DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT
Spencer Levy
In the 1920s, the Fifth National Bank and the Third National Bank came together to form one of the largest consumer banks in the U.S. Headquartered in Cincinnati, the combined Fifth Third Bank grew into a Fortune 500 company, a multi-service financial institution that's now pioneering new ideas about workplace and wellness, the major topics of this show. On this episode, we're on location in Cincinnati, where a roundtable shares Fifth Third Bank’s approach to real estate design and operations with insights into its innovative mindset.
Thomas Neltner
We've had very good success with people coming back to the office. We started early and we got people back early, and I think that really helped our momentum.
Spencer Levy
That's Thomas Neltner, the bank's head of Enterprise Work Services and its real estate strategy leader. Thomas joins us with leaders from other relevant specialties, including the bank's director of workplace design, Valerie Garrett.
Valerie Garrett
Space as a proxy for culture. And so you can't extricate the two from one another.
Spencer Levy
We also have the bank's wellness lead, Maureen Balent, Senior Vice President and Director of Benefits.
Maureen Balent
I'm all about movement, light and socializing. That just is mentally fulfilling to most people.
Spencer Levy
And to add wider context, we're also joined by CBRE’s Todd Pardon, Managing Director of Global Workplace Solutions, a 25 year veteran based in Michigan, who has advised Fifth Third and other clients in the banking sector.
Todd Pardon
Different financial institutions are in different parts of their rationalization of all of the workplace experience changes that we've seen over the past several years.
Spencer Levy
Coming up, insights into those changes at Fifth Third Bank, a century old institution that's doing anything but painting by the numbers when it comes to workplace and wellness. I'm Spencer Levy, and that's right now on The Weekly Take.
Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take. And we are here with our friends from Fifth Third Bank, the 12th largest bank in the United States. And we're going to talk about Fifth Third's real estate strategy. We're going to talk about workplace, we're going to talk about wellness. And to help us with today's conversation, we are joined by Thomas Neltner. Thomas, great to see you.
Thomas Neltner
Good to see you.
Spencer Levy
We're also joined by Maureen Balent. Maureen, welcome.
Maureen Balent
Great. Thank you.
Spencer Levy
Valerie Garrett.
Valerie Garrett
Thank you, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
And then our own Todd Pardon. Todd, thanks for joining the show.
Todd Pardon
Thank you.
Spencer Levy
So, to begin, let's start with the easy one. Thomas, tell me, are people coming back?
Thomas Neltner
They are coming back. We've had very good success with people coming back to the office. We started early and we got people back early, and I think that really helped our momentum and we've had people back for almost a year, so it's been great and it is a good thing to have. It's good mojo and it's good to have people back and the excitement and the collaboration thing, so.
Spencer Levy
Valerie, since you are Director of Workplace Design, the workplace isn't just the four walls where you're working these days. It actually includes the parking lot, it includes the bank branches. In the same vein of people coming back, what are you doing to try to make people want to come back to the office?
Valerie Garrett
Mm. Well, it's a little more enduring than a post-pandemic conversation, which I'm very pleased and proud to say. When people ask me how you futureproof the workplace, my answer has always been that you design toward universal, basic human need. So this is things like collaboration, connection, and so we design based on those kinds of things. We have a very, I'll say, city planning focused set of principles that we design with. Those are enduring principles that Kevin Lynch published in 1960. And they were very quickly understood as a seminal work in city planning. And it was also recognized that those things were good things to plan around for interior space as well. And so that's our foundation. And then we look at things like variety, choice, flexibility. How do we ensure that all of the different workplace behaviors you engage in all through the day are accommodated and supported in the work environment? But also, as we started to bring people back, we got questions from leaders in the organization about were we ready to do that. Was the office environment ready? And we did some studies and said yes, and we don't need to change a thing. We're ready. People can come back, they can spread out. There are places where they can come together and stay spread out enough that it's safe. And so we've had places since the beginning of the pandemic, I would say, just about. We have a very flexible space. We had just opened what we call the forum, and it was a place where this person could bring 15 people together in a big room and do an ideation session using some design thinking tools for us to be able to stay on mission.
Spencer Levy
That's super cool, and I think that one word you didn't use was cool because, you know, people say, oh, it's variety, it's functional, it's safe, and these are all the things that are, we're thinking about. But I must add, I walked through the forum and it is cool and it...
Valerie Garrett
It is pretty cool.
Spencer Levy
You see that? Don't, be afraid to say that! Add that to the adjectives. Add that to the adjectives.
Valerie Garrett
We specialize in doing extraordinary things with ordinary materials. It's what we're good at in human centered design. So that's what you experienced when you came through this space.
Spencer Levy
Terrific. So, Todd, you've been working with the bank for a while, but you also worked on other accounts like it. What do you think is the distinguishing characteristic of how Fifth Third’s approaching workplace versus, say, some of our other accounts?
Todd Pardon
Well, I think different financial institutions are in different parts of their rationalization of all of the workplace experience changes that we've seen over the past several years. Valerie and I were talking yesterday about, you know, one of the things I really appreciate about Fifth Third is, I think they were very early to grab onto the experience and the importance of that with the employees that probably enabled and powered you through the COVID time period because you were already well equipped for some of those changes. I think a lot of the financial institutions that were on that same arc fared very, very well. And in fact, this propelled them, accelerated their business plans, and they're leading the race a little bit. But I also think we've seen a dramatic shift in just the expectation of employees. Everybody's been very conscious of what is it like to work in an environment? What is it like for wellness in an environment? The past several years have been a giant education. And so I think we're seeing our clients really focus on that elevated expectation as they do return to the office and have a higher level for themselves.
Spencer Levy
Let's now turn to you, Maureen, to talk about wellness in the context of workplace design, because it's not just things you do for people under the wellness banner. It's the way you design the space. Talk about how the two come together.
Maureen Balent
So I love the new space. I love the new atrium. It's fabulous in the fact that it's beautiful and it's also cool, fun and using this space, we have a group that's getting together on a regular basis talking about how do we make it more fun or more interesting or different than what it was before the pandemic? So we have tunes on Tuesday, so there's a musician in the atrium just having tunes, right? That's something we never had before. But it also helps us to promote other things that we're doing. So people are curious, like, what's going to happen next? We had a bale of hay in the lobby the other day where you could get selfies taken. And we're really building upon that from a wellness standpoint. So we use the atrium now as a place to catch people's eye on wellness activities. So we had a big table with balloons, advertising. The mammography van is outside at Fountain Square. We have appointments available. Sign up. We had a sellout crowd. We had flu shots, sellout crowd. We've never had a sellout crowd before. Biometric screening. Somebody's taking your blood right around Halloween. That's a little scary, right? And sellout crowd again. I don't know if it's because the space is so welcoming or easy to have those on tide events. So people are walking in that would have never seen us before, maybe in a conference room.
Valerie Garrett
Yeah, I'll riff on that for a moment if I could, Spencer. Maureen's talking about wellness. She's also talking about culture, and space as a proxy for culture. And so you can't extricate the two from one another. When you activate space, I mean, space is both a catalyst and a supporter of culture. But then when you come behind a completed space and you activate it that way, you're perpetuating something really positive for people. And so I think what we're talking about here is, there's a huge cultural element to this that you just can't deny.
Spencer Levy
And there's the old expression that culture beats strategy is, I think that's the terminology.
Valerie Garrett
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Spencer Levy
There we go. Thank you for that correction!
Valerie Garrett
There's a reason why Drucker said that. I mean, it's immensely powerful.
Thomas Neltner
And I think to add to that, Spencer, just one other comment to the wellness pieces, and you'll see this when we talk about some of our branches and our next gen, which we'll get to in a minute, which is environment around our customers and employees. But the transparency. I mean, there's a reason why the entire front of this building is glass. There's a reason why natural light on every single floor is so bright, almost like you're working outside. So very, very much like a lot of companies have done. But we believe that health and wellness, a lot about bringing that natural light in and having that free flow of people moving around the floor, moving about the campus and that mobile worker, we've talked about that. So I would add that to the wellness piece.
Maureen Balent
And daylight and movement just brightens your day, right? You just have to feel better, more energized. And then sitting at your desk, dark lights, just typing by yourself if you're out and about, even if you're just going to a copy machine, I've learned, or printer, they've put them intentionally two-on-a-floor. So you can't just get up and take seven steps, you have to walk. And it helps us with not using as much paper as well. But there's actually steps and socialization that happens when you go to print something that maybe wouldn't have happened before. But I'm all about movement, light and socializing. That just is mentally fulfilling to most people. I won't say all, but most.
Valerie Garrett
It's an innovation catalyst too, right? Like, Iinnovation 101 is serendipitous encounters, they tend to be a catalyst for innovation. So if I get up and I see somebody as I'm moving about that I wouldn't have otherwise seen. Oh, Maureen, that thing we were talking about last week, let's connect on that. And suddenly you have this impromptu conversation that is, by the way, a meeting of sorts. So it's one of these behaviors that we engage in every day that if you're sitting in one place for 8 hours and it's a desk, and first of all, you're going to hit the diminishing returns point pretty quickly that way because it's not a productive way to work for that long. One of my favorite studies for workplace was published, and it’s old now. It was published in 2014 in Fast Company and an organization had studied its top 10% of, like, high performers. So their top 10% of producers. And what they found is for every 47 minutes of what we would think of conventionally as work, those people were spending 17 to 19 minutes doing other things. Maybe they were planning their next vacation, maybe they were on social media, maybe they were going to get coffee, any number of things. Maybe they were taking a break and reading a book like literally, you know, something for pleasure. And when you do the math, their top performers only did conventional work for about 6 hours a day. And these are, again, the top performers. What that tells me is all those other things are big contributors to productivity. They're contributors to work. So you take a block of time and you're not doing one thing for the whole day. How long has it been since we did one thing all day long? It's been decades since that was the reality.
Spencer Levy
To summarize what you were suggesting, Valerie. Productivity is the most important word in our business. How do you make people not more efficient but more productive? Productivity drives the top line. Efficiency drives costs and other things like that. And it's different depending upon the type of employee you have, so, um....
Valerie Garrett
And the type of work they're engaged in on a given day.
Spencer Levy
So, Thomas, how do you look at those two concepts? Productivity versus efficiency, or do you look at them together?
Thomas Neltner
I think you look at them together. I then want to go back to efficient. It may be, let's talk about both. Let's talk about efficient, me walking through the atrium or an open environment and being in person and seeing two or three different people that I haven't been able to get a hold of. And it's very efficient because I asked Maureen a question, she answered it, I'm done, it's quick. I didn't leave her a message. I didn't have to call her back. She calls me back.
Maureen Balent
He didn't give me an email, again.
Thomas Neltner
Again, sorry.
Spencer Levy
And it was serendipitous.
Thomas Neltner
It was serendipitous. So, yes. Is that efficient? That's much more efficient, at least if I'm here and I'm running into many people. From the productivity standpoint, we talk a lot about productivity. And during the pandemic, we may mention that in coming here. The pandemic, I think people pride themselves on, they were productive at home. We were so productive, we left the office. You can do that in a crisis. How you behave in a crisis is different than when there's not a crisis. And I think there was a false sense of, hey, we were so productive. Everybody can just work from home. Well, that worked for a time being, I think having people back, I believe, feeding off others. And we talk about people wanting to come back to work. I mean, think about how you learn. You learn from observation. Most of your learning comes from observation, whether when you're a kid to see how your father behaved or your mother behaved or your brother didn't behave, and you saw that, but you also saw it in the workplace. We have told our people we have an obligation to not only teach our coworkers, learn from our coworkers, and you can't do that sitting at home. You can't do that not being in a room. You can't do that in exchange of ideas and you feed off each other. And so I think productivity and efficiency are linked. But I think being in person and really have an obligation to meet other people and to learn from other people is how we learn. And I think you're going to miss that if you're not in the office you're going to miss it. And I think there's going to be a set of people they're going to be behind because they're not in the office. There are some remote jobs. Got that. And we can talk about that. But I think people that are in the office are going to learn more. They're going to advance their career more, and they're going to be able to teach other people and pass it on.
Maureen Balent
And it's going to help their emotional and social well-being.
Thomas Neltner
Yes.
Maureen Balent
Being around people is important and having conversations and going to lunch and all of those things. Being with people is great for your well-being.
Valerie Garrett
You know, we're talking about productivity, efficiency, face to face. And there's another word that's popped up a couple of times, which is critical to the whole conversation, and that's communication. In a time where we're talking about flexibility, when I think about what's changed, I often like to think about what hasn't changed as a measure for what has changed. The reality is people have always wanted flexibility. Technology has enabled us, but the idea, I mean, any executive who believes that people were in the office five days a week, 8 to 5 before 2020 is probably, there's some dilution there, right. Our batch data indicated that that was not real. And I think the need for flexibility has just become absolutely undeniable for leaders. They just cannot ignore the desire for it and the need for it anymore. The message that I've sent to my team is threefold. One is communicate. I don't mandate that anybody be here certain days a week or a certain number of days or certain times, but communicate. The entire conversation around flexibility gets much easier if you're producing and communicating proactively. The second thing is be mindful of your peers. We have a team calendar and I asked the team to forecast a week or two out when you're going to be traveling in the office, out of the office on PTO. There are three or four categories that we use. And what I say to them is like, look, if you're looking at the calendar and you have flexibility next week of the days you can be on site and you notice that there's a day that two or three others are going to be on site pick that day. Otherwise, you're coming in. It's like a mausoleum. There's no energy. You need human hum when you're here to help energize you and help you be productive. And then the third thing and this, Thomas, you spoke to this a little bit. Don't be too scarce. It’s hard to position you in an organization if you're not communicative and you're never around. So I think there's a way to leverage flexibility and lead in a way that encourages flexibility. And all of that culminates in something that I think is really important, and that's wisdom. The wisdom to know when you need to be on site because it's important. We could have done this podcast on Zoom. I've seen podcasts done remote. You came here because you felt like it was important. I report to Thomas. Thomas likes to see me and I like to see him. We have a lot of creative conflict. I mean, a lot. Sometimes we have actual conflict, conflict, but most of the time, most of the time it's creative conflict and it gets very lively. It is wise for me to be on site, and there are days when I come on site just for that meeting because it's important to me to connect with my leadership in that way. And I know it's important to him.
Thomas Neltner
Well to go with that, Valerie, I think the other thing we talked about is, you cannot replace nonverbal communication. And I can look at you sometimes, Valerie, and say, this is not going to work.
Maureen Balent
This is a real conflict.
Thomas Neltner
This is a real conflict. I can look at Spencer today and he's telling me, cut it off because you're rambling.
Valerie Garrett
Well, what did I say to you just this morning?
Thomas Neltner
I can't see that on a conference call.
Valerie Garrett
We had a conversation just this morning and I looked at Thomas and I said, I don't know what your face means right now.
Maureen Balent
So I think it's important. You know, we talked about remote. We've talked about being in person. We have to remember that half of our population has been face to face with the customer.
Valerie Garrett
That's right.
Maureen Balent
Or at their normal desk through the pandemic. We can't forget about that important, half of our company never went home. They were there when people needed them the most. And we did a lot of things to help them, you know, buying lunch, special plastic to protect. But in the end, they should be our heroes, right? They were here when we needed them the most. And so we can't forget that when we're talking about being as an onsite or in-person company.
Spencer Levy
Let's go out into the field now, shall we? And let's talk about the branches. First of all, how many branches do you have? What's the big picture strategy? And then let's get into the real estate.
Thomas Neltner
Yeah, so we have 1,080 branches and again, our shift over the last, Spencer, has been shifting to the southeast. The growth is there, the income’s there, the activity is there. And I'm talking about places like Charlotte and Raleigh and Greenville where you see a lot of activity. Florida and Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville. Over the last four years, we have built over 100 branches in those areas and we continue to do that. So our shift has been on building branches in the southeast. We subsequently have been doing two and three for ones in other markets where we're oversaturated with branches. So you'll see a swapping out of the Midwest to the Southeast. But our next gen branch is what we call, and I'll let Valerie talk a little bit about it, is, we think top of the market out there. Smaller branch, 1900 square feet, 2400 square feet, 2800 square feet. That's down from average of 4500 to 5000 square feet. So much smaller footprint and really trying to put them in the best areas. We can get into that a little bit, but I want to talk about the design a little bit. When you talk about a little bit of our next gen design, especially around transparency and what we're doing and how we service our customers.
Valerie Garrett
The bank believes that design thinking is a strategic tool and that design research using those methods creates a really nice foundation for creating a really good experience. So we realized a couple of things about five years ago. One was we had an entirely undifferentiated experience, so you could take images, and we've done this for presentations where images of a half a dozen different banking environments and say, okay, pick out our, and you can't. Ours could be anybody and anybody's could be hours at that time. So a completely undifferentiated experience. And then also the understanding that banking has changed over the last hundred years, but the way we bank has not changed in 100 plus years. So if you think about the days of George Bailey, who I understand is a fictional character, obviously, but like that's how banking was done. The idea that you had this all knowing, all powerful banker on one side of the desk and these people who needed to borrow money on the other side of the desk. And it was not an equitable experience. So we did a significant amount of research with both customers and our internal teams here that serve our customers. And we asked our customers about their perceptions around banking. And there was a time where the perceptions around banking was pretty negative. So if you think about the last time we had a major market downturn, banking was kind of a culprit. I mean, not kind of. They just were. And so the perceptions around banks was pretty dismal. What they told us were things like, you have a lot of back-of-house space and we don't know what you do back there. Translation, we don't necessarily trust that whatever's going on back there is for our benefit. Essentially, what customers told us is, we want to learn. We want to be empowered. We want to know that what you're doing is actually for our benefit. And we want that transparency that Thomas talked about. And so out of all that research came some insights that gave us, essentially, the next gen design that you see in our new branches. And we've built about 70 so far throughout the footprint. They're very open. The feedback that we get from customers is, that my favorite is, this doesn't feel like a bank, which is a home run for me, because one of the major insights was we need to be the “un-bank”. Customers don't want to walk in and feel like they have felt doing banking for the last hundred years. They want a space that is theirs. And so when a customer comes in and says, this doesn't even feel like a bank, my immediate response is, yes, we did it, and we get that over and over and over again.
Spencer Levy
So for the benefit of our listeners who are not movie buffs, George Bailey was the lead character in Frank Capra's “It's a Wonderful Life”. I won't give you a spoiler, but there is a happy ending in the movie, notwithstanding the travails of George Bailey. But just so people are aware of that. The other thing that I was thinking about when you said next generation, I was thinking about the new movie “Maverick”, the new “Top Gun”, and talk all about next generation fighters. Is that what you're building here?
Thomas Neltner
That's what we’re building. Next generation fighters. Branches that look unlike anything else you've seen in the best locations with the best visibility, transparency and glow. We've got this thing called glow. If you look at our branches, especially, obviously at night, they glow. They stand out. They are unique, and it's really cool. It's cool to see. The feedback we get from employees and customers, it's just been outstanding. So our new branch design, we're very excited about smaller footprint, but to Valerie’s point, it gives the customer the choice where they want to work. Whether it's at a high top table, a booth. Believe it or not, the booth is the most popular place for people to sit, and you would think they would want to be behind closed doors. But the feedback we got from them is that when they're behind closed doors, they may be in trouble.
Valerie Garrett
Or you're trying to sell.
Thomas Neltner
Or you're trying to sell something. So they like the booth, so they can go to the transaction bar, they can go to a table or they can sit on the couch. So there's a variety of places to service our customers within the branch, and it's mobile and it's almost that concept. When we sort of looked at other retailers, that concierge type service has just been outstanding.
Valerie Garrett
Yeah, the reality is that we're in an experience economy. We have been for some time and so we're not being compared to anybody's last best banking experience. We're being compared to their last best experience, period. Could be their last best boutique hotel visit. Their last best restaurant experience. It could be anything.
Spencer Levy
Let's go back to the concept of smaller and first of all, I can't help myself, but I will quote a book that I liked. I do send it to some people. It's called Small Is Beautiful, and it's by E.F. Schumacher from the early 1970s. It talks about people wanting less and it actually makes them happier. Are we going back to the future, so to speak? Of what banking, I bet you bank branches of 50 years ago were smaller, then they got bigger. Now we're getting smaller. Is that a fair way to put it?
Thomas Neltner
I think it's a fair, Spencer, way to put it. I think the interesting thing, I was listening to recently, a podcast on NPR and I don't know the author of the podcast but the research was showing that you get to a point where after three or four choices, that's all you really need. If you go into a supermarket and there's 18 different types of ketchup, you almost walk away because you can't make that decision, your mind can't distinguish between 18 different types of ketchup, as an example. When it gets too small, we found that when we walked into a traditional branch, and here's the kicker, all the back office and the offices was really taking up majority of the branch. And if you think about it, a customer would come in, walk up to the teller line. They were only in about 300 square feet of space, although we had all this other space for people in offices and other back office things. So what we said is, let's open it up, let's make it smaller, what do we really need to do in it? And let's give variety and choice, and I think that has paid off dramatically. Now there's a real estate side to that, also. If you build a 5000 square foot branch, you put it on two acres of property. If you build a 1900, you put it on .87 an acre. So there's a financial piece of this too, and positioning. So that's both small but smaller, you know, we've gone there.
Spencer Levy
Todd, let’s come back to you for a moment. So we're talking now about smaller. Is that something that our other clients are talking about, too? Not just because it's a better design, but also for cost savings?
Todd Pardon
Yeah, we've done a lot of cost consultancy and compared just retail in general, but specifically for banks. And as they're looking at that footprint, one of the greatest ways to save on your real estate cost, both your actual construction cost, but also just that actual operating cost and cost to buy is by reducing, actually in quantity, the amount that you're doing. Something else we haven't covered today, too, is just the changing nature of electronic banking and the impact that that has on drive-thrus, as an example. For those who have done any banking in Texas, there could be 10, 15 drive-thrus in a Texas bank back in the day. And with electronic banking and some of the changes they're in, we don't have to build as many drive-thrus, and that's probably a part of the changes that we're seeing now, too. So I think it is about rationalizing the space and pulling out the essential elements, and I think it's about creating that experience that is much closer to the customer. With other clients, one of the things that we were learning is we want to get our people from behind a wall. So when you walk into the lobby, there's not necessarily a barrier any longer, but it's literally somebody with a tablet saying, how can I help you today? And even to your education point, how can I show you how to do this electronically, just as you're coming in here for me to help you do this? You also can do a lot of this yourself. And customers, I think, appreciate that more and more as well.
Valerie Garrett
There's another critical component to that openness, which is, it's a huge deterrent to bad actors. So if you come into the bank branch with nefarious intent and our people are moving about the branch and the moment you walk in the door, you're greeted with a friendly face and you're welcomed. You are no longer anonymous, immediately. We have had people with what we assume is nefarious intent, walk in, be greeted and walk back out and leave. And so the security you would think it's a little counterintuitive. You would think that that openness would give you a higher risk. And it doesn't. It's the opposite.
Spencer Levy
Let's talk about drive-thrus. What is the math, the logic, more or less? How do you assess your customers on, are we going to have more drive-thrus versus less?
Thomas Neltner
Well, I'll start out. I think drive-thrus became, Spencer, extremely valuable two years ago, because the branches, they depended on them. Our branches that had drive-thrus were just critical. We have had a hard time in some jurisdictions about getting drive-thrus. They don't want to drive-thrus and all the backup. But in the pandemic, it absolutely saved us in a case because people didn't want to get out of their car, the convenience of it, they wanted to be able to go through. So we actually, statistically, working with the retail team, those branches performed better with drive-thrus. They absolutely do.
Valerie Garrett
There's been a conversation in recent years about, is the bank branch going away? Our research shows that the answer is no. That even if, I'll say 98% of the time I’m banking on my ubiquitous rectangle that we call phone, I still want a place that I can go to see a human being if I need to. So the branch is not dead. Todd is absolutely right. And Thomas as well that we're building fewer drive-thrus. But in the places where for some reason we can't have one, it gets noticed and we get customer feedback almost immediately like, well, you don't have a drive-thru here. There's a convenience factor. Sometimes they're coming in. But what we find too is a lot of times people are coming in for other things. They need consultation, they need advice, they need notary service, they need, I mean, any number of other things that we can do at the bank. They need education, they need to learn something. And so there's a real consultative depth to the work that our teams do in the branch environment. But if somebody is coming for a quick transaction, the drive thru is often what they default to.
Spencer Levy
So let's wrap up this portion of the conversation on real estate and we're going to make wellness the star of the show. Thomas, you've been doing this for a very long time and we've been trying to get the wellness thing right. I would love to know, through your years of experience, what's worked and what might not work.
Thomas Neltner
It's interesting we had this conversation about the pandemic, and one of the things our CEO, Tim Spence, was talking about. I was talking to him and I said to him, he said, How do we get people back to work? And I said, you get people back to work by taking away the excuses of why they wouldn't come back. So can they get their dry cleaning done? Yes, they can. We talked about concierge earlier and we can talk about that. We talked about parking. Can we offer discounted parking? We do that. So we took away that excuse. We're talking about fitness center. Can we take that away from it? Can we put a fitness center? And it's not one amenity, it's multiple amenities. How can we make our workplace similar to home, that you can work in the kitchen, you work in the den, you can work outside. So from a real estate perspective, how do we prepare the workplace to have multiple places to work?
Valerie Garrett
We've done some benchmarking recently around gyms in particular, and corporate gyms that are successful serve about 10% of the population when you do the numbers. So if you've got 1000 people on a campus and you're building a gym for 500 people, it's probably never going to feel full. If you build it for about 10, 12% of the population, that's about the number of people that are going to rotate through on a given day and are going to use it regularly. The other thing I would share is not only is it dollars on your paycheck, if you do certain things for wellness, not only is it giving you tools to understand where your fitness is, but it's pretty gamified. So it's app based and parts of it are and you get points. And those points equate to dollars that you can spend in the shop. And it's for good stuff. I'm saving right now for a bonfire for my patio and it's like 50,000 points and I'm halfway there. So the gamification of it is very engaging. Last year I think I used all my points and I cashed them in for gift cards and all of my stocking stuffers for my kiddo were purchased through all the exercise I did all year long.
Thomas Neltner
And it's funny, I talked to some friends about this over the weekend, and they're like, Fifth Third pays you to be healthy? I’m like, yeah. What do they pay you? And I went through the program. They pay me $1800 to wear this watch and be healthy. And they're like, they pay you to be healthy? They kept saying that. I said yeah. So it's interesting.
Valerie Garrett
I think one of the best points of view that came out of all the workplace research over the last couple of years is that all of the places you work are part of an ecosystem. It's not one place or two places or a third place. Work is a thing that you do, and you do it within an ecosystem of spaces and places.
Thomas Neltner
There's also a psychological around wellness. Most people want to belong to something. They want to feel part of something. And it's very hard to feel a part of something when you're at a distance. We talk about culture, how important culture is. Culture is important because we want people to feel like they belong to something, and I think that makes them more productive. So that's how we look at it.
Valerie Garrett
So much of wellness is in the mind, and I don't say that in the negative way of like, well, it's all in your head. It's not bad. It's about the things that you're thinking about. It's the things that are weighing on your mind. And I think that one of the primary opportunities we have is not a space opportunity. It's a leadership opportunity. Leaders supporting people, they become a big lever for wellness. So if I know that, if I say to Thomas, hey, I've got to scoot because I need to go pick up my kiddo and I'll be back online and you can call me in the car. And he's like, well, of course, go do it. And I know that there's not a ramification for that. It's not going to come back and bite me later, the anxiety that I don't carry is not insignificant. That's a big deal. And it's a huge contributor to not only balance and flexibility, but a big contributor to wellness. When people are worried that just doing life is going to get them in trouble or limit their career, the stress and anxiousness that that creates is really detrimental.
Maureen Balent
I also was just kind of thinking about kind of stress and being at work. I think people, as they're coming into the office, they're now getting that buffer on their commute home that they didn't have before. And sometimes I think maybe a separation of it not feeling the same lets you relax a little bit as opposed to your home and your workplace feeling identical. It's an interesting concept, for sure, but you're starting to hear that, you know, just wind down time in rush hour traffic sounds weird, but just, you know, the value of that separation, that separation gives you a time to just take a deep breath.
Thomas Neltner
I think one of the things we heard during the pandemic is there was no separation.
Maureen Balent
Just no separation.
Thomas Neltner
I think, yeah, people tended to work more and they couldn't shut it down and you just kept working and you couldn't stop. And there wasn't a breaking point and there wasn't. And it's interesting about interruptions.
Maureen Balent
Because he knew you couldn't go anywhere, so you were at home and you were available.
Thomas Neltner
I mean, there is a fatigue of being on eight Zoom calls.
Maureen Balent
Yes, yes.
Thomas Neltner
Zoom calls all day. That's fatigue, that's mentally burned out of being on a call after call after call after call. I believe the separation is important. Maybe I'm old school. I think the separation, and I can go home and I can focus on my family and not worry about that next email I got to get and I can know I'm leaving work and I'm coming back. Doesn't mean I don't sign on at night late, but I've got a separation and I'm not doing. When I was working from home the limited time that I did, I felt like the day just never ended. In fact, you know what the comment was, Spencer, says life is like a series of Wednesdays. Every day was a Wednesday. There was no difference because you were working. If you were in the same environment every day, doing the same thing.
Valerie Garrett
You have no bookends.
Thomas Neltner
Series of same days.
Maureen Balent
Every day is Wednesday.
Thomas Neltner
Everyday is a Wednesday. That's what we used to say.
Valerie Garrett
It was interesting that there was this brief moment where people said, oh, this is great, I don't have the commute.
Thomas Neltner
Yes. Yes.
Valerie Garrett
And it very quickly turned into, oh, my God, I don't have the commute. Like, it just means I roll out of bed and I work, and I work until I can't work anymore. And then I think about should the workplace be like home? There are parallels that are really important that speak to engagement. So should we replicate home? Not necessarily. But if you think about what's on your walls at home, it's probably pictures of your family. It's probably pictures of your favorite places, the places you vacation together. These are artifacts that are indicative of your family culture, the things that are important to you. We have artifacts here that are indicative of our corporate culture. They're very engaging. The graphic activation in our spaces is one of the ways that we engage team members and engaged team members are the engine of a successful organization. And so I think there are parallels that are pretty important to incorporate into the workplace. That doesn't mean that it has to replicate home.
Spencer Levy
So we only have a few minutes left. So I'm going to cover a couple of topics in a little bit of a rapid fire fashion, if you don't mind. So we've had several episodes on different aspects of wellness, including air quality and water quality. And so we had two authors from Harvard, Joe Allen and John Macomber wrote the book Healthy Buildings, talking about how having a healthy building not only makes you happier, but actually improves your cognitive ability. How much does that go into your thinking?
Valerie Garrett
So we have a gentleman in our property management group who leads the charge for mechanicals right down to the particulates in the air that we breathe in our spaces. He is very good at it. He is a great partner. And in fact, when we wanted to start to use scent activation in our spaces, we reached out to him and said, How do we do this? And his immediate response was, You know what? I need to do a study to see what that's going to do to particulates in the air. So IAQ, indoor air quality, is very important to us. We have somebody that is paying attention to that for us on a regular basis, on an ongoing basis. And multisensory activation is important to us as well.
Spencer Levy
Isn't it true, this is not like a cross examination, but isn't it true that Fifth Third has a proprietary scent that you have in your bank branches?
Valerie Garrett
That is correct, sir. Smells like success.
Spencer Levy
Or from “Apocalypse Now”, smells like victory. But what does it smell like?
Valerie Garrett
So in our atrium, part of the goal of our atrium space has to do with understanding our geographic location and proximity to our community. Part of where we are geographically is on Fountain Square. Fountain Square has a fountain on it, and that's a water element. And so we have created a digital water element in our atrium, and we have what smells like fresh water, smells like the air after it rains. When you walk into our atrium. In the branches, there is a blend of scents that is intended, if any of the listeners know anything about aromatherapy, this will resonate, but a blend of scents that tend to engender trust and openness. And so it is a unique blend that is specifically crafted for Fifth Third to achieve that idea that we want to empower customers and enable them to reach their goals. And we want a deep, trusting relationship with our team.
Thomas Neltner
So I have to add to that. When we talked about scent, we had not done scent before until just about three or four years ago. And I've got this idea, and Val and I talked about it. We kind of push this with the organization. I was at the Napa Valley Inn in Napa Valley and I don’t know if anyone’s ever been to Napa Valley, but it's beautiful. And we were out there about five years ago, and my wife and I walked in and the scent in that hotel was so good. I mean, I'm like, this woke me up and the sound along with it, it was like calming and it was so good. And I came back, I remember having a conversation with you and I said, we have to, with the atrium and with our branches, have to experiment with how do we track all the senses, whether it be smell or it be sound. And so we have music in our branches as well. We have music in our branches, and we also have sent in our branches that we're experimenting with. And we also have an atrium and it gives a certain vibe, it gives a certain feeling. But the scent and the sound is important.
Spencer Levy
Well, we're just about out of time here, but I will just go around the table, lightning round style. Any final thoughts on the topic of wellness and real estate? And maybe Todd, your final thoughts?
Todd Pardon
Well, my final thought is how awesome is it that we're having this conversation, where we're talking about issues that bring out the best versions of our most important resources? And who would have thought 15 years ago when we were talking about bricks and sticks, that today we're talking about all the things that we're talking about today and how important that is to our most important resources. So I'm excited about where we've come in just a few years, and I'm really even more excited about where we head in the future with this. And so I thank you for including me as part of this.
Spencer Levy
Thomas, final thoughts on wellness and real estate?
Thomas Neltner
I will say what I said before. I think if we can create an environment where people enjoy working and they do their best work or their career while they're here, that's what we're trying to do.
Spencer Levy
Valerie, final thoughts on wellness and the workplace?
Valerie Garrett
I'll go back to leadership and just say if you are a leader in your organization, your contribution to the wellness of the people that report to you is not insignificant and you need to take it seriously. You are a tremendous lever for the way that they experience corporate culture. You have the power to create a really positive micro culture within that, and you have a tremendous ability to affect the mental wellness of the people that work on your team. And so I think the leadership opportunity that we face right now in 2022, going into 2023 very soon, is significant and powerful. And if we do it well, nothing but good things on the horizon.
Spencer Levy
Great. And then as our resident wellness expert, Maureen, the final thought.
Maureen Balent
My final thought is, I learned a lot about real estate today. I spend a lot of time with Thomas on various things, but I learned a lot about real estate and maybe how we might partner in new and different ways than what we were already doing. So it was exciting and very cool.
Spencer Levy
See that. Our new favorite word. On behalf of The Weekly Take, I want to thank our friends from Fifth Third Bank for talking to us, starting with Thomas Neltner, the Head of Enterprise Work Services, Fifth Third Bank. Thomas Thank you.
Thomas Neltner
Thank you, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
Maureen Balent, Senior Vice President and Director of Benefits, Fifth Third Bank. Thank you, Maureen.
Maureen Balent
Thank you, Spencer and team.
Spencer Levy
Thank you. Todd Pardon, Managing Director CBRE. Todd, well done.
Todd Pardon
Enjoyed it. Thank you.
Spencer Levy
And last but certainly not least, Valerie Garrett, Director of Workplace Design, Fifth Third Bank. Thank you, Valerie.
Valerie Garrett
Thank you so much, sir. It's been a pleasure.
Spencer Levy
For more on Fifth Third Bank and the topics we discussed, there's a vault of additional information and content on the CBRE website. The Weekly Take’s Home Page features more about our guests and the show. That’s CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. And, hot off the presses, you will find wider perspectives on workplace trends, multifamily trends and retail trends in a new global piece from CBRE Research called the Live-Work-Shop Report. It's available at CBRE.com/GlobalReport. So feel free to check out all of that, share the program, and remember to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen. Thanks for joining us. We'll be back next week with more real estate stories and business insights. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
.jpg)
