Estates Gazette • 15 February 2025 • LEADER EDITOR’S COMMENT

On a bitterly cold and rainy Friday morning in February, even the biggest office evangelist might think about staying on the sofa and working from home. I’m glad I didn’t last week – and not just because Brave Corporation’s Caleb Parker would have killed me. OK, that’s an exaggeration. But as one hip-hop head to another, he would at least have recorded a dis track.

Caleb invited me to MC an event titled “Culture First: Leading the Way in Commercial Real Estate”, exploring company culture and its intersection with the workplace. What does it take within our workplaces to promote healthy corporate cultures, and how can real estate companies keep it in mind not only in their own businesses but in those of the occupiers of their buildings?

The topic continued a conversation Caleb and I had on stage back in mid-2022, as the country grappled with what a post-Covid return to the office would look like. Speaking at our Cities Live event in Manchester, Caleb picked up on toxic workplace environments as a more significant risk to the future of the office than the pandemic we had faced.

“The bigger threat to our industry is not Covid, it’s bad company cultures,” Caleb said then. “Why are people not wanting to come back in? Because of toxicity, because it’s a better environment when they’re working from home and they don’t have to be around negativity or a culture where they have to be next to the boss at 7am.

“As an industry we have to address that. We should be standing up for good company culture and that should be what we encourage to happen in our buildings.”

It’s a topic that is front of mind for me already, leading a team in which we’re reforging bonds in a new location.

The attraction of our new office isn’t in question – Mark Allen Group’s Herne Hill offices are in a converted church, without question the coolest workplace I’ve commuted to. But like Caleb, I know that making people want to be here – as opposed to facing a mandate to be here – takes more than that. It takes bringing them together and ensuring that they feel supported, listened to and trusted. Earning the commute takes more than a building, it takes showing people that they are valued as part of a team.

Last week’s keynote speaker Stephen “Shed” Shedletzky made the point perfectly. Stop focusing on whether people should work in an office, and focus more on why they should. After all, once you nail the answers to the second point, the first becomes a no-brainer.

Companies in which employees feel “heard, valued and empowered” outperform rivals that focus instead on enforced policies and mandates, Shed said. And, yes, the design of the workplace and our being in them plays a factor in that, as well as the behaviour of managers and other leaders.

In an update to the rather tired “watercooler moments” idea of what we gain from bring together as a team, Shed offered “cranberry muffin moments” – an ability to find common areas of joy and interest through serendipity, and then using them as a base on which to build culture. As someone who spends, at a conservative estimate, an hour of each day talking with or at colleagues about food, I wholeheartedly endorse this.

Find those cranberry muffins, give Shed’s Speak-Up Culture book a read, and look after your colleagues. And who knows – you might even see them in the office on a Friday.