In this episode, host David Abrams is in conversation with Antonia Cardone, Americas Lead, Total Workplace at Cushman & Wakefield. Antonia’s career journey began with her training as an architect and her early interest in strategic facility planning. Her career trajectory took hold and she has been fortunate to be doing what she loves, solving a wide variety of problems for her clients. Antonia shared a glimpse into the data that Cushman & Wakefield is analyzing, including employee sentiments around the value of connecting to people in the workplace. Antonia shared a number of reasons people want to be in the office. In the past, being in the office was about having access to “stuff”, whereas today the new emphasis is on socialization and collaboration. She suggests that while amenities and environment are important, the “value” of being together is the real driver of spending time in the office. We both agreed that casual interactions are critically important to building great teams and doing great work, and are especially difficult to schedule spontaneously over Zoom. We had a great conversation about how building operators and occupiers can be working together to really shake up the physical workplace, across all building classes. Antonia’s insights on how the way people work in buildings is impacting cities and local businesses, causing less stress and allowing for more streamlined operations, was really interesting and something that I had not previously considered. We also discussed how technology can help solve some of the challenges around improving collaboration in the workspace and supporting people continuing to work from everywhere. Antonia also recognized the need to be able to better track space utilization to deliver improved services and programs and provide more visibility of data for the users of spaces. 

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