Eric Horn is the Director of Workplace & Real Estate at Wish. He is also the CEO of CREW Consults, a consulting agency that helps startups expand and connect to the right vendors and maintenance managers in the industry. Eric has worked in facility management for over 15 years, with Opendoor, Optimizely, Airbnb, and many more.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Learn:
- Eric Horn talks about his personal life during the lockdown.
- How has COVID-19 changed building management?
- The new questions about office space.
- Eric looks to his co-workers in China for their input on facility management.
- New policies for returning to the office.
- Eric discusses some of the changes in how we approach personal health.
- What rights do employees have to personal information?
- Eric recalls what got him started with building management
- Eric explains the purpose of CREW Consults.
- Helpful resources for building managers.
In this Episode:
When a new challenge arises at your workplace, how do you pivot your team to face it? Many companies have dealt with the obstacles associated with COVID-19, whether a loss in office clientele or decreased profits. Eric Horn, Director of Workplace & Real Estate at Wish, as well as CEO of CREW Consults, has worked with countless vendors and co-workers to lead the charge on understanding how to get their employees back to work while maintaining a clean and safe environment.
Greg Owens, host of the Watching Paint Dry Podcast, interviews Eric Horn, Director of Workplace & Real Estate at Wish, as well as CEO of CREW Consults, as they discuss the challenges associated with facility management and COVID-19. Eric highlights some of the tough questions about health, employee rights, and office space. He also recalls how he started his career in facility management and the resources that helped him grow.
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
- Eric Horn on LinkedIn
- Wish
- CREW Consults
- 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
This is Greg Owens with McCarthy Painting. And this is an episode of Watching Paint Dry. It’s May 1 2020. And it’s an unusual time right now because we’re in the midst of the global pandemic of COVID-19. And first of all, I’d really hope that everybody’s families and loved ones are safe and sound and doing well out there. And that’s like most important on a A lot of people’s mind. I’m really excited about today’s podcast. Because we are we’re going to explore some of what facilities managers are up to and doing in this challenging times right now. And there’s a lot going on when it comes to facilities and how to bring people back into them safely, and all the considerations that facilities managers need to take. This episode is brought to you by McCarthy Painting. We serve the entire San Francisco Bay Area painting both commercial and residential work we’ve done work for Google, Facebook, FICO, Abercrombie and Fitch, First Bank. Many other companies out there we’ve been in business since 1969, a family owned company, and we’re here to serve your painting needs. If you’d like to find out more about McCarthy Painting, you can go to mccarthypainting.com or info@mccarthypainting.com. And I’m super excited to introduce our guest. And it’s Eric Horn who he has a fascinating career. Found out a little bit about him. He’s, he’s worked at Airbnb, through their hypergrowth. I know I’ve been out to Airbnb and looked at painting projects for them. And they were hiring I think 400 people a month at that time, and that was just a couple of years ago. And that’s got to be incredibly challenging for a facilities manager. And currently he’s at Wish, and has his own company that he’s started called CREW. CREW Consults, taking companies from startup to grown up, and we’ll find out more about that too. Welcome, Eric Horn. And
Eric Horn 2:51
thank you, thank you, I’m glad to be here.
Greg Owens 2:53
Yeah, first checking in with you how’s your family and how’s your how state of affairs where you’re at?
Eric Horn 3:03
Yeah, thanks for the intro feel very fortunate to be one of those people who can work remotely and remain at work. My family’s has been safe and healthy since the beginning of this. So my wife and I are safe here at home sheltering in place. My sister actually works out of Kaiser in Oakland, and she lives with my mom. So they have their own kind of quarantining of their own house going on over there. But fortunately, everyone’s been safe in a while, like you.
Greg Owens 3:27
Yeah, yeah, it’s challenging times when you can’t really go and visit family members and that kind of thing. I’ve got the same thing going on with my parents and we’re, we’re not able to, it’s gonna be a while before I get to actually see them in the flesh. But, you know, thanks to Zoom and things like that. We’ve been having fun sort of connected, bringing more family together and connecting in these times. I’m like to get a little,
Eric Horn 3:54
actually a little personal tidbit on that. We had a wedding plan for April 10 at City Hall. My own wedding and my wife. But we ended up doing something in our backyard here at home, where we had just a couple of friends over we had gotten my sister signed to be a deputy commissioner for a day through the Contra Costa County Clerk. And then we had our, you know, extended family in on Zoom. So, actually WebEx, sorry about that we had a VC call. So we have family from around the world, just kind of zooming into the whole whole experience. So different different times for all sorts of things. So but it was certainly an uplifting moments in these otherwise kind of grunt times, if you will, right?
Greg Owens 4:39
Yeah, a bad way to wait to pull that off. That’s not an easy thing to pull off. Like the coordinating of all that and all the people and making that decision had to be really tough to, to continue to go with.
Eric Horn 4:52
Yeah, it was it was an important date for us. It was a few years since our first day so we really wanted to keep that and not knowing when this would lift you know We wanted to get out just make it happen and and candidly it was it was a great experience. beautiful day outside a lot of close friends with us but separated appropriately. And yeah, it was great experience and certainly the story for the ages.
Greg Owens 5:13
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. That’s great. So I like to get into sort of like you’re now working out Wish is that correct right now I’m your whatever it’s like what are you guys what’s your biggest challenge is going on within with within facilities right now with all the COVID-19 and things that are happening?
Eric Horn 5:37
Geeze I mean, that’s it’s a it’s a what’s not a challenge right now. There’s probably a better question. I think to kick things off. There was like how do we keep operations going? Right? We have things that just don’t stop, you know, package deliveries and mail. Important letters coming down from Ed for HR department. We’ve got invoices coming in for finance, how do we quickly move that to a technology method? How do I not expose my team to going into the office or taking public transportation every day? So we certainly overcome that we have you know, we have interns, we have new hires, Wish is still hiring. So we need to like figure out how to work with it and package up laptops and get that to, to the new hires, as well as like onboarding and orientation. So we’ve actually overcome a lot of those hurdles already. So what we’re looking at now is like how that re entry into into the workforce, which we’re predicting will start to slowly happen some sometime in June, maybe a little later. But the you know, it’s it’s every single measure that you wouldn’t even have thought of before. You know, that the workplace has been increasingly designed towards density and towards shared devices, right, whether it’s the WebEx screen and the office that you’re all touching and using as a virtual whiteboard, or the check-in device on the iPad of the conference room, or even down to the you know, dry erase markers that you’re using to write on the whiteboard. These are all shared devices. And then how do we even handle all this going going forward? And janitorial disinfecting something. I mean, you name it, there’s you know, nothing is off the table at this point.
Greg Owens 7:10
Right. Right. And where you Wish has locations. There’s a main location here in San Francisco. Are there areas, other areas within the Bay Area and that kind of stuff that you guys have?
Eric Horn 7:24
facility? Yeah, absolutely. So our headquarters downtown San Francisco with one Sansom and a high rise, which presents its own challenging when you’re thinking about partnering with the building, of course, on these measures, and, and you have small elevators that’s, uh, you know, trying to get, you know, 500 people up and down when we reopen will be a challenge. But we do have a small satellite office over in San Jose. That’s one of our other Barre locations. We actually just opened up a shared workspace in Seattle, back in October, November. So we’ve got a space up there. One of our other major offices is in the Toronto office. As well, we are a global company period. So we do actually have large offices in China who are looking to because as they try to open back up and see what their prescriptive measures have been over there, and globally, we’re looking to expand almost every country you can imagine. But we do have a significant Amsterdam office as well.
Greg Owens 8:18
Oh, nice. Yeah. So and I’ve actually been on a couple of calls with some companies from China. And have you gained any insight into how they’ve opened up and like what considerations that they’ve, you know, had to overcome, overcome and because they’re kind of ahead of us on this curve, you know, us just starting to open up here in the San Francisco Bay area where they announced construction and painting to be opened up as of like, on Monday, but China’s You know, I think ahead ahead of us quite quite far ahead of us right now. Any shit anything they got?
Eric Horn 8:54
Yeah, sure. Quite a bit of things. Some things we kind of already had in You know, we think about when we reopen the office density wise, you know, again talked about like these offices have been denser and denser, you think about a per square foot per employee type, right metric, where we’ve been, you know, in that 120 to 150 range for a while, you’re probably gonna have to double that. So that’s certainly something we’re certainly seen out of China already talked about elevators a little bit, they have lines queuing up to the elevators and where they would fit 15 people in elevator before and they’re down to five. That’s something there be one other interesting piece that’s come out is taking people’s temperatures when they go back into the office and not letting people into the office where the temperature in the triple digits. There’s obviously a legal aspect to that. Are we allowed to check this this is like somebody’s personal data. Right? So it’s, it’s something that we’re going to be able to do, I think the health restrictions around that are loosening because of how much this could affect and infect other people. But beyond the actual You know, having a some sort of thermometer there are, you know, iPads out there with software on them that can use the camera to actually, you know, look at, you know, a kind of a slew of people and take temperatures for multiple people versus having a one on one type thing. So that’s some of the interesting things that we’ve seen that were certainly more applicable to what we’re doing here in the US.
Greg Owens 10:20
Yeah, yeah. And those considerations around the our HIPAA laws and those kinds of things. Definitely, I’m definitely feeling the same thing as an owner of a painting company. We’re looking at doing the same thing is like, Okay, how do we take temperatures of our CREW members before they get to work? And wait a minute, is this even legal to do? Plus we’ve been having a hard time just even sourcing the thermometers, right, and finding out which ones are actually like, because there seems to be a lot of what ones that are not working so great, right. It’s that kind of thing. So definitely a challenge there. And the elevators it’s an interesting one too, because even in construction projects, right? Right now we’re trying to figure out what’s the best way when you have multiple trades on a floor or something like that. It’s how, how many people on a floor and how many people in the elevator at a time. So five seems like a reasonable number going forward.
Eric Horn 11:16
That’s our, you know, we’re talking about brand new buildings in Shanghai with that, who were able to squeeze 15 into an elevator before, once and some it’s not an old building per se, but it certainly doesn’t have that kind of capacity right now with nobody in the office or just limiting it to one person per elevator at a time. But you know, I see like for it’s probably a reasonable reasonable metric, of course, we’re undergoing elevator upgrades and in place of that, you know, there’s inside the cab there, all the buttons are tucked in one corner and you have to use your badge to be able to press those buttons, right. So yeah, it’s it’s again, it’s, it’s almost taking everything we’ve done for the past 20 years and starting all over and figuring how to do it again.
Greg Owens 11:58
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The multi multi use spaces is something that has been very popular where it’s like, you know, I think five people sharing one desk. Right? And that that’s not going to be the that’s not going to be the same thing going forward in any way. Are you guys considering like, I’m like a combination of people working from home certain days of the week and then coming in certain days of the week and that kind of thing as you as as things start to open up?
Eric Horn 12:28
Yeah, absolutely. Like I tell my team who’s helping plan this returned to the office scenario, nothing’s off the table at this point. So it’s the I will say it’s it’s a smattering of things. It’ll be static, possibly staggering shifts. You know, being a tech company, we actually do have a lot of people who work just fine, you know, remotely, and perhaps better. We have a very large engineering and product organization. There tend to me a lot of introverts in those sort of departments as well. So they may prefer just to work at home, right. So There’s that piece of it. So yes, staggering schedules, asking people to stay at home, if they’re able to and comfortable to, on the flip side as people may not be comfortable coming back to the office for some time, and then at that point you won’t require them to a staggering test system is something we’ve looked at in the future, possibly taking out desks or just kind of flexing them off. Even at that, again to talk about the density of the workplace. And as you’ve seen a lot of supermarkets now they have a one way aisles, which is something we might have to do now to what they you know, rectangular floor plate, you may just be making circles around the offices.
Greg Owens 13:36
Right, right. Right. And then everybody is probably going to be wearing masks for the foreseeable future. I think they’re doing the same. And I think Shanghai is still all in masks. Is that correct?
Eric Horn 13:48
Yeah, yeah, they are wearing wearing masks there. And even a bit ahead of the curve. A lot of those, you know, people in countries were wearing masks already right as part of their daily lives. So let’s say Kind of a little anecdote that people were kind of getting made fun of for wearing masks around before we’re like, no, that’s the new normal. Maybe they were smart to do that in the past. And so that’s one thing I don’t know. But as I was reading today on, actually against our article, about, you know, again, tuck going back into shared touch devices, we have coffee machines, so you know, we provide food and snacks and all that sort of stuff that have a touchscreen. Is that something that we can keep open and alive? How are we going to drink your coffee with a mascot? So you know, simple things like oh, we can figure out the coffee machine and then the stylist will actually work on the coffee machine and maybe give everyone a stylus and that works. But then yeah, like how do you drink the coffee if you’re supposed to wear a mask the entire time? It’s It’s literally again, nothing’s off the table at this point. Like the way you’ve done everything to date is just starting all over.
Greg Owens 14:49
Right right. And we’re and there’s no there’s no clear path either. Right and a tremendous amount of misinformation. So that’s, that’s been something that’s been challenging in this whole thing is like you Keep reading one article or another article and you find out that you thought one you’re thinking one way and then you find out No, that’s not correct that actually could be hazardous or something like that. Have you? Have you gone down any of those paths of thinking like, Oh, we this is like the correct path but then found out like, as you’re going into it, like, hey, that’s not gonna work at all at this point.
Eric Horn 15:23
Oh, yeah, certainly. I think there’s a lot of things are just still up for debate and up in the air. You know, one thing we’re, you know, select some things, we’re playing the slight, lightweight and see mentality, like, what’s the, you know, California government don’t go into mandate. They seem to be more restrictive than a lot of other states. And, you know, countries are at the moment. So we’re just kind of using what’s happened in California and spreading it out to our Seattle and our Toronto and Amsterdam offices. But even coming back to like the temperature tech piece, right. So checking someone’s temperature is great, but knowing that COVID-19 you can remain asymptomatic for two weeks. How good is that temperature check even good news. You know, how much is good? Is that gonna do you? If they’re actually like contagious for two weeks leading up to that, right? So it’s one of those things like, well, we could do this and spend a lot of money on it, but at the same time, it may not do us any good if there’s just, you know, carriers in the office who aren’t showing symptoms.
Greg Owens 16:14
I’m, I’m so glad you you’re talking about that, because it’s something that I was, I was I was like, This makes no sense. There’s people that are asymptomatic and how many and it seems to be the majority of them are asymptomatic in a way and so they wait a minute, why are we doing Why are we doing this temperature checking? If that’s the case, but maybe if it if it makes people feel safer, then I’m all for it. Right? If they actually feel a little bit safer, coming back to work and that kind of thing.
Eric Horn 16:41
And going yeah,
you’re absolutely right. A lot of that is like a peace of mind. If nothing else, you know, it’s like some of these are just feel good movements, right? That’s how I’m kind of doing here to make people feel a little bit better about coming back to the office.
Greg Owens 16:54
Right? Right. And the reality is is like even with the just the regular flu, I actually Company whenever an employee was like not feeling good, I was like, you need to go home because you’re gonna get the rest of us. So there’s a little bit of me like thinking like, Oh, this is actually a good thing that we might be checking temperatures, you know, and because we had way too many people coming in with, with, you know, not feeling well or feeling like they needed to come in, or they were just like, Oh, I’m gonna tough this out. But meanwhile, they’re spreading it to other people. Right? And so those days, those days are over for sure.
Eric Horn 17:27
Absolutely. I’ve shared that mentality for some time if if you’re sick, stay home if it’s a little bit of a PR campaign, I put together with the or VP of people who I report into it, which made sure we were lying there, like if you’re sick, stay home, right? Because like, way too many people coming into this very dense 500 plus person office that are just trying to charge through and like, oh, I’ve got an interview today. So I need to be here like, now you’re going to make the interview. He’s sick. If I come into the office, I know personally, I I’ve been in situations where even with certain companies, meaning someone and we have lots of small phone rooms to have one on one conversations with, and that person came to work like, Oh, I’m sick, don’t shake my hand like you’re sick Don’t be in the office. Like, it’s not even about shaking hands at that point. We’re sharing the same error in a, you know, 10 square foot room here. Yeah, gotta move on. Sorry, I think that’s, you know, there’s a few like good things that I’m hoping come out of this. One is with that, like really pushing that mentality if you’re sick, just stay home and then hoping, you know, which has a very progressive, you know, flexible time off policy as well as sick policy, and I hope that other companies look at theirs as well. And, you know, kind of update them with the times a little bit, right. I know that some companies have that, you know, unpaid sick time off and that’s not gonna fly, right. So if you know, someone’s sick, and they’re not getting paid, of course, they’re going to come to the office. So there’s a little bit of obviously responsibility on the individual about responsibility for the companies.
Greg Owens 18:57
Yeah. And I was reading a report Out of South Korea, I’m not sure if you’ve seen it around. It was one case study that’s been peer reviewed. If you haven’t seen it, I’ll send it to you. It’s um, it’s fascinating because it’s one building where they studied like how the coronavirus had spread throughout the building. And you can see that they they actually have a map of the floor and you can see it just on one side of the building had the most amount of like people getting sick, whereas the other side and other corners of the same floor, nobody got sick. And so, and keeping those kind of and it was like proximity, and it was a call center too. So it can only imagine that it’s a call center and people are our air rating more right like they’re speaking a lot more and, and they’re and this was in South Korea and so they’re they were pretty densely packed to into this building. Um, how you mentioned this earlier. How do you see your relationship with the building owner The HVAC systems per floor and the shared air and that kind of thing. Any any thoughts on what they’re doing around that? Because that’s a complicated, you know, built in structure right now. Maybe they’re looking at filters maybe they’re, you know, disinfecting them. It’s that’s a tough one.
Eric Horn 20:18
Yeah. That’s in the costly wanted that. I have not seen that career article, please, please share it. We’d love to see that. But yeah, and to your point on that the call centers are, you know, dense, densely packed, you know, or, you know, I talked about around 125 150 square feet per person and a standard tech office environment. You’re at 100 square feet, you know, per person or less when you get into those usually 90 to 100 in a call center environment. But coming on to the H fac and working with the building I know that they’ve stopped recirculating their air so they’re pulling in all outside air. Obviously recirculating air you’re getting a lot in efficiencies as it comes to you know, electrical use because you’re taking cool air and and just Continue cooling it. But you know when we get those, you know, random hot days in San Francisco or it’s 95 degrees and you have to take that you know 95 degree air and get it down to 55 degrees for it to have any sort of cooling capacity with the office. Now your energy efficiency goes way down and you may not even be able to achieve that. So that’s that’s one thing I know that they’re they’ve all already gone to the outside air peace, how we’re going to achieve efficiency in the summer TBD. disinfectants, or I haven’t heard of yet are working with them. We have a meeting with our particular building next week to discuss this in many other situations, elevators included and other guest services into the building. But one thing we’re thinking of internally is the shared plenums in these small phone rooms that I was talking about before, right where we have three or four rooms in a row, which may be, you know, 10 to 20 square feet per room, and they’re all sharing the same air plenum and likely the same VAV above there. So where there’s been cost saving initiatives before instead of giving each room its own way HVAC its HVAC its own that a system that now you know, instead of doing that in the future we may have to you know, dedicate it but today it’s been a cost saving measure of just like oh just have those for you know rowshare one zone and then you’re fine. But yeah, I mean we’ve been looking at all sorts of stuff whether it’s just you know, UV lights in the rooms or you know, air scrubbers or you know, anything along those lines, any, you know, hepple filters in each of the rooms, I’d say nothing is off the table for now, as we, you know, kind of figured things out our biggest I think it’s probably best idea is simply just closing off most of those rooms. So if you have three or four rooms in a row that may be sharing that one plenum and one vv system that will just close down three, use it for storage and then we’ll, you know, only make one of those available and it’s a single person phone room, not a one on one conference room as it’s been today. And even on that piece you mentioned, like storage in those rooms, there’s I keep thinking about stores these days is because a couple of things where, you know, maybe taking out a lot of furniture, you know, tech companies in general, have been very collaborative today we have, you know, soft seating areas. We have Scrum areas, a little ad hoc whiteboards, so people get together and crowded into little space and have a jam session. That stuff has to go right and it has to go somewhere. So if I can make some extra storage out of what was a folder once that that’s at least kind of helps me out into capacities.
Greg Owens 23:33
Yeah, that’s so much that’s so much to consider. And I didn’t even think about that because we do a lot of the whiteboard walls, right painting of Whiteboard walls. And that kind of collaboration, like you said, just even sharing the markers and that kind of stuff. if everybody’s standing in that conference room, that kind of stuffs just probably going to go quickly and really fast to just sort of in a zoom call have a whiteboard wall. Everybody’s collaborating on that. rather than be in the same room together, touching that same wall touching that same being in that close proximity, right? Yeah,
Eric Horn 24:07
yep. Um, and that’s actually one thing we have learned about China as far as like, the conference rooms and meetings in general. So they’re having a mixed bag approach to it. Whereas the pretty much removing half the seating out of conference rooms and one of those, like, if you can’t take it from your desk, take it from your desk, versus being in the room from other other people. We’re hoping it kind of plays off each other, you know, I don’t see us occupying more than like, Yes, 30%. So when some of these initial orders are lifted, I’ve been kind of working with this 30 to 50% metric in my mind here. So having less people in the office in general means more people can have these sort of laptop conversations going on, but will also reduce the strain on the amount of conference rooms we need, right in those try to focus on the larger corner offices which could normally see like 15 to 20 people will just reduce that that’s like six person conference room going forward, right?