Thank You to Everyone Who Attended Our 1st W.O.W Event

Wide Open Workspace Breakfast Briefing Recap

Yesterday morning we hosted a panel of FM Experts at our headquarters in Houston, TX, to discuss the struggles and triumphs regarding the shifting workplace, and how their employees adjusted to the changes. Pam Matula with Hilcorp Energy and Allyson Hajdu with Equifax joined us and provided wonderful insight from a facilities manager’s point of view. Here is a quick recap of the event and those to come. 

W.O.W Breakfast Briefing Session #1

We were delighted to have facilities managers, human resources and CRE professionals join us yesterday for our first Wide Open Workspace breakfast briefing. Our purpose of the event was to spark an engaging discussion about the current state of the office environment, and how facility leaders can prepare their workplace to be desirable to incoming talent and to function well in the future. 

Allyson Hajdu spoke on her experience bringing a company from a cubicle-designed space to an open concept, multi-purpose floorplan. “Before we switched to an open workspace, I kept thinking, how can employees be colorful, innovative and stimulated in a small gray box?” Allyson mentioned. Her company has seen rapid improvement to their facility and their employees’ work environment after they decided to take down cubicle walls in favor of offering various spaces for employees complete their work. She walked through the process of gaining a CEO’s approval, engaging employees in the entire change process and how their team tackled various issues regarding office privacy and noise. 

The seminar also focused on the positive response managers are seeing from their workers. Our CEO, Don Traweek, mentioned that he “saw one of his developers working in four different spaces yesterday, which shows offering variation is appreciated and definitely utilized“. 

Our goal was to have Wide Open Workspace introduce a new thought process to our attendees, and to have them understand the positives and challenges that come with adopting this rapidly growing trend. We will continue to cover various FM topics in our second briefing in May. 

We want to thank all of our attendees, especially those that came in from out-of-town, for our briefing today! We also want to give a big thanks to Pam and Allyson for sharing their thoughtful insight.