Let’s Get Real Episode 23: The Benefits of On-Demand Workplaces

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Hear about Amina’s innovative start-up, Radious.pro, a B2B marketplace for workspaces that’s aiming to bring true flexibility and choice to the world of work.
• What is the value of “third places” when most of the discussion around the future of work has focused on the office vs working from home?
• How can we mitigate the difficulties of working from home—the isolation, the lack of work-life separation, the burnout?
• What are the downsides of Airbnb for booking workspaces? How does Radious differ?
• What are the benefits of on-demand workplaces as opposed to locking into a 10-year lease?
• How does Radious mitigate the “proximity bias” and bring more equality to the workplace?
• How do you deal with safety issues on a marketplace-style rental platform?

Links:

• Sandra Panara on LinkedIn – Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix
• Amina Moreau on LinkedIn – CEO and Co-founder of Radious.pro
• Radious.pro – Your home office away from home

If you liked today’s show, check out more episodes of the Let’s Get Real Podcast! This podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Transcript: 

Sandra

Hey everyone, welcome to Let’s Get Real with Sandra and Friends, a workplace consortium podcast brought to you by Relogix. I’m excited to be sharing conversational musings about current events and how we envision the ever-changing world of work. I’m Sandra Panara, Director of Workplace Insights at Relogix. With 25 years of hands-on experience, I help value engineer global workplace portfolios and employee experiences by aligning workplace analytics with corporate real estate needs.

Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future podcasts? Please drop me a line at [email protected].

This week, I’d like to welcome a special guest, Amina Moreau. Amina is the CEO and co-founder of an online platform that’s dedicated to making work more flexible, equitable, and healthy. As she grows Radious.pro, a marketplace often dubbed the Airbnb of workspaces, she’s expanding the conversation beyond the all-too-binary office vs work-from-home, and is exploring the value of third places. She believes that remote work doesn’t have to be lonely or contribute to burnout, and that if we lean into third places as opportunities to gather remotely and to foster work-life separation, we can create a healthier, more equitable future of work.

Welcome, Amina! I’m very happy to have you with me today. We crossed paths through a mutual contact of ours, Dan Barham, who was a previous podcast guest who suggested that you and I connect. So, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Amina

Thanks very much for having me! It seems like we have expanded circles that we both spend time in. And what fascinating circles they are, with the future of work and everything that has been happening, from a seismic shift perspective. My background is very entrepreneurial, I come from a very different space—I come from marketing and filmmaking and communication psychology. It wasn’t until the middle of the pandemic that the idea for the start-up I’m running now came to be. Without the pandemic, the idea never would have surfaced, I just know, without a shadow of a doubt. And it ended up taking me in a very different direction, career-wise. But it’s very timely and it’s very exciting. And I’m happy to be here to get to share a little bit about it with you.

Sandra

That’s fantastic. So, I’m always curious, how did you end up in the real estate space? Like you said, your background is not in corporate real estate. So, tell us a little bit about your start-up, your company, because I’m very excited to share that with our audience.

Amina

Sure thing. So, Radious is a B2B marketplace for on-demand workspaces that are down the street from your house. Imagine walking three doors down to your neighbor’s guest house turned office and getting some work-life separation, maybe seeing colleagues again, but staying right in your neighborhood. Effectively, it’s similar to Airbnb in concept, but instead of overnight accommodations, we provide great workspaces. And critically, because they’re residences like the one I’m in right now, we cut the commute down and maybe even eliminate it.

Sandra

The first thing that jumps to mind is, how are users responding to this? What about thinking, if I can work from home, why would I opt to go work at a house 3-4 doors down from where I live?

Amina

It’s a very good question, because I think over the past two years, we’ve gotten used to the convenience of just walking to the next room and boom, we’re online, we’re ready to go. And I’m not saying that doesn’t have value. But after extended periods of time working from home, some people, myself included, start to experience feelings of burnout because we’re living at the office when we work from home. It can be very difficult to disconnect at the end of the day. So that’s one challenge.

The other is that it can feel isolating when we’re working from home. We’re not necessarily with our colleagues, at least not in person. And Zoom and Teams and all these other digital tools, they’re great because they’re efficient. But do you build the same sort of relationships and deepen that camaraderie you might have when you’re meeting in person? And from a logistical standpoint, you’re probably not going to have a 10-person meeting in your own living room, you’re going to have to go somewhere, whether it’s to a corporate office or a coffee shop, or a space like ours.

But the thing about coffee shops is that they’re a little louder. You don’t know what kind of Wi-Fi you’re going to get, and they’re not very private. So, if you need to have a private conversation, you might want to go somewhere more secluded.

What I love about what we’re building is that we’re basically bringing together the best of the office, that work-life separation and in-person collaboration, and the best of work from home, the convenience, the time savings, the cost savings, the fuel savings. We combine the best of both in a third place.

Sandra

Yes, absolutely. The privacy and security aspect of work, which I know from prior experience and conversations with people and organizations, is crucial. Working from coffee shops, there’s that potential exposure of IP, there’s people hovering over your shoulder looking at what you’re doing. I’ve never personally experienced that. And it seems that everybody feels comfortable working in a public space, but there’s still this awareness we all need to have around privacy. And I think a solution like yours eliminates that to some extent, because you’re in more of a private space, more like working from home. And as you say, you get that separation.

What has been the uptake with respect to your start-up?

Amina

It’s definitely been an interesting journey, especially through the various pandemic waves. Because obviously when people feel less safe being together in person, then collaborative spaces see a little bit of a dip in business. So, in January, when the Omicron spike happened, we definitely saw people behaving a bit more safely, and we were happy about that. But as more people are vaccinated and more people have gotten sick and that immunity is starting to kick in, people are starting to feel more comfortable being together in person again. So, since the Omicron wave has died down, we’ve seen month-over-month growth at significant rates.

It’s been both individual working professionals that book and pay out of pocket for one day here or there, if they’re doing renovations in their home or they need a space to meet with a client or something like that. But then we’re having more and more companies book our spaces for things like off-sites, team building, and even just regular, everyday work, where people might get together in person without necessarily a scheduled meeting, just to be around each other. We’re seeing more and more of that, which has been great. In fact, next week, we’re going to be announcing expansion into our second market, which is very exciting for us.

Sandra

How exciting! So, in terms of the number of people who go into these spaces, what are you seeing from a sizing perspective? Is it large groups, smaller groups of 2-3 people? Is it one person?

Amina

I would say our sweet spot is anywhere between 5 and 12 people, kind of a big range. But if you look at the space I’m in right now, it’s also listed on AirBnb per night. Of course, we’re a per-day platform, but the room I’m sitting in is a 2-bedroom condo. It’s got one bath, a full kitchen, and I’m sitting at the dining room which doubles as a boardroom. I’ve got two couches behind me with a presentation space that has a TV with HDMI, so you could do a presentation with slides. We’ve had people book this space for an 8-person offsite, but you could just as easily book this for two people if you wanted to get together with a friend and just have a day together.

Our smallest space is a tiny home, actually tied for smallest with a 1970s Airstream. Those can accommodate one to two people comfortably. Our largest space right now can accommodate 30, and we’ve got everything in between. You basically just use the search filters on the site to filter by the size of space you need, how many hours you need it for, whether you need super-fast Wi-Fi speeds, whether you need sit-stand desks, basically all kinds of amenities if you need them, you just search for them.

Sandra

Interesting. You mentioned Airbnb—one of the things I’m thinking of is, why wouldn’t you just go to Airbnb and just book a space for the day or night? Why would you need a separate tool or business to do that?

Amina

Well, the answer is what you alluded to in the way you asked the question—you sort of went back and forth between “day” and “night”. That’s the thing, you can’t book Airbnbs by the day. So, let’s say you need a space from 9 to 5. With Airbnb, you’ve got to check in at 4:00 PM and check out at 10 or 11 the next morning. So, in order to get one full day of work, you would need to book two nights, effectively paying double to get one day. And what if you don’t need nights, because you’re a local company with local teams? Why would you pay for two nights of Airbnb if you only need 5 or 6 hours in the day? That’s one of the biggest differences.

And then the other is simply amenities. With Airbnb, they’re about overnight stays and vacations. So, you know you’re going to have a comfortable bed and a great shower and all those things. But when it comes to workplace amenities, with us, you’re getting monitors, faster internet speeds, sit-stand desks—we are a workplace platform. A lot of our properties are also listed on Airbnb, but we’ve taken the time to work with our hosts to customize these spaces and make them much more work-friendly than they ever would be if they were just on Airbnb.

Sandra

Interesting—it’s fascinating because one of the things that I’ve seen recently, certainly since the pandemic, is fewer and fewer people opting to go to the office, and a lot more companies looking to go remote first. But a lot of these companies are still looking to have their team get together, once a quarter or something like that. I’ve heard from many companies they’ll actually go to an Airbnb to do that offsite. So it’s interesting to see that shift where previously they might have gone to a hotel or some other venue to do that off-site, now the Airbnb type environment seems to be the new place to go. Can you provide some insight into why that might be the case?

Amina

I think part of it is that over the last few years, people have simply gotten used to the comforts of home. A more corporate space, whether it’s a hotel conference room or even a conference room at a WeWork or something like that, it doesn’t have temperature control, operable windows, it doesn’t have the kind of comfort you’d find in a home.

The other thing is that these corporate options are a little more cookie cutter, whereas with a platform like Airbnb or Radious, you’re getting a different space every time you book. If you want to, you can become a regular at one of the spaces, if you particularly love it and want that consistency. But the difference between Airbnb and, let’s say, a hotel chain, is you know you’re going to have exactly the same experience every single time you book. With an Airbnb type platform, you can choose to have a completely different experience every time. And when companies are doing offsites, the whole point is the experience, otherwise you’d just do it onsite. So it provides you with extra amenities, something to write home about, something to Instagram, something to share with your friends and family when you get home. And I think you can go deeper with team-building.

Sandra

You said a lot of great things in that last paragraph. The first thing is the comforts of home, I absolutely agree. When I was doing analytics in workplaces and surveying employees, temperature control was always the number one issue people complained about in the office, because you don’t have personal control over the temperature within your immediate workspace.

I love the outdoors, so I don’t care how cold it gets outside, the windows are always open, any time of year. I love that about working from home because I can just open the windows in my office and always get fresh air, or just step outside. But in the office environment, most towers don’t have the ability to open windows. Actually, last week I was in an offsite at our office in Ottawa, and I stayed at a particular hotel because there you can open the windows.

The other thing you mentioned was having an Instagrammable experience, which is something that seems to be picking up some popularity as well. You hear more and more that people just want to be able to share their experiences. I’m curious to hear your thoughts, because I hear this from the landlord side. In traditional buildings, there’s lots of talk about bringing amenities into the traditional space. Do you think that offers the kind of experience that employers or users are looking for, or is it still too traditional and restrictive?

Amina

I think it’s yet to be determined. Honestly, I do think that it’s smart of companies, if they’re stuck in a lease, to put some effort into making it more attractive to visit, even if it’s just once in a while. Whatever those amenities are, it’s going to differ from company to company, and what’s important to employees will differ. So, I do think it’s important to make that effort.

However, I think the biggest barrier to coming back to the office isn’t the lack of amenities, it’s the commute. It’s the time and cost of commuting. We’ve gotten a significant chunk of our lives back as we were forced to work from home. It wasn’t necessarily healthy because we had nowhere else to escape to, and now we do have places we can go to. But especially if the commute is arduous, and in certain cities it really can be, you’re sitting on the road for maybe an hour for a five-mile ride, it can be really frustrating. It’s bad for the environment. It’s taking time away from other things that you thought you’d be doing in your life. Add that up across 5 days per week for 30 years or however long, and it’s not insignificant.

So, no matter how many snacks we put in the lunchroom or foosball tables or even just comfy chairs and we install operable windows, it’s going to help some, but is it going to result in people coming in five days a week? No.

Sandra

I would agree. It’s funny because it makes me think about 8 to 10 years ago, when this trend started, they called it “resimercial”, which was the idea of bringing the comforts of home or the design of home into the workplace. You’d have a design kind of mimicking the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, spaces you’d typically use in your home, in the office. But it never really took off because I think again, it’s a workplace environment, it’s just not the same. The office is the office and there’s always that delineation.

But what’s interesting about your business and what you’re saying about the commute, is that it’s absolutely true that the commute is the biggest pain point for the user. It doesn’t matter how many amenities you have to entice people back, if the commute is not convenient. People are just not going to do it.

How does community play into your business? We hear a lot about that, we know that WeWork was built off of the concept of building a community. How does that play into your model?

Amina

Community is huge. We are social beings, so being isolated in our work-from-home situations until the end of time is not going to be healthy. One of the things that I’m super excited about for Radious is that we’re helping people get out of the house for that work-life separation. And even more importantly, seeing other people again, but in conveniently located workspaces, so you’re not driving 20, 30, 40 minutes to a central office, because we’re focused in residential neighborhoods. There could be one just around the corner. And if you have coworkers that live within even just a medium vicinity, but it’s closer than the corporate office, you can still get together casually or for some kind of scheduled, formal meeting.

I will also say that, in the future of work conversation, the term “proximity bias” has started making the rounds. It’s the idea that people who choose to work from home may end up being disproportionately disadvantaged when it comes to growth opportunities in their organization, as compared to people who come into the office. If they are less seen, if their work is less seen because of this proximity bias, they simply may not have the same opportunities as someone who’s coming into the office.

I’m not saying, let’s force everyone back to the office or let’s force everyone to be remote. But I think there are ways to mitigate this, and it’s another reason why I’m excited for these more hyper-local workspaces where you can be seen. If I think about the people more likely to be in that boat, it’s parents, it’s working moms. It’s people who are already disadvantaged in the workplace and are struggling for equality. So now, if they take their employer up on the offer to work remotely more of the time, could it backfire? I think it could if we’re not careful. I think we need to be having conversations like this more often.

Sandra

Those are all valid points. From a costing perspective, you touched upon this a little earlier, but who ultimately pays for the use of the space?

Amina

We actually have two pricing models. The first one is similar to the Airbnb model, where anybody can go on the platform at any time, browse spaces in their area, book, and pay out of pocket. So, we’re making it available for working professionals, freelancers, self-employed people, or employees who might work at a bigger company who just need a space for themselves.

The second way is through employer subscriptions. We believe that great workplaces should be a workplace benefit that employees shouldn’t have to pay for, especially if their company is already saving millions of dollars on office space because they let go of their leases or they sold their building. Then why should it be on the employee to provide that space, especially if it’s a mental health issue and would absolutely benefit the company? So, companies are now joining Radious on a subscription basis—they’re pre-paying for spaces on a monthly basis that enables their teams to log on, our platform recognizes them as belonging to this employer ID, and they can book a space entirely for free because it’s been covered by their company.

Sandra

That’s pretty cool! When you say pre-pay, is it like a hotel where you guarantee so many room days?

Amina

It’s more like we agree on a monthly dollar amount, and that amount becomes like a gift card credit. So then if an employee books a space for $200 for the day, then that $200 simply gets depleted from the overall account credit. And then at the end of the month, if there’s a bit left over, we roll it over to the next month. And if it looks like they’re going to run out of credit prematurely, we let them know and talk about topping them up.

Sandra

That’s very interesting. So, from a company size perspective, are we talking enterprise, small, medium size? I can see people assuming that this would apply to small businesses more, that being more manageable. What are you seeing in terms of interest?

Amina

Honestly, it’s been all over the board. Our initial contracts have been with smaller companies, but we’ve been seeing significant increases in interest from growth stage start-ups. And frankly, I think that’s going to be our sweet spot because start-ups are going to try to be as cost efficient as they possibly can. Especially in a climate that’s really unpredictable right now, it makes a lot more sense to just pay for space when you need it and don’t pay for it when you don’t, versus being locked into the fixed cost of a 10-year lease.

But we’re also having conversations with Fortune 500 companies. In fact, we’re on the cusp of signing a contract with one of them, so at the end of the day, it’s any company that has office workers that can work remotely and want to work remotely.

Sandra

What are you seeing from a real estate perspective? Are they maintaining the existing real estate they have, or are they looking to reduce existing real estate to enable these types of services?

Amina

It’s both. There are some companies that have contracted with us that have never had space, and they’ve always operated in some remote fashion and made use of flex space, and are now really keen to start using Radious spaces.

A lot of customers may have used a more traditional co-working space before, and that’s also on demand. It’s also more flex than a 10-year lease, but those tend to be centrally located, whereas we’re not—we’re everywhere else. So it offers more flexibility. But there are companies who are stuck in leases for another one or two years, and so we’re starting to see lots of off-sites that they would be doing anyway, regardless of if they had office space or not.

We’re developing these relationships and they’re starting to offer our spaces to their employees just as a test, to see how much people want this and what we’re finding is that they do, which makes them that much more confident in not renewing their lease when it comes due.

Sandra

It’s crazy to think that something is so simple. But like you said, it’s about the comforts of home, and feeling like you can still enjoy that but being a completely different environment with coworkers. I know from personal experience, when we were in the throes of the pandemic, getting together with some coworkers that live in Toronto here and there, and trying to figure out where to meet, it’s difficult. It was awkward, right at the beginning. And at the time, I was fairly new to the organization, I didn’t really know these people, but you’re inviting them into your home. There was an awkward feeling about it, just being a woman. I wonder if I would feel differently going into an Airbnb type situation where it’s a neutral space from a safety perspective. How do you address the safety aspect?

Amina

It’s a very good question, and it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge everywhere, so we’re very careful. First of all, it starts with vetting our hosts, because you’re entering the home of somebody who doesn’t necessarily live there, because a lot are investment properties. But you’re entering somebody’s home. So, we make sure we know you. And of course, we’re a start-up, so we can do this now with the number and scale of properties that we have, but we vet everyone who hosts and we actually meet all of them. We know all of them personally at this point. And as we move forward, things like background checks and confirming identity are going to be huge, because with any platform where you’re putting your trust in the hands of your hosts, you want to make sure that they have been vetted.

But vice versa as well. We want to make sure our hosts feel confident that the guests that will be there for the day are going to be responsible, too. And one of the great things we get to tell them is that, compared to a platform for vacation rentals, with Radious, these are working professionals in your home. Not somebody there to have a party. And you know who their boss is because we know who they work for. And they’re only there for the day, and not overnight, so there’s going to be less wear and tear. So, the safety aspect goes both ways.

Sandra

Right. Well, this has been fantastic. Like I said, it’s definitely a fresh new idea. I think the whole concept of choice has exploded over the past couple of years as people are finding new places to work. We’ve certainly broken the mould with respect to where, how, and when people work. And there’s really no limitation with respect to where that can actually happen. It’s just a matter of people being open to it. It certainly appeals to the personal choice that people have, and their different comfort levels around where they want to work, how far away from home, and the overall experience. It’s a very personal thing. I always liken it to the idea of going away on vacation and you check with your friends and ask them to make a recommendation and they go on and on about something fantastic, and then you take their advice and it isn’t what you were expecting. Our expectations are all so different. So I think the workplace model has to follow suit.

This has been really great, it’s nice to see new ideas come to fruition and see where the market takes it. Do you have any final comments or thoughts?

Amina

I just want to echo what you said about flexibility and choice. Everybody is so different, it’s why we have such a diverse workforce, which is a beautiful thing. But with that come diverse needs and diverse desires. And if there’s any silver lining that’s come out of the pandemic, I think it’s enabled a lot of people to pause, take a step back, and think about what they want in their lives, what’s important to them. And now that it’s safe to be out of the house again, we can start living that.

So those companies that offer their employees choice, whatever that looks like, the more choice the better. The more options, the better, in my view. Offer people choice and they’re going to stay with you. Be more rigid and you’re probably going to lose a lot of talent. And I’m already starting to see it. People want autonomy, flexibility, and choice. And I’m really excited about that because I think many, many of us are going to feel far more fulfilled not just in our careers, but in our lives moving forward.

Sandra

Totally, totally agree. Well, thank you very much for your time, Amina, I really enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to seeing more in the news about Radious and where it’s going to go in the not-too-distant future. So thank you for your time!

Amina

Thanks for having me!

Sandra

You’re welcome!