Chris Burke Podcast Transcript
Chris Burke joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Chris Burke. Chris Burke is the founder of HybridHero, a workplace operating platform used by enterprise organizations across 40-plus countries, including Dyson, BMW, and Pepsi. He works with COOs, CFOs, and senior leadership teams to solve one of the most expensive and least understood problems in modern business: hybrid work that reduces productivity, increases cost, and lacks operational visibility.
Chris brings an operator-led perspective, having built and scaled both a global consulting firm and a SaaS platform. His work focuses on turning hybrid work from a policy into a measurable optimized system across workforce behavior, office utilization, and real estate cost. Where most conversations stay theoretical, Chris focuses on execution and how workplace decisions translate into financial outcomes, performance, and efficiency at scale.
Well, good afternoon, Chris. Welcome to the show.
Chris Burke: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it, and I appreciate the fact that you stayed up super late tonight there in Singapore. I know you travel between London, US, Australia, Singapore. It’s, it’s amazing what you do. So again, thank you so much for traversing all these time zones.
And Chris, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump into your first question. Your path is really unusual. You’re an accountant by training who founded Brickenden, a London consultancy, as a two-person shop and scaled it into an award-winning global firm. HybridHero actually grew out of Brickenden’s internal innovation incubator in 2018, two years before COVID forced the whole world to rethink the office.
What made you see the hybrid work problem coming before the pandemic, and how did a consultant, consulting firm end up building a SaaS platform?
Chris Burke: Yeah, great, great question, Brian. So, so in 2015, we acquired a smaller consultancy that had within it a, an arm that actually built hybrid working software. They did desk booking, meeting rooms door access systems.
And from that, we sort of looked at that, and we thought that there was something in it. So we were watching some of the large banking clients in London, and they were doing things that were probably not the greatest. They were saying, “First come, first serve. You can, you can get a desk if you come into the office.”
And we saw people were being disadvantaged, particularly working parents and, and working mothers in the main who, you know, there’s horror stories of them having to sit in Starbucks for the day because they couldn’t get a seat in the office in one of these, these large global banks. So we thought if people could, could schedule and plan and had some more structure and organization around their team as they…
when they were coming into the office, that would be something that’d be really useful. So in 2018, we set up a, a, an incubator. Within the incubator, we set up a project, and we, we built this, and we went live with our first clients in, in 2019, which was yeah, well before COVID took hold. But we found it was getting great traction and, and great outcomes for people back then who were finding that the biggest stress if you were having hoteling or hot desking, as it was called back then was, was actually turning up at the office and just not knowing where to sit.
And, and being able to, to, to know that and being able to schedule it really, really helped, helped people out
Brian Thomas: Amazing. And I appreciate you sharing the backstory, but the fact that you were able to look beyond and really innovate in this area. I know, a lot of things have come out since the pandemic, a lot of innovation, a lot of technology, et cetera because of that.
But y- again, you had the foresight to look across and see how you could truly make a difference with leveraging either it’s the technology or the process improvement to make things more efficient across the real estate space there. Chris, you deliberately worked with chief operating officers, CFOs, framing hybrid work in terms of financial outcomes rather than culture or employment– employee sentiment.
Why did you decide to anchor the conversation in cost and performance, and how does that change whether leadership actually acts on it?
Chris Burke: So, so what we looked at was we have organizations across the world, and if we look at professional service organizations b-b-but with most organizations, your second biggest cost is normally real estate.
It, some… There are some firms where it isn’t, but in the main, particularly professional services, consulting, law, legal, even pharmaceuticals and things, they’re looking at real estate right up there. And what we had or what we found is I think when people started to remote work some of the time, employers lost track of who’s in the office when and where and knowing exactly how much real estate they needed.
So you’ve got the second biggest cost, sometimes in the hundreds of millions or more, and people making decisions on, on guesswork. Now, that’s, that’s quite an uncomfortable thing for a COO or a CFO to admit. So what we did is we sort of put together a a, a structure where you actually can see, in real time how your, your teams are being used, how your property’s being used, sorry, and how your teams are performing within the property.
And that really helps on a number of different things. First of all, it helps on cost because you can make decisions on real data. But the other part of the question there, I think in, in culture and in employee sentiment, you also get that as an answer because you can say the partners of a law firm are not sitting in the same location as, as the associates.
So how do you mentor them? How do you grow them? How do you build those people up? But, but the main driver, you’re correct, is us getting utilization within the platform.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. And absolutely right. I mean, we, we’ve all been there now. We’ve got hybrid teams everywhere, and it is hard sometimes to manage that stuff.
You can’t just be guesswork, and that’s what it was initially. But you’re able to help CFOs and other execs in real time look at how the property and teams are being leveraged across the globe, across the company, and that’s very helpful, so thank you. Chris, HybridHero connects desk booking, meeting rooms, visitors, and parking with utilization analytics, but you emphasize that workforce behavior should drive how office space is designed, not the other way around.
What do you mean by that, and what surprising behavior patterns have you seen in the data once companies can finally see across a whole building?
Chris Burke: So I think what we’ve found is that we’ve found a lot of organizations… A-again, what, what you’ve said there is correct. We cover the, the whole spectrum of how your office is being used, and that gives you, gives you amazing analytics to look at into, into the behavior.
But also, we do things that make it very simple for you to collect data. So what we’ve looked at every, every interaction, be it a visitor, be it someone just turning up at the office, if you tap your phone, it basically will book you a desk, or it’ll check you into a desk if you’ve already booked it, or a meeting room or a parking spot, all those different things.
So we’ve looked at the behavior, and we found that people were looking at certain, certain structures and, and, and within their organization, everyone was coming and sitting on a certain floor. So we had a example of a, of a British client who found that one of their floors when they, when they implemented our system wasn’t being used at all.
And unfortunately, that floor had a, had a mold problem and an odor problem, so no one wanted to sit there. So, so the behavior was then showing that, that, that people needed to restructure or, or rebuild their, their office space based on that behavior. Other things that were found that would fit within that is the use of meeting rooms and breakout spaces where you might have made a space for six people, but the average use is one point two people each meeting, so therefore you might want to then, based on that behavior, change your office design to meet it.
So every organization is different. Everyone has different ways of working and, and running their organization. But I think this, this enabling and the, the visibility for, for managers of organizations to see how their space is being used, then they can make those decisions to make it better for their employees and therefore have a better working environment.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah, you absolutely, Again, you talked about to keep things simple here, it’s all that data that you collect. You provide dashboards. Sometimes there’s some reorg that needs to be done in these spaces, but including the use of meeting rooms and break rooms. But enabling that visibility for leaders and managers in how that space is utilized is so important, and it makes all the difference in the world.
So I appreciate those insights. And Chris, the last question of the day, you’ve been thinking about hybrid work since before it was mainst- the mainstream term, and now you serve enterprises in forty-plus countries. Looking five or even ten years out, where do you see the workplace heading? How will AI analytics and shifting expectations reshape the office, and what should leaders be building into their systems today to be ready for that?
Chris Burke: Yeah, again, great, great question. I, I think the biggest thing we’re gonna see is, is that hybrid working has become the norm. We’ve had this to and fro-ing, I think, in the years since COVID, where some people have forced everyone back to the office, some have gone fully remote, some are hybrid. But the hybrid working model has become a lot more established.
We’re gonna see more data-driven decisions, you know, increasingly looking at different processes in organizations, either having AI implemented or being managed by AI. But I think it’s not gonna be focused on how many days people are spending in the office. It’s gonna be working out who needs to be in the office, when and where and why, and who they need to be with when they’re, when they’re in the office.
And I think that creates a substantial opportunity for organizations. They can think about, I guess, the workplace management or, and how they’re, how they’re organizing their entire, entire company. And it may mean that, in the future, we’re, we’re really just deciding, what, what is the key, key parts we need to collaborate.
Because organizations are always gonna need people, and they’re always gonna need to figure out how to bring those people together for both the organizational objectives.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And y- talked to many CEOs here, Chris, and like you just, I’d say, emphasized, re-emphasized the biggest future is hybrid will be the norm.
We’re seeing that more and more. But the fact that we’re gonna have more data available at our fingertips because of the technology, we’ll be able to do more data-dri-driven decisions implement new processes. Obviously, scheduling the o- office space, workplace management tools, et cetera, is only gonna make it better.
So I really appreciate, again, the insights today. Chris, it was such a pleasure having you on this evening, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Chris Burke: Thank you very much, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Chris Burke Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
