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Flex (FLEX): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Flex | Fortune

Flex (FLEX): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

Since she took the helm at Flex in 2019, Revathi Advaithi has overhauled its portfolio, exited volatile markets, and quietly positioned the global electronics manufacturing giant as a major player in AI infrastructure. How to pivot and lead a company that make everything from electric car circuits to cardiac catheters? We sit down with its chief executive.

Revathi Advaithi
Chief Executive Officer, Flex 

Ellie Austin
Editorial Director, Most Powerful Women, Fortune

How Flex Got its Groove Back

Conferences

Flex is the kind of company that most people don't see, but everyone depends on. Since taking over in 2019, CEO Revathi Adviti has recast Flex from being a sprawling manufacturing company into a major player in reinventing AI infrastructure. To discuss more about how she's led this transformation and what it means to run a company that builds the hardware behind the future of technology, please welcome Rayati. At BT and she'll be interviewed by our amazing Ellie Austin. OK Wow, what a welcome. Thanks, guys. OK, so I want to start with a very important note that Ravay is one of our 100 most powerful women in business globally. As per Fortunes List, which was published in May of this year. So it's such an honor to have you with us today, Ray. Um, so as we heard in Jason's introduction, you've executed a pretty impressive transformation at Flex. You joined the company as CEO in 2019. Give us a brief overview of what your strategy was in those early days when you went in. Yeah, so when I started in 2019, you know, Flex is one of the world's largest contract manufacturing companies, around $25 billion. I'd say when you hear about contract manufacturing companies, you hear about people like Foxconn. So The top three in the world and it was going through a transformation phase that didn't go well. So when I joined in 2019, the stock was, you know, around $7. The CEO had just left the company, so I was brought in, my background being mainly in industrial companies to remake the business itself. And I approach every job the same way, and this has been in every sector I've been in, which is oil and gas or aerospace or any electrical, any sector is really focused on the portfolio, kind of say, do you have the right products for what the customers want and will they pay for it, right? Pretty simple. So focused on the portfolio, did the stuff of exiting a pretty significant part of our portfolio, which is more consumer driven, and then refocused the business on really kind of high value goods that we could actually drive value for with customers and in the middle of that. As we were doing all of that, this is well before kind of people were talking about AI and Nvidia and all that. My background being with Power, you know, Flex was building compute racks for kind of the data centers, and I thought, well, someday compute's going to be power hungry. Why don't we Build a power infrastructure and so started buying a whole bunch of power companies and put together a power infrastructure so today Flex 20% of our portfolio that's growing at 35% builds power, cooling, and compute for data centers so really have become. A contract manufacturing company and then somewhat of an industrial AI infrastructure company and then in the 7 years this is my 7th year we've done really well. The stock's around 500+% we've spun off a certain part of our portfolio so really. Do a full blown transformation of the whole company end to end. So you mentioned that about exiting certain markets, and I know that you exited things like footwear, like smartwatches, like laptops. Tell us a bit about what your criteria was for making those decisions to leave certain markets. Yeah, so if you think about, you know, You know, you're a Western company that if you look at our capital markets and our cost of capital, you have to get the returns for it. So if you're in high volume consumer goods that have very cyclical ups and downs, you don't get the return in the time period you're looking for. So if it was a very cyclical. and the product portfolio moved really fast. I felt like the returns wasn't being made through the cycle, and maybe the Asian companies that had a different cost of capital and were funded in a different way were better suited for doing that. So we exited cell phones, you know, very famously things like Nike footwear, all those things we. Exited because I didn't feel like for our returns that we were looking for it would provide that through the cycle. So to use a very systematic way of thinking about what are the financial returns. Will customers pay for those financial returns over a long period of time? Can you drive value? And if you can do that, you stay, otherwise you exit. It's obviously been a huge year for manufacturing with the current administration prioritizing reshoring a lot of manufacturing. What will, in your opinion, never be made on US soil? Um, well, it'll be hard to imagine phones being made in the US soil. I know that's, uh, publicly not a great thing to say, but, um. You know things that take uh a significant amount of labor still will be difficult things to be made in the US soil. I would say not because we're not capable or we don't have the capacity to do it. I would say that the population doesn't support that kind of skill level so it's more to do with what is the best use of our resources in the United States, right? You want higher skill level jobs. Jobs and to do higher skill level jobs you want to do the more complicated things and cell phones are not the most complicated things to do, you know, so is in footwear, right? So I don't think those things are the things that you would make in the US and hopefully you can do final assembly or other things that would add value to it, but I don't see those things being reassured in. And I know you speak a lot about job creation, and so how do we go about upskilling the domestic workforce? I would say, you know. There's a lot of work involved in this, so some important things that are happening in the US today is, you know, a significant part of our employment is around warehouses, right, e-commerce, and you think about the future of warehouses and e-commerce with automation, with human robots, all of that that's being worked, you see those. Jobs migrating to a higher skilled workforce, so companies who are in that space have to undergo significant transformation and say what is our role in reskilling this workforce, right? And I talk about this even in our factories today. So my uh employees who come into the factory today and maybe operate a 5 axis CNC machine in the. Future they may be just programming that from their phone. This is my responsibility to train and reskill that workforce to be able to do that. So I'd say organizations have a pretty significant role. You have to kind of say there's the world going in the next 5 years and we have to have a systematic way of really reskilling the American workforce, and I'm a huge fan of that. I feel like. Organizations own it. I feel government owns it, and a good cross partnership between industry and government is really important to be doing that. Now. Flex is very clearly booming. At the same time, your revenue has dipped slightly over the past couple of years. I think it was $27 billion in 2023. It's now $25.8 billion still huge. But what do you attribute that slight dip to? I would say because we're continuing to remake the portfolio, right, so, um, you know, we used to be less than 3% manufacturing margin type of business, right? Today we're like a 6% operating margin business, so we continue to exit parts of the portfolio that we think long term are not financially viable for where we need to be. So I don't really focus on kind of. Revenue per se at the top level. I focus on revenue and the high value areas that we're growing so our data center AI infrastructure business is is around $6.5 billion growing at 35%. That is more important to me than trying to figure out, are there other parts of the business that aren't long term for us that will continue to kind of re-scope. So that's how I think about overall. Revenue. Flex operates in 30+ countries, I think, um, and you and I caught up yesterday and you were saying that a few days ago, well last month, one of your facilities in Ukraine was hit by a missile, which I'm sure is an incredibly kind of complex and upsetting time. Take us inside kind of your response in those hours afterwards, and then second part, what are your operations going to look like in Ukraine going forward? I would say, you know, this is the role of every CEO, right? I mean, you never know what's going to come in the next minute and the next day, and you have to kind of go with the flow as these things happen. It's like the pandemic. Nobody realized you'd wake up one day and half your workforce couldn't show up. The next day, I think it's similar to that, right? It was around 10 p.m. I got a text from my team saying that our site in Ukraine was hit. I first thought it was a joke because we're in the western part of Ukraine, really far away from where any of the shoes have been. So I picked up the phone and called and then I'd say our team was on the phone the entire night, right, trying to figure out what happened and why it happened. But the incredible part of this is how good our teams are, right? 600 people evacuated in 7 minutes, no loss of lives. We had bomb shelters in place, unbelievable. So once we understood our employment. were good. Everything else fell in place, right? That's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned. We're in the process of evaluating and rebuilding, right? We still don't have a good view of kind of how the site looks. There are parts of the site that are destroyed, so I'd say the team will reevaluate, very committed to making sure that awesome team in Ukraine gets a chance. So I would say that, you know, it's one of our best teams. One of our best manufacturing sites and we'll continue to be supportive. And so when you say rebuilding, rebuilding the site or going elsewhere, or is that not a decision that's been made yet? I would say we definitely rebuild the site. OK. And and this is connected is kind of the resilience of supply chains, particularly in this time of really kind of unending geopolitical. Volatility. I know that you've integrated AI into your supply chains. Talk to us a bit about that and the efficiencies that you're seeing as a result. Yeah. See, I think the whole AI story is interesting. It's funny. It depends on the news of the day. Some days, AI is the most coolest thing, and then suddenly, oh, everything's coming to a, you know, grinding halt. Is it really happening? Um, so. I want to talk about it practically speaking, how I think it works in industries and you know factories like ours. First is, most companies like ours, most industrial companies, most manufacturing companies, anybody who's making anything probably has 50 plus software systems that are sitting in your factories. Like 50 is probably the low end, right? And so putting all those together and getting information that can then harness the power of AI, forget it even generative AI, it's happening but happening slowly. There's a lot of work that needs to happen for that, but I feel the future of this is very significant for for companies like ours and for everybody in this space because. Manufacturing productivity, despite everything that's been said, really hasn't moved in the last decade. Labor arbitrage maybe has been added a little bit, but other than that it really hasn't moved. Why? Because things are super fragmented in factories. Most factories you run into other than a few maybe in China are not fully automated end to end. So to be able to do that we need to take all these fragmented systems, be able to harness the power of information that comes in from that, and be able to run our factories like your car navigation system. Think about the future of that. So much to be had. I'm very bullish about this. I feel like the productivity journey through AI has just started. For most organizations like ours, and so I'd say don't pay any attention to the to the news cycle. It's not about who's using Chad GPT today. That's just barely the starting of of everything. When big industrial companies can harness the full power of AI, it's going to be a game changer. And what's the timeline for that, do you think? I think the time, I think in the next. My view is in the next 3 to 5 years, this whole data issue will get figured out, right? Because it's going to be controversial when I say this, but enterprise software companies, I'm sorry, a lot of you are here in the audience and listening, have sold as many softwares, fragmented systems that have been hodgepodge and, you know, jerry rigged together. So the first thing we have to do is fix that. And so that's going to take a little bit of time, but there is such innovative startups that are coming up that are going to skip all these systems and processes and really put overlaying, I'd say, systems in place that doesn't do all this data integration work. So I would say in the next 3 years we should be seeing full blown productivity coming out of these AI. at least for us, that's what we're pushing our teams to do, right? And I think most companies, most organizations, if they're thinking about it the right way, we'll be driving for that. I'm gonna ask you one more question and then open it up to see if any of you have a question for her. What's one thing that Flex isn't doing well at the moment that you're excited to see progress over the next year or so I'd say this is, I mean, the AI question is a big one, right? You know, we just, I was just talking to my teams last week about this. I want to see all this happen in the next year. I don't want to wait for 3 years. Like, who doesn't want to get this done? Like if I can go into like, you know, loud or chap TPT and it's solving these complex problems. For me, I don't want my supervisors to walk into a factory and then having to do spreadsheet and resources and MES systems and all that. I want them to be able to do it from their bed in their home, and I want them to do it tomorrow. So I would say that is where we need to progress and really go fast and um as far as I'm concerned, 3 years is too slow, OK. I love the impatience. Um, question over here. Nazar, is that you? Tell us your full name, Naz, um, where you're from. Uh, thanks. So thank you so much. You're such an inspiration. Um, it's been a pleasure listening to you during the MPW as well as this session. Um, so I'm Nas. I'm, um, co-founder and CEO of Vernie KI. We are all about making it so that operationally heavy enterprises can actually be silo, which is exactly the point that you were making. They make it so that in an AI native way we give you guys basically this operating platform that ends up helping both your employees as well as, you know, basically consumers. You have one across the board in a very unified and transformative way so that you don't have an AI that answers questions of your employees in a completely different way than the AI that answers the questions of say your um customers. So on that point what we've seen as the biggest uh challenge is that of course enterprises are very complicated with so many owners, so many hands. Uh, we've seen this, uh, 3 in a box model where the CEOs in the are in the driver's seat with the CTOs on a CXO next to them, 3 people helping drive the agenda, but the question back to you is, as the CEO, uh, how do you think such a transformation can happen if you are in the driver's seat to help. Silo and kick out all these again legacy software providers that have bloated your organization and become very expensive gold plated silos. How do you think you can work with your C level executives to actually go about these transformations which naturally take time and a lot of resistance? I would say that the CEOs have to be at the forefront of rethinking organizational design to drive this kind of change. It has to come from that office, and you know the MIT study that everybody was surprised about that 95% of AI projects are failing is not a surprise because. Because most of these are kind of someone is just, you know, kind of finding a project and resourcing it and doing it. So I just had this conversation with my team yesterday is that, you know, everyone is doing projects across the organization, but it has to come from my office to think about design. organizational structure. How do we break the silos? How do we pick the top 5 things that will drive the most change in the quickest way and get that done? And I would say, and most CEOs I'm talking to are thinking the same thing. So I think it's a common conversation across almost every CEO that I hear and talk to today. Thank you, Nas, um. Yes, one final question from the audience. If you could keep it brief, please, because we are running short on time. Thank you and tell us your name. Hi, I'm Emily Sherberth with APO. We do advisory and communications work. Um, I, I know several people that work at Flax, they talk about how incredible the culture. There and I just maybe wanted to ask you um what's what how have you really instilled something special in the culture at Flex and what are some of the the things that you think are most important in this time of uncertainty and um chaos. Well thank you for that and um I love the fact that our flex people talk about our culture. It's based on very simple principles, right? Treat everyone with respect whether you're in a shop floor in Poland or, you know, China or in the C-suite. We like to say just treat everyone the same way. That's the cornerstone of everything we do. And so in a time like this when geopolitics and. Having people across the globe can be quite traumatic for our employees. We just keep reminding everybody of that. It doesn't matter where you are, how you work together. It's really important that you respect each other. And how do you do that? Is that communications? What does that look like? Lots of communications. When I first came, we published kind of very simple 3 to 5 rules on how you treat people, and we've kind of stuck with that, and we remind everyone of that all the time. And you see that in meetings with our teams and my team, and, and so you have to live it. You have to show it by example, and then you hope it spreads to 140,000 employees across the world, right? And I love the fact that it does. I will say, and don't confuse that with the fact that we aren't competitive. We're competitive. We want to win, you know, we're very aggressive about everything we do. That's why we've delivered the performance we've done. and I think those two things can exist side by side. So, and I like to think that we'd like to show up and be competitive, but at the same time do it in a way that we have fun with each other and like being around each other. So a culture that's really important to me. Great question. One very final quick question for me that I would be remiss not to ask as someone who works for the most powerful women. Only 30 to 35% of the global manufacturing workforce. Is women. It's made up of women. I know it's something you're very passionate about, big question, 30 seconds to answer, how do we change that? I would say by doing what we continue to do, which is every woman around the world should push the story of why aren't you hiring more women? It has to come from women, men across every single platform. You have to ask the question of what makes them different? is it skills? Is it competencies, and really change the thinking around it. This will not come by just some C-suite initiative. It has to come up and down the organization. It has to come horizontally across and it's going to take a lot of work. I feel like in my lifetime we'll get to the 50%, which is where we need to be, and I want to see that in my lifetime, but it has to come from conversations like this. It has to come in everyone asking the question in their organization and forcing it to happen. OK, well, I count on you to keep asking that question. Ravay, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank

The labor market is in a rut. Companies are struggling to hire, and only 22% of employees feel they are thriving. A skills-first mindset—prioritizing capabilities over credentials—helps expand talent pipelines and build diverse, high-performing teams. Yet in addition to skills, employees need the will—the motivation, adaptability, and support to apply skills effectively. By fostering work wellbeing through belonging, flexibility, and growth opportunities, companies can create an engaged, resilient workforce that drives innovation and long-term success. Join two seasoned leaders for an interactive session exploring an integrated framework for skills, will, and wellbeing that will inspire you to rethink how you hire, develop talent, and create a high-performing culture.

SKILLS, WILL & WELLBEING: AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK

As return-to-office pressure ramps up, Zillow is holding its ground—keeping all 6,900 employees fully remote. The company’s remote-first approach, known as “Cloud HQ,” has reshaped operations, boosted engagement, and quadrupled job applications. But is flexibility a competitive advantage—or a risky gamble? McKinsey’s latest research suggests what’s important is not where people work, but how companies intentionally design the experience to unlock innovation and impact. In this conversation, a McKinsey workplace expert and Zillow’s chief people officer explore the nuance—not the noise—of the RTO debate, offering data and on-the-ground insights from both research and real-world application. 

SEE YOU AT THE WATERCOOLER?: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RTO DEBATE

Thank you, Elizabeth, um, and now a message from our partner Gild on how it's helping people turn hard work into debt-free degrees and real career growth. I'm working towards the career that I want with no debt. I saved up for years to go to community college, and in two semesters it was all wiped out. Having something you worked so hard for vanished so quickly, it was heartbreaking. I found out Chipotle has this great benefit called guild where they pay for your education. So I got a job at Chipotle, signed up for guild, and now I'm getting a degree without paying tuition. Not only that, I've been promoted twice with Chipotle and guild. I'm just getting started. All right, um, so I edit a lot of stories about RTO, and you really need to take it from me that the reader interest is off the charts. We get love letters, we get hate mail, we hear about it one way or another. So show of hands who here has been part of delivering an RTO mandate to a workforce? OK, yep, lots of hands. OK. Who here has been personally traumatized by that experience? Still lots of hands. All right. Our next guests are here to help us understand how flexible work or lack thereof affects corporate culture and things like productivity, success, and happiness. Dan Spalding is the chief people officer at Zillow, which lets staffers work from where they want to, and Brooke Wettle is a workplace expert and senior partner at McKinsey and Company. So please join me in welcoming them to the summit. All right, Dan, I'm gonna kick it off with you. Um, Zillow has something called cloud HQ. What does that mean and what made you take the leap? Yeah, uh, first, thanks for having us here to share our cloud HQ story. We're, we're really excited and, and proud of it. Um, for us, cloud HQ is about enabling our employees to work where they work best, whether that's at home, in the office, or in the office sometimes. Now we call it cloud HQ because we wanted to take the politics of proximity out of the equation and start from a place that remote work isn't a perk, it's a business strategy. And so for us at Zillow, it's an intentional strategy of everything we do starts in the cloud. It's gonna be documented, it's gonna be written down, it's gonna be clear for our employees to follow. So whether they're working at home or in the office together. Uh, that they know the rules of the road and, and for us it's, it's, it's been really transformative on our, on our culture. Yeah, so you've had some notable results. I'm gonna go through them. 4 times the number of job applicants, 84% of employees say that they can be themselves at work, and there's been a 5% increase in women employees. What was your secret sauce to making this work? Well, we started from listening to what our employees wanted and what they clearly wanted coming out of the pandemic was a workplace that wasn't going to change the rules on them and a workplace that understood that we all learned different ways of collaborating, different ways of working. Uh, and, and so we started down, how do we figure out what the future of work is going to look like, and applying those learnings to building a really intentional strategy around how do you enable remote work that doesn't feel remote, uh, that that allows for in-person connection, allows for teams coming together, um, and. Those results that you just listed really speak for themselves. We're we're 5 years into this project. We've made a ton of mistakes, but we learned from them. And the best part, we're building this in partnership with our employees, so they're really motivated to come to the office when we ask them to come to the office versus feeling like we're forcing them there. All right, we're gonna get back to those details, but Brooke, I'd like to, uh, ask you, so McKinsey released a bombshell study earlier this year, and it found that across remote, hybrid, in person, the levels of burnout, intent to quit, effort and satisfaction were all pretty similar. So do work arrangements matter at all? Yeah, first of all, I've never heard of McKinsey report called a bombshell report, so thank you for that. Um, yes, it was, it was a surprising result though, to your point, we did find that, uh, irrespective of the model, we looked at hybrid, remote, in person, we found that burnout levels, exactly as you say, intend to quit were all similar and so it it it begs the question, right? Well, what's happening here? And if you look. Yeah and and this is what we did, we looked at 5 practices that we know are critical to workplace culture and health, and those are collaboration, uh, and connectivity, right? It's one kind of category innovation, and then you have, uh, mentorship and skill development and what we found is that employee perceptions of all five practices were extremely low. And most interestingly, leaders' perceptions of those practices were orders of magnitude higher, which got us thinking maybe the what question, what policy should we have is perhaps not the wrong question, but not a sufficient question. The more important question, the more nuanced question is how do you implement any kind of workplace policy? Right, and, and so we see study after study say that like workers really love remote options. They like really, really love it. So how do you square what we know to be true with the results from that study? Yeah, well, I think you know it's interesting and and and I've seen the same studies that talk about the preference that a lot of workers have for remote work or hybrid work. Those same studies though typically elucidate a number of other key factors that drive employees to stay or go, and those would be things like compensation. It matters, right? People like to get uh paid something that they think is a fair wage. Uh, meaning and work, especially that connection with the manager, right? Do I feel valued by by my team and my manager, uh, and development. So I would encourage us to take a more nuanced, a more, um, differentiated approach to thinking about this. And by the way, Dan and I were talking about this earlier, flexibility can manifest in many different ways. I work with a lot of manufacturing, uh, companies, a lot. Retail organizations that are building flexibility into in-person work right and we've seen the um the kind of the uberization of of different shift models um there's been some great innovation on that front it's in particular to support working parents right and we're gonna get back to that cohort in particular right Dan, we've heard about the big upsides to cloud HQ. What were some of the specific challenges you ran into, um, lessons learned along the way, stuff you wish you had known on day one. Yeah, absolutely, um, for us, the thing that we knew we had to figure out right from the start was the intentional time together for teams. And so from the beginning, one of the biggest challenges was how do you organize bringing thousands of people together across the year. And we had a lot of learning as we went through that process and what has resulted is we now have a really interesting team that sits at the intersections of a lot of bodies of work but really focuses on that schedule of bringing. Most of the company together on a fairly regular basis for that in-person collaboration. So whether that's scheduling, uh, planning the meetings, planning the food, planning the activities, things that that take a lot of time centralizing those activities, but then actually publishing we call it the cruise calendar of when every group across the company is coming together, where they're coming together, what the purposes are of those groups coming together, and then making that transparency. To the company really gives our employees the ability to understand kind of what's happening outside of the virtual world that they work in on a daily basis. So is this like a big party like 4 times a year? No, uh, it's not, but fun in person is a key goal for a lot of our retreats. Uh, employees want to feel connected like Brooke said, feeling connection to your manager, making sure that we're bringing people together for intentional training time, uh, has been a key part. Of the strategy, but no, sadly it's, it's not about parties. But what I will say is data, as you might imagine is quite important to us at Zillow. We've now used 5 years of data to really dial in for which types of jobs do people need to collaborate more in person. And so we set the expectation when we're hiring people, even though you may be remote and can work anywhere in the US, hey, you're gonna travel to one of our core offices 6 times a year. And, and we need you to be comfortable with that. And then there's other jobs that may get together only once a year and then frankly there are jobs where you may work your entire time at Zillow and only get together a handful of times. So we're trying to use a data oriented approach which really helps, uh, our, our employees understand when they're coming together and why they're coming together. OK, yeah, and I want to talk about optimizing different styles of work. So in person, hybrid, remote, should these look different, how should they look different? Yeah, I, I think they, they should look different, um, and one of the things that we've also been working with a lot of companies on is to acknowledge that a policy setting a policy is not a strategy policy is not equal strategy, right? So setting a policy that the next step is creating a framework, right, creating a set of guard rails right around how you want to implement that policy and that could be in person. It could be hybrid, it could be remote, and I think that's really important because we actually put a great deal of responsibility and, and I would say in some cases pressure on some of our middle managers to interpret a broad policy at scale that's very difficult to do and to the question you know if you're looking at collaboration uh you know, virtually versus in person, yeah, that's gonna look really different and and it's not all easy. In person either, right, it's not, you know, all parties and, um, you know, companies that are trying to prioritize in person work. In fact, many employees have come back to an office and I'm sure some of you have experienced that and been like this, this is terrible. Like I'm just walking the halls of people on on their different Zoom calls, right? Well, that is not fostering any kind of connectivity or collaboration so from everything from real estate to. How to structure work time and versus time for, you know, collaboration, which by the way is work too. All of these things need to be thought through and then there needs to be a process by which you upskill managers to really embrace and role model those practices, but that's not necessarily a skill set that managers had, you know, even 56 years ago, right? OK, we're going to do best case, worst case. So Dan, remote work, best case. Uh, best case, I think you're going to see a lot more companies adopting a cloud HQ model because employees are going to demand it over time. But what are the specifics of that best case look like? Schedule the Z retreats throughout the year, how many, any kind of special other tools? Oh, best case, I mean, you have to rethink everything around your employment policies. You have to think everything. You have to rethink everything around the employee life cycle, how you're onboarding your employees, how you're training managers to support remote employees that come together. And frequently, uh, and then how they're actually managing through the reality of, uh, a workforce that may be trained to do everything in person in the office and it may be traditionally inefficient ways into a culture where you got to write everything down to a culture where you have to be really clear and articulate in in your written thoughts as much as as as you are in your verbal thoughts and then planning of course when when groups are coming together and what you're going to accomplish when you're in person collaborating. Worst case remote. Worst case remote is, uh, people who are looking at it as a way to optimize solely for their personal situation. Uh, aren't committed to the organization, uh, and are, are not willing to adap adapt their style to the working norms of the team or the broader organization. OK, Brooke, in person, best case. Uh, well, I think I would start with a story, right? So how are you creating value for an in-person, um, kind of environment and how does that enable you to, uh, drive whatever performance outcomes you have that tactically means the CEO, the, the top leaders down into the organization know that change story and know why we are choosing that in this case the in-person. Working model versus not right so that's, that's the starting point. Uh, second, I think you need to get smart about how you're actually, uh, upskilling, right? Talked about the managers, but that goes all the way down to the front line if you will, uh, in a, in a in person working context so that's equipping them with things like, you know, meeting rituals, right? Uh, how do you, uh, start a meeting? how do you. End a meeting what are some of the common practices and norms by the way, a lot of these would be similar practices to, uh, virtual, but they would look and feel different in an in-person office obviously you're, you're gonna have a different kind of meeting versus virtual. Then I would think about things like data and analytics, right? You're looking at who's coming in are you leaving people out right that can't come in what's, you know, what's happening there you. Monitoring your high performers, right? uh, what's the impact? It doesn't mean that you should change your policy, but you might be curious about some of the impacts right as you fine tune and approach that. So those would be some of the things I'd look at and I mentioned real estate. I do think there are real ways and we, you know, heard a earlier presentation in which people are evolving their workspace to really live into some of the practices that we've been talking about collaboration, innovation, etc. OK. Um, you know, some groups really value flexible work more than others, caregivers, working parents, like it's really important to them for, you know, for companies thinking about what to do, do they have to sacrifice that group of people if they want to do in person? I, I look, I think, uh, it is hard to say that all caregivers are, you know, have one preference versus another. I think there are certain certainly groups of people that are prioritizing flexibility that is for sure, but as I said earlier, there are different ways to solve for flexibility and one thing I would say about this RTO debate, um, is that a lot of it really. Is about power right? and when can you do your work and how does that fit in with your broader life goals, right? We went through a period during the pandemic where I think we really were, you know, whether you were, um, at home in your office, I was at home in my office, my kids like pressed with their faces against the glass door like we all reexamined why we are doing work and what trade-offs we're making. And so I don't, I don't think you can unsee that and so as you think about crafting a policy, I think you need to acknowledge that, um, but also help people who need more flexibility also get in the flow on things like development right? One of the pieces of research we did a couple of years ago coming out of the pandemic that really stuck with me was around this notion of social capital and guess what, women. Have less social capital meaning fewer connections, fewer relationships, fewer diverse connections than men. Frontline workers have fewer or lower levels of social capital compared to senior leaders. We gotta give, we gotta work to level that playing field and so I think we need to acknowledge some of these needs, but also help people get to where they want to go um in in terms of their careers and development. I'm wondering, you know, for a company deciding what kind of work model they want to go with, what are some foundational questions they need to ask themselves at the beginning to make the right choice? Dan, let's start with you. I think one, how willing are you to listen to your employees and act on what your employees tell you? Uh, secondly, how willing you are to disrupt the ways that you work today, uh, if you're a culture that, you know, only values face to face interaction, uh, and believes that's the only way that that you can, uh, share and extract value from, from the relationship, then it, it's gonna be a challenge if your employees feel that that that they would be better served in driving innovation going in a different direction so you have to really be willing to take. Not the essence of what's important to you as a culture down to the studs, but the way that that culture shows up on a daily basis for your employees, listening to them, letting them architect it along with you, of course, with high expectations about performance and productivity that can't go to the wayside, but your employees will really help to to architect it if you give them the opportunity. Um, you know, we hear from a lot of CHROs, and you know they are the ones who give these mandates even if they disagree with them. Um, so I think a lot of people in those positions are like wondering how do I make the case, how do I show this to my CEO, what's the magic word, what advice do you have for them to, uh, make the best case they can to the powers that be? Well it's a great I I completely agree. I, I work with a lot of CHROs that are like if I get one more forwarded email about RTO from my CEO, right? I'm literally gonna just die. um, so I think it's a thing, um, I guess where I would start from is, you know, going back to what Dan said like let's actually put aside my own feelings and think about what does this business need to deliver value, right? Um, you know, I work at a large aerospace and defense company well they. Manufacture big things. They need to be in person and they wanted to make sure that there was parity right between the in person workers and those that were sitting in the corporate office. Great. So they, they have a clear thesis and they're gonna go implement that. I work with a large quick service restaurant, right? They also have a huge emphasis placed on in-person work, but they ultimately ended up with a hybrid model and wanted to cultivate development in that way, so. I think you really got to figure out, I like the down to the studs what are going to be the critical ways in which your people need to work to deliver that value and by the way, employee experience is part of that formula for value let's not forget that, right? And so that's where I would have the discussion with my, you know, fellow executives if I were making a case and then discern the policy and ultimately the strategy based on that discussion. All right, Dan Brooks, thank you so much for joining me. Bye. All right.

Forget gadgets and gimmicks—the most impactful workplaces are intentionally designed to reflect how employees actually like to work. They balance focus with connection, autonomy with community. They don’t just house culture —they create it. In this insider look from the co-CEO of one of the world’s leading architecture and design firms, discover how top companies are reimagining the workplace as hybrid, flexible, and fully in-office models evolve.  

THE FUTURE OF WORK IS HUMAN: DESIGNING OFFICE SPACE FOR CULTURE 

So continuing on with the theme of workplace culture, our next guest believes that culture doesn't just materialize out of nowhere. It's something that is actively forms in the day to day experience that you have in your office and in your physical environment. A well-designed space doesn't just serve as a backdrop. It can help foster and develop positive culture. Elizabeth Brink, CEO of the global architecture and design firm Gensler, is with us. She joins us to talk about creating workplaces with a purpose in the ever changing world of work. So please welcome her to the stage. Thank you, Phil, and good morning everybody. It's really great to be here with you today. Um, as many of you know, there has been a lot of discussion about the future of work and the future of the workplace, and much of it honestly paints a pretty dystopian future. In fact, if you look at the images coming out of Hollywood, the future of workplace is pretty bleak. You'll start to see. The corridors, the disorienting maze of corridors in severance, you'll start to see the dramatic imbalance of power in succession, and you'll start to see the sterile and seemingly endless workstations in the Imperial Bureau of Standards from Star Wars. The common threads in all of these isolation, control, surveillance, and a general disregard for people's autonomy and well-being. But the real future of work, it's not dystopian at all. In fact, it's really genuinely human. It's not about designing better mandates or clever perks to convince people to come into the office. The challenge in front of us is to really create and design spaces that empower creativity and build belonging that support people and teams to do their best work, whatever that work looks like. At Gensler we've spent decades designing workplaces for many different sizes of organizations across locations across industries, and what we've seen is this organizational culture, deep organizational culture does not live in a mission statement. It lives in the people and in the behaviors and the places where they gather. So, instead of asking, how do we convince people to get into the office, maybe let's flip the question and start asking, how do we create places that people want to come into? Spaces and places that drive connection and spark innovation and reflect our shared values. Places that encourage colleagues to build relationships across the organization and connect with our purpose. Because the workplace is not just the mirror of your company culture, it is really a tool that can be the driver of that company culture. So knowing all of this, how do we actually create those physical spaces that create the feelings of connectedness and belonging that we're looking to drive? Well, I'll give you a hint. It is not with sterile white kitchenettes or controlled snacks, and it is not with mandated choreographed fun and merriment. What every great workplace needs at its core is a heart. Physically, that heart is the central place where people naturally gravitate to come together. The coffee bar that sparks impromptu brainstorms or the lounge where colleagues gather to chat, the canteen that flexes from a sort of buzzy lunch spot during the day to an event space at night. It's the place where people from different teams naturally run into each other and relationships across departments are built. Culturally, it's a space where your values become visible, where new hires get the feeling of your brand without being told what it is. It's where impromptu mentoring and coaching happens. And it's where people truly experience what it means to be a part of your organization. If your workplace doesn't invite collision, creativity, and connection, it's not a culture space, it's just a call center. You can't force culture and you can't force the heart of an office, but you can design the the conditions for it. You can create the places that attract people and draw them together from different teams that break down silos and give rise to serendipitous interactions. The heart of the office is a place that people choose to be in because it feels good to be there. It's about their choice. So knowing all of this, if we know these are the spaces we need to build, why have people been reluctant to come into the office? What we're learning is it's not just because they like their pets and wearing pajamas. The reality is that they're opting out of a place that feels imbalanced, a place that doesn't suit their real needs. So if the workplace makes it harder, not easier, to do their focused work, to collaborate, to feel inspired or connected, why would they come in? The best workplaces today are meaningful balanced ecosystems that offer performance and balance across the spaces. Deep focus spaces and collaborative zones, private nooks and vibrant commons, balancing out, seamless digital integration and thoughtful in-person touch points. Amenities that demonstrate their employee recognizes their humanity. And this could be everything from access to outdoor spaces to fitness facilities, to bike storage, to mother's rooms and prayer rooms and hydration stations, again, that recognize people's humanity. Something that our 2025 workplace survey has shown is that privacy for deep focus work is a top priority across generations, across locations, across industries. People want to be able to focus on their work, and they often have a hard time doing it at home because there are so many distractions. It's not that people want isolation, they just want choice. They want agency in how they engage with the work, with their work, and with others. And design can deliver that, providing that variety of balanced spaces, private spaces, small huddle rooms, common areas that are dedicated to quiet focus work, or lively communal spaces. So if your office still thinks balance means a number metric between conference rooms and cubicles, it's really time to evolve. We're also hearing a lot about the smart office. And what is a smart office really? It's much more than functional AV equipment, sensors and screens. Today's most innovative workplaces are using data not to surveil employees but to serve them. To deliver customized real-time insights, just like we're starting to expect from healthcare facilities. Not to track people, but to respond to them. With the right systems, you can truly understand how spaces are being used in real time, where people gravitate, what tools they prefer, what makes collaboration successful or frustrating. So just imagine being able to tie your employee survey data about engagement, about satisfaction to actual behavior in space, understanding how that tracks with where people are sitting, how they move, where they linger or spaces that they avoid. It's not theoretical. It's actually happening now. And the real opportunity is to use that data to create spaces that listen, that learn, and that adapt. There could be adapting with personalized lighting, with air quality adjustment, with acoustics that are tuned to stress levels and personal preferences, or even energy use goals. And even more so identifying predictive insights that could help leaders make portfolio decisions about their spaces at scale. So when workplace design is integrated with business planning, organizational strategy, and human experience, it becomes a true lever for smart transformation. So, what if the office was not a place that people felt an obligation to visit, but rather a place that they were compelled to engage with. What if anticipated needs sparked creativity and deepened connection in ways we haven't even imagined yet? What if your office became a living ecosystem, one that responded to your people, that evolved with your strategy, and amplified your culture every single day. The future of work is not about control or compliance. It's about creating meaning, and we have the opportunity and the responsibility right now to design for that very human future. Thank you.

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