Modern work: Less meetings, more trust and the office reboot

The real reason to return to the office is not for productivity, but for trust. The office isn’t too full—it’s too big. These are some of the issues debated in a candid and wide-ranging conversation on the Real Finds Podcast with Density CEO Andrew Farah and host Gordon Lamphere.

Together they unpack some of the most pressing—and misunderstood—ideas shaping the future of work. They also explore the cultural and economic shifts redefining workplace design and why the most innovative startups are doubling down on in-person collaboration. 

Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Gordon: Tell me a little bit about what got you started in the world of offices and productivity and how people use space?

Andrew: We essentially build radar sensors that count people inside buildings. And we started because we wanted to know how busy our favorite coffee shop was. It was really annoying that we could know the weather in Spain in real time, but we couldn't know if there was a line at Café Kubal [in Syracuse, New York] down the street. 

So we looked for some technology that could do this. We found hundreds of products that purported to count people in buildings. But they just did a really terrible job of it, mostly around just latency and accuracy. And they were invasive. 

So we were like, well, it can't be that hard to build. It turns out it's extremely hard to build. 

And for the last 11 years, I’ve been working with a really extraordinary team to design and build radar sensors that anonymously count people in buildings. That's what led me to real estate, workplace and a whole bunch of other really interesting industries. 

Gordon: How do you go about measuring office use while also allowing for privacy? Because that's one of the biggest issues that we hear about is people are like, oh, we'll just put cameras in there.

Andrew: In our case, we designed a product that's anonymous at source. This radar sensor behind me right now can't tell that I'm Andrew, even if it wanted to. 

That's not the same with most camera-based vendors where even if they anonymize the image. There's a bunch of providers that do that—they call them optical sensors. But they’re really just cameras. 

Cameras are very good at counting people. But if you want to take the high road and you don't want to be invasive (and you also don't want to be a legal team's worst nightmare), you’ll build technology that preserves privacy at source.

Gordon: One of the things I was curious about is what should we be doing  with information about how people use space? 

Andrew: So when you talk to someone and you ask, ‘Hey, how often do you go to the gym? they may say, ‘three times a week.’ The reality is if you had a log of how many times they went to the gym, it probably wouldn't be three times a week. 

It's not because humans are actively lying. It's because humans are pretty bad at record keeping. 

So if you say, ‘Hey, are there available meeting rooms?’ They'll say, ‘I can never find an available meeting room.’ Or ‘Are you able to find a desk when you need it?’ And they'll say, ‘No, it's always swamped.’ 

But then when you look at the data, and we have a lot of it, the numbers are staggering. For example, something like nearly 40% of all desks are untouched for 90 days post post return to office.

There is usually plenty of space. [Sensors] give you visibility. Then everyone can make better decisions instead of these political debates about [space].

Gordon: Do you think there’s a gap between using sensors on one hand and using just key card data?

Andrew: There are a couple problems with key card data. The first is that most of us don't badge into a floor usually. You definitely don't badge into a room usually and you certainly don't badge into a desk or a phone booth. 

That’s one of the primary problems with badging. You tend to only badge into the building. You don't badge into the individual space. 

So you have zero visibility into what’s actually getting used where you’re actually running out where you're not. And then the other problem is that most people don't badge out.

Gordon: What have you seen in terms of effective return to office policy? 

Andrew: I have a number of thoughts. Being remote creates the conditions for an absence of connection or a reduction in connection. That’s premise number one. In-person does the opposite. The return to office, in my opinion, should not be about making sure people are doing work. It should be about building high trust teams. 

If you mandate in-person return, you are choosing to value investing in and trying to build a high trust team. And a high trust team resolves conflict better, more productively. They make it about the work, not about the individuals. 

So trust is upstream of building great products, which is upstream of building a great business. 

In Density’s case, we work in the office four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Wednesday is choose-your-own-adventure, work-from-wherever day. 

We have common hours for in-office days. You’re expected to be in the office by 10am and stay until 3pm. The commute sucks on either side so we'd like to reduce some of the pain there.

The second thing is, just be an adult. I know people need to go home and take care of their kids, or go to the dentist or pack for a vacation. We have some constraints but outside of those, just be an adult.

Gordon: What do you think about how we work versus how we think we work and how we're effectively using space?

Andrew: I think that people think that meetings equal work. And I think a lot of remote folks would agree with this that meetings do not equal work. I think they’ll say being in person and doing a meeting is not work, that's preparation for work or planning for work or whatever. 

But what I think is the other side of that coin, heads down focus time is when real work happens and meetings are mechanisms to create shared context. And so if you have good shared context, then the team's going to row in the same direction. 

I think that if you look at the most aggressive startups right now, they're all in person. They're unwilling to compromise on this. 

When it comes to space design, is it a six-person meeting rooms? Is it 25 phone booths. Is it dual booths? We sort of have over-intellectualized the problem. The problem is we have too much space or we don't have enough people. And that's kind of it. 

You can play with either of those. You either decrease the amount of space that you have shut off floors and it will naturally increase with the existing population, the critical mass that you have on those floors.

Just to be clear, the number of people assigned to the building should always be more than its capacity. Always. Even if you don't have desk sharing. People are traveling or they're out sick or they're doing meetings elsewhere. You're never at a hundred percent capacity. 

All you have to do is shrink the amount of space or increase the assigned headcount. Humans literally just naturally become communities. They create norms and they create culture. They do all the things that you need from a productive team to build a great business. 

Gordon: So where do you see workspace going 10 years out?

Andrew: I think that we're going to see a lot of people benefiting from self-driving. I think that offices or spaces to do work will show up in weirdly configured self-driving machines. Whether you're facing each other or facing the road, you’ll be doing work while you're traveling to New Hampshire from California. So that's the remote work box. 

It’s true that the tools and technologies we can use today allow us to do quite a bit more with folks who are not immediately proximate. But I don't think that that changes the fundamental value of being in the same place with another human. 

Gordon: If you could have given yourself a little bit of advice when you were starting off in your career, what would it be?

Andrew: There's so many things that I would tell myself if I were younger. I think in 10 years, the size of companies relative to their revenue is going to be dramatically different. We're already starting to see these 20-person teams generating a hundred million in revenue in their first two years of operation like Cursor and some of these others. The revenue ramp and the revenue per employee I think is going to go way up. 

That will reduce the demand and need for space because you can build big businesses without needing a lot of people. But I think we're just going to see way more businesses get built - I don't think it changes the overall thrust. 

Gordon: What kind of advice could you give somebody starting off in their career?

Andrew: I’d encourage you to read what you love until you love to read. The percentage of humans in this world who actually read regularly, not just for entertainment but just generally, is pretty small. There's another side to that, which is if you read so much and that's all you ever are is just encountering new ideas. That's also a downside. 

But I think if you're trying to figure out how to meaningfully change the difference between you and say the next person, I would say don't try to compete. Just go read. Go explore your own curiosities and explore the curiosities of other people. 

Books are one of the very few things that you can literally put yourself in the mindset of the author at the time that they were having these ideas. It's like a cheat code on stuff. And so that's a really practical one. 

Gordon: And if you could give one recommendation for a book that someone could pick up, what would it be?

Andrew: Our conference rooms are named after books. So I'll tell you the names of the conference rooms, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is phenomenal. He's a physicist. He writes like a poet though. He talks about literally time and how time doesn't exist. It's like a really wild book and it's really small. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. 

Another one is called Endurance. It's about Ernest Shackleton and especially his navigator. It's insane. Read that book. It reads like an adventure novel and it's totally all just real. Also, Shackleton is not as cool as [Frank] Worsley, who's his navigator. He gets all the credit Shackleton, but Worsley is the reason they survive. It's like an amazing story.

Contact by Carl Sagan. It's a fiction book. There's a film about it with Jodi Foster.

Unreasonable Hospitality is about the restaurant 11 Madison Park and it’s the name of one of another one of our conference rooms. It's about essentially what it was like to make that restaurant work. There's some incredible lessons in it. 

And then I'm sitting in the Lessons from History by Will and Ariel Durant. That one is super narrow, but it's probably one of the best written books I've ever come across.

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