The Edge - Volume One

Tell us about your work with Smart Buildings and how that has become a core element of your operational strategy. Darrell: Across our portfolio, we have 20,000 assets that produce data every minute – from mechanical to electrical to water meters – and we’ve historically done very little with this data. Through our Smart Buildings program, we are working with Cushman & Wakefield to aggregate all this data to make it actionable, enabling informed decisions. For example, now we can analyze our lighting data to better understand occupancy or review our conference room data to assess utilization. With our Smart Buildings approach, we can now go from reactive to proactive to predictive in order to drive operational efficiencies - and this is only the beginning. Going forward, we will continue to leverage the Google Cloud and apply Machine Learning and AI whenever and wherever possible, which is extremely innovative and exciting. What type of innovations and advancements are you implementing to make your buildings smart? Darrell: Like a lot of portfolios across the world, we already have all the data we need to make our buildings “smart.” The real challenge is pushing this data to a platform and automating the analytics and processes. Buildings have been operated the same way for the last 30 years – our plan is to be disruptive. We want to change the approach to portfolio operations through a robust platform and data analytics. The end goal is to create the healthiest and most productive spaces in the industry, allowing “Googlers” to thrive.

Google is known for attracting and retaining the best talent. How is Cushman & Wakefield building the right team for the job, and how do you continue to develop them? Brandon: I’m very passionate about developing and retaining talent. To start, we have a very deliberate recruiting strategy that focuses on bringing in talent at all levels and helping them grow quickly. We also rely on the recruiting skills and referrals of our employees. Referrals are vetted within 24 to 48 hours, and feedback is quickly provided to those that have provided the referral. Our goal is to have a pipeline that allows us to immediately fill open roles. We’ve also created and piloted a leadership development program, as well as an internship program. The leadership training program TAL (Team Accelerate Leader) has a mission to solidify and grow talented silo-breakers, communicators, exceeders and mentors into the future leaders of Cushman & Wakefield. For the internship program, we hired three future leaders who are currently college students within the areas of Space Management, Facility Management and Project Management this past summer. We have plans to expand that number to 10 in 2019 as well as assist our peers in Silicon Valley on recruiting their interns.

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