it a professional building? Come on. What kind of building is it? It’s a marker of your commercial space. In the future, WhiteSpace is going to be that. It’s, “Where's the coffee stand? Where's my collaboration space? Where's the WhiteSpace?”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeoTQKIIzT8&feature=youtu.be

Offices vs. Working From Home - What does the future hold?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvFspY_q87k&feature=youtu.be

How to Create a Powerful Workplace Culture That Brings Out the Best in Employees:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWj0dFBgdRY&feature=youtu.be

About Zain Jaffer

Zain Jaffer is an accomplished executive, investor, and entrepreneur. He started his first company at the age of 14 and later moved to the US as an immigrant to found Vungle, after securing $25M from tech giants including Google & AOL in 2011. Vungle recently sold for $780m.

His achievements have garnered international recognition and acclaim; he is the recipient of prestigious awards such as “Forbes 30 Under 30”, “Inc. Magazine’s 35 Under 35,” and the “SF Business Times Tech & Innovation Award.” He is regularly featured in major business & tech publications such as The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.