"How do you align specific employee experience initiatives to your company's business objectives?"
When Phil Kirschner posed this question to a panel of accomplished workplace leaders at the Future of Work USA conference, the response was telling: silence. "It was creepy," Kirschner recalled at WorkSpaces. "Nicole Turner saw my name and asked if I wanted to rephrase the question. I said, 'No. And I think the silence is deafening.'"
That silence reveals corporate real estate's uncomfortable truth: we're brilliant at building experiences but terrible at proving they matter.
Kirschner, a future-of-work expert, witnessed this gap firsthand. A panelist had just shared a compelling story about studying driver experiences at warehouse facilities, optimizing restrooms, break rooms, and coffee quality, because driver wellbeing directly impacts turnaround times and safety records.
"You had it," Kirschner told her. "The connection was there. But we're not trained to draw these lines to outcomes."
The result? Corporate real estate teams talk about attracting and retaining talent while never actually looking up retention rates for the offices they build. They invest millions in workplace initiatives without connecting them to business metrics that anyone in the C-suite actually cares about.
Here's another uncomfortable reality: corporate real estate gets the short end of the technology talent stick.
When Kirschner ran an AI-powered "Listening Lab" with 50 heads of real estate and workplace experience, he asked how their teams leverage AI to collaborate and deliver projects. The responses? Almost entirely aspirational, focused on "intelligent facilities": smarter HVAC systems and energy efficiency.
"My question was about how you're using AI to collaborate with each other," Kirschner clarified. "And everybody jumped to the building."
Meanwhile, HR leaders are publicly embracing "try and learn" cultures for an AI-powered future. Corporate real estate? Moving backwards. In Kirschner's research, "we have processes in place to test and learn" was the only capability that went net negative. More leaders disagreed than agreed they had it.
Kirschner introduced the concept of "vibe office," borrowed from "vibe coding," where people create entire applications from a single prompt. It's a world where work materializes around you, where algorithms help you move seamlessly between spaces, and where experienced density matters more than desk utilization.
"We're building linear, rigid, immovable buildings for a non-linear, unpredictable future of work," he warned.
The MasterCard example proves it's possible: 84% of teams together by enabling movement, not mandating presence. But it requires giving up control and assigned desks.
- Align for outcomes before starting projects. Use a "North Star vision" framework, the same one McKinsey gives new CEOs. Define the business outcome you're driving (not "improve the office"), identify cross-functional themes, and assign metrics before you begin. When Atlassian pioneered "cost per visit," it gave leaders "access to their common sense in a way no other metric had before."
- Invest in translators and technologists. One McKesson technologist did in a morning what would have taken others weeks. You don't need AI to run the building. You need it to connect HR's people data with IT's usage patterns with your space intelligence. Without technical horsepower, real estate loses the front foot.
- Treat workplace like a product. That means testing, measuring, learning, and yes, failing fast. "We don't go back to bad restaurants twice," Kirschner noted, "but we're expecting people to return to spaces we never iterate on."
Kirschner's final advice was simple but radical: "Go to an HR conference."
If corporate real estate wants a seat at the strategy table, it needs to understand how other functions think, speak their language, and stop operating in isolation. The future of work isn't being written by any single function, but right now, it's being written without much input from the people who control 5-10% of most companies' operating budgets.
That silence at the beginning of Kirschner's presentation? It doesn't have to be permanent.
Watch his full talk below 👇
Want to be in the room for conversations like this?
Request an invite to WorkSpaces →