As challenging as everything has been over the last five months with Covid-19, it has raised some really pertinent questions around the workplace, and really raised the bar on how committed an organization is to not only safety, but to maintaining culture. There has been a change for workplace teams, real estate teams, and management teams across all enterprises, to prepare employees, and plan for safety and peace of mind for employees when they do return to work.

It’s forced us to ask hard – and unique – questions: How deeply is frictionless and voice-activated technology correlated to health and wellbeing? What specifically does culture mean to an organization when teams are not physically together as often – or anymore? How can we motivate our teams - whether it's IT, HR, workplace, real estate teams, even folks in the C-Suite - to get behind this new work world and figure out what’s needed moving forward to ensure people are happy, and have a choice in where and how they work?

We spoke to Tracie Kelly, head of corporate real estate for the Bay Area Uber headquarters. Her focus on operations, facilities management, project management and employee experience, makes her uniquely qualified to expand on how Uber is handling all of the above. At the helm of Uber’s much-anticipated Mission Bay project, she faced a double whammy when Covid-19 hit - sudden shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders put the brakes on planning and production – but also allowed for return to work efforts and the new campus planning efforts to become one train on the same track. As Tracie talks about in this episode, much as it’s a strange time to open a new campus, “...in a lot of ways it's good, because you start fresh, you start with a clean, fresh building that nobody's ever worked in!”