Indeed, at an April breakfast for analysts, Fano talked about a multinational travel company that was spread out over three floors of an office building in Chicago. It hired WeWork to redesign and manage the space. WeWork was able to reduce the company’s space to just two floors while adding a wellness program, a calendar of events, and landscaped outdoor areas. WeWork is transforming the office into a place that better serves workers as well as their employers. Everything in our lives is being personalized and optimized, thanks to the emergence of artificial intelligence. Predictive technology ensures the ads we see in our Facebook stream are directed exactly to us. It means our calendars will notify us to buy flowers on our spouse’s birthdays. Our diets can be tailored exactly to our genetic makeup. Is it that much of a stretch to believe that soon, our workspace will be tailored exactly to us as well? This is WeWork’s master plan. Through a combination of culture and technology, it will, over time, create the perfect platform for reducing offices to the least square footage possible while at the same time energizing the people who roam through those offices to embrace its brand with the fervor of early iPhone diehards. The company aims to position itself to be the “Intel Inside” of office space—the de facto provider of desks, and by extension, the services that go with them. That reality is a long way out. It’s too early to say if businesses testing out aspects of the strategy are going to embrace it. Perhaps the real test will come when the economy, having pushed mostly up and to the right for longer than most economic cycles usually last, finally turns down. Many suspect WeWork will suffer dramatic losses as small businesses abruptly close shop and entrepreneurs work from their couches instead of the communal watering hole, leaving WeWork with long leases on empty buildings. But there’s also a school of thought that suggests WeWork will become an answer to companies looking to cut down on expenses quickly. That’s what Veresh Sita is betting. Remember him? I met him on his second day of work, and he didn’t have a title yet. Now he’s a senior vice president of product. Earlier in his career, he’d worked in commercial real estate with Colliers International, and he explains, “This technology we talk of is a massive double hedge. In boom times, people want it because it provides the experience...In a downturn, most companies are going to look towards that technology to bring in the efficiencies and the streamlining.” Indeed, GE’s Reinke is most impressed by WeWork’s utilization software, which relies on sensors and other inputs to let community managers know how WeWork locations are being used. Right now, she says, GE doesn’t use it. But she envisions a possibility for how it could be helpful in the future. “Any real estate leader would tell you a building is only used 70 percent of the time at any given time,” she says. People go on vacation. They’re traveling. Right now, she says, the Boston office has 88 desks. What if she could figure out exactly how people were using the space, and house 88 people across 75 desks? How do we house more people, more productively, for less money? All this stuff is viewed as efficiency. But WeWork’s master calculation is that it’s also going to make your office life—the 8.9 hours you spend attending to the tasks for which you get paid every day—better. If WeWork gets this right, it could usher in the best of all possible office worlds, where the customary trade-off between worker happiness and company profitability magically turns into an everyone-wins game. Photo direction by: Noah Rabinowitz
WeWork’s bet is that because it is amassing so much office space and studying how thousands of different businesses use it, it can position itself as the company with the most valuable firsthand knowledge about how jobs best get done. Since its inception, WeWork has been collecting data about how people work, where they are most productive, what they need to feel good, and how much space they really require in the first place. (It’s less…much, much less…space than you think.) So far, WeWork has applied this knowledge to its own locations. The company’s headquarters will be located on a former parking lot at 1 World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.