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"I like the buildings industry because it's a physical manifestation of our values. A building that is truly net zero, set up to have composting, electric vehicle charging, bike racks that really protect your bike, is a physical manifestation of how much you value your employees. There's nothing better than taking the concept of bettering the environment and putting it into something real that you can touch."
-Kat West
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Episode 106 is a conversation with Drew DePriest, Facility Management Technology Lead at CBRE and Kat West, Vice President, Sustainability at JLL.
We walked through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building. What are the major features, what challenges are there, where can technology help, and what are the major themes that came up throughout the fictional day.
So without further ado, please enjoy the Nexus Podcast with Drew DePriest and Kat West.
You can find Drew and Kat on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobinger—licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:03] James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
[00:00:31] James Dice: This episode is a conversation with drew to priest, facility management, technology lead at CVRE and cat west vice president of sustainability at JLL. We walked through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building. What are its major features? What challenges are there, where can technology help and what are the major themes that come up throughout that fictional day? And in our transition to it as an industry.
So without further ado, please enjoy the nexus podcast with Judah priest [00:01:00] and cat west.
Welcome to the nexus fog test. It's great to have you guys on drew. Can we start with you? Can you introduce yourself?
[00:01:08] Drew DePriest: Sure. Thanks James. Thanks for having us both.
My name is Trudy priest. I've been in this industry for almost 20 years, right out of my undergraduate career. Currently working at CVRE. I'm a facilities management technology lead. So a lot of the things. You've talked about on the podcast that you get into with the, the nexus sessions are right up my alley.
Very much my jam. So I'm one of those longtime listeners. First time, caller type deal. So happy to be here. Happy for what I think is going to be a dynamic conversation. And we've, we've all agreed that we're not just going to hit head nod to everything that everybody says here, which is going to be fun.
Awesome.
[00:01:49] James Dice: Let's let's go into your background first, before we bring on cat, can you talk about how you got like all your roles before CBS. Sure
[00:01:57] Drew DePriest: thing. So coming out [00:02:00] of undergrad, I did a bachelor's degree in systems engineering and I was a web developer at the time. This was 20 years ago. The internet was, was barely a thing.
Google had just rolled out page rank. We, we still had to ask Jeeves and Yahoo maps and all kinds of everything else. So I never really found anything that I was at a crossroads coming out of undergrad with, do I go become like a full engineer? I design things or do I go off and try to build websites?
And, you know, web had just crashed in the late nineties. So, oddly enough control systems and DMS were the first thing I found that really combined both of those things. So excuse me, I got very much into you know, just the, I was on top of a ladder. I was programming the AVS and chiller plan.
Straight out of college and was building, we were a Trillium and Honeywell and reliable shop in the old days. So I was building the actual user interface on top. So for me at the time that was, I [00:03:00] was getting the candy store. It was great. So I, I stayed in that space for about 12 years, worked my way up to regional spot within automated logic or ALC decided to have some fun and took a little side journey to a startup company called building robotics whose flagship product at the time was what's now the global behemoth notice company.
It was acquired by Siemens in 2018 it from there. So that took me from kind of above the ceiling to down to above the desk, in terms of workplace technology. And from, from there pivoted into a workplace tech role at an Avon. So I was managing anything at a desk, anything in a conference room, and then anything like this that people use to collaborate digitally.
And that was my team. We owned all of it from a tech perspective. From there rolled into CVRE spent my first couple of years here on our host digital platform. Expanded it out to broader digital workplace IOT, mobile access, kind of all of, all of the buzzwords that we all talk about and have been very [00:04:00] fortunate to, to join global technology account about nine months ago.
So have had one of those kind of once in a decade, once in a career projects to work on, which has been super exciting. And that brings us to today.
[00:04:14] James Dice: Cool, very cool. Such a, such a diverse background. And you, you joined us last week. Also the, when this comes out, it won't be last week, but while we were recording this, it was last week for our next foundations career planning workshop, which is super fun.
And the reason I wanted to have you on is because you've had all of these different perspectives which are so cool. I'd love to hear. Are you distant enough from the comfy situation where you can talk about it at this point?
[00:04:42] Drew DePriest: And I have nothing, but. Positive fond memories. I mean that the crew that I worked with from 2016 to 2018, like that's, that's one of my bars now for just a great group of just good humans who were brilliant and willing to try [00:05:00] new things.
Even if the world is saying, Hey, we're not ready for this yet. So. Absolutely.
[00:05:04] James Dice: Yeah. Well, I was just wondering what your general experience was. It sounds like you answered it. That sounds like a pretty cool you came on, you weren't a founder you came on after the product team had, had the product developed.
You came on in the business development role, I think. And then you went
[00:05:18] Drew DePriest: through the acquisition. So I, I came on post it was one of the, the rounds of funding. It was the total million dollar round, the eight or the B. And I, I was in business development. I was calling on, you know, just anybody that we could, we could get ahold of really at the time.
And this was, oh my goodness. Almost six years ago now. And to think about the contrast that. I'd get in a room with a facility manager or a chief engineer, and we tell them what we wanted to do. Like, we want to put your building connected to the internet and then let anybody kind of nudge it one way or the other for their own personal comfort.
And it was sometimes we'd have a bed. Like how long before someone says, are you serious?[00:06:00]
There, there were some who would just straight wouldn't engage the conference. Like, no, that's absurd. That will never happen. And then, you know, here we are six years later and the, that ecosystem has exploded. So I am, I still keep in good touch with a lot of, a lot of my teammates from those days. Yeah, it was just, just a fun time and it's cool to see the industry is, has come so far ever since.
Yeah.
[00:06:22] James Dice: And that, and just, just thinking about six years ago, the concept of what I call advanced supervisory control, you know, control is coming from the cloud. Still hasn't taken off. And yet there is this one use case, this one application that's been doing it they've been around for a long time and has achieved scale and that kind of thing.
So it's just a cool story to point back to
[00:06:45] Drew DePriest: I bet. Oh yeah, no, it was when I first saw it, it was, it struck me as one of the most forward-looking innovative things I'd ever seen. And then once, once I went to work there and really got to see it under the hood, it was like, yeah, [00:07:00] this is, this is a very, very unique once in a very long time technology and place to be.
And to your point, like it's, it's, it's held true. We still have a long way to go at that level. I'm proud to have been at that place. Somewhat early. Yeah, I
[00:07:18] James Dice: think some, sometime we should bring all the founders together and like talk about, you know, all the, all the stumbling blocks, but that's a different conversation I did want to bring in cat here.
So cat went, why don't you introduce yourself?
[00:07:32] Kat West: Thanks, James. So great to be here also long time listener, first time participant. So I studied environmental law at Trinity college in Hartford, Connecticut, and was able to run the environmental club. We did a lot of work on recycling and bothered some of the facility building engineers about why aren't these LEED certified buildings.
We improved recycling. We bought wind energy offsets or renewable energy [00:08:00] certificates for earth day. And some of the major events like homecoming. We really liked to educate people about sustainability, make it easy and fun. We would have people write letters to their Congress person and we didn't want to be hypocritical.
So we offset our energy use with renewable energy certificates. Then when it came time to graduate, I contacted the salesperson who was selling us. There were noble energy certificates. And I said, could you give me some paper made with wind energy so I can put my resume on it? And this gentleman said, no, just come work for me.
So that's how I got my first job in sustainability working for our renewable energy certificate seller. I would go to farmer's markets and town festivals, selling renewable energy to individual consumers for about like seven, $10 extra a month, and sell to mayors of small towns in Connecticut. There was a really cool program where if a hundred people paid for a little bit [00:09:00] extra for renewable energy on their electric bill, their town got a one kilowatt solar array to put on any town building.
So it was a really good public private partnership that got people in the towns really motivated. I was working for that company and they said, Oh, we're headquartered in Norcross, Georgia. So could you move down here and I've packed up what could fit in my 81 cubic foot Toyota Corolla, and just came on down to Atlanta, Georgia, where I've been the director of sustainability for JLL.
I had a point there where I worked for Sterling planet, their renewable energy certificate company, and really, really enjoyed that working on carbon offsets and greenhouse gas, emissions accounting, but I felt I got a little, a little bit bored. My coworker shouted over the cubicle that he was studying for his lead green associate exam.
So I went ahead and did that too, and then ended up working for this commissioning and engineering company called energy ACE. That [00:10:00] was awesome. So I worked there before coming to my home at JLL where I've been for seven years. I started at JLL to work on the Braves stadium, which was really fun. So I work on a lot of like ground up new construction.
Tenant fit-outs screen leasing standards. And I get really passionate about integrative design. So working with the architects and engineers to make a building that works for the facilities managers and the occupants resorts, a place that people can thrive.
[00:10:31] James Dice: Got it. And what, so what, what's your current role at JLL and what?
Cause JLL is a big, big, massive company. Can you talk about like what your, what your group does
[00:10:42] Kat West: specifically? Certainly I'm on the project development services team and I'm a vice president of sustainability, the director in the Southeast. So I lead a team of 10 individuals working on ESG strategy. On new construction.
[00:10:58] James Dice: Yeah. Very cool. [00:11:00] And how long how'd you guys meet the two of you? So sort of came to me with this concept of a podcast. And how, how did you, how did you guys come together?
[00:11:11] Kat West: I researched this, I looked into my LinkedIn messages and drew was posting a lot of really cool internet of things or indoor air quality sensor posts.
And I reached out to him because that's something I'm interested in.
[00:11:23] Drew DePriest: Yeah. This is the classic the web 2.0 generation of you, you start interacting with a lot of interesting people. And for me, it's been a lot of LinkedIn, a lot of Twitter. And then over time, you know, like, oh, well, cat's talking about the same things that I am and has a different perspective on things.
So it it'd be really cool to, to convert kind of the, the social friends into, in real life friends. And here we are.
[00:11:49] James Dice: Nice. Nice. So one of the things we're going to talk about today is. Overall ESG and sustainability. So I very much feel that that was my [00:12:00] calling and my career. You know, I had someone come visit me when I was a senior.
I was in a sustainable energy course. And I was like, I have no idea what I want to do for my career, but I know it's in this direction. Right. And then someone came and spoke and she came from a mechanical contractor and I was like, okay, I guess I'll go that, you know, that direction within this overall umbrella, I'd love to hear from you guys.
W like, it sounds like cat, we'll start with you. It was similar. You were in college and you knew that was a direction you wanted to head. Do I have that right. And, and how did you get into buildings specifically?
[00:12:34] Kat West: Yes. Well, I remember sitting in my college library, like it was yesterday and I had read the inter-governmental inter-governmental.
On climate change report and then saw a trailer for an inconvenient truth. All the while I was about to write a paper for my environmental law class
[00:12:52] James Dice: existential crisis.
[00:12:53] Kat West: I wrote this 17 page paper where I quoted Nelly. It's getting hot in here. And I got an a plus, [00:13:00] and I just said, this is the universe telling me I need to go into sustainability and the building, the buildings I like because it's a physical manifestation of our values.
So we're taking our money and putting it somewhere that you can see if somebody has a building that is truly net zero and set up to have composting electric vehicle charging, bike racks that really protect your bike showers so that people can shower after they bike to work. To me, it's a physical manifestation of the fact that you care about your employees.
You want to do what's right for the environment. And I just. Taking that abstract concept and putting it into something real that you can touch
[00:13:42] James Dice: that's so well said, drew, what was your, what's your motivation? How how'd you sort of do, do you, I mean, you said you kind of stumbled into, okay, this is the technology I'm interested in.
Where did the sustainability piece
[00:13:54] Drew DePriest: come in for you? I think from, from me after the [00:14:00] first, maybe first year of being a BMS field tech, starting to really learn the core philosophy of, for me, it was a challenge. You know, how do you, you, you find that that balance between how low can we drive energy consumption while also keeping a building comfortable and habitable such that people will continue to go there.
And after a while you just kind of, kind of understanding. That's that's the perpetual balance that we find ourselves in. And over time, that's evolved to get to a place where especially the last probably five or six years, we're really leaning hard into the human side, but it's still very much, I mean, even in the short time, I feel like I've been in the industry, the advances in how we're operating a building.
It's, we're, we're, we're getting down almost as far as we can go from a, just a physics perspective. How many kilowatt hours in BTUs, can you just ring out of a building? [00:15:00] So for me, that's, it's, it's just always been this, it's a fun, purposeful challenge of, you know, here's something we can control on the demand side.
How much further can we take it? And it all kind of wraps into a lot of the things that I know Kat works on to really, you know, kind of paint the full picture of moving forward.
[00:15:20] James Dice: Yeah. And that, that challenge or that puzzle, I view it kind of like a puzzle. How do
[00:15:25] Drew DePriest: we.
[00:15:25] James Dice: How do we make this happen in every building?
Long-term it feels a lot like to me, like there's plenty of runway here to stay and that's problem for a really long time. Is that how you guys feel to?
[00:15:36] Drew DePriest: I think so there's the opportunity is certainly big and it's pressing from a motivation perspective. You always hear about if you want people to act and do something, give them a hard deadline in a finite scope, clean.
We, we certainly do think things are changing very quickly. Cat, what about you?
[00:15:58] Kat West: So that's where I'm excited to [00:16:00] see how we achieve net zero, because a lot of buildings are attempting to generate all of the power that they have. With onsite solar panels. And to do that, you have to analyze the data about things like plug loads, how much ventilation and heating and cooling load is on the building.
And drew, I liked how you referenced, ask Jeeves. Cause I remember using ask Jeeves back in the day and then I would code my AOL profile with HTML. And so I believe that a lot of people around the elder millennial age, they expect buildings to be smarter than they are. And so it's pretty cool when we can get it right.
And right now it might take a lot of analysis, collaboration, coordination, and time like money spent on getting things to work exactly how we want them to. But I would like to see that become the norm in the next 10 or 20 years where the buildings are smart. They're giving [00:17:00] feed feed two way feedback, you know, between the building and the occupants.
[00:17:05] James Dice: With that, I feel like what's a good time to jump into our, our exercise, our fun exercise for the day. Let's call that. So what we're going to do is walk through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building and sort of, I want to hear from you guys as we go through this where we're at, what are the challenges, what are the potential opportunities for making that a better experience?
Like you said, two way communication, Kat. So who wants to kick us off? What's the beginning of the day in the life
[00:17:35] Drew DePriest: I can jump in. So the way that we've kind of laid this out, I feel like the, especially on the experience technology side, folks have been thinking about this one for a couple of years. I've seen it in my time with, with hosted CVRE and just kind of the way that everyone else has built this up. So start from the beginning of your day, eh, you wake up in the morning.
And initially a series of decisions you have to start [00:18:00] making. After the last two and a half years of a pandemic, this has become even more strong of a use case. Where am I going to work for the day? And that decision as we go through this exercise will have some significant impact on carbon footprint on productivity and all of these things that kind of all swirled together.
So what, what has been interesting, there've been a number of I've seen a handful of startups pivot toward this sort of the two way communication that Kat is talking about of helping to socialize and plan for. Am I gonna, am I gonna work from home? Am I going to go to a coworking space? Am I going to go to a physical office?
For me, the most exciting part, the most useful part has been the socialization of everything. I mean, if you live in, I live in the Midwest or somewhere in the north where we get snow. And in the old days of three years ago, we would be sending emails or tests, texting like members of our [00:19:00] team of, Hey, it's supposed to snow six inches tomorrow.
So I'm probably not going to come in. I'm not going to plan to have any in-person meetings in that case with, with James, with cap, whereas today, what, what I'm starting to see more of, and it's kind of exciting is to have an app or something in a, in a calendar function to show like, Hey, tomorrow, you've got a meeting with James and with cat, and they're both planning to come to the office.
You've sit in old somehow, either through an email, through a calendar or something that you're all coming that helps make that decision for you. I think there's a degree of, of social proof, which. Anytime you go to a bar, the tip jar always has a few dollars in it. It's intentionally. So because it's oh, cool.
That I'm tipping to in this case, the social proof part is two of my colleagues that I work with are going to a physical space I should go to. And that, that makes it even, even more, more interesting. It's more collaborative that way. So [00:20:00] I would start with what's the decision when I get up, am I work from home and am I going into a building?
[00:20:06] James Dice: Yeah. And the first thing I think of when you say that is what happened during the pandemic, right? When all those people made those decisions, Hey, I'm not going in for good reason, right. Our buildings didn't respond to that in any way. So you mentioned the sustainability as. I can't remember what it was, but there was a lot of data around buildings dropping their energy use either.
Not at all or very little. Right. And so from a sustainability standpoint, I feel like the building of the future is going to need to be able to then operate itself based on that data that comes in. Right.
[00:20:41] Drew DePriest: Yeah. Spot on. It's it's the ability to, as we talked about a little bit in the intros of eventually it building, learning its own occupancy, you know, after it may take, after the first month of the pandemic in a, in a perfect future state, [00:21:00] that building or that portfolio would have started to learn from patterns to say, oh, well it's been a month and nobody's coming in.
So I guess I don't need to be at 72 degrees and 40% humidity, seven to five all day anymore. Yeah.
[00:21:16] Kat West: Definitely people are going to be checking the weather. They may also be checking the indoor air quality in our office. We have an indoor air quality sensor and I'm able to check it easily on my phone. I can tell when the landlord starts ventilating the building. And so I adjust my daily schedule based on when I know there will be excellent indoor air quality in the building.
[00:21:37] James Dice: That's funny. So I'm wondering how that works technically. Right. So what, what is, what is your reading say at, say 7:00 AM versus how do you know when it's time to go in?
[00:21:49] Kat West: So I edited my story a little, cause I'm a night owl and I was literally going into the office sometimes at like midnight. But that, that just sounds a bit much.[00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Drew DePriest: I'm gonna stop talking now.
[00:22:02] James Dice: Well, I think that's an important aspect of it. It's like people use the office in different ways, right? The office of the future that digitize decarbonize offices, a future. Right.
[00:22:11] Kat West: Right. And I would go to a coworking space at night, but I didn't have the data. So it's like how much data do you want to share with the occupants?
[00:22:20] Drew DePriest: Interesting. Yeah, that is, that's a big, that could be its own separate podcast topic. If you're putting things in the, in the parking lot slash by. James that's I think that conversation for probably the last, I think that goes back to the lead days of the heyday of probably 15 years ago, I, we would, we've been talked to certain building owners or chief engineers to say, you know, this city of Chicago, city of New York are starting to require that, you know, you need to publish how efficient your buildings are.
And a lot of them were just, they just go like this, they'd wrap it up. They don't, they don't want to, to share with people because there's a, [00:23:00] there's a certain degree of, of assumption of risk on some people for, for right or wrong. Like, you know, I'm hearing similar conversations with folks that I've talked to in the last couple of years around indoor air quality data.
And I mean to cat's point, like I'm the same way I take, I've got this little AirNet for. Thing that I've been taking everywhere. Literally everywhere has been my, if this thing turns red, I get out, I leave the building full stop or go open a window or something. So I think there's a lot to be discussed still around.
I mean, for, for all of this kind of day in the life, we're talking about how much data can and should be shared about a facility that a large group of people go into, especially now that a lot of people, not just, not just we well fans and IAQ nerds, everybody wants to know what's in the air. And I think there's a lot of conversation around how much are a lot of buildings willing to share.
Yeah.
[00:23:57] James Dice: I think, I think that's a perfect, maybe [00:24:00] potential we'll start to, I'll start to make a list of the. Yeah, we can maybe summarize all of this at the end, but where my mind went to when you guys started talking about that was what is this technology that needs to provide this look like? Because you have all these inputs on one side and you have these outputs on the other side, which are scheduling the right rooms, potentially HVAC modifications.
Like there's a piece of technology here that we're talking about. That sounds pretty complicated compared to a lot of the like basically applications that we have today. Right. So I think that's maybe one thing that I would, I would throw out there as potential theme later, unless you guys have seen this happening where all of these things we've talked about are active in a building somewhere.
[00:24:45] Drew DePriest: It's very rare. And I'm sure if you asked my question in one of your sessions or in a podcast like this, you'll get a handful. That'll say, oh yeah, we can do, we can do that 80% of that. Right. Or in theory, the product as they, but [00:25:00] it's. The execution piece that they don't think we're at scale yet. Totally.
[00:25:05] James Dice: One thing before we move on to the next step in the day is you mentioned social proof and I have to call out the book behind you influence.
r
Definitely recommend that one. If no one knows what social proof means, definitely check out the six weapons of influence. Okay. That's the next,
[00:25:20] Drew DePriest: what's the next step in the day here
[00:25:23] James Dice: for deciding to go to work?
Is that, that we're deciding,
[00:25:26] Drew DePriest: yeah. Let's let, let, let, let's go to an office, you know, for old time's sake. So it, I think something I'd be curious to, to cat's take on how do we get there and there's some assumption for this exercise of, do you live in a major city or are you further out in the suburbs?
Each of your possible choices is going to have a carbon impact and, you know, from a technical perspective and certainly things that, that could be arranged through a technology. But I, I am more curious, cat your take from kind of the broader [00:26:00] ESG policy approach. You know, how are, how are companies thinking about like, do they care if I ride a bike or if I try and buy a Hummer or, you know, what is the w what are going through conversations you're having, we definitely
[00:26:16] Kat West: care as sustainability professionals in real estate.
We want to enable people to make choices that are good for the environment and convenient. So it starts with picking a building that has amenities such as being next to public transportation, having adequate bike racks, and then some companies are providing showers. Very nice amenities, similar to a fancy gym, to get people to bike, to work.
It's something that we think will start to be included more and more in the carbon emissions calculations that companies are calculating as part of their reporting. And so where you locate your building, which can be influenced through a green leasing [00:27:00] criteria, which we're seeing gain popularity can definitely help people get set up so that they can get to work in a way that doesn't involve a single occupancy vehicle, which typically is the most polluting.
[00:27:14] James Dice: Can you explain that, that connection between the green lease and the location of the building? How does that work?
[00:27:20] Kat West: Certainly. So some companies have hired JLL to make a list of items to look for in buildings. So they're obviously looking for a location where there's talent, but they also may look for things.
Like being next to public transportation, having increased ventilation in the building areas for Evie charging stations, rainwater capture, because a lot of companies have really ambitious goals around water efficiency and carbon reduction. So the base building that they may go into as a tenant really enables them to achieve those goals.
[00:27:58] James Dice: Got it. Got [00:28:00] it. Makes sense.
[00:28:02] Drew DePriest: That's super compelling to, to hear that, that a lot of those things, you mentioned cat, you know, proximity to public transportation, enhanced ventilation. I feel like those have been kind of core staples of, of both lead in, well over the last five, 10 years. And to hear that there's now a, a hook financially w within a lease agreement to do it, that that feels like.
That will drive some change. It's not just, you know, just not to over oversimplify or disrespect, you know, it's not just a lead seal or you know, the well logo on your front door. If that's in your lease, that's, that's got some power I would think.
[00:28:46] James Dice: Okay. So how do we get to work then? How will there be some sort of technology that will tell us which way to go or what's the, what's the tech stack or what's the, what's the future [00:29:00] of building going to do for us in this regard?
[00:29:03] Drew DePriest: I think I ideally there's, there's a handful of things. It all, depending on which mode you take, I think there's going to be a point in time where a lot of the things cat is talking about. We'll roll into this anticipatory building or destination in the future where you may get prompted to say. If you are driving, here's the, the most most sustainable least carbon emitting route to go.
Otherwise here's suggestions. Here's the next train. Here's the closest bike or scooter rental thing that all have just kind of hooks and all these other systems. I've seen a handful of startups who have done this pretty well over the last couple of years, to the point that they can start kind of nudging people of, Hey, this, this public train is going to be within two stops of your house in the next 10 minutes.
You should leave now. So it's more of the behavioral nudge that I think is with pattern detection, with a number of systems, all tied [00:30:00] together. That's where it's going to start to, you know, kind of leverage these, these ESG and carbon goals to help. You know, push people in the right direction. If you will of take the bike or take the train instead of, instead of driving your car.
And then once you do get there, any number of automation in terms of you drove your car, you know, parking in terms of what's the closest space, do we have EVs chargers onsite? You know, can we kind of direct people to those spots as well? As well as a lot of the amenities cat's talked about with showers and bikes, I think there's a a lot to be, to be done there as well, in terms of managing the occupancy.
Like if everybody's gonna ride their bike in, because it's 65 outside and everybody comes into eight, there's going to be a line. So some, some element of, you know, Maybe kind of staggered people as they come in or just give them a notification to say, showers are super busy right now, unless [00:31:00] you plan on going, going straight to your meeting, super sweaty, you know, go right another mile.
And by the time you get here, everybody should be out of the way. So it's more, I see it as just kind of leveraging all these different various technology platforms to kind of give people context more than anything and allow them to make decisions for themselves as well as keeping an eye on this is what my carbon footprint is going to change because of what I decided.
[00:31:29] Kat West: Yeah. And similar to how, if you put your running shoes and your clothes right by the door, or right. When you get out of bed, you're more likely to go exercise. If you could have that nudge where when you walk over the threshold of your door, it says, Hey, public transit is coming in one minute, one minute or biking.
You haven't exercised in X days. If you bike, it will be beneficial for you giving you that nudge so that you make the decision that's healthier and more sustainable.
[00:31:57] James Dice: What is the overlap between the types of use [00:32:00] cases we're talking about here and tenant or workplace mobile applications?
[00:32:05] Drew DePriest: I think it's fairly similar.
To be candid, a lot of what I'm pulling out of my brain or from just being in that space the last five years. It's what a lot of, a lot of those platforms are, have either already moved to, or are starting to move to just, it's going to be an open marketplace at a certain point. Like if you have a transit app that's hooked into every public transit and all the ride shares, you know, we need a container, you know, put it into a single place.
That's kind of like your traffic control for all these different services.
[00:32:38] Kat West: And then there are different camps on the privacy side, I would welcome an automation that said you have these meetings that are within two miles of each other and you don't have anywhere. You need to go far away after work. So go ahead and take your bike.
But other other people may want more privacy and [00:33:00] say, I will run all those analysis in my head, on my.
[00:33:05] James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor Nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview
All right. So there was one of the threads that I forgot in the middle of that, that I hope comes back to me and maybe I'll come back, but what's the next, what's our next step after we get to the office.
[00:33:54] Drew DePriest: So we've arrived at the building through any number of, of ways to get us from point a [00:34:00] to point B, we kind of skipped through, you know, just getting in through security. Maybe there's a gem that's onsite. You know, some, some folks like to workout first thing in the morning.
I think the, the next area of. Kat. And I had, had kind of wanted to, to anchor on it. There's more on food in the building. So either, you know, kind of a large class, a multi-tenant where there's a giant food court or things going on in the lobby, or if it's a corporate occupier and they provide breakfast or lunch or coffee bars.
And what have you, I think from a, there's a couple of ways to look at it from the energy and energy perspective on the engineering side, a lot of those type facilities are going to have to start finding ways to adapt from more gas powered kind of source of, of heating and cooking food to a lot of where the carbon free [00:35:00] push is moving is, is focused on electrification.
So if those are not currently ways that any food provider or restaurants, or, you know, even the coffee shops, if they're leveraging. Natural gas for ovens to heat things up. Then that's going to be a pretty significant infrastructure challenge. I would think CA I know you've got many, many thoughts around the food service side from an ESG perspective as well.
Well, I
[00:35:27] Kat West: love when food is something that ties into the community. I don't like walking into an office building and feeling like I could be anywhere. I love when there's some education about local honey or vegetables from community supported agriculture. And I see that as a way of real estate being more inspiring at our offices.
We have beehives and it's something we point out on a regular basis to visitors. And everybody seems to think it's really cool. In addition, it's some of the best honey you can get, and it helps fight [00:36:00] allergies. So I didn't really like the food being something that builds community, not something more bland that you could find it.
[00:36:11] James Dice: I love it. Yeah. The, the, both of those things are super interesting. Those different threads are interesting, the community building and the electrification piece. And I think the cooking on the electrification side, I think there's a huge reckoning to be had not just on the infrastructure of the installing the right devices, but also with the cooks, right.
That, that aspect of. You know, there's this great article in the New York times around, you know, the perception of cooks needing their blue flames, right. And then, you know, giving them the opportunity to try an induction stove and then seeing how they like it. And it seems like most people get used to it in a couple of days, a couple of meals that they cook, but it takes that number one infrastructure.
And then number two, the behavior change to get over that hump. And I just see that as a [00:37:00] huge obstacle when it comes to every appliance, every device that we have, not just a stove, right. But I think the kitchen is where it really hits like the rubber hits the road cause it's out in front and center of, you know, it's at the core of these people's professions, which is a really interesting aspect of like vacation.
[00:37:21] Kat West: I've seen the electrification of cooking go smoothly when it's a new building. For example, there was. Multifamily project. And every buddy who bought into that building got a set of cookware that worked with the new induction stoves. It was a way to make it really positive. Interesting.
[00:37:41] James Dice: You get this gift and it's, it's a part of this
[00:37:44] Drew DePriest: transition.
[00:37:45] James Dice: What about the, the waste aspect? So I'm reading this book called waste free world right now. It's really, really good book. It's about all these innovations to create a more circular economy. So how about like, [00:38:00] what were the, the building of the future look like? And it's one of my assignments that I've given myself is that when I get this book done, I'm going to write something like this, but I'm I'm going to you guys first, before I write it.
W what do you think. From a waste standpoint that the building of the future looks like
[00:38:17] Kat West: I see a huge educational opportunity with regard to composting in our offices. We started composting and had a great partnership with a local organization who started to sign their emails, instead of saying, thanks.
They said two building soils, and we were laughing a little bit. And then it was very educational. Eventually when you thought about it for a couple of days, because you start to see it, not as waste, but as a nutrient, that goes into a whole cycle. And so I could see an educational component where somebody isn't picking what Ben to throw something into, but they are contributing to healthy soils, [00:39:00] which then grow healthy.
Which nourish healthy people and some fraction of the population will like that. Another fraction just wants it to be as easy as possible. So you have to, you have to build for both.
[00:39:13] James Dice: Right? Right. Totally. Composting is huge. What about the recycling side of things?
[00:39:18] Kat West: I would love if there was more of a national recycling program, because the thing that I'm noticing is that there needs to be education for every region.
So if you have a building with the same population on a daily basis, you can educate them. But if you have a, an event facility, it's a little bit harder. For example, if you have a stadium or a concert venue, you need to have really clued in signage that is worded in a way someone can read in an instant.
So I see the building of the future, perhaps having. Scanner so that you don't have to do all of that thinking and you can scan the item and it'll tell you which bin [00:40:00] to put it in. I'm not as big a proponent of the single stream recycling in my experience that is confusing to people because they think everything is being thrown away.
So I like the idea of bringing some technology into it, where you can tell what materials are in the product. And that could be an educational moment and those exist, but they're quite expensive now. So I just see them becoming more, more mainstream,
[00:40:26] Drew DePriest: right? Hearing a lot of, of change management. It feels like a lot of these things that are a little new, a little different for people that, you know, if it's composting, if it, if it's recycling cats, your point around, if something is simple and easy and it's well-marked like I I've been in corporate cafeterias or food boards in the past where I have no clue.
There's a blue band and a green band and a, in a regular trash, I don't know what goes where, so I ended up just throwing everything in the, in the one spot, whereas others who have been doing this for awhile. [00:41:00] And, you know, as you mentioned, what I've seen a lot of the large corporate occupiers, because they're, it's, it's part of their culture.
It's just, they have certain ways of doing things and the people that work there, you know, they just kind of get it. It's just part of their everyday routine. It's much easier to, to drive that change in behavior than it would be. If you know, the flip side, that, again, back to the, the large class eight multitenant, where you've got 50 different companies that all work there, there's no single cohesive culture to anything.
You've got people, guests floating in and out all the time. You know, it's a lot harder to drive people there to, to do things differently, especially around kind of waste management activities.
[00:41:47] Kat West: Definitely lately, the best practices I've seen are designing for durables, otherwise known as ceramic cups and plates, so that you're not generating a lot of trash [00:42:00] and then slowly transitioning to using more of the utensils that you could wash and reuse.
But there is that bridge step of using compostable utensils. And that's where in my role, I will facilitate a conversation between the operations and catering team and the design team, because we need to have the right bins. And then we need to buy the right compostable items to have it all work as a system.
And oftentimes those people aren't speaking to each other. So that's one of the things I really like about my role is integrating everything. So it works seamless.
[00:42:35] James Dice: Interesting. Yeah. The same silos we have today could be there in the future building of the future. Right. So we need someone to kind of go and be that bridge between all the different silos in the organization.
Loves that. Okay. Should we keep going?
[00:42:50] Drew DePriest: What's next? I think the next real kind of general section that we'd all sort of brainstorm through is now that you're in an actual [00:43:00] building, just the building of the future, supporting the full spectrum of activities that people will go to an office for. And that's going to vary.
That's going to vary by person. That's going to vary by team in some cases by location. There's been a lot of good work I've seen coming out of Leesman the group who's kind of pioneered this for lack of a better term surveys to help understand how people need to use a space. And then also evaluating how that space supports any of the, I think there were 22 tasks that any one person could do in a space from, I have heads down focused work.
I need to take a phone call. I need to go collaborate with a whiteboard somewhere to a video call all these different things. So I think there's a number of different paths that really, to think about how that future building from a tech perspective, as well as from the kind of the broader impacts as [00:44:00] well.
Go about it. How would you think about kind of overall space use that? Where does that land in your world?
[00:44:06] Kat West: We're noticing a trend that's termed flight to quality. Companies may have less square footage per person, but the square footage they do have is very, very high quality. And then other companies have more actually space per square foot because they're moving to more of those big, open social areas with amenities to draw people back into a collaboration space.
I see the office of the future being more social because people will perhaps work. Remotely when they're working on a spreadsheet, but then when they're working out some complicated problem, more and more, I see people wanting to get together and go through ideas. I've also personally noticed that interviewing for new hires, you can use real estate as a recruiting tool [00:45:00] because you show, if you have a mother's room that is immaculately designed, you're showing your values by implementing that that's part of the S in ESG, and then people can get a feel on the social proof side.
If there are all these awesome people that you see walking through what we call the social hub, you, you may be more likely to work there. It's not just salary. It's a big chunk of your life. So having that real estate be part of your recruiting tool, getting HR to comment uh, you know, human resources to comment on the design of a space so that it can be used as a recruiting tool.
[00:45:38] James Dice: And how does, so when I think of this, I think of the decision-making that goes into it too. So drew well in that sort of tenant app world, or that occupier app world, what are the, some of the capabilities of those sorts of applications that are sort of handling some of this today?
[00:45:58] Drew DePriest: Yeah. So I think table [00:46:00] stakes this year, are everything of the basics from passively, helping, someone explore the space to, borrow will Ferrell from, SNL verbage to understand, you know, of those, many, many tasks that you have to do throughout the day.
What is the, what is the right place to do the right work at the right time? For my own. needs And, you know, for a lot of people, especially more of the legacy building stock that there's no technology built in anywhere. I feel like we've all felt the pain of, I need to go take a phone call and I can't do it out in the open space.
So then you just do laps, you physically walk around the floor plate looking for a quiet place, whereas the state of either mobile apps or web apps, or I think we're getting more to an automated place where a calendar is starting to recognize to say, you know, you don't have anyone invited to this [00:47:00] meeting coming up soon.
Do you need a phone room? Do you need a small huddle space? Just to start to kind of drive that to say. We want people to have choice and the technology needs to be able to help people explore what their options are, because I think it's not always, it's not always obvious. We don't always have, you know, Kat and I both work at a commercial real estate company.
So generally our offices are designed with, with how we strategically advise clients. So, you know, I think if you walk in any one of our offices, especially those kind of a newer design to last few years, there's no shortage of place to go and collaborate with somebody. And it could be, you know, let's go sit down and have a coffee and just kind of casually chat we need a whiteboard, we need a video screen.
Any of those things. the, real interesting pieces to me as we look forward from just helping people utilize space is, not only learning from how they do current state. [00:48:00] And that's, been around that has really matured probably the last three years of just the, traditional, the IOT sensor.
If it's passive infrared for, did someone use this room or not just kind of mutter off to even deeper into, we think about a conference room as an example, are people using it? Yes or no. If they are, how many people are in the space, that kind of level two, and then even further, which kind of begs the data privacy question, that Kat alluded to What intent are people using the space? You know, are they, are they using any sort of video presentation? Are people using the space more often than not for, white boarding and kind of brainstorming or is it primarily, is there a 10-seat conference room that the, same two people use it to make phone calls three times a week?
It really, it, it drives this sort of, if we can better learn from how people leverage space, that in turn helps us [00:49:00] design space to support them better in the future. And then eventually where we get to is the building starts to learn this on its own. And if the building, you know, the, sentient being, if it can understand occupancy trends over time to the floor, to the space level, it can start automatically scheduling things on its own.
So we talked a little bit earlier around, you know, in the pandemic buildings that they didn't learn enough to recognize that. 5% of occupants were there. I think in the future, we're going to start seeing if, if I have 10 floors on a building automation system and eventually sensors throughout the space, start to figure out that every Tuesday we only need two of those floors.
The building's not going to ask. It's just going to shut down eight of them and message everybody to say, Hey, you had a meeting scheduled on the fifth floor. Well, we're not going to open that floor today. So we've rebooked you down to the second [00:50:00] floor. Just go there instead. So eventually, and it's kind of, it's a process we'll get there, but eventually the building just, just makes those decisions for us to find the optimal occupancy on its own.
Totally.
[00:50:13] James Dice: And is there like an intermediate cause like it's making that decision based on, I'm trying to minimize my carbon emissions, given how you guys are using the space. Right? So there's like. Automation aspect of it. That could be a little bit farther in the future. Hopefully not, but is there an intermediate step that's like, you can book this here, but if you book this here, this one is the lower carbon option.
Is that maybe an intermediate step that's more of a tenant engagement piece. I also asked, like, do I really want to be bothered with that when I'm trying to get my work done at the same time though? I think that's a tough, you're balancing two different outcomes that you're, that you're trying to accomplish the same time there.
It's interesting.
[00:50:58] Kat West: I love the idea from an [00:51:00] educational perspective and some major airlines are doing that now, and it sparks up a wider conversation for researching what's causing it to have lower carbon emissions.
[00:51:09] Drew DePriest: I like that concept. I think if just giving people the context and the option to choose the, the, the lower carbon.
Perspective. I mean, I do some development on the side and some of these, the larger platforms Google cloud, Azure, AWS, some of them have started to flag and GCP does this on its own. If you have to pick which data center you want to run your, your code base out of, they'll put a little leaf next to each one at that is their, their, their highest performers in terms of carbon.
And I, because it really makes no difference in many cases, like I'll pick the one with the leaf every single time. Oh yeah,
[00:51:53] James Dice: So there's a lot there that we just talked about. We talked about specialization and we talked about the engaging the tenant. We talked [00:52:00] about building automation on the backend.
It really seems like that section of the day. Right? It's the most right? For technology to sort of facilitate all of these different outcomes at the same time, because, and this is what I always say. Like kind of like that the challenge between the two different outcomes we're going for us humans, can't manage that level of the problem.
There's too many outcomes that we're trying to go forward there. And so that, that piece to me feels like the biggest, the biggest need for technology there that we've talked about so far.
[00:52:34] Drew DePriest: Agreed. I think it's a building is a system of systems with hundreds, if not thousands of competing priorities, the fact that to your point, James, there's a, there are some times where you just want to get your work done and it really doesn't matter what the impact is. Stuff is critical. It's gotta happen.
And th the, the opportunity for technology is to find the way to [00:53:00] balance. All of those needs to make sure, Hey occupants, we still got you. You're good. You've got your, your space that you need. It's comfortable. However, we're still going to make sure that we're taking care of, of all the commitments on the energy and the carbon side as well, because people can't do it on our own.
There's no way I don't want to add a more
[00:53:22] James Dice: complicated piece or factor into this, but Kat, before we hit record, you were talking about, there's an equity and inclusion aspect of this as well. Can you take us through that? Not to make it more complicated, but to, to, to say this is a really important piece of the.
[00:53:40] Kat West: We have noticed that the size of conference rooms can directly impact the ability of early career professionals to get exposure to the type of meetings they need to progress in their career. And so in that way, having more of the bigger rooms where people can sit in and listen on an important [00:54:00] meeting, contributes to equity and inclusion and having a larger cohort of those individuals who may not be represented at the highest levels of organizations, allowing them to be in the meeting and get those skills, communication skills, more of the soft skills by being included in those meetings, because it's very common nowadays that there's an important meeting and a number of people can't sit in because the room is too small.
So we've seen. The size of rooms directly affect the X, the ability of people to access information and mentorship through attending meetings. And that's something that I was educated about first with the Kendeda building, which I did not work on, but it was a very important living building in Georgia.
So that's where I first learned about that concept.
[00:54:52] James Dice: Interesting. So, and obviously we can't have massive conference. We can have every meeting held in an auditorium for instance, and we don't want [00:55:00] everyone attending every meeting. So it's more, yeah. Balanced, looking at the, all of these types of inputs.
[00:55:06] Kat West: Right. And there are opportunities to use technology to share space. So having some, some sort of option to pay. $10 per hour per person to get access to a bigger meeting room. So maybe you don't have to have it on your real estate books so that you didn't have to pay for a bunch of conference rooms, but perhaps having more community sharing of those large meeting spaces so that they're not sitting idle too much.
But then when you do have those meetings where it would be valuable to have a larger audience sit in, that you can include them.
[00:55:38] James Dice: Fascinating.
[00:55:39] Drew DePriest: Okay.
[00:55:40] James Dice: What's next? I feel like we're, we're covered most of the day. What, what else we
[00:55:45] Drew DePriest: got?
[00:55:45] Kat West: One thing I noticed is that different people on my team have wildly different desires for heating, cooling, and daylighting. So there could be an aspect where if you're picking to meet at [00:56:00] 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, With Sue Joe, a Bob, you find out what their preferences are and you sit in the room that is most in line with their preferences, that it also speaks to perhaps the feedback that the operations facilities managers could give to design teams, because we have one meeting room in our office that has the best sunshine in it.
And it's full in 8:00 AM to five. Yeah. And that's where you might have the infrared sensors and the anonymized data. And then also marry that with some of the more narrative feedback that would say, this is why I like this room, because it can be a little nuanced and then incorporating that into the design for the next office.
So there's continuous.
[00:56:50] Drew DePriest: And that's the last point you made cat around incorporating that into design? I think there, there are a lot of things that this one in particular about [00:57:00] personalization of indoor environmental quality of just space experience in general, that at a certain point, all the technology in the world is not going to be able to facilitate for every single person inside the space, unless as a, a core requirement of that next space of that next building, you build into the mechanical systems, the daylighting systems, you know, you're glazing on the windows, controllability of all these things.
You build that in to say. We want to be able to provide a full, a diversity of, of space, not only from how, how amenities are organized and seating, capacities, and intent and all that, but exactly what you're describing of need to be able to have, you know, for lack of a better term, a chili room or like a bright room, just kind of that, that has been a Wellpoint.
And for the last several years, as well as we'd gone are the days of [00:58:00] every room and every floor is 72 degrees flat full-stop cause that's not how that, that's not how people find comfort. It's all, it's different for everybody. So I think, I think it's both, I think it's gonna be. Design has to have that, that intent, that focus of, we need to be able to support as many different combinations as possible, but then the technology is there as well.
Harking back to memories that accompany of, of taking in that personal direct feedback in order to, to kind of get the spaces to a place where it's, oh, we know that cat, here's a room that meets your, your learning preferences. You know, perhaps you should book more of your, your meetings in this room and then you'll be happy and then the system can learn everybody else as well.
So it's going to be a little bit of both. Yeah. I mean, what I'm
[00:58:50] James Dice: not hearing from you guys is like, here's exactly how the office will be designed. I'm hearing more. This is the data that we're going to collect to [00:59:00] aid the design process, which is interesting because if you think about the data collection piece, I mean, drew, you were talking about occupancy sensors earlier where we had, you know, passive infrared to begin with.
And then now we have, I think we have the ability to start to say these people are white boarding. We using the data coming from an occupancy sensor, which is interesting to think about how much needs to change from the occupancy sensor, hardware and analytics that we're providing today. Because right now it's just hit the API and give me a count to the number of people in this room.
It's not hit the API and give me their activity today, which I don't think a lot of that has to happen for it to change to get to that point, which is interesting to think about in the future.
[00:59:45] Drew DePriest: Yeah, I think technically on that point, technically with computer vision that the state of camera's right now, it's possible it's.
The broader implication of, I mean, that requires, oh, big time. That is [01:00:00] it. That's not quite facial recognition, but it, it almost, it almost kind of is because you're still, you're running code to detect humans. And the fact that they're moving and that is the that's, that's not a place that, that we socially or legally I think are there yet.
So
[01:00:17] James Dice: because as soon as you, as soon as you know that their whiteboard and you also know what else they're doing other than white boarding, are they slacking off or whatever, you know, that gets into a serious privacy concern for sure. Okay. What else do we have continuing on our day?
[01:00:33] Drew DePriest: I think we're to the point, I think we, we reversed the process.
I mean, we assume that the day is over and exactly what we talked about at the top of, you know, what is the most sustainable efficient. Meets my needs way to get back home or back wherever I happen to be going. I think that's where it kind of ties up. I think one
[01:00:56] James Dice: piece I feel I feel is missing from the day that we just walked [01:01:00] through is I used to work at this coworking space and they had a catch phrase or saying, they call it serendipitous collisions.
Like you didn't know who you were going to run into. Right. And the ability to run into someone and say, do you want to grab lunch? Or just, just the ability to just meet new people and run into people. Is that aspect where yeah, it can happen, but does it happen every office? Does it need to happen more probably.
And can technology help with that? We're going to say cat.
[01:01:30] Kat West: I don't know about technology, helping it, but just classic running into people in the staircase and in the elevator has led to a lot of fruitful relationships with me. So I'm a big person who loves cities because the work, the more people you have, the more often you're gonna be running into smart people.
We've seen some architecture firms, intentionally designed staircases so that they have large landing areas, assuming that you are going to run into somebody and be able to have that [01:02:00] serendipitous interaction. And that's somewhere where it'd be cool to use a technology to see if that is an occupied space.
[01:02:09] Drew DePriest: And I would look at it as a, I think it's it's space, design space layout. I mean, a lot of the CVRE spaces that I go to where I run into people. Or intentionally designed for that purpose. Generally, it's the Chicago office. We have a big place called the heart and it's literally, it's intended to be the heart of the office and every single path from all of the heads down workspaces, the big sweeping staircases, they all end at the same spot.
So you're just by statistics and probability. You're guaranteed to run into more people just because that's where we walk from a tech perspective. I, I almost see it more and more indirect to the point of if your office has the technology that best supports what you need to do. And that gives you confidence to come in more frequently and gives other [01:03:00] people confidence that they will have tech support tech support, tech support, but the technology from the building to enable their work, that's going to bring you there in the first place.
So I think it's both, it's the design of the space intentionally to. And I've heard a similar, a similar phrase from a friend about the co-working world of they're in the business of fostering serendipity and that stuck, like I heard that eight years ago. So that, that combination of, of space that just give me a place that I know is going to support me.
We're going to run into each other more often than not. And that's great. Oh, okay. Yeah.
[01:03:35] James Dice: We don't have to have a tech solution to every problem. Okay. Let's, let's talk about themes here then. Assuming our day is kind of winding down the themes I heard. So Kat, you said education like 50 times, which is like, I feel like that's one of the main themes that we're hearing here is like, we need to number one, engage occupants, and then educate them on the changes that need to happen in the building.
And change management goes along with that. Another [01:04:00] piece of the, you guys interrupt me if you want, but another theme is around privacy and sharing data, and whether we're going to share data and whether we can get to the outcomes we're looking for while maintaining privacy, it seems like, then I, if I think after talking to both of you for the last, you know, this session and in our prep session, the main thing I'm hearing is like, we have to get to where the, the industry views these things as interconnected.
It's not where we're going for sustainability and we're doing space planning. And we're engaging the occupant with an app. Like all of this feels, as we're talking about, this feels like it's coming together into sort of one holistic vision. Whereas it feels like the history of our industry is like this.
Like single-minded, you know, headlights view on one problem at a time.
[01:04:48] Drew DePriest: Yeah, that all that all resonates. It's why I think conversations like, like these are more important in terms of the workplace itself has become more of [01:05:00] a product than it has in years past in that it has to continually iterate. It has to get better. It has to. Now when people over, whereas three years ago it was a default and now it has to be designed and operated as a destination to attract people to come in.
And the only way to do that is to approach all sides of it. It's, it's all of the things that, that had traditionally to your point get talked about from a technology perspective, but it's also policy and sustainability and everything else, kind of the the nuances, if you will, that are super important that people may not always notice.
They start to appreciate once they're there absolutely
[01:05:45] James Dice: cat, you have any closing comments.
[01:05:48] Kat West: It's funny. You caught onto the theme of education because everyone in my family is an education except for myself, right? [01:06:00] Because you can have all the technology in the world and then the users are the ones who may be able to implement it successfully.
So that's why it's so important to have discussions like this and stick with it so that we can have those buildings that are smart and help all of the occupants stay healthy and sustainable.
[01:06:21] James Dice: Absolutely. All right. Let's close with carve-outs. So carve-outs are what a book podcast, TV show movie could be from your personal and professional life when you recommend the audience checks out.
I'll go first. So, Luis Munger from Schneider electric recommended that I check out severance and it's a show on apple TV. Plus Drew's raising his hands if I just wanted to bring it up in this conversation because it ties so heavily to the dark side. It's like, it's like the anti day in the life.
It's like the dark side of going to the office. Right. I enjoy exploring the dark side a little bit. Although I [01:07:00] feel like I have a hard, I couldn't sleep last night and I had, I watched an episode before bed. And so I feel like it hurts my heart a little bit to watch it, but I still choose to do it and want to finish the series.
[01:07:13] Drew DePriest: It's so good. It dark is a good way to put it. It when you get to the season finale, let's talk. I've got thoughts. All right. Sounds good. Oh man. So my, my carve out is another podcast. In addition to this one, I'm a huge cybersecurity fan. So I listened to a a show called darkness diaries, which is this guy named Jack reciter who interviews like somehow he gets Packers from all walks of life.
Some of whom have been to prison, gets them to come on and tell them a story. And it's, some of them will make you sit up in terms of like, how, how have I not had my bank account stolen just yet. And knowing that these, these brains are out there, but dark hat. Dark
[01:07:59] James Dice: net [01:08:00] diaries. Cool. All right. What about you, Kat?
[01:08:03] Kat West: There's a fantastic podcast called ESG insider by S and P global. And it's posted weekly with a special guest talking on a deep dive topic related to ESG. So one week it could be a greenhouse gas emissions, accounting, another time it could be the supply chain for a certain type of metal. I find it fascinating.
And then I'm reading from green to ESG by about Ellis, this measurable. It's really good.
[01:08:31] James Dice: Cool. Yeah, he has a great CRE tech talk demo a demo day. Talk on that concept from, from green DSG, which I really enjoyed. Yeah. I'm excited to check out that book as well. Well, thanks for those. That's a great recommendations and thanks for you to you both for coming on the show.
[01:08:49] Drew DePriest: Likewise, thanks for having us
[01:08:54] James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to [01:09:00] get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
"I like the buildings industry because it's a physical manifestation of our values. A building that is truly net zero, set up to have composting, electric vehicle charging, bike racks that really protect your bike, is a physical manifestation of how much you value your employees. There's nothing better than taking the concept of bettering the environment and putting it into something real that you can touch."
-Kat West
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Episode 106 is a conversation with Drew DePriest, Facility Management Technology Lead at CBRE and Kat West, Vice President, Sustainability at JLL.
We walked through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building. What are the major features, what challenges are there, where can technology help, and what are the major themes that came up throughout the fictional day.
So without further ado, please enjoy the Nexus Podcast with Drew DePriest and Kat West.
You can find Drew and Kat on LinkedIn.
Enjoy!
Music credit: Dream Big by Audiobinger—licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:03] James Dice: hello friends, welcome to the nexus podcast. I'm your host James dice each week. I fire questions that the leaders of the smart buildings industry to try to figure out where we're headed and how we can get there faster without all the marketing fluff. I'm pushing my learning to the limit. And I'm so glad to have you here following along.
[00:00:31] James Dice: This episode is a conversation with drew to priest, facility management, technology lead at CVRE and cat west vice president of sustainability at JLL. We walked through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building. What are its major features? What challenges are there, where can technology help and what are the major themes that come up throughout that fictional day? And in our transition to it as an industry.
So without further ado, please enjoy the nexus podcast with Judah priest [00:01:00] and cat west.
Welcome to the nexus fog test. It's great to have you guys on drew. Can we start with you? Can you introduce yourself?
[00:01:08] Drew DePriest: Sure. Thanks James. Thanks for having us both.
My name is Trudy priest. I've been in this industry for almost 20 years, right out of my undergraduate career. Currently working at CVRE. I'm a facilities management technology lead. So a lot of the things. You've talked about on the podcast that you get into with the, the nexus sessions are right up my alley.
Very much my jam. So I'm one of those longtime listeners. First time, caller type deal. So happy to be here. Happy for what I think is going to be a dynamic conversation. And we've, we've all agreed that we're not just going to hit head nod to everything that everybody says here, which is going to be fun.
Awesome.
[00:01:49] James Dice: Let's let's go into your background first, before we bring on cat, can you talk about how you got like all your roles before CBS. Sure
[00:01:57] Drew DePriest: thing. So coming out [00:02:00] of undergrad, I did a bachelor's degree in systems engineering and I was a web developer at the time. This was 20 years ago. The internet was, was barely a thing.
Google had just rolled out page rank. We, we still had to ask Jeeves and Yahoo maps and all kinds of everything else. So I never really found anything that I was at a crossroads coming out of undergrad with, do I go become like a full engineer? I design things or do I go off and try to build websites?
And, you know, web had just crashed in the late nineties. So, oddly enough control systems and DMS were the first thing I found that really combined both of those things. So excuse me, I got very much into you know, just the, I was on top of a ladder. I was programming the AVS and chiller plan.
Straight out of college and was building, we were a Trillium and Honeywell and reliable shop in the old days. So I was building the actual user interface on top. So for me at the time that was, I [00:03:00] was getting the candy store. It was great. So I, I stayed in that space for about 12 years, worked my way up to regional spot within automated logic or ALC decided to have some fun and took a little side journey to a startup company called building robotics whose flagship product at the time was what's now the global behemoth notice company.
It was acquired by Siemens in 2018 it from there. So that took me from kind of above the ceiling to down to above the desk, in terms of workplace technology. And from, from there pivoted into a workplace tech role at an Avon. So I was managing anything at a desk, anything in a conference room, and then anything like this that people use to collaborate digitally.
And that was my team. We owned all of it from a tech perspective. From there rolled into CVRE spent my first couple of years here on our host digital platform. Expanded it out to broader digital workplace IOT, mobile access, kind of all of, all of the buzzwords that we all talk about and have been very [00:04:00] fortunate to, to join global technology account about nine months ago.
So have had one of those kind of once in a decade, once in a career projects to work on, which has been super exciting. And that brings us to today.
[00:04:14] James Dice: Cool, very cool. Such a, such a diverse background. And you, you joined us last week. Also the, when this comes out, it won't be last week, but while we were recording this, it was last week for our next foundations career planning workshop, which is super fun.
And the reason I wanted to have you on is because you've had all of these different perspectives which are so cool. I'd love to hear. Are you distant enough from the comfy situation where you can talk about it at this point?
[00:04:42] Drew DePriest: And I have nothing, but. Positive fond memories. I mean that the crew that I worked with from 2016 to 2018, like that's, that's one of my bars now for just a great group of just good humans who were brilliant and willing to try [00:05:00] new things.
Even if the world is saying, Hey, we're not ready for this yet. So. Absolutely.
[00:05:04] James Dice: Yeah. Well, I was just wondering what your general experience was. It sounds like you answered it. That sounds like a pretty cool you came on, you weren't a founder you came on after the product team had, had the product developed.
You came on in the business development role, I think. And then you went
[00:05:18] Drew DePriest: through the acquisition. So I, I came on post it was one of the, the rounds of funding. It was the total million dollar round, the eight or the B. And I, I was in business development. I was calling on, you know, just anybody that we could, we could get ahold of really at the time.
And this was, oh my goodness. Almost six years ago now. And to think about the contrast that. I'd get in a room with a facility manager or a chief engineer, and we tell them what we wanted to do. Like, we want to put your building connected to the internet and then let anybody kind of nudge it one way or the other for their own personal comfort.
And it was sometimes we'd have a bed. Like how long before someone says, are you serious?[00:06:00]
There, there were some who would just straight wouldn't engage the conference. Like, no, that's absurd. That will never happen. And then, you know, here we are six years later and the, that ecosystem has exploded. So I am, I still keep in good touch with a lot of, a lot of my teammates from those days. Yeah, it was just, just a fun time and it's cool to see the industry is, has come so far ever since.
Yeah.
[00:06:22] James Dice: And that, and just, just thinking about six years ago, the concept of what I call advanced supervisory control, you know, control is coming from the cloud. Still hasn't taken off. And yet there is this one use case, this one application that's been doing it they've been around for a long time and has achieved scale and that kind of thing.
So it's just a cool story to point back to
[00:06:45] Drew DePriest: I bet. Oh yeah, no, it was when I first saw it, it was, it struck me as one of the most forward-looking innovative things I'd ever seen. And then once, once I went to work there and really got to see it under the hood, it was like, yeah, [00:07:00] this is, this is a very, very unique once in a very long time technology and place to be.
And to your point, like it's, it's, it's held true. We still have a long way to go at that level. I'm proud to have been at that place. Somewhat early. Yeah, I
[00:07:18] James Dice: think some, sometime we should bring all the founders together and like talk about, you know, all the, all the stumbling blocks, but that's a different conversation I did want to bring in cat here.
So cat went, why don't you introduce yourself?
[00:07:32] Kat West: Thanks, James. So great to be here also long time listener, first time participant. So I studied environmental law at Trinity college in Hartford, Connecticut, and was able to run the environmental club. We did a lot of work on recycling and bothered some of the facility building engineers about why aren't these LEED certified buildings.
We improved recycling. We bought wind energy offsets or renewable energy [00:08:00] certificates for earth day. And some of the major events like homecoming. We really liked to educate people about sustainability, make it easy and fun. We would have people write letters to their Congress person and we didn't want to be hypocritical.
So we offset our energy use with renewable energy certificates. Then when it came time to graduate, I contacted the salesperson who was selling us. There were noble energy certificates. And I said, could you give me some paper made with wind energy so I can put my resume on it? And this gentleman said, no, just come work for me.
So that's how I got my first job in sustainability working for our renewable energy certificate seller. I would go to farmer's markets and town festivals, selling renewable energy to individual consumers for about like seven, $10 extra a month, and sell to mayors of small towns in Connecticut. There was a really cool program where if a hundred people paid for a little bit [00:09:00] extra for renewable energy on their electric bill, their town got a one kilowatt solar array to put on any town building.
So it was a really good public private partnership that got people in the towns really motivated. I was working for that company and they said, Oh, we're headquartered in Norcross, Georgia. So could you move down here and I've packed up what could fit in my 81 cubic foot Toyota Corolla, and just came on down to Atlanta, Georgia, where I've been the director of sustainability for JLL.
I had a point there where I worked for Sterling planet, their renewable energy certificate company, and really, really enjoyed that working on carbon offsets and greenhouse gas, emissions accounting, but I felt I got a little, a little bit bored. My coworker shouted over the cubicle that he was studying for his lead green associate exam.
So I went ahead and did that too, and then ended up working for this commissioning and engineering company called energy ACE. That [00:10:00] was awesome. So I worked there before coming to my home at JLL where I've been for seven years. I started at JLL to work on the Braves stadium, which was really fun. So I work on a lot of like ground up new construction.
Tenant fit-outs screen leasing standards. And I get really passionate about integrative design. So working with the architects and engineers to make a building that works for the facilities managers and the occupants resorts, a place that people can thrive.
[00:10:31] James Dice: Got it. And what, so what, what's your current role at JLL and what?
Cause JLL is a big, big, massive company. Can you talk about like what your, what your group does
[00:10:42] Kat West: specifically? Certainly I'm on the project development services team and I'm a vice president of sustainability, the director in the Southeast. So I lead a team of 10 individuals working on ESG strategy. On new construction.
[00:10:58] James Dice: Yeah. Very cool. [00:11:00] And how long how'd you guys meet the two of you? So sort of came to me with this concept of a podcast. And how, how did you, how did you guys come together?
[00:11:11] Kat West: I researched this, I looked into my LinkedIn messages and drew was posting a lot of really cool internet of things or indoor air quality sensor posts.
And I reached out to him because that's something I'm interested in.
[00:11:23] Drew DePriest: Yeah. This is the classic the web 2.0 generation of you, you start interacting with a lot of interesting people. And for me, it's been a lot of LinkedIn, a lot of Twitter. And then over time, you know, like, oh, well, cat's talking about the same things that I am and has a different perspective on things.
So it it'd be really cool to, to convert kind of the, the social friends into, in real life friends. And here we are.
[00:11:49] James Dice: Nice. Nice. So one of the things we're going to talk about today is. Overall ESG and sustainability. So I very much feel that that was my [00:12:00] calling and my career. You know, I had someone come visit me when I was a senior.
I was in a sustainable energy course. And I was like, I have no idea what I want to do for my career, but I know it's in this direction. Right. And then someone came and spoke and she came from a mechanical contractor and I was like, okay, I guess I'll go that, you know, that direction within this overall umbrella, I'd love to hear from you guys.
W like, it sounds like cat, we'll start with you. It was similar. You were in college and you knew that was a direction you wanted to head. Do I have that right. And, and how did you get into buildings specifically?
[00:12:34] Kat West: Yes. Well, I remember sitting in my college library, like it was yesterday and I had read the inter-governmental inter-governmental.
On climate change report and then saw a trailer for an inconvenient truth. All the while I was about to write a paper for my environmental law class
[00:12:52] James Dice: existential crisis.
[00:12:53] Kat West: I wrote this 17 page paper where I quoted Nelly. It's getting hot in here. And I got an a plus, [00:13:00] and I just said, this is the universe telling me I need to go into sustainability and the building, the buildings I like because it's a physical manifestation of our values.
So we're taking our money and putting it somewhere that you can see if somebody has a building that is truly net zero and set up to have composting electric vehicle charging, bike racks that really protect your bike showers so that people can shower after they bike to work. To me, it's a physical manifestation of the fact that you care about your employees.
You want to do what's right for the environment. And I just. Taking that abstract concept and putting it into something real that you can touch
[00:13:42] James Dice: that's so well said, drew, what was your, what's your motivation? How how'd you sort of do, do you, I mean, you said you kind of stumbled into, okay, this is the technology I'm interested in.
Where did the sustainability piece
[00:13:54] Drew DePriest: come in for you? I think from, from me after the [00:14:00] first, maybe first year of being a BMS field tech, starting to really learn the core philosophy of, for me, it was a challenge. You know, how do you, you, you find that that balance between how low can we drive energy consumption while also keeping a building comfortable and habitable such that people will continue to go there.
And after a while you just kind of, kind of understanding. That's that's the perpetual balance that we find ourselves in. And over time, that's evolved to get to a place where especially the last probably five or six years, we're really leaning hard into the human side, but it's still very much, I mean, even in the short time, I feel like I've been in the industry, the advances in how we're operating a building.
It's, we're, we're, we're getting down almost as far as we can go from a, just a physics perspective. How many kilowatt hours in BTUs, can you just ring out of a building? [00:15:00] So for me, that's, it's, it's just always been this, it's a fun, purposeful challenge of, you know, here's something we can control on the demand side.
How much further can we take it? And it all kind of wraps into a lot of the things that I know Kat works on to really, you know, kind of paint the full picture of moving forward.
[00:15:20] James Dice: Yeah. And that, that challenge or that puzzle, I view it kind of like a puzzle. How do
[00:15:25] Drew DePriest: we.
[00:15:25] James Dice: How do we make this happen in every building?
Long-term it feels a lot like to me, like there's plenty of runway here to stay and that's problem for a really long time. Is that how you guys feel to?
[00:15:36] Drew DePriest: I think so there's the opportunity is certainly big and it's pressing from a motivation perspective. You always hear about if you want people to act and do something, give them a hard deadline in a finite scope, clean.
We, we certainly do think things are changing very quickly. Cat, what about you?
[00:15:58] Kat West: So that's where I'm excited to [00:16:00] see how we achieve net zero, because a lot of buildings are attempting to generate all of the power that they have. With onsite solar panels. And to do that, you have to analyze the data about things like plug loads, how much ventilation and heating and cooling load is on the building.
And drew, I liked how you referenced, ask Jeeves. Cause I remember using ask Jeeves back in the day and then I would code my AOL profile with HTML. And so I believe that a lot of people around the elder millennial age, they expect buildings to be smarter than they are. And so it's pretty cool when we can get it right.
And right now it might take a lot of analysis, collaboration, coordination, and time like money spent on getting things to work exactly how we want them to. But I would like to see that become the norm in the next 10 or 20 years where the buildings are smart. They're giving [00:17:00] feed feed two way feedback, you know, between the building and the occupants.
[00:17:05] James Dice: With that, I feel like what's a good time to jump into our, our exercise, our fun exercise for the day. Let's call that. So what we're going to do is walk through a day in the life of a digitized and decarbonized building and sort of, I want to hear from you guys as we go through this where we're at, what are the challenges, what are the potential opportunities for making that a better experience?
Like you said, two way communication, Kat. So who wants to kick us off? What's the beginning of the day in the life
[00:17:35] Drew DePriest: I can jump in. So the way that we've kind of laid this out, I feel like the, especially on the experience technology side, folks have been thinking about this one for a couple of years. I've seen it in my time with, with hosted CVRE and just kind of the way that everyone else has built this up. So start from the beginning of your day, eh, you wake up in the morning.
And initially a series of decisions you have to start [00:18:00] making. After the last two and a half years of a pandemic, this has become even more strong of a use case. Where am I going to work for the day? And that decision as we go through this exercise will have some significant impact on carbon footprint on productivity and all of these things that kind of all swirled together.
So what, what has been interesting, there've been a number of I've seen a handful of startups pivot toward this sort of the two way communication that Kat is talking about of helping to socialize and plan for. Am I gonna, am I gonna work from home? Am I going to go to a coworking space? Am I going to go to a physical office?
For me, the most exciting part, the most useful part has been the socialization of everything. I mean, if you live in, I live in the Midwest or somewhere in the north where we get snow. And in the old days of three years ago, we would be sending emails or tests, texting like members of our [00:19:00] team of, Hey, it's supposed to snow six inches tomorrow.
So I'm probably not going to come in. I'm not going to plan to have any in-person meetings in that case with, with James, with cap, whereas today, what, what I'm starting to see more of, and it's kind of exciting is to have an app or something in a, in a calendar function to show like, Hey, tomorrow, you've got a meeting with James and with cat, and they're both planning to come to the office.
You've sit in old somehow, either through an email, through a calendar or something that you're all coming that helps make that decision for you. I think there's a degree of, of social proof, which. Anytime you go to a bar, the tip jar always has a few dollars in it. It's intentionally. So because it's oh, cool.
That I'm tipping to in this case, the social proof part is two of my colleagues that I work with are going to a physical space I should go to. And that, that makes it even, even more, more interesting. It's more collaborative that way. So [00:20:00] I would start with what's the decision when I get up, am I work from home and am I going into a building?
[00:20:06] James Dice: Yeah. And the first thing I think of when you say that is what happened during the pandemic, right? When all those people made those decisions, Hey, I'm not going in for good reason, right. Our buildings didn't respond to that in any way. So you mentioned the sustainability as. I can't remember what it was, but there was a lot of data around buildings dropping their energy use either.
Not at all or very little. Right. And so from a sustainability standpoint, I feel like the building of the future is going to need to be able to then operate itself based on that data that comes in. Right.
[00:20:41] Drew DePriest: Yeah. Spot on. It's it's the ability to, as we talked about a little bit in the intros of eventually it building, learning its own occupancy, you know, after it may take, after the first month of the pandemic in a, in a perfect future state, [00:21:00] that building or that portfolio would have started to learn from patterns to say, oh, well it's been a month and nobody's coming in.
So I guess I don't need to be at 72 degrees and 40% humidity, seven to five all day anymore. Yeah.
[00:21:16] Kat West: Definitely people are going to be checking the weather. They may also be checking the indoor air quality in our office. We have an indoor air quality sensor and I'm able to check it easily on my phone. I can tell when the landlord starts ventilating the building. And so I adjust my daily schedule based on when I know there will be excellent indoor air quality in the building.
[00:21:37] James Dice: That's funny. So I'm wondering how that works technically. Right. So what, what is, what is your reading say at, say 7:00 AM versus how do you know when it's time to go in?
[00:21:49] Kat West: So I edited my story a little, cause I'm a night owl and I was literally going into the office sometimes at like midnight. But that, that just sounds a bit much.[00:22:00]
[00:22:00] Drew DePriest: I'm gonna stop talking now.
[00:22:02] James Dice: Well, I think that's an important aspect of it. It's like people use the office in different ways, right? The office of the future that digitize decarbonize offices, a future. Right.
[00:22:11] Kat West: Right. And I would go to a coworking space at night, but I didn't have the data. So it's like how much data do you want to share with the occupants?
[00:22:20] Drew DePriest: Interesting. Yeah, that is, that's a big, that could be its own separate podcast topic. If you're putting things in the, in the parking lot slash by. James that's I think that conversation for probably the last, I think that goes back to the lead days of the heyday of probably 15 years ago, I, we would, we've been talked to certain building owners or chief engineers to say, you know, this city of Chicago, city of New York are starting to require that, you know, you need to publish how efficient your buildings are.
And a lot of them were just, they just go like this, they'd wrap it up. They don't, they don't want to, to share with people because there's a, [00:23:00] there's a certain degree of, of assumption of risk on some people for, for right or wrong. Like, you know, I'm hearing similar conversations with folks that I've talked to in the last couple of years around indoor air quality data.
And I mean to cat's point, like I'm the same way I take, I've got this little AirNet for. Thing that I've been taking everywhere. Literally everywhere has been my, if this thing turns red, I get out, I leave the building full stop or go open a window or something. So I think there's a lot to be discussed still around.
I mean, for, for all of this kind of day in the life, we're talking about how much data can and should be shared about a facility that a large group of people go into, especially now that a lot of people, not just, not just we well fans and IAQ nerds, everybody wants to know what's in the air. And I think there's a lot of conversation around how much are a lot of buildings willing to share.
Yeah.
[00:23:57] James Dice: I think, I think that's a perfect, maybe [00:24:00] potential we'll start to, I'll start to make a list of the. Yeah, we can maybe summarize all of this at the end, but where my mind went to when you guys started talking about that was what is this technology that needs to provide this look like? Because you have all these inputs on one side and you have these outputs on the other side, which are scheduling the right rooms, potentially HVAC modifications.
Like there's a piece of technology here that we're talking about. That sounds pretty complicated compared to a lot of the like basically applications that we have today. Right. So I think that's maybe one thing that I would, I would throw out there as potential theme later, unless you guys have seen this happening where all of these things we've talked about are active in a building somewhere.
[00:24:45] Drew DePriest: It's very rare. And I'm sure if you asked my question in one of your sessions or in a podcast like this, you'll get a handful. That'll say, oh yeah, we can do, we can do that 80% of that. Right. Or in theory, the product as they, but [00:25:00] it's. The execution piece that they don't think we're at scale yet. Totally.
[00:25:05] James Dice: One thing before we move on to the next step in the day is you mentioned social proof and I have to call out the book behind you influence.
r
Definitely recommend that one. If no one knows what social proof means, definitely check out the six weapons of influence. Okay. That's the next,
[00:25:20] Drew DePriest: what's the next step in the day here
[00:25:23] James Dice: for deciding to go to work?
Is that, that we're deciding,
[00:25:26] Drew DePriest: yeah. Let's let, let, let, let's go to an office, you know, for old time's sake. So it, I think something I'd be curious to, to cat's take on how do we get there and there's some assumption for this exercise of, do you live in a major city or are you further out in the suburbs?
Each of your possible choices is going to have a carbon impact and, you know, from a technical perspective and certainly things that, that could be arranged through a technology. But I, I am more curious, cat your take from kind of the broader [00:26:00] ESG policy approach. You know, how are, how are companies thinking about like, do they care if I ride a bike or if I try and buy a Hummer or, you know, what is the w what are going through conversations you're having, we definitely
[00:26:16] Kat West: care as sustainability professionals in real estate.
We want to enable people to make choices that are good for the environment and convenient. So it starts with picking a building that has amenities such as being next to public transportation, having adequate bike racks, and then some companies are providing showers. Very nice amenities, similar to a fancy gym, to get people to bike, to work.
It's something that we think will start to be included more and more in the carbon emissions calculations that companies are calculating as part of their reporting. And so where you locate your building, which can be influenced through a green leasing [00:27:00] criteria, which we're seeing gain popularity can definitely help people get set up so that they can get to work in a way that doesn't involve a single occupancy vehicle, which typically is the most polluting.
[00:27:14] James Dice: Can you explain that, that connection between the green lease and the location of the building? How does that work?
[00:27:20] Kat West: Certainly. So some companies have hired JLL to make a list of items to look for in buildings. So they're obviously looking for a location where there's talent, but they also may look for things.
Like being next to public transportation, having increased ventilation in the building areas for Evie charging stations, rainwater capture, because a lot of companies have really ambitious goals around water efficiency and carbon reduction. So the base building that they may go into as a tenant really enables them to achieve those goals.
[00:27:58] James Dice: Got it. Got [00:28:00] it. Makes sense.
[00:28:02] Drew DePriest: That's super compelling to, to hear that, that a lot of those things, you mentioned cat, you know, proximity to public transportation, enhanced ventilation. I feel like those have been kind of core staples of, of both lead in, well over the last five, 10 years. And to hear that there's now a, a hook financially w within a lease agreement to do it, that that feels like.
That will drive some change. It's not just, you know, just not to over oversimplify or disrespect, you know, it's not just a lead seal or you know, the well logo on your front door. If that's in your lease, that's, that's got some power I would think.
[00:28:46] James Dice: Okay. So how do we get to work then? How will there be some sort of technology that will tell us which way to go or what's the, what's the tech stack or what's the, what's the future [00:29:00] of building going to do for us in this regard?
[00:29:03] Drew DePriest: I think I ideally there's, there's a handful of things. It all, depending on which mode you take, I think there's going to be a point in time where a lot of the things cat is talking about. We'll roll into this anticipatory building or destination in the future where you may get prompted to say. If you are driving, here's the, the most most sustainable least carbon emitting route to go.
Otherwise here's suggestions. Here's the next train. Here's the closest bike or scooter rental thing that all have just kind of hooks and all these other systems. I've seen a handful of startups who have done this pretty well over the last couple of years, to the point that they can start kind of nudging people of, Hey, this, this public train is going to be within two stops of your house in the next 10 minutes.
You should leave now. So it's more of the behavioral nudge that I think is with pattern detection, with a number of systems, all tied [00:30:00] together. That's where it's going to start to, you know, kind of leverage these, these ESG and carbon goals to help. You know, push people in the right direction. If you will of take the bike or take the train instead of, instead of driving your car.
And then once you do get there, any number of automation in terms of you drove your car, you know, parking in terms of what's the closest space, do we have EVs chargers onsite? You know, can we kind of direct people to those spots as well? As well as a lot of the amenities cat's talked about with showers and bikes, I think there's a a lot to be, to be done there as well, in terms of managing the occupancy.
Like if everybody's gonna ride their bike in, because it's 65 outside and everybody comes into eight, there's going to be a line. So some, some element of, you know, Maybe kind of staggered people as they come in or just give them a notification to say, showers are super busy right now, unless [00:31:00] you plan on going, going straight to your meeting, super sweaty, you know, go right another mile.
And by the time you get here, everybody should be out of the way. So it's more, I see it as just kind of leveraging all these different various technology platforms to kind of give people context more than anything and allow them to make decisions for themselves as well as keeping an eye on this is what my carbon footprint is going to change because of what I decided.
[00:31:29] Kat West: Yeah. And similar to how, if you put your running shoes and your clothes right by the door, or right. When you get out of bed, you're more likely to go exercise. If you could have that nudge where when you walk over the threshold of your door, it says, Hey, public transit is coming in one minute, one minute or biking.
You haven't exercised in X days. If you bike, it will be beneficial for you giving you that nudge so that you make the decision that's healthier and more sustainable.
[00:31:57] James Dice: What is the overlap between the types of use [00:32:00] cases we're talking about here and tenant or workplace mobile applications?
[00:32:05] Drew DePriest: I think it's fairly similar.
To be candid, a lot of what I'm pulling out of my brain or from just being in that space the last five years. It's what a lot of, a lot of those platforms are, have either already moved to, or are starting to move to just, it's going to be an open marketplace at a certain point. Like if you have a transit app that's hooked into every public transit and all the ride shares, you know, we need a container, you know, put it into a single place.
That's kind of like your traffic control for all these different services.
[00:32:38] Kat West: And then there are different camps on the privacy side, I would welcome an automation that said you have these meetings that are within two miles of each other and you don't have anywhere. You need to go far away after work. So go ahead and take your bike.
But other other people may want more privacy and [00:33:00] say, I will run all those analysis in my head, on my.
[00:33:05] James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. Hey guys, just another quick note from our sponsor Nexus labs. And then we'll get back to the show. This episode is brought to you by nexus foundations, our introductory course on the smart buildings industry. If you're new to the industry, this course is for you. If you're an industry vet, but want to understand how technology is changing things.
This course is also for you. The alumni are raving about the content, which they say pulls it all together, and they also love getting to meet the other students on the weekly zoom calls and in the private chat room, you can find out more about the course@courses.nexus lab. Start online. All right, back to the interview
All right. So there was one of the threads that I forgot in the middle of that, that I hope comes back to me and maybe I'll come back, but what's the next, what's our next step after we get to the office.
[00:33:54] Drew DePriest: So we've arrived at the building through any number of, of ways to get us from point a [00:34:00] to point B, we kind of skipped through, you know, just getting in through security. Maybe there's a gem that's onsite. You know, some, some folks like to workout first thing in the morning.
I think the, the next area of. Kat. And I had, had kind of wanted to, to anchor on it. There's more on food in the building. So either, you know, kind of a large class, a multi-tenant where there's a giant food court or things going on in the lobby, or if it's a corporate occupier and they provide breakfast or lunch or coffee bars.
And what have you, I think from a, there's a couple of ways to look at it from the energy and energy perspective on the engineering side, a lot of those type facilities are going to have to start finding ways to adapt from more gas powered kind of source of, of heating and cooking food to a lot of where the carbon free [00:35:00] push is moving is, is focused on electrification.
So if those are not currently ways that any food provider or restaurants, or, you know, even the coffee shops, if they're leveraging. Natural gas for ovens to heat things up. Then that's going to be a pretty significant infrastructure challenge. I would think CA I know you've got many, many thoughts around the food service side from an ESG perspective as well.
Well, I
[00:35:27] Kat West: love when food is something that ties into the community. I don't like walking into an office building and feeling like I could be anywhere. I love when there's some education about local honey or vegetables from community supported agriculture. And I see that as a way of real estate being more inspiring at our offices.
We have beehives and it's something we point out on a regular basis to visitors. And everybody seems to think it's really cool. In addition, it's some of the best honey you can get, and it helps fight [00:36:00] allergies. So I didn't really like the food being something that builds community, not something more bland that you could find it.
[00:36:11] James Dice: I love it. Yeah. The, the, both of those things are super interesting. Those different threads are interesting, the community building and the electrification piece. And I think the cooking on the electrification side, I think there's a huge reckoning to be had not just on the infrastructure of the installing the right devices, but also with the cooks, right.
That, that aspect of. You know, there's this great article in the New York times around, you know, the perception of cooks needing their blue flames, right. And then, you know, giving them the opportunity to try an induction stove and then seeing how they like it. And it seems like most people get used to it in a couple of days, a couple of meals that they cook, but it takes that number one infrastructure.
And then number two, the behavior change to get over that hump. And I just see that as a [00:37:00] huge obstacle when it comes to every appliance, every device that we have, not just a stove, right. But I think the kitchen is where it really hits like the rubber hits the road cause it's out in front and center of, you know, it's at the core of these people's professions, which is a really interesting aspect of like vacation.
[00:37:21] Kat West: I've seen the electrification of cooking go smoothly when it's a new building. For example, there was. Multifamily project. And every buddy who bought into that building got a set of cookware that worked with the new induction stoves. It was a way to make it really positive. Interesting.
[00:37:41] James Dice: You get this gift and it's, it's a part of this
[00:37:44] Drew DePriest: transition.
[00:37:45] James Dice: What about the, the waste aspect? So I'm reading this book called waste free world right now. It's really, really good book. It's about all these innovations to create a more circular economy. So how about like, [00:38:00] what were the, the building of the future look like? And it's one of my assignments that I've given myself is that when I get this book done, I'm going to write something like this, but I'm I'm going to you guys first, before I write it.
W what do you think. From a waste standpoint that the building of the future looks like
[00:38:17] Kat West: I see a huge educational opportunity with regard to composting in our offices. We started composting and had a great partnership with a local organization who started to sign their emails, instead of saying, thanks.
They said two building soils, and we were laughing a little bit. And then it was very educational. Eventually when you thought about it for a couple of days, because you start to see it, not as waste, but as a nutrient, that goes into a whole cycle. And so I could see an educational component where somebody isn't picking what Ben to throw something into, but they are contributing to healthy soils, [00:39:00] which then grow healthy.
Which nourish healthy people and some fraction of the population will like that. Another fraction just wants it to be as easy as possible. So you have to, you have to build for both.
[00:39:13] James Dice: Right? Right. Totally. Composting is huge. What about the recycling side of things?
[00:39:18] Kat West: I would love if there was more of a national recycling program, because the thing that I'm noticing is that there needs to be education for every region.
So if you have a building with the same population on a daily basis, you can educate them. But if you have a, an event facility, it's a little bit harder. For example, if you have a stadium or a concert venue, you need to have really clued in signage that is worded in a way someone can read in an instant.
So I see the building of the future, perhaps having. Scanner so that you don't have to do all of that thinking and you can scan the item and it'll tell you which bin [00:40:00] to put it in. I'm not as big a proponent of the single stream recycling in my experience that is confusing to people because they think everything is being thrown away.
So I like the idea of bringing some technology into it, where you can tell what materials are in the product. And that could be an educational moment and those exist, but they're quite expensive now. So I just see them becoming more, more mainstream,
[00:40:26] Drew DePriest: right? Hearing a lot of, of change management. It feels like a lot of these things that are a little new, a little different for people that, you know, if it's composting, if it, if it's recycling cats, your point around, if something is simple and easy and it's well-marked like I I've been in corporate cafeterias or food boards in the past where I have no clue.
There's a blue band and a green band and a, in a regular trash, I don't know what goes where, so I ended up just throwing everything in the, in the one spot, whereas others who have been doing this for awhile. [00:41:00] And, you know, as you mentioned, what I've seen a lot of the large corporate occupiers, because they're, it's, it's part of their culture.
It's just, they have certain ways of doing things and the people that work there, you know, they just kind of get it. It's just part of their everyday routine. It's much easier to, to drive that change in behavior than it would be. If you know, the flip side, that, again, back to the, the large class eight multitenant, where you've got 50 different companies that all work there, there's no single cohesive culture to anything.
You've got people, guests floating in and out all the time. You know, it's a lot harder to drive people there to, to do things differently, especially around kind of waste management activities.
[00:41:47] Kat West: Definitely lately, the best practices I've seen are designing for durables, otherwise known as ceramic cups and plates, so that you're not generating a lot of trash [00:42:00] and then slowly transitioning to using more of the utensils that you could wash and reuse.
But there is that bridge step of using compostable utensils. And that's where in my role, I will facilitate a conversation between the operations and catering team and the design team, because we need to have the right bins. And then we need to buy the right compostable items to have it all work as a system.
And oftentimes those people aren't speaking to each other. So that's one of the things I really like about my role is integrating everything. So it works seamless.
[00:42:35] James Dice: Interesting. Yeah. The same silos we have today could be there in the future building of the future. Right. So we need someone to kind of go and be that bridge between all the different silos in the organization.
Loves that. Okay. Should we keep going?
[00:42:50] Drew DePriest: What's next? I think the next real kind of general section that we'd all sort of brainstorm through is now that you're in an actual [00:43:00] building, just the building of the future, supporting the full spectrum of activities that people will go to an office for. And that's going to vary.
That's going to vary by person. That's going to vary by team in some cases by location. There's been a lot of good work I've seen coming out of Leesman the group who's kind of pioneered this for lack of a better term surveys to help understand how people need to use a space. And then also evaluating how that space supports any of the, I think there were 22 tasks that any one person could do in a space from, I have heads down focused work.
I need to take a phone call. I need to go collaborate with a whiteboard somewhere to a video call all these different things. So I think there's a number of different paths that really, to think about how that future building from a tech perspective, as well as from the kind of the broader impacts as [00:44:00] well.
Go about it. How would you think about kind of overall space use that? Where does that land in your world?
[00:44:06] Kat West: We're noticing a trend that's termed flight to quality. Companies may have less square footage per person, but the square footage they do have is very, very high quality. And then other companies have more actually space per square foot because they're moving to more of those big, open social areas with amenities to draw people back into a collaboration space.
I see the office of the future being more social because people will perhaps work. Remotely when they're working on a spreadsheet, but then when they're working out some complicated problem, more and more, I see people wanting to get together and go through ideas. I've also personally noticed that interviewing for new hires, you can use real estate as a recruiting tool [00:45:00] because you show, if you have a mother's room that is immaculately designed, you're showing your values by implementing that that's part of the S in ESG, and then people can get a feel on the social proof side.
If there are all these awesome people that you see walking through what we call the social hub, you, you may be more likely to work there. It's not just salary. It's a big chunk of your life. So having that real estate be part of your recruiting tool, getting HR to comment uh, you know, human resources to comment on the design of a space so that it can be used as a recruiting tool.
[00:45:38] James Dice: And how does, so when I think of this, I think of the decision-making that goes into it too. So drew well in that sort of tenant app world, or that occupier app world, what are the, some of the capabilities of those sorts of applications that are sort of handling some of this today?
[00:45:58] Drew DePriest: Yeah. So I think table [00:46:00] stakes this year, are everything of the basics from passively, helping, someone explore the space to, borrow will Ferrell from, SNL verbage to understand, you know, of those, many, many tasks that you have to do throughout the day.
What is the, what is the right place to do the right work at the right time? For my own. needs And, you know, for a lot of people, especially more of the legacy building stock that there's no technology built in anywhere. I feel like we've all felt the pain of, I need to go take a phone call and I can't do it out in the open space.
So then you just do laps, you physically walk around the floor plate looking for a quiet place, whereas the state of either mobile apps or web apps, or I think we're getting more to an automated place where a calendar is starting to recognize to say, you know, you don't have anyone invited to this [00:47:00] meeting coming up soon.
Do you need a phone room? Do you need a small huddle space? Just to start to kind of drive that to say. We want people to have choice and the technology needs to be able to help people explore what their options are, because I think it's not always, it's not always obvious. We don't always have, you know, Kat and I both work at a commercial real estate company.
So generally our offices are designed with, with how we strategically advise clients. So, you know, I think if you walk in any one of our offices, especially those kind of a newer design to last few years, there's no shortage of place to go and collaborate with somebody. And it could be, you know, let's go sit down and have a coffee and just kind of casually chat we need a whiteboard, we need a video screen.
Any of those things. the, real interesting pieces to me as we look forward from just helping people utilize space is, not only learning from how they do current state. [00:48:00] And that's, been around that has really matured probably the last three years of just the, traditional, the IOT sensor.
If it's passive infrared for, did someone use this room or not just kind of mutter off to even deeper into, we think about a conference room as an example, are people using it? Yes or no. If they are, how many people are in the space, that kind of level two, and then even further, which kind of begs the data privacy question, that Kat alluded to What intent are people using the space? You know, are they, are they using any sort of video presentation? Are people using the space more often than not for, white boarding and kind of brainstorming or is it primarily, is there a 10-seat conference room that the, same two people use it to make phone calls three times a week?
It really, it, it drives this sort of, if we can better learn from how people leverage space, that in turn helps us [00:49:00] design space to support them better in the future. And then eventually where we get to is the building starts to learn this on its own. And if the building, you know, the, sentient being, if it can understand occupancy trends over time to the floor, to the space level, it can start automatically scheduling things on its own.
So we talked a little bit earlier around, you know, in the pandemic buildings that they didn't learn enough to recognize that. 5% of occupants were there. I think in the future, we're going to start seeing if, if I have 10 floors on a building automation system and eventually sensors throughout the space, start to figure out that every Tuesday we only need two of those floors.
The building's not going to ask. It's just going to shut down eight of them and message everybody to say, Hey, you had a meeting scheduled on the fifth floor. Well, we're not going to open that floor today. So we've rebooked you down to the second [00:50:00] floor. Just go there instead. So eventually, and it's kind of, it's a process we'll get there, but eventually the building just, just makes those decisions for us to find the optimal occupancy on its own.
Totally.
[00:50:13] James Dice: And is there like an intermediate cause like it's making that decision based on, I'm trying to minimize my carbon emissions, given how you guys are using the space. Right? So there's like. Automation aspect of it. That could be a little bit farther in the future. Hopefully not, but is there an intermediate step that's like, you can book this here, but if you book this here, this one is the lower carbon option.
Is that maybe an intermediate step that's more of a tenant engagement piece. I also asked, like, do I really want to be bothered with that when I'm trying to get my work done at the same time though? I think that's a tough, you're balancing two different outcomes that you're, that you're trying to accomplish the same time there.
It's interesting.
[00:50:58] Kat West: I love the idea from an [00:51:00] educational perspective and some major airlines are doing that now, and it sparks up a wider conversation for researching what's causing it to have lower carbon emissions.
[00:51:09] Drew DePriest: I like that concept. I think if just giving people the context and the option to choose the, the, the lower carbon.
Perspective. I mean, I do some development on the side and some of these, the larger platforms Google cloud, Azure, AWS, some of them have started to flag and GCP does this on its own. If you have to pick which data center you want to run your, your code base out of, they'll put a little leaf next to each one at that is their, their, their highest performers in terms of carbon.
And I, because it really makes no difference in many cases, like I'll pick the one with the leaf every single time. Oh yeah,
[00:51:53] James Dice: So there's a lot there that we just talked about. We talked about specialization and we talked about the engaging the tenant. We talked [00:52:00] about building automation on the backend.
It really seems like that section of the day. Right? It's the most right? For technology to sort of facilitate all of these different outcomes at the same time, because, and this is what I always say. Like kind of like that the challenge between the two different outcomes we're going for us humans, can't manage that level of the problem.
There's too many outcomes that we're trying to go forward there. And so that, that piece to me feels like the biggest, the biggest need for technology there that we've talked about so far.
[00:52:34] Drew DePriest: Agreed. I think it's a building is a system of systems with hundreds, if not thousands of competing priorities, the fact that to your point, James, there's a, there are some times where you just want to get your work done and it really doesn't matter what the impact is. Stuff is critical. It's gotta happen.
And th the, the opportunity for technology is to find the way to [00:53:00] balance. All of those needs to make sure, Hey occupants, we still got you. You're good. You've got your, your space that you need. It's comfortable. However, we're still going to make sure that we're taking care of, of all the commitments on the energy and the carbon side as well, because people can't do it on our own.
There's no way I don't want to add a more
[00:53:22] James Dice: complicated piece or factor into this, but Kat, before we hit record, you were talking about, there's an equity and inclusion aspect of this as well. Can you take us through that? Not to make it more complicated, but to, to, to say this is a really important piece of the.
[00:53:40] Kat West: We have noticed that the size of conference rooms can directly impact the ability of early career professionals to get exposure to the type of meetings they need to progress in their career. And so in that way, having more of the bigger rooms where people can sit in and listen on an important [00:54:00] meeting, contributes to equity and inclusion and having a larger cohort of those individuals who may not be represented at the highest levels of organizations, allowing them to be in the meeting and get those skills, communication skills, more of the soft skills by being included in those meetings, because it's very common nowadays that there's an important meeting and a number of people can't sit in because the room is too small.
So we've seen. The size of rooms directly affect the X, the ability of people to access information and mentorship through attending meetings. And that's something that I was educated about first with the Kendeda building, which I did not work on, but it was a very important living building in Georgia.
So that's where I first learned about that concept.
[00:54:52] James Dice: Interesting. So, and obviously we can't have massive conference. We can have every meeting held in an auditorium for instance, and we don't want [00:55:00] everyone attending every meeting. So it's more, yeah. Balanced, looking at the, all of these types of inputs.
[00:55:06] Kat West: Right. And there are opportunities to use technology to share space. So having some, some sort of option to pay. $10 per hour per person to get access to a bigger meeting room. So maybe you don't have to have it on your real estate books so that you didn't have to pay for a bunch of conference rooms, but perhaps having more community sharing of those large meeting spaces so that they're not sitting idle too much.
But then when you do have those meetings where it would be valuable to have a larger audience sit in, that you can include them.
[00:55:38] James Dice: Fascinating.
[00:55:39] Drew DePriest: Okay.
[00:55:40] James Dice: What's next? I feel like we're, we're covered most of the day. What, what else we
[00:55:45] Drew DePriest: got?
[00:55:45] Kat West: One thing I noticed is that different people on my team have wildly different desires for heating, cooling, and daylighting. So there could be an aspect where if you're picking to meet at [00:56:00] 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, With Sue Joe, a Bob, you find out what their preferences are and you sit in the room that is most in line with their preferences, that it also speaks to perhaps the feedback that the operations facilities managers could give to design teams, because we have one meeting room in our office that has the best sunshine in it.
And it's full in 8:00 AM to five. Yeah. And that's where you might have the infrared sensors and the anonymized data. And then also marry that with some of the more narrative feedback that would say, this is why I like this room, because it can be a little nuanced and then incorporating that into the design for the next office.
So there's continuous.
[00:56:50] Drew DePriest: And that's the last point you made cat around incorporating that into design? I think there, there are a lot of things that this one in particular about [00:57:00] personalization of indoor environmental quality of just space experience in general, that at a certain point, all the technology in the world is not going to be able to facilitate for every single person inside the space, unless as a, a core requirement of that next space of that next building, you build into the mechanical systems, the daylighting systems, you know, you're glazing on the windows, controllability of all these things.
You build that in to say. We want to be able to provide a full, a diversity of, of space, not only from how, how amenities are organized and seating, capacities, and intent and all that, but exactly what you're describing of need to be able to have, you know, for lack of a better term, a chili room or like a bright room, just kind of that, that has been a Wellpoint.
And for the last several years, as well as we'd gone are the days of [00:58:00] every room and every floor is 72 degrees flat full-stop cause that's not how that, that's not how people find comfort. It's all, it's different for everybody. So I think, I think it's both, I think it's gonna be. Design has to have that, that intent, that focus of, we need to be able to support as many different combinations as possible, but then the technology is there as well.
Harking back to memories that accompany of, of taking in that personal direct feedback in order to, to kind of get the spaces to a place where it's, oh, we know that cat, here's a room that meets your, your learning preferences. You know, perhaps you should book more of your, your meetings in this room and then you'll be happy and then the system can learn everybody else as well.
So it's going to be a little bit of both. Yeah. I mean, what I'm
[00:58:50] James Dice: not hearing from you guys is like, here's exactly how the office will be designed. I'm hearing more. This is the data that we're going to collect to [00:59:00] aid the design process, which is interesting because if you think about the data collection piece, I mean, drew, you were talking about occupancy sensors earlier where we had, you know, passive infrared to begin with.
And then now we have, I think we have the ability to start to say these people are white boarding. We using the data coming from an occupancy sensor, which is interesting to think about how much needs to change from the occupancy sensor, hardware and analytics that we're providing today. Because right now it's just hit the API and give me a count to the number of people in this room.
It's not hit the API and give me their activity today, which I don't think a lot of that has to happen for it to change to get to that point, which is interesting to think about in the future.
[00:59:45] Drew DePriest: Yeah, I think technically on that point, technically with computer vision that the state of camera's right now, it's possible it's.
The broader implication of, I mean, that requires, oh, big time. That is [01:00:00] it. That's not quite facial recognition, but it, it almost, it almost kind of is because you're still, you're running code to detect humans. And the fact that they're moving and that is the that's, that's not a place that, that we socially or legally I think are there yet.
So
[01:00:17] James Dice: because as soon as you, as soon as you know that their whiteboard and you also know what else they're doing other than white boarding, are they slacking off or whatever, you know, that gets into a serious privacy concern for sure. Okay. What else do we have continuing on our day?
[01:00:33] Drew DePriest: I think we're to the point, I think we, we reversed the process.
I mean, we assume that the day is over and exactly what we talked about at the top of, you know, what is the most sustainable efficient. Meets my needs way to get back home or back wherever I happen to be going. I think that's where it kind of ties up. I think one
[01:00:56] James Dice: piece I feel I feel is missing from the day that we just walked [01:01:00] through is I used to work at this coworking space and they had a catch phrase or saying, they call it serendipitous collisions.
Like you didn't know who you were going to run into. Right. And the ability to run into someone and say, do you want to grab lunch? Or just, just the ability to just meet new people and run into people. Is that aspect where yeah, it can happen, but does it happen every office? Does it need to happen more probably.
And can technology help with that? We're going to say cat.
[01:01:30] Kat West: I don't know about technology, helping it, but just classic running into people in the staircase and in the elevator has led to a lot of fruitful relationships with me. So I'm a big person who loves cities because the work, the more people you have, the more often you're gonna be running into smart people.
We've seen some architecture firms, intentionally designed staircases so that they have large landing areas, assuming that you are going to run into somebody and be able to have that [01:02:00] serendipitous interaction. And that's somewhere where it'd be cool to use a technology to see if that is an occupied space.
[01:02:09] Drew DePriest: And I would look at it as a, I think it's it's space, design space layout. I mean, a lot of the CVRE spaces that I go to where I run into people. Or intentionally designed for that purpose. Generally, it's the Chicago office. We have a big place called the heart and it's literally, it's intended to be the heart of the office and every single path from all of the heads down workspaces, the big sweeping staircases, they all end at the same spot.
So you're just by statistics and probability. You're guaranteed to run into more people just because that's where we walk from a tech perspective. I, I almost see it more and more indirect to the point of if your office has the technology that best supports what you need to do. And that gives you confidence to come in more frequently and gives other [01:03:00] people confidence that they will have tech support tech support, tech support, but the technology from the building to enable their work, that's going to bring you there in the first place.
So I think it's both, it's the design of the space intentionally to. And I've heard a similar, a similar phrase from a friend about the co-working world of they're in the business of fostering serendipity and that stuck, like I heard that eight years ago. So that, that combination of, of space that just give me a place that I know is going to support me.
We're going to run into each other more often than not. And that's great. Oh, okay. Yeah.
[01:03:35] James Dice: We don't have to have a tech solution to every problem. Okay. Let's, let's talk about themes here then. Assuming our day is kind of winding down the themes I heard. So Kat, you said education like 50 times, which is like, I feel like that's one of the main themes that we're hearing here is like, we need to number one, engage occupants, and then educate them on the changes that need to happen in the building.
And change management goes along with that. Another [01:04:00] piece of the, you guys interrupt me if you want, but another theme is around privacy and sharing data, and whether we're going to share data and whether we can get to the outcomes we're looking for while maintaining privacy, it seems like, then I, if I think after talking to both of you for the last, you know, this session and in our prep session, the main thing I'm hearing is like, we have to get to where the, the industry views these things as interconnected.
It's not where we're going for sustainability and we're doing space planning. And we're engaging the occupant with an app. Like all of this feels, as we're talking about, this feels like it's coming together into sort of one holistic vision. Whereas it feels like the history of our industry is like this.
Like single-minded, you know, headlights view on one problem at a time.
[01:04:48] Drew DePriest: Yeah, that all that all resonates. It's why I think conversations like, like these are more important in terms of the workplace itself has become more of [01:05:00] a product than it has in years past in that it has to continually iterate. It has to get better. It has to. Now when people over, whereas three years ago it was a default and now it has to be designed and operated as a destination to attract people to come in.
And the only way to do that is to approach all sides of it. It's, it's all of the things that, that had traditionally to your point get talked about from a technology perspective, but it's also policy and sustainability and everything else, kind of the the nuances, if you will, that are super important that people may not always notice.
They start to appreciate once they're there absolutely
[01:05:45] James Dice: cat, you have any closing comments.
[01:05:48] Kat West: It's funny. You caught onto the theme of education because everyone in my family is an education except for myself, right? [01:06:00] Because you can have all the technology in the world and then the users are the ones who may be able to implement it successfully.
So that's why it's so important to have discussions like this and stick with it so that we can have those buildings that are smart and help all of the occupants stay healthy and sustainable.
[01:06:21] James Dice: Absolutely. All right. Let's close with carve-outs. So carve-outs are what a book podcast, TV show movie could be from your personal and professional life when you recommend the audience checks out.
I'll go first. So, Luis Munger from Schneider electric recommended that I check out severance and it's a show on apple TV. Plus Drew's raising his hands if I just wanted to bring it up in this conversation because it ties so heavily to the dark side. It's like, it's like the anti day in the life.
It's like the dark side of going to the office. Right. I enjoy exploring the dark side a little bit. Although I [01:07:00] feel like I have a hard, I couldn't sleep last night and I had, I watched an episode before bed. And so I feel like it hurts my heart a little bit to watch it, but I still choose to do it and want to finish the series.
[01:07:13] Drew DePriest: It's so good. It dark is a good way to put it. It when you get to the season finale, let's talk. I've got thoughts. All right. Sounds good. Oh man. So my, my carve out is another podcast. In addition to this one, I'm a huge cybersecurity fan. So I listened to a a show called darkness diaries, which is this guy named Jack reciter who interviews like somehow he gets Packers from all walks of life.
Some of whom have been to prison, gets them to come on and tell them a story. And it's, some of them will make you sit up in terms of like, how, how have I not had my bank account stolen just yet. And knowing that these, these brains are out there, but dark hat. Dark
[01:07:59] James Dice: net [01:08:00] diaries. Cool. All right. What about you, Kat?
[01:08:03] Kat West: There's a fantastic podcast called ESG insider by S and P global. And it's posted weekly with a special guest talking on a deep dive topic related to ESG. So one week it could be a greenhouse gas emissions, accounting, another time it could be the supply chain for a certain type of metal. I find it fascinating.
And then I'm reading from green to ESG by about Ellis, this measurable. It's really good.
[01:08:31] James Dice: Cool. Yeah, he has a great CRE tech talk demo a demo day. Talk on that concept from, from green DSG, which I really enjoyed. Yeah. I'm excited to check out that book as well. Well, thanks for those. That's a great recommendations and thanks for you to you both for coming on the show.
[01:08:49] Drew DePriest: Likewise, thanks for having us
[01:08:54] James Dice: All right friends, thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus Podcast. For more episodes like this and to [01:09:00] get the weekly Nexus Newsletter, which by the way, readers have said is the best way to stay up to date on the future of the smart building industry, please subscribe at nexuslabs.online. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. Have a great day.
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