Greg Owens is the owner of McCarthy Painting, a company that specializes in serving commercial and residential spaces in the San Francisco Bay area. McCarthy Painting was founded in 1969 and has since worked with influential companies like Google, Autodesk, First Bank, Abercrombie and Fitch, SPIN, FICO, and many more. Greg now works closely with building and facility managers to help create efficient and relaxing workspaces.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:
- COVID-19 and the new challenges it presents for facility managers
- How has the ongoing civil unrest affected the decisions that facility managers have to make?
- Defining building capacities and capabilities with the current limitations in place
- Greg talks about how companies have changed their approach to the space allotted to the janitorial staff
- Will the world enter a more autonomous era to reduce contamination in high-touch areas?
- How are companies using doctors, epidemiologists, and psychiatrists to provide a safer workspace for their employees?
In this Episode:
While we wait for the daily numbers of new COVID-19 cases to drop, we have started to think about what it takes to create better workspaces. With the new normal, building managers have unique challenges to address, from how to bring employees back to work to the appropriate spacing required when working in an office. Greg Owens, the owner of McCarthy Painting, helps to address some of the concerns and creative measures facility managers have taken to ensure the safety of the building occupants.
Join host, Greg Owens, and John Corcoran of Rise25 Media as they discuss how facility managers are tackling bringing employees back to a safe workspace. Greg shares his experience with handling painters as they create new and efficient workspaces and the concern about office space. He also advises on the necessary steps and concepts building managers will need to consider as they begin to re-open their office spaces.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Greg Owens on LinkedIn
- McCarthy Painting
- McCarthy Painting Contact No.: 415-383-2640
- McCarthy Painting Email Address: info@mccarthypainting.com
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25 Media
- IFMA
Sponsor for this Episode:
This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, where we serve commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay area.
We’ve been in business since 1969 and served companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie & Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more.
If you have commercial facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area and need dependable painters, visit us on the web at www.mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com, and you can check out our line of services and schedule a free estimate by clicking here.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Watching Paint Dry Podcast where we feature today’s top facility managers, property managers and property owners talking about the challenges and opportunities of managing hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate and how to beautify and improve their properties. Now, let’s get started with the show.
Greg Owens 0:32
Hello, it’s Greg Owens here with the Watching Paint Dry Podcast. I am the owner of McCarthy Painting and the host of this podcast where we talk to building owners property management companies and top facilities managers about their buildings and their facilities today, and this is unprecedented times it’s, like in the middle of the month of June 1 day of summer. Really like just getting started here. And there’s a tremendous amount of challenges and opportunities that building managers are facing. today. I have John Corcoran here, who has done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs, investors, and CEOs. And today, we’re just going to flip the script and John is going to interview me to kind of find out and learn about what the different facilities managers are doing out there in the world.
John Corcoran 1:31
Yes, Greg, and thanks for having me. And this is a really interesting time. You know, it’s, as you mentioned, it’s mid June 2020. We’re just kind of coming out of the shelter in place. The COVID-19 pandemic is still with us, but hopefully is fading a little bit. And what’s interesting is that nearly every element of business has had to rethink the way they operate, especially in person offices. And so facilities managers I think are being challenged in ways they’ve never been challenged before. So I want to, I know that you are on the front lines, talking to facilities managers all the time who come and consult with you, and ask your opinion about moving people around and how to constitute different physical space. And you’re having to do this for office space and retail, and for cafeterias, and janitorial and all these different categories of space, that that constitute the modern office space and modest works, but modern workspace, so I think it’d be really interesting to talk about what you’re hearing from facilities managers you’re talking to, but first before we get into that this episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting, which serves commercial and residential clients all around the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve been in business since 1969, and serve companies such as Google, Autodesk, Abercrombie and Fitch, FICO, First Bank, SPIN, and many more, if you have commercial facilities, and this is San Francisco Bay area, and need dependable painters. You can visit them on the web at mccarthypainting.com or email info@mccarthypainting.com. All right, Greg. So first of all, let’s just dive in, you know, you’re talking to facilities managers all the time. And there’s just so much that has changed and so much that they’re thinking about what are you hearing right now as you talk to facilities managers about what they’re thinking about, about how they’re, they need to change their spaces around in order to accommodate social distancing and allow people to work in a safe and clean environment.
Greg Owens 3:36
Yeah, it’s a fascinating, challenging time for facilities managers. And I have a tremendous amount of compassion for them. Because if you can imagine, John, they went from, you know, dealing with day to day of the building, right. And this is something like you’ve worked in office spaces and skyscrapers and in retail spaces, really as a consumer or as the You know, as an employee working at these things, really you don’t think about the building unless something goes wrong, like the air conditioner is not working right. And then you’re like, upset because you know, you’re hot. And that’s when you think about the building. But otherwise you flow through these spaces with no, no sort of thought whatsoever about how this entire infrastructure works until something goes wrong. And they were, they’re really good at their jobs because they really sort of everything sort of happens at night or on weekends. And when employees and people are not visiting them, but now they have to look at every single aspect of the building and come up with a plan. So, their jobs have changed completely. Like overnight, they have to think about, okay, how do we, you know, how are we going to bring employees back into this office space. We’ve had shared hot desks for so long and it’s been something very trendy right where you go And you actually don’t have a desk and you have a shared space. And, you know, you sit down and you just use that desk for the day. And you leave. Right? Well, there’s been a tremendous amount of talk, what I’m hearing is, you know, I think it’s around, like, in the San Francisco Bay area, 150 square feet per employee, right? Well, they’re having to look at like, okay, that’s way too tight. How do you keep social distancing in that? So maybe we need to actually expand our office spaces, right and have more room to have people and not do these shared desks? Or if we do due to shared desks, how are you going to sanitize them and that kind of thing, but every aspect of the building and we’ll get into a little bit more.
John Corcoran 5:44
Yeah, I mean, you know, it seems like in recent years, a lot of companies have balanced people working from home or many companies who even before COVID-19 had remote teams. And so you know, and also companies now with the fact that, you know, office rents have gone up and coworking has risen. And so a lot of companies have retracted their space. And now they’ve got to expand the amount of space that they have, in order to have their workforce have enough space. But you got to counterbalance that with how many people are going to continue to work from home or what, what rate so, you know, is it just a little is it early right now to be able to know these things? Or, you know, are companies making firm decisions right now?
Greg Owens 6:30
They’re, it’s the whole gamut, really, because each company has what like, like, there’s some companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook, here in the Bay area that pretty much announced that they’re not coming back into their office spaces until next year. 2021. Right, they just pushed it all back off and just took it off, off the board completely. There’s other companies it’s really interesting in that, you know, they’ve never really had a work from home policies and that kind of thing you think of like institutions like insurance or financial services and things like that they they’re so more sort of old school and they were coming in every day to the office spaces. And so when this Coronavirus showed up here and they all had to start working from home, they all had to adapt and start using new technology. And the facilities managers jobs then became a tremendous amount of like, what do you need at home? And how do we support you? And how do we get you, you know, the computers or chairs or desks and things that you can do so you can do your work and you can do it from home. And there was a lot of that in the beginning stages of this was a lot of that kind of challenges that they were facing, especially those companies that weren’t used to it. And then as like, companies that are looking at it, like okay, how do we come back to work like manufacturing is allowed again in California, so, you know, like, what, what does that look like? Like how do we come back into the building? How do we do this safely? How do we have social distancing? How do you know the bunch of buildings I was in a recently full room just filled with masks and other PPE sort of supplies, right? Because they had to acquire all those things. And it wasn’t easy. And they had to get it from, you know, multiple different vendors. And now all that’s all on the facilities, managers shoulders in a lot of ways of providing and figuring out how they’re going to do that plexiglas is being used a tremendous amount to divide up spaces. Right. You know, and then you put you put on top of that civil unrest, right, there were the protests, but then it was the rioting. That sort of happened also and you know, now you’ve got a board up all your windows and do a tremendous amount of other things just sort of protect the building in the space and the people that are coming to work.
John Corcoran 8:58
So, right, right, yeah, you bring up a great point and that’s another one we should touch on, as well as some of the unrest and how that maybe affects facilities managers and the decisions that they make. You know, it’s amazing how these things have an impact, like, you know, having to provide space for PPE or having to space out these lines when people wait in line for something like the elevators. So that was one area that’s affecting people when you have a skyscraper, and you have thousands of people or even hundreds of people that work in a skyscraper. Maybe you have to stagger out when people arrive, so that there isn’t a ton of people all at 8:30am are all at 9am all trying to get up at the same time because it’s not going to work that way. So talk a little bit about that concern also.
Greg Owens 9:09
Yeah, it’s like there’s like queuing up for the elevators even right now like with the trades that are going in and doing work so we used to just do all the work on nights and weekends but right now there hasn’t been anybody in the office spaces. So we’ve been in there but we’re some buildings are only allowing like three people to maximum maybe five people per elevator. And so we have to stagger even like us as the vendors that are coming in and working in these buildings, we have to stagger the trade start times, right? And so they’re looking at it like okay in a multi-tenant space where you need to stagger which company is going to come in first, you know, maybe it’s financial services coming in or super early in the morning. And then suddenly that maybe higher tech companies are coming back, you know, when they when they start coming back into the office, they might come in a little later or something like that, depending on the space, depending on each building has to look at what their capacity is for their elevators, do they have stairs? Is the stairs accessible to some of the you know, some of the employees which is very possible. But then there’s some buildings in San Francisco that are really old, right and the elevators were already a challenge and now it’s even much much much more so and so a lot of companies are also looking if they didn’t do something like Google where they’re like, Hey to the end of the year, you don’t have to work but they’re there or they’re looking at maybe it’s like 30% coming back, you know, in August right now, but even that it’s a moving target because as these as things change, they they’ll push things back as new information. And as you know, I think in California here, the COVID-19 numbers have gone up again. And so I think there’s a lot of conversations right now around like okay, let’s slow down coming back to work in person.
John Corcoran 11:38
Right, right. And you know, another one that is affecting people is temperature taking, you know, the need to take temperature before people enter the building. If you have a large enough space, then you’re going to need a space for that and I was even when I was outside of an Apple store a couple of weeks ago. And outside you know, we were in the sunlight, you know, not an overhead They had a bunch of security staff that was there taking people’s temperatures before they came in. Well, that was what they improvised on, eventually you’re gonna have to create something more of a permanent solution. So talk a little bit about that consideration. Also companies are having to think about, do we create a new space where temperature taking can take place?
Greg Owens 12:21
Yeah, yeah. And isn’t doesn’t this is where there’s a lot of opportunities. And you see entrepreneurial companies springing to action where they have like cameras that can take the temperature as you walk towards it. And if you’ve ever traveled outside of the United States to Asia, they already had these kinds of things set up like infrared cameras set up to sort of monitor people getting off a plane and see who’s got a fever and then pull those people aside and see what’s going on for them. Right. Um, but there’s some there’s a lot of considerations around that too, because, you know, in, in the United States, there’s a lot of legal aspects and things like that. They have to look at and There’s also like, what if you ride your bike that morning to work, now you have an elevated temperature as you’re going into these things and you want to get sent home because, you know, you’re, you’re trying to stay fit, I think. And it depends on the company. So that’s not as far as I know, that’s not a rule for all. Medical, not all companies are doing that. So it depends on I guess how much space they have and a company’s risk tolerance, right? whether or not they’re taking them temperatures as they go in and, and as you know, like, like, that doesn’t always, that’s not gonna always capture the asymptomatic people, right? And so there’s still going to be high levels of sanitizing and social, you know, 16 six feet apart and wearing the masks but I think by now everybody knows that wearing a mask is incredibly helpful and useful. In so and so and there’s supply again, right we can find them, we can get them and you can have them for your people.
John Corcoran 13:59
So, right now another one that has come up in your conversations is janitorial staff and the physical space attributable for the janitorial staff because everyone’s talking about we’re gonna have to do a lot more sanitizing a lot more cleaning a lot more frequently. So just giving the janitor staff a little closet at the end of the hallway is probably not going to do it anymore. It’s not going to cut it to talk about that.
Greg Owens 14:27
Yeah, like I’ve seen like they’re taking some office spaces and dedicating it towards like just cleaning supplies right so taking some of their square footage that is more precious now because they need it for for people and having it used for for supplies like sanitizing and that kind of thing and everything is taking longer. I kind of like to joke about it that we’re more like Island time. I don’t know if you’ve ever visited like, you know, like, you know, an island time you have to have a lot more people patience and tolerance when you’re when you’re doing things, right because, you know, the people were out surfing or something that morning and you know, and that’s that’s just like how life is right. And the same thing with getting anything done now is taking a lot longer like even us as vendors coming into the building we have to now which we never really had to think about before. But we have to look at: how do we stagger so we’re not on top of each other. And we don’t have too many people on one floor working around each other, right? Or, you know, even for ourselves, like there’ve been times where we’re inside a facility working and we’re painting, but then there needs to be a bunch of people that need to come through and move some furniture, we can’t all be in that space together. And so our employees have had to like, go take a lot longer lunch break, you know, like a two hour lunch break and, you know, go out to their vehicles and social distance and hang out for a little bit before they can get back in there. And so there’s a lot of those kinds of considerations. It seems like also, especially for the janitorial companies that they’re having to work so much harder, right? There’s a lot of pressure put on them to make sure that they sanitize all the touch points throughout the building, right. And so I can only imagine what’s going on for those companies. And those employees that are having to work a lot harder right now. Same thing for the facilities, managers, everybody’s having to work tremendous amounts more hours and overtime and doing things that they weren’t originally hired to do in a lot of ways.