Workplace Hospitality, Employee Experience & the Office Worth Coming To

Podcast Transcript

_{Caeley O'Shea:}

Can I go big here for a minute?

_{Adam Landsman}

Please.

_{Caeley O'Shea:}

Okay. I think that over the last ten, twenty years, what an employee population looks for from their company has significantly changed. People aren't participating in third spaces in the way that they used to. So they're looking at their company to sometimes provide social engagement, to provide a sense of community, to provide a sense of meaning and purpose. And I think a lot of workplace and employee engagement managers are trying to understand how to tap into that desire and meet that responsibility.

_{Adam Landsman}

Well, welcome everybody to What's Working. I'm Adam Landsman. I'm the senior vice president and head of growth at Sharebite, the number one meal benefits platform built exclusively for business.

I'm very excited today, for multiple reasons. This is our first podcast, first content creation that we're doing and I am extremely excited about conversations that we'll have in general. I hope it provides value to anybody that might take a listen And I'm really excited to spend my time with Caeley O'Shea. I'm head of workplace and hospitality and lots of other things at Warner Music Group. Welcome, Caeley.

_{Caeley O'Shea:}

Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I think we're gonna talk about some fun stuff today.

_{Adam Landsman}

Yes. This is this is gonna be great.

So let's let's talk about let's talk about you. Let's talk about your career. Your career trajectory has zigged and zagged to a whole bunch of different places, veterinarian offices, Nike, CBRE, and now, obviously, Warner Music Group. What's the through line? What is the similarity between any of those places, if there even is one?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. That's a great question. I think one thing that continually pops up for me in my career is community and placemaking.

Finding the heart of an office of a company, making that community something that has resonance for the people who are there, whether it's folks who are planning meetings for upcoming retail sales that they have, bankers that are hosting clients, or in the music industry, making sure that the artists who come into our office feel like they're a part of our space, they're welcome, and we're taking care of them.

_{Adam Landsman}

That's great. You know, sometimes I find as I think back to my career, you learn something in one place that maybe it's effective and great there, but it really helps in another place. Anything that you found throughout your career that was crucial you learned someplace that you're now applying in other places?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Oh, absolutely. I think learning to trust instincts and transitioning especially from different kinds of industries throughout my career was scary. You know, you walk into a new place and you're like, I don't know how people do it here. But really, it's different in every different place. And when you have a little bit of distance, that added perspective brings value that you wouldn't anticipate. So trusting that things that you've seen before you can bring into a new space and adapt for the people there is something that I wouldn't have expected early on.

_{Adam Landsman}

I appreciate you sharing a lot about your your career. I think it's important for folks that might, you know, tune in. There's a lot of lessons. You're you're accomplished in your career, certainly a lot more so than someone else that might just be starting out. Is there something, maybe a way that you used to approach things earlier on your career that might sound like good advice for folks that are on their way up?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Oh, gosh. Yes. I think one of the things that has served me well, especially in the corporate world, is understanding that sometimes you're to put effort into things that don't shake out for whatever reason. And especially when you're early in your career, you might have a project you're excited about.

You bring your enthusiasm. You bring a perspective. You work really **** ** it. And the company changes directions.

And that ends up not being a part of where things are headed. Learning to not take that personally is something that, I think, for early career people is really tough to do but really important. It means that you can show up the next day. You can put your heart and soul into whatever is in front of you.

But let go if that's not the thing that everybody jumps on. Just being able to separate that identity from the work that you're doing is something that's been really valuable for me.

_{Adam Landsman}

That's great. All right. Let's keep this on you. Okay. So experienced services leader, workplace hospitality. They mean different things in different places. What do you actually do?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Oh gosh. Who has a good answer to that question in this field? It's so tough.

Years ago, I worked in a restaurant, and the owner that I worked for made us business cards. And he asked me, what title do you want? We could put anything on there. And he had the idea Personnel Whisperer.

And I was like, that's the best. Please do that one. It was my favorite card. Even after I stopped working there, I'd still hand them out because I love the title so much.

I think that that is the through thread of a lot of what people in workplace experience services do. You're about making the space somewhere that has continuity for the people that are a part of it, where they feel like they're heard, where it's clear that the services and amenities are something that are there to serve them.

It can mean a lot of pieces. It can mean that you're managing specific vendors. You're managing specific services. You're involved in strategy when you're developing new offices.

Those are all things that are part of my remit. I have a lovely workplace services app that I manage that we use for desk booking. But for me, it also means that people who work with me know who I am and they can ask me any question. And I love that, that throughout my career, people know that they can come to me with any question that they have about the workplace, about the office, or there are things that we have on-site.

They want to do something. They have an idea. Do you know who's in charge of this?

And we can facilitate those conversations for them. So it's a lot of vibes, I would say. That's not very specific. But I think that's a big part of just being the energy of a workplace team, of an employee services team.

_{Adam Landsman}

Has it always been that way for you? And I'm thinking more for maybe the younger generation that is not quite there yet. Would you say the same thing? And how do they how should they think about that?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. That's a great question.

It hasn't always been that way for me. I think I've been curious throughout my entire career. So I've been somebody who people know they can ask to jump in on something, and I would do it. And I would ask questions that were about different operations outside of my remit. So I think that if you're early career, it's a good way to grow into being that person, just being curious, being open, having conversations with people you work with about what they do, about what they care about.

You know, those relationships are going to serve you for your whole career no matter what.

_{Adam Landsman}

Let's talk about the industry, the music industry.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Okay.

_{Adam Landsman}

You work at a super cool company.

You guys host artists, executives, support staff, lots of different visitors all under one roof. What is it about the space, either when you were building the space or as you continue to modify the space? What is it that is so important that gets all those different folks to work cohesively in the same space?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. Well, I would say cohesively is doing a lot of work there. That word's doing a lot of heavy lifting. The way that we have things structured, we try to give space to as many different kinds of people that might be in our office and support as many kinds of activities as they might want to host on-site.

So we really cover a broad spectrum. And part of that is just about getting to know the people who we work with and what they care about. So making sure that if an artist is coming into the office, they don't want to sit at a conference table. We have lounges.

We have rooms that feel more like an authentic living room type of space where you can have a conversation that's more conducive to something that's really personal, like somebody's artistry.

And we have a boardroom. We have really formal executive spaces. So if investors are coming to visit, they can have a conversation that's appropriate for that space.

So cohesiveness, you know, it's more like a it's more like we have a whole rainbow of spaces. And that comes from having honest conversations with the people we work with, asking them what they're interested in, what are they trying to do, listening to their thoughts about it, and trying to be supportive and meet them where they're at across that whole spectrum.

_{Adam Landsman}

And as someone who has visited your office, you know, I think it's super cool. And I can see one of the lounges. What do the employees think? Are they do they get to utilize all these cool spaces as well on the sort of the day to day?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

It's a spectrum. It really is. So we have employees who are definitely using our songwriting suites every day that are in those specialty spaces. And then we have employees for whom those spaces they're not necessarily in them regularly, but it becomes almost an attraction for them.

So getting to tour the office with new employees is one of my favorite thing to do, getting to share those spaces, making sure that people who might not be as close to that, if that's somebody on the finance team or in just other areas of the business or somebody who works remotely gets to see where that magic happens, that has value for them. And then for the people who are using it regularly, it gives them credibility with the folks that they work with as well. If you're talking to a songwriter, you can walk them into a room, show them the equipment that they can use in the space. It makes

it a seamless kind of fluid experience to be talking about what your priorities are and then moving exactly into the space where you can work on them.

_{Adam Landsman}

So I know I'll say thus far, but stemming from you work at a cool company with also a cool office space. And it doesn't have to be specific about the space, but thus far, what is one of your fondest memories of either something that has taken place in your office or at your company during your tenure there?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

My fondest memories are probably just hearing people say what they're excited about in the office. Whenever we host events and I have folks come up to me afterwards and tell me they're excited about it, or if just yesterday I had somebody send me a message about an iced tea that we added in one of our common areas that they are addicted to and so excited about, those are the moments that are the most rewarding for me. But if you want to talk about like the cool weird stuff, we have all sorts of fun things happen in this space. I know you're familiar with our tarantula story about a promo that involved terrariums with tarantulas getting sent out to different influencers.

Those things are really fun and memorable for me. And collecting questions that employees ask me about things they want to do in the office, whether that's make pancakes with the griddle for a celebration one day, host a flash tattoo session for an event that they're holding, different kinds of content they want to shoot, all sorts of fun stuff. That's what makes it engaging.

_{Adam Landsman}

You'll have to tell me which iced tea later. All right. Let's talk about some of the non negotiables. Yeah. So culture, employee engagement.

What are the non negotiables? What the must haves?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

I think for employee engagement, you've got to look at the silos in your company. You've got to look at the different teams, the work that they do, how they encounter each other, whether you have communal spaces. We've tried in our offices to focus on the strategy of what I call anchor amenities, which are items that bring people to a space where they encounter each other. We have some services that we could place in different areas of our floors, which would be more convenient for different employees. But hosting them in one consolidated space means that people who otherwise would never encounter each other have the opportunity to see each other. So I think that that's really important for culture, having unstructured, casual drive by encounters, having people that you see every day that you have that interaction with, those are the pieces that really are the foundation of your culture.

_{Adam Landsman}

Is there something that you've tried that didn't work?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

We have tried to overly meet people where they're at, I think. So we've we've taken the approach I was just talking about anchor amenities of distributing items exactly where people are so that they don't have to leave their space. But that's not really what fits for our company. You know, it's it's we have a tech team. They're lovely. But it's not like other software companies where it's about the coders and the independent contributors being able to go to their zone and just do. We have so much collaboration and so many relationships that are important to the way that we interact that it really is about facilitating those opportunities for people to encounter each other and keep that momentum and the enthusiasm around the culture alive.

_{Adam Landsman}

Got it. Anything specific you would say to definitely avoid?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

You know what I try to avoid? This is a little separate from what I was talking about a second ago.

Discouraging feedback. I think it's really easy, in workplace worlds where you're trying to do so many things.

Everybody has an opinion about it. There's often a lot of backstory that you don't necessarily have the opportunity to explain to people about why you're making the decisions that you're making and what influences them.

My philosophy has been any time people bring me feedback, whether it's based on inaccurate assumptions or it's something that they're the only person who thinks that way and nobody else agrees, whatever it is, I try to encourage it. Because if you if you push back, if you're defensive on feedback when people give it to you, they'll stop coming to you. And that means that they might try workarounds on their own that have impacts for everybody downstream. It might be that they're just secretly mad.

It might be that they're talking to their co workers about things and you don't have the opportunity to intercede or to correct. So I think something that's really important is to just as much as you can, whether it hurts your feelings, whether there's something that's missed in the assumptions, to just welcome all the feedback that comes your way. Because if you shut that valve down, you're not going to get it. And it's just going to hurt the function of your whole operation.

_{Adam Landsman}

Feedback is a gift. Right?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

It is.

_{Adam Landsman}

That's why that saying exists.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Every time.

_{Adam Landsman}

All right. What's your honest take on food in the office? Is it a requirement? Or is it just a nice to have?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

People got to eat. You got to feed them.

But I think that there is in my experience, I think that there is a balance.

Our strategy for food in the office is to offer it, but we don't fully subsidize everything. And I think that gives it more meaning than things just being, you know, everything's free, whatever you want all the time.

I think it's an absolutely important thing to feed people in the office, especially when you have offices where other amenities, resources require not just getting up and leaving your desk, but that whole exercise of thinking about where am I going to go, what am I choosing, what do I even want. Like that those are those are brain calories that you don't need to spend tackling those problems. So I like to keep it in house as much as we can.

_{Adam Landsman}

All right. Let's shift gears. Let's talk about data and measurement. Out of all the things that you do on a daily basis, how do you measure them?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

I like to measure them in emoji reacts in our building chat channels. Feel like like I was saying about engagement earlier, there's a lot of different ways to slice workplace operations, whether you're looking at badge data or you're looking at consumption of different supplies or when people are in the office, utilities, any of that fun stuff. But people work in different ways, especially with our employee population. A lot of employee populations, traveling. You might be working off-site.

I don't think that you can necessarily draw really firm conclusions about where people are and what they're doing without understanding all the nuances of their function.

So I really look to how comfortable do people feel telling me what they think about the messages that we're giving. Those are the for me, that's the signifier of they're engaged, they're paying attention.

Whether they're here, they're somewhere else, whether they're involved or they're not involved today, at least they're tuned in to the conversation that's happening.

_{Adam Landsman}

If there was one metric and if it's emojis, it's emojis. If there's one metric that you are measuring to support either the programs that you're implementing or the feedback that you're gathering, what is the most important metric that you think you can get from employees?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

That's a tough one. I think emojis and responses. The number of people who reach out to me on side conversations to say something that maybe wouldn't have otherwise.

_{Adam Landsman}

Got it. All right. Let's talk about innovation. What's new? What's evolving? This could be tools, process, anything.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

What's evolving? Definitely how we're approaching amenities in the workspace. I think that's always a conversation, whether that means looking for different services, looking for different engagement activities.

Can I go big here for a minute?

_{Adam Landsman}

Please.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Okay.

I think that over the last ten, twenty years, what an employee population looks for from their company has significantly changed. People aren't participating in third spaces in the way that they used to. So they're looking at their company to sometimes provide social engagement, to provide a sense of community, to provide a sense of meaning and purpose that maybe if they were in a bowling league or part of the Kiwanis Club, however many years ago, they would have found that there. Now it's redirected into office spaces. And I think a lot of workplace and employee engagement managers are trying to understand how to tap into that desire and meet that responsibility in a way that's appropriate for a company.

So that's something that I definitely see people iterating on all the time. We're looking at what services do we provide in the office space to make it feel comfortable, to make it feel like home, to keep people energized, to keep people focused, and what kind of activations really draw your employees in, help them stay engaged, help them stay focused, help you retain them, especially top tier talent.

_{Adam Landsman}

And so we were talking before before we started taping, we were talking about Music League and some other Yes. I'll say, employee leagues and games. Do you find that employees want that and are yearning for their company to provide them that? Because I would say and maybe this is slightly different, but as it relates to maybe after hours activities, the world has shifted. I think there is more of a desire for some people to just go home after How does that work at Warner Music Group? And what do you think, just generally speaking, the industry, is the line between what people are looking for their employee to provide and then what's sort of, Okay, I got to go home and do everything else on my own?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. I think there's a spectrum there. And you're meeting your demographics where they're at. So understanding who your employee population is, what's their lifestyle, what are their priorities, and trying to give a variety of engagement opportunities for them.

We, just on the subject of innovation, recently added fresh food vending machines to one of our offices as a pilot program. And part of that is that we recognize that we had a population that's working late into the evening. So they're there seven pm at a minimum. Sometimes we'll have recording artists on-site until four in the morning, late sessions.

And having a fresh option that's accessible regardless of the time is something that helps meet them where they're at.

So that was something that we did to recognize that not everybody is working in the same way. Not everybody is working on the same schedule.

And meeting them with just a small resource has a huge impact on their ability to continue to work the way that's best for them. On the topic of engagement and events, I think that providing a spectrum of events we talk about things that are asynchronous versus things that are hosted on a timeline together. That kind of combination of event strategy means that more people can participate because we definitely have folks that are on with Europe early in the morning, and they leave earlier. And then people who are on with the West Coast or even APAC, and they stay later.

And finding events that kind of hit the sweet spot of people can participate in them at their own speed. It's a window. They can drop in. Or things like Musical.

Ly, where you don't have to be in the same time zone to be able to have a conversation and feel like you're sharing something personal with people.

_{Adam Landsman}

Right.

All right. Let's talk about RTO, Return to Office, which every time I think we're completely done talking about this because that is a long time ago, I realize we are still talking about it. So I think I read that Warner Music Group has an eighty nine percent in office occupancy rate, which awesome.

What are you doing right?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Oh, great question.

We have a lot of people who that's just how their work happens. And there is a lot of you have to be here to be a part of the culture engagement. We had an event last night in our office here in New York that involved building bouquets to give some of our women who were nominated for Women in Music Awards give them their flowers. It was a fun little celebration.

_{Adam Landsman}

I like that.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

It was great deck out of the space. Really felt like it was a a space that you wouldn't be able to access if you weren't a part of that activation, a part of the culture, a part of that company.

So I think that those pieces have a big impact on people. And it's a culture where you kind of want to be around the people you work with. They're cool. They're fun. They have something interesting to say. They're tapped into pieces of culture that are dynamic and they're they're kind of on the cusp. So it's it's stuff that you'd be missing if you weren't in the room.

_{Adam Landsman}

So this might put you on the spot a little bit, but not every company has the luxury of having an office. Some are fully remote. Some are hybrid.

Do you have an opinion on what's right, or is it just different for every company?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. I think it depends on your functions and how you work. But I do think that there are ways to create that connectivity, even if you're not in a physically shared space. And a lot of it is about setting the expectation of communication and being available, and especially for folks who are new to their career that maybe grew up in the social media age or were even impacted in their schooling by COVID, being able to lower the anxiety threshold around interaction by just making it something that you're regularly practicing, I think that can give you a lot of the same benefits of an in person culture.

_{Adam Landsman}

All right. Let's talk about what's next for the industry of workplace folks. How do you see the workplace experience role and really the entire function evolving in the future?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah. I think we're going to continue to have conversations about what the workplace means to everybody.

I think we've all seen throughout COVID, throughout RTO conversations, that some people really thrive in individual contributor roles when they're in their own space and they have their heads down or even people who are taking a lot of virtual calls. Sometimes it's nice to be in a quiet space, which makes you wonder, what is the workplace for? What is it all about?

I'm highly biased here, but I anticipate that we'll be moving more towards amenities, using offices as specialty spaces to showcase the brand, making it something that is accessible to employees and helps them feel connected to the company that they're a part of.

So that's what I foresee, people kind of diving into how can you make your office a place that has a special unique value and creates a sort of culture just by the nature of the activities that happen there.

_{Adam Landsman}

And can't believe we've been talking for as long as we have, and neither one of us have said AI yet. So how do you see AI playing a role, more specifically in the workplace experiences function?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Because I don't want to talk about AI in music. I want to definitely get bopped by our PR team for that.

What I foresee with AI in the workplace is that AI becomes a tool, a service, almost another employee that you manage. I think anybody who's worked with prompts knows that the first prompt you put out there, it doesn't usually get you the result that you want. Just like a junior employee, just like somebody who's an intern. You might ask them to work on a project, and you've got to iterate with them to help them get through it.

I foresee a future where our workforce, the teams that we're managing, are human. And there are some components that expand our capacity that are AI agents or that are processes that we've set up through AI that allow us to turbocharge what we're doing. And I hope for everybody that means that they get to spend less time in Excel if that's not what they're into, that they spend less time crafting emails that they're not excited about. They get to spend more time having strategic input or conversations with the people they care about and focus on driving their business and not so much the monotonous tasks.

That's what I'm hoping for.

_{Adam Landsman}

Right. Well well, fingers crossed. Alright. We are going to move.

If it's okay with you, we're gonna move to our lightning round.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Okay.

_{Adam Landsman}

Which we call food for thought. So whatever's on top of your mind, you got a handful of questions. First question, name one thing every office should have.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Coffee.

_{Adam Landsman}

Okay. What is the one workplace perk that sounds great but never delivers?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

I don't know about never delivers, but fresh food is tough to keep in the office. And I don't mean lunches. I mean having stocked peaches, bananas all over the place. Those are the things that sound like they're a great idea. But then when two o'clock comes, what people really want is a chocolate bar, and they just sit on the shelf and spoil.

_{Adam Landsman}

Name a book, a person, or an experience that helped you be a better leader.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

I really enjoyed the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I think a lot of people have. There are some components of that book that talk about encountering what you're afraid of and just going through it because approaching what it is that you're afraid of is just as good as getting to the other side.

_{Adam Landsman}

Okay. I haven't read it. I will add it to my list.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Okay. It's short.

_{Adam Landsman}

What is your go to office lunch?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

I love Naya's baba ganoush.

_{Adam Landsman}

Oh, yeah. Agree. All right. What is the one out there most out there initiative That you've ever proposed?

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Okay. I got this. When I worked in a conference center and we had many very long days, early mornings, calls at four or five am, and nights that ran late, I wanted nap pods.

And there was a lot of conversation about the risk associated with people napping on-site or having

_{Adam Landsman}

What do you mean?

No. Just kidding. So that's a different podcast.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yes. Yes. Exactly. So I I put that out there. Nap pods I think are a controversial one.

_{Adam Landsman}

Okay. Last one. Finish this sentence.

People do their best work when...

_{Caeley O'Shea}

They feel cared about.

_{Adam Landsman}

They feel cared about.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Yeah.

_{Adam Landsman}

Alright. I thought this was awesome. Good. Thank you so much, Caeley. I really appreciate you being on What's Working.

_{Caeley O'Shea}

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, Adam.

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