This week we'll be talking with this week's panel about talent, people, recruiting, jobs, returning to work, and the future of workspaces and workplace culture during and post-Corona.
A recording, links, and transcript will be available after the event below.
What are Regular Checkups?
I’ve created Regular Checkups as a way to keep you informed by relevant industry professionals as well as giving them a platform to share their best advice for you.
Join me every Thursday night at 6pmET for a rotating weekly panel of professionals from different relevant areas giving up-to-date advice for expats living and working in the U.S.
You can submit your own questions for the panel each week before Wednesday at 6pm and we will include it in our discussion.
I’ll include professionals from a wide range of backgrounds including:
- Government & Consulate;
- Travel, Movement & Flights;
- Immigration & Law;
- Recruitment & Jobs;
- Tax & Accounting;
- Health (Physical & Mental);
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Watch Regular Checkup #3
Relevant Links from the Panel
A recording, links, and transcript will be available after the event.
Meet the panel from Regular Checkup #3 (May 14, 2020):
Renee Diakogeorgiou, Senior Associate, Financial Services, People & Organization Practice, PwC
Talking about HR, company culture, people, and employers.
Renée has spent the last 10 years working across People & Culture in Australia and in the US. She has been with PwC US over the last two years, helping her clients design what the future of work looks like for their organizations. With the onset of COVID-19, she and her team have moved swiftly to help organizations shift to an immediate remote working culture while also thinking about long term changes and solutions as the world of work continues to evolve during this time.
Dan Rosenzweig, Co-founder, KettleSpace Inc.
Talking about offices, returning to work, and the culture of New York business.
Dan Rosenzweig is a Co-founder of KettleSpace, a company focused on empowering professionals to thrive in today’s era of location-agnostic work. With its core offering, KettleSpace takes underutilized spaces and converts them into revenue-generating on-demand coworking spaces during off-peak hours. The company also offers a suite of digital tools — KettleSpace Virtual — designed to enable Members to support one another virtually. In his role, Rosenzweig manages digital product, identifies and expands the network of physical spaces at a national level, and oversees the seventeen spaces operating in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Prior to KettleSpace, Dan worked on the Real Estate team at WeWork, identifying and acquiring real estate assets all over the world. Before that, he was on the Real Estate team at Alvarez & Marsal, advising the Bloomberg Administration on policies to encourage local entrepreneurship. He has always been interested in unique spaces and retooling underutilized assets. He currently splits time between New York and San Francisco where he lives with his wife Rachel.
Amy Meyer, Aussie Recruit & Australians In San Francisco Bay Area
Talking about the jobs, employing Australians and the West Coast.
Amy moved to San Francisco 6 years ago from Sydney after walking down the Embarcadero and feeling compelled to make the jump over.
Upon moving, she created the Australians In San Francisco Facebook group in an effort to meet other Aussies, and over the years it's turned into a highly active online community with almost 4,000 members.
Amy then built the AussieSFBay website, to provide additional support for Aussies. The site shows all the Australian events happening each month, expats groups and helpful moving resources.
Earlier this year, Amy founded Aussie Recruit, focused on helping Australians and jobs in the Bay Area at E3 friendly companies.
Transcript from Regular Checkup #3
Josh Pugh: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm America. Josh, welcome to Regular Checkups, my weekly summary of the news for ex-pats in the United States. Every week we've got different panelists who can answer questions about their industries, tell you what they see day to day, and make some recommendations for your future as ex-pats living in the United States.
[00:00:18] These aren't going to be deep dives, but each week we'll answer as many questions as we can that have been submitted and hopefully give you some comfort knowing that you've got all the information you need at your fingertips. That leads me to introduce my panel for tonight. I want to thank these three very much for taking the time out.
[00:00:35] We've got Renee Diakogeorgiou, senior associate financial services, people and organization practice at PWC. We've got, Dan Rosensweig from the cofounder and of coworking space, KettleSpace Inc., and Amy Mayer, the founder of Aussie Recruit and Australians in the San Francisco Bay Area on Facebook.
[00:00:56] Thank you very much, all of you for joining me tonight. We divide every week into three sections, past, present, and future. Past, we're going to hear about how our panelists have gotten here tonight and how their industries have gone over the last few months. Present. We're going to talk about what our panelists are up to now and what they're seeing, in their industries at the moment and answer your questions.
[00:01:18] Then future, we're going to talk about recommendations and ideas that they've got for you and sort of see how things are changing in the future. Before we get to any information, though, we do need to flag that this webinar is strictly for informational purposes only and it is not intended, nor should it be relied upon as a source of legal or financial advice or opinion.
[00:01:39] As always, it's important to let you all know that because everyone's situation is different and not everything we say tonight will apply to you. So now with all the formalities out of the way, Renee, I'll start with you. Hello. If you don't mind introducing yourself, give me a little bit of a background about how you got here tonight.
[00:01:58] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:01:58] Cool. Hi. Hi everyone. My name is Renee. As Josh said, I work for PWC in the people in people in organization, culture practice. I've been in HR for around about 10 years now. In Australia I used to work for Westpac Bank. and I'm from Adelaide, so I worked from the SA Water. And I've been in New York now for just over four years.
[00:02:19] So I used to work on Wall Street, Deutsche Bank doing HR, and I've been with PWC now for two years. Moved into consulting, in terms of, yeah, so how I got here that that's, that's how we got that. Yeah.
[00:02:36] Josh Pugh: [00:02:36] Yeah. So tell us a little bit about like, what your, what your office and what your role looks like and what's it look like over the past few months.
[00:02:43] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:02:43] Sure. So, as a consultant, I mean, I'm based here in New York, but I'm often onsite at client site. Because, the consultant is usually a traveling role. So we're on client site almost every week depending on, on where the client is based and depending on how long the project is there at the moment, my client is in Houston.
[00:03:01] So, up until a few months ago, I was flying to Houston almost weekly. And I was in Houston Monday to Thursday, every week, serving my clients, giving them, the, doing the project with them onsite there. that has since changed. We are all remote now, including our client. Obviously everyone's been working from home but yeah, so it's definitely shifting.
[00:03:23] Josh Pugh: [00:03:23] So how does that change your role as someone sort of in the people services? You know, I imagine you have a lot of face to face time and it's all about, sort of, engaging the community and culture of a business, how sort of has that changed your job?
[00:03:36] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:03:36] Our job, we've sort of shifted the trajectory in terms of, the services where we'll be getting, we're getting asked to provide.
[00:03:43] So obviously we still provide our regular services, which is, a lot of things around change management. It's sort of like our bread and butter. We have a lot of things to do with, organizational redesign, things like that. Yeah. But right now the key people problem or like change in the work in the work world at that's happening is how do we get our people to be productive and happy and healthy while working remotely, and then eventually, what's our plan for return to work.
[00:04:09] So there's been a bit of a shift in that and trying to, and I mean, we're not, I won't say the problem, but the challenge there is we're learning as we go as well, and we're having to advise our clients on how to do it right. So we've been practicing a few things within our own team. We're over communicating like we have, we have a lot of social hours, we have some competitions to keep us engaged, like a doodling challenge that we do within our team. Just anything that we can do to try, try to keep us connected, that we can then pass on that advice to our clients. I think is, is helpful and it seems to be working, but in terms of the future, return to work looks like that's where we're starting to build out what we think it's gonna.
[00:04:52] Josh Pugh: [00:04:52] Yeah. Okay. And that's the sort of evolving one. Amy, thank you as well for joining me tonight. is that similar to what you're seeing with businesses that you work with and the people that you're talking to?
[00:05:04] Amy Meyer: [00:05:04] Yeah. Thanks for having me, Josh. Big fan of these, joined your past two. So grateful to be on this, tonight.
[00:05:11]My situation's a little interesting because I've been working with companies as essentially a third party recruiter, so they would look at me as kind of a recruiting agency. but I see it more as a recruitment community. That is around the, around Australians. I've definitely seen a big impact in how the companies I'm working with are hiring and how they are working together.
[00:05:37] And a lot of that is either a slowing or a pause. So a lot of them I think are taking this, view of let's wait and see, and as we do currently speak and interview with potential candidates, let's slow down that process so that we can still wait and see. or otherwise, there's just kind of been a big pause on a lot of their, their internal hiring initiatives.
[00:06:03]And I've been quite interested to further explore, and it's something I'm more interested in doing more research on, on how this whole working remote, has actually been impacting recruitment and the internal hiring processes, because a lot of the companies, at least out here in the Bay area, and I'd imagine also in New York, there's a lot of face to face that occurs as part of these hiring processes.
[00:06:27]And so I'm quite interested to see over time, over the next couple of months, throughout the rest of the year, how these things are impacted. Along with, you know, a lot of the other internal processes, whether it be employee engagement and having the, the doodle competitions or all sorts of things, keep people engaged.
[00:06:45] Josh Pugh: [00:06:45] For sure. Can you tell us just a little bit, so Aussie Recruit, just to give us a little bit of a background about, you know, I, we've obviously hosted, well not “obviously” but we've hosted some webinars together before and done some things, and we've talked about our communities on each of the coasts, but do you mind giving up on just a little bit of a background on sort of how you've gotten to where you are today?
[00:07:04] Amy Meyer: [00:07:04] Sure. Thanks Josh. So I moved to San Francisco from Sydney about seven years ago. I kept saying six years until yesterday, and I was like, at some point you have to switch to the next year!
[00:07:23]Josh Pugh: [00:07:23] Amy I think we've lost you sorry…
[00:07:26] Amy Meyer: [00:07:26] I just got disconnected for a second. Yeah. If I have that issue again, I might just need to switch to a tethering. yes. So. When I moved here, I started an Australians in San Francisco, Facebook group because I didn't have any friends or family or support network here.
[00:07:42] And for a couple years it was kind of just me, one or two other friends. But then it started really building momentum and you know, fast forward to last year, there's thousands of members. There's this really big expat community here. And I wanted to do something that was really meaningful and significant, both for me in my career, but also Australians out here.
[00:08:03] And I found that from meeting, you know, over a hundred Australians one-on-one, that there was this really big issue with Australian professionals getting jobs out here. And I was just blown away. I was like, this is crazy. You're all super overqualified, have moved countries. you know, some of you…. (connection issues)
[00:08:24] Josh Pugh: [00:08:24] Oh, I might have to jump to you, Dan. Sorry. Amy, we lost you a little bit, so I'll quickly jump to Dan. I met you Dan, as a brand new arrival in New York, myself, and, I joined KettleSpace, the coworking space that you co-founded. I imagine, you know, being a real estate and physically oriented business that, your life has changed and your business has changed a fair bit over the last few months.
[00:08:50] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:08:50] Certainly has, first off, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. Yeah, so for us, we offer coworking space. It's certainly unique. We partner with restaurants, hotels, retail spaces that are generally under-utilized and help bring, easy revenue to, to those operators. And at the same time, on the other side of that, deliver the world's most affordable coworking product so our members get access to all of the spaces that we partner with, which was 17 as of I guess, nine weeks ago. Hard to believe that it's been that long. so yeah, it's been tough. We offer people space and we currently can't do that. So we paused our entire communities memberships. So we obviously from a business standpoint, in theory, it, people might frown upon that.
[00:09:38]We did it, because we knew it was the right move and we, got over time, we got our investors behind us knowing that, this isn't, we're not here for, to be a, you know, a, I don't know, something, we're not here for the short term. We're here for the longterm. And so, we had to do, do right by it by folks.
[00:09:54] As best we could.
[00:09:55] Josh Pugh: [00:09:55] No. And I think that's important. We're seeing that in a lot of these catch-ups where hearing from businesses saying, you know, it's better about, and sort of why I wanted to bring you three together. It's about the people. It's about the, the parts of the business that are important and the community members to make sure you take care of them in the short term.
[00:10:09] So that longterm you actually have, you know, business prospects etc. So do you mind telling us a little bit of a background, you know, that's KettleSpace. What's your, how did you, get, get here and
[00:10:20] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:10:20] How did I get here? So always been in real estate right out of school I started working for an, a consulting firm called Alvarez and Marsal, which primarily focuses on, bankruptcy and restructuring work.
[00:10:31]But we worked with the Bloomberg administration to help, assess new York's ability to attract entrepreneurs. Which is, which is pretty cool. That was my first dipping my toe into the entrepreneurial world. And then from there I actually went to work for, we work on the real estate team. so it was one of the first hires there, helped them grow from a few locations to several hundred and through that experience came up with the idea for KettleSpace, and sort of seeing how the market dynamics were playing out and also just, through my own experience, seeing a lot of underutilized space that was beautiful and checked a lot of the boxes of what we were looking to create. And we thought this might be a more efficient and potentially smarter way to do it.
[00:11:11]Josh Pugh: [00:11:11] For sure.
[00:11:11] And so with everything that's happened, you know, you've said that you've put everyone on pause and you've changed the sort of, the business dynamic a fair bit or completely, what, what's sort of, what's it looking like now? What are you, how are you engaging with your community and how are they responding?
[00:11:25] What are they asking for?
[00:11:26] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:11:26] Completely. So it's honestly, it's a lot of this, right? I don't, I know I'm probably not alone in saying I sit, I've always sat a computer, but the camera's on more than it ever has been. We called every single one of our members, and ask them, first and foremost, “how are you?”
[00:11:41]”Are you okay?” From health as well. We all know that. I guess now more than ever. but then “how can we help?” What, in what way? What are, what's ailing you most other than if it's health? And a lot of folks were saying, you know, a lot of our community is made up of, of freelancers and consultants, and they were saying, my pipeline is dried up and the scope of work of what I'm focused on right now for a lot of my existing clients, has been reduced. So we immediately went to work on different ways that we could bring more, more revenue to our user base. And so we created an offer-ask system where members who are working on certain projects and have needs, if I'm a web developer and I need someone to help me with copywriting or marketing or something like that, they can post that ask.
[00:12:23] And, we have a pretty talented community, and folks are very, very eager to help one another. So. we've really been focused on helping people make more money. And then on the flip side, we've gone out and negotiated with, I want to say over a hundred different companies, services, businesses that were in, in the stacks or in the tech tech stacks of, of the businesses that, work in our community.
[00:12:46] And we've amassed, over half a million dollars in savings for those folks. So, $20,000 in Stripe credit, $5,000 in AWS credits, you name it. we probably got it. You can request it.
[00:13:00] Josh Pugh: [00:13:00] Yeah. Awesome. So just out of interest, how does it work with, you know, there are obviously some other, you know, it's no big secret, so there are other coworking spaces. Is that something that you have a community with? Like do you speak to other leaders in the coworking space and workplace space, or is that, yeah.
[00:13:16] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:13:16] Yeah, we're, we're all in this together. At the end of the day, I mean, we are, we're prop tech company, but we were in real estate.
[00:13:21] So, I try and stay in touch with folks from all over the real estate ecosystem. You know, we're what I call asset agnostic. We go in retail spaces, we go in hotels, we go in, restaurants. Multifamily properties. So I've been talking to brokers and owners in all of those different areas, and hearing if you'd like to hear, I'm happy to share, some of the feedback I've been getting, which is a lot of, slow down and pausing right now, similar to what, you know, a lot of the comments we've, we've heard thus far. Cause no one really knows. The key is the timeline is, is somewhat unknown right now.
[00:13:53]We're starting to see some best practices come out though. So, for example, McDonald's just came out with their, reopening policies. a lot of focus around social distancing, sanitation, and really focusing on, making sure that people who are on site are going to leave as they came, which is hopefully healthy.
[00:14:13] Josh Pugh: [00:14:13] No. Awesome. I mean, and it's good. At least something good can come out of a whole bunch of people being locked down and having some time to think. Amy, I'll jump back to you. so you were just saying, so you've got started sort of thinking about this idea that Australians don't have the opportunity to properly advertise themselves, basically. I'll throw it back to you and you were sort of in the early stages of, Aussie Recruit.
[00:14:32] Amy Meyer: [00:14:32] Thank you, Josh. Sorry about that. And Dan, it sounds like you're doing some really amazing work and saving those businesses a lot of money. So that's really awesome. Just running my own small business, I know how much those cost savings can really mean during a time like this.
[00:14:48]So great work!
[00:14:49] Yeah, so I realized that Australians just weren't really getting a fair opportunity throughout hiring processes because of that little box that we need to tick about needing sponsorship. And so that's really how Aussie Recruit came into formation. And I essentially just started meeting with more and more companies and pitching Australian talent, that evolved into monthly meetups for the Australian community out here.
[00:15:15] Looking at job seekers, essentially attending these meet ups to expand their own professional networks, because that's really my number one piece of advice to anyone, both pre Coronavirus and also now is expanding your professional network is always going to be key to landing those new jobs. So I was thinking, how can I help all of these people would help each other?
[00:15:38]But also to meet with the companies that I'm recruiting for, face to face instead of through a resume. And then that's what's going to be really interesting now. As I was mentioning earlier on, as hiring processes start to change, as we rely more on video conferencing, it can be really difficult to have those face to face interactions, and to, you know, just see how you feel in the work environment, or see how you kind of get along with certain people. That will be really interesting to see, to see how that changes over time because we're going to have to rely on that more and more.
[00:16:13] Josh Pugh: [00:16:13] For sure. Renee, is that sort of the same for you, for what you're saying, you know, it, it really is educating people on how that they, how they can engage with community and what they can do moving forward and what are, what are people asking you?
[00:16:25] What are the questions that you're seeing come to you?
[00:16:28] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:16:28] Yeah. Josh, that's a great question. And Amy hearing what you do, or you would have been so helpful to have when I move to New York. Let me tell you, cause that's truly the purpose of your business. So you can speak to as many recruiters as you want, but having, so having an Aussie to sort of go in and bat for you is a, is a great thing.
[00:16:48]Yeah. So some of the questions we're getting are definitely around how to keep people engaged. How, what things are gonna look like moving forward? How can we keep, how can we offer people balance? So does everyone have to come back into the office. So I know Twitter yesterday announced that “if you don't want to go back to the office, you never have to ever.”
[00:17:09] We'll see. We'll see who follows next. I imagine it'll be a lot of the big tech companies might follow suit. The other things we're hearing are really around wellness. So how can I make sure my people are not just healthy, but also mentally healthy, emotionally healthy? Like this has been such a huge challenge for everyone, and as humans, we're social people, right?
[00:17:32] We depend. We rely on community. We rely on social interaction. A lot of people that live on their own haven't even had physical touch with someone in, you know, now we're going on 10 weeks now, and you just don't realize the toll that takes on someone emotionally and psychologically, especially when day to day, they're probably on autopilot, you know, getting back to their computer, doing the work, and then going to sleep and sort of, wake up, repeat. So there's, it's a lot around wellness and a lot around what they can do, what they can do to sort of, yeah, manage that. So we, at PWC for example, we have access to, they gave us the Nike app for free, so that we can exercise to keep us healthy. we have the Calm app as well. They've given us, to sort of keep out, be able to meditate and be able to have that available. Yeah. Just little things like that that we are then sort of seeing how it works within our own organization and then able to further advise.
[00:18:28] Exactly. But yeah, I mean they are the key questions and also just around location. So we do lots of work around location strategy.
[00:18:36] That's usually based on, where do I need to go to get the right talent? Like where is the right talent for the type of business that I have? now it's going to be doing, do we even need to worry about that? Is it more just looking at what technology do you have to make sure that you can actually communicate with people wherever they are?
[00:18:55] Yeah, that's been a huge, a huge thing around digital upskilling as well.
[00:18:59] Josh Pugh: [00:18:59] Yeah, for sure. I've, I've taught a lot of people how to Zoom in the last few months. Amy, is that, is that, we were talking about Twitter a little bit, is that what you're saying? Sort of as a general thing? You know, there's a real shift towards this idea of accepting, you know, work from home or expanding where they're looking for…
[00:19:15] Well, are company's looking!? I guess would be the question more broadly.
[00:19:20] Amy Meyer: [00:19:20] Yeah, that's a really good question. And we're finding out more answers to that every day. I'm finding out more answers every day as I continue to engage with the companies that I'm working with and just. Check in with them and see how things are going, and in a sensitive way, as you really don't know whether people that you contact are even in those jobs anymore.
[00:19:39]And that's something to really be mindful as well as you're navigating, you know, the new hiring processes and finding new opportunities with companies. But yeah, I've definitely seen a big, slow or pause. On hiring, unfortunately. And on the flip side, I'm seeing an increase in the amount of Australians or non Aussies that are contacting me for jobs because they're either being laid off or they're just afraid of the situation and they want to know about other opportunities out there.
[00:20:08] But. I have heard from a lot of the Australians I'm working with that although it's slowed, there are definitely companies out there that, that are still hiring. There's a lot of companies that are enabling this kind of globally distributed remote force. and it sounds like those companies are continuing to hire.
[00:20:26] And then a number of the startups that I work with, who I wouldn't have necessarily picked for, wants to be, you know, companies still hiring, but they did just, you know, raise rounds of funding. they do have a pretty good run rate and they are in a position where they can continue to make those hires.
[00:20:43] But yeah, it is in a much more slow, measured way. It does seem at the moment.
[00:20:48] Josh Pugh: [00:20:48] Yeah. Okay. Cause I'm saying I've sort of similar thing, I've actually seen a spike in the amount of people visiting America Josh, and asking questions of me of, you know, “I want to move over. I've still got this dream. What do you think?”
[00:20:59] What are you telling people in terms of a path forward? You were saying, you know, you, you're having a, an increase of people applying or looking for jobs and not necessarily, well, sort of the inverse happening for the, the jobs being available. There are different opportunities, but if they're getting less at the moment that they're lower at the moment, what are you telling people as an outlook?
[00:21:17]Are you giving a timeline? Are you saying, you know, just “come back in six months. I have no idea”
[00:21:24] Amy Meyer: [00:21:24] Yeah. So for a lot of Australians, one of the big challenges is the visa. So they either need a new visa or they're in Australia and they're waiting for embassies to open up. And so what I've, I've been doing is just actually hosting regular monthly or biweekly updates for the Aussie Recruit community to keep people updated on what's going on with the visas, because these are actually changing all the time.
[00:21:47]And from our session last night, it sounded like, the consulates abroad may open, as soon as June 8th. I mean, definitely kind of keep checking on the embassy websites for information. Yeah. But that's what the information that we got last night from an immigration attorney. So my advice is to kind of, just make sure that you're, you're checking these sites, that you're staying up to date with the information.
[00:22:10]It may be a little bit difficult if you're in Australia at the moment. You want to relocate to the U S right now. Even things like finding an apartment or getting a social security number, I mean, these challenges, the challenges already, and that's way harder right now. So. I definitely think that through and be recommending the people probably just weight dropped a bit of a wait and see approach.
[00:22:33]But if you are in a scenario where you do have to move here, that there are definitely kind of jobs. so it's all about, again, expanding your network and taking advantage of the remote situation. Everyone is remote already right now. So there are scenarios where you can start working in Australia or say New York for San Francisco based position or vice versa, and play that remote card.
[00:22:58] Just make sure that you can work the same hours or that doesn't really affect your job. but I think it's a really interesting play for Australians right now since everyone is already working remote potentially, you know, through to the end of the year, as Renee mentioned, with Twitter and possibly other companies soon to announce that
[00:23:15] Josh Pugh: [00:23:15] For sure. And how does that change your role as someone who would normally be some more directly engaging people on the ground? Do you see your role as a recruiter changing or it's just going to be a little bit different on physical location? That's about the only difference?
[00:23:28] Amy Meyer: [00:23:28] Yeah. So my role has already massively changed in the number of companies that I've been working with, have paused on their hiring quite a bit.
[00:23:37] So I feel as though my role has kind of shifted to supporting the Australian community with the immigration challenges at the moment. Which is the best thing that I can personally do in this scenario. And I think that my role is going to continue to evolve, as we kind of see what's next and what the next steps are here.
[00:23:54] I would like to get those monthly community meetups back up and running. I thought they were really impactful, but I can also see people putting off in person events all the way through to next year. So I have to take a bit of a longterm approach here and just say, look, I'd like to get it back up and running, but in the meantime, it's going to be about creating virtual resources for people, and doing my best to help connect.
[00:24:18] Australians looking for jobs with companies that are hiring and it's definitely, it's definitely going to be a challenge, but when I'm, I'm certainly up for.
[00:24:27] Josh Pugh: [00:24:27] Awesome. Dan, is that about a similar message coming from you? You know, what's your projection for, you know, New York city, the East coast? What are you seeomg?
[00:24:35] What are you telling people? What are you planning?
[00:24:38]Dan Rosenzweig: [00:24:38] In, in terms of space or in terms of jobs or a little bit of both?
[00:24:41] Josh Pugh: [00:24:41] Well, I guess in terms of space to start. So what are you sort of seeing? Do you have any projections for, you know, the city of returning to normal? I realize it's a real crystal ball kind of moment, but where we're at, we're pretending like we all know something more than everyone else.
[00:24:54] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:24:54] It's tough to say. In terms of specifics, what I would say is, I think there it's probably going to reopen on a limited basis with some serious restrictions. One of the biggest challenges I'm seeing in commercial real estate, especially in office right now, is, getting in and out out of buildings.
[00:25:11]One of the most amazing things about New York is how dense and how dense we are and how tall we can build. One of the biggest problems with this current issue is that exactly, it's the logistics of getting people. To their desks safely and back is very, is going to be very, very challenging, under, the restrictions that, that probably make a lot of sense for us right now.
[00:25:35]So I mean, there's a number of things that, that, commercial real estate, is going to adopt going forward. I mean, at a minimum, it's increased sanitation and increased spacing, but, for you to get to your desk, there's probably gonna be a slot at some point in the morning and some point in the afternoon for when you are allowed to come in and leave, because we're talking about, you know, tens of thousands of people in single buildings, right.
[00:26:01] Right. And, I mean, we can all think about the way it was and how challenging that is going to be going forward. So I, I certainly think it's going to make more sense to continue to be remote, at least in some, some capacity for the foreseeable future.
[00:26:18]And any return to work is probably going to be on a limited basis. So you'll send some percentage of your workforce back to work on any given day. But the, the, requirement to be in the office as it used to be, I, I don't see that it going back anytime soon.
[00:26:35] Josh Pugh: [00:26:35] Yeah. Renee, is that a, I mean, again, I'm taking the crystal ball from Dan and I'm handing it to you, but is that sort of a similar message that you're giving up?
[00:26:45] Is that a, you know, this will change things indefinitely, will sort of change the workforce?
[00:26:49] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:26:49] Yeah, absolutely. I think this will change the workforce forever.
[00:26:53] Like I don't think, I don't think indefinitely is the right word, thinking that at some point we just don't know when there'll be a shift, but the world as we know it is probably, it's probably changing forever and it could, I think in some ways it's going to be for the better. So I think that people are gonna enjoy working remotely to an extent. It's going to give them more freedom. It's going to give them more flexibility. I think as things go back to normal, It might be that people who work remote don't necessarily want to be completely remote, but they also don't want to go into their office. So Dan's business could come in handy once things are back up and running
[00:27:29] Josh Pugh: [00:27:29] Dan, it's working. It's working!
[00:27:31] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:27:31] I think what Dan said as well about commercial businesses…
[00:27:35] We years ago we went from having our cubicles to having open work plan spaces. And now you can expect to see like the plastic go up again. It'll probably be, perspex. So it's going to be see-through, but you can definitely expect something like that. Some sort of cubicle like structure. But in terms of how things are going to change for different industries, I think it's going to be very interesting.
[00:27:58] I think for the consulting industry alone. The consultant will no longer be a traveling profession. Because we've proved that we can be productive without having to fly every single week and without costing our clients. Cause I mean, our clients pay for our expenses. They're going to be saving because we're not going to have to be flying out there every week.
[00:28:18] Not to say we'd never fly and we'd never travel. but I don't think, I think that, yeah, our, our, industry is gonna shift completely.
[00:28:29] Josh Pugh: [00:28:29] That's a really good point. And I think that's a. Sort of highlights that it's changing for everyone, as we all know. But those kind of industries where you would never have thought, you know, you think of consultants as people that are always on planes and absolutely, they'd be the first ones to go back to that normal behavior.
[00:28:42] If, as you said, if you can prove that it doesn't need it, then suddenly you where you can change an industry forever. Yeah. That's perfect. look at that. 6:31 PM the point of phase is to be good and punchy and get through some topics and answer some questions. So we hope we've answered some of the questions and, or all of the questions that were submitted in.
[00:29:01] And thank you to everyone who is watching and everyone who submitted questions. Thank you very much to Amy, Dan and Renee. That was really helpful to hear some insight from all of you and all of your industries. I am going to be sending out some feedback forms to everyone who's watching. I really appreciate it if you can give, give me a bit of an idea on what you thought, what you took from it. If you have any questions for the panel, you can put that in there as well. If you have any questions for me, I, I'm more than happy to answer those. So everyone knows. I also host Friday night drinks, a cocktail hour and trivia hour on Friday nights from 5:30PM Eastern until 6:30PM Eastern.
[00:29:36] And we'd love to have you all on boar. But thank you again very much. Amy, Dan and Renee, I'll be sending some information for you, three around to everyone as well, and some links that they've mentioned throughout the topics, throughout the evening. So thanks again and thanks everyone for watching.
[00:29:51] Renee Diakogeorgiou: [00:29:51] Thank you.
[00:29:52] Dan Rosenzweig: [00:29:52] Thank you.
[00:29:54] Amy Meyer: [00:29:54] Thank you.
