In this episode of The Inner Chief podcast, I speak to Brad Krauskopf, Founder & CEO of Hub Australia, on Designing inspiring flexible workspaces for the future, and Building workplace engagement and experience.

Brad is an industry pioneer and has been at the forefront of the coworking and hybrid work revolution for more than a decade, having co-founded and Co-Chaired Flexible Workspace Australia, the peak-industry body for flexible and coworking space in Australia.

Under his leadership, Hub Australia has expanded nationally, delivering human-centred, sustainable workspaces that help businesses attract the best talent and to thrive.

Hub Australia is widely considered the market-leading workspace hospitality operator in Australia and has been ranked 6 years running by the Great Places To Work program.

Brad is a passionate advocate for the future of workplace experience, bringing deep expertise in workplace strategy and property innovation.

In this CEO masterclass, we talk about:

✅ Why businesses must now earn their employees’ commute by creating community and purpose.

✅ How to champion flexible modern workplaces that drive connection and performance.

✅ Strategies for scaling culture and impact in a hybrid and distributed workforce, and

✅ The evolving role of leaders in designing work experiences that empower the humans behind your brand.

Connecting with Brad Krauskopf

You can connect with Brad via LinkedIn.

Books and resources

• Hub Australia – Love Where You Work Report 2024

Similar Episodes on hybrid working

• Stephen Shedletzky, author and TEDx speaker coach, on How to foster a speak-up culture where people feel safe, trusted and worthy
• Tristan Sternson, CEO of ARQ Group, on Being answerable to investors, systemising values and culture, and building equality through technology
• Nick Bell, Founder of Superist, on The threat of AI on addressing productivity gaps, looking after his A-players and living to 150

“When I think about the workplace of the future, it's about the experiences you provide when bringing people together. It’s an extension of your brand.”

On the evolution of the workplace

• We consider ourselves a workspace experience company. Businesses and their teams have their office at Hub, but they are choosing Hub because it helps them attract and retain the best talent.
• What we're going to see is that the workplace is not going to be any one place, it's going to be a network of spaces. It's definitely not going to be this binary choice of work from home or work from headquarters.
• Ultimately, I see that the workspace is more of a place for learning, innovating and socialising. If anything, it's more of a school or a university. Workspace will be on demand.
• The most popular meeting room in the world, is not the boardroom, it's the digital space, the Zoom room, the online video conference. And those digital spaces are going to become more and more immersive.

On how companies need to change their thinking

• The single biggest reason that people are going into the office is to foster social connections.
• The workspace is not necessarily about work. It's about connecting. It's about learning.
• We want to work at a coworking space that matches our culture and matches our brand because ultimately, our team, our customers, our investors are going to be coming into that office.
• It's not about how many desks I've got or how many meeting rooms I've got, it's what does that office say about my brand, about my culture?
• The expectations of employees have really grown to such a high standard that I'd also put to CEOs that you really need to think about the office as something that you should now actually just outsource just like I've outsourced my IT infrastructure. Now we’ve got to a level of expectation that we’re actually better off outsourcing the office infrastructure too.

On what leaders need to consider

• What are the kinds of work that people are going to need to come together and work on to make my organisation successful?
• What are the types of activities as opposed to the number of people or the number of square metres?
• Quite often we penny pinch on the office, but really the whole point of the office is to attract and retain all of those really expensive people, which is the most expensive item and the most important thing for your organisation.
• So let's think about how we can create workspace experiences for those people, and that'll be a good starting point.

On what Brad would change about current offices

• There's nothing more useless than an empty workspace. So often what we've got now is that people are coming in for their one day at work and the office is empty. They're going, damn, this workspace is empty. And leaders are thinking, well, we just need to shrink it. Or why bother even having one?
• But people are coming into the workspace because they want the social connection. You would've heard people talking about the loneliness epidemic. All of these things can be the solution to that and the office is a key way to connect people.
• Another good reason to be going for coworking is because then you spread the risk of people coming in on a day when nobody else is in the office as there are other companies with their people coming into the office.
• We are seeing a lot of companies do what we call workplace window dressing where they say that their office workspace and their culture is amazing, but it's not. You might convince the person to take the job, that's also the person that leaves you after six months.

On the arrival experience at Hub

• We deliberately make it when you walk into a Hub, there's a noisy café. You can smell the coffee. There's a smiling person at a welcome desk, more like what you'd expect when you walk into a busy hotel lobby. That's the kind of buzz that you want to have when you enter our building.
• The most important element in the workspace is the café and that arrival experience.

On what he learnt from WeWork's demise

• Venture capital money never belonged in real estate in the first place. VCs want to get a 100x return, it's baked into their model but with WeWork they were trying to scale a real estate business to get a 100x return. Well, it's impossible. You can't just flick a switch and ask for some more software, some more space on Azure or Amazon. It doesn't work that way.
• The other one is that because WeWork had all of this VC money, they adopted a blitz scaling strategy and it was never going to be a winner.
• Usually blitzscaling works really well if there's going to be one or two or three players at the end of the day, even in the flexible workspace industry, where it is a subset of all commercial office spaces, depending on which city you're in. It's still only between 2 and 10% of all of the commercial office in any given market.
• You've got to get your capital from the right source because they're all going to expect different returns on different timelines. That's incredibly important. And then remember also like your market will also dictate a lot as to what kind of strategy you should employ in order to grow.

On the Hub's operating rhythm

• My focus on the rhythm definitely helps with how I make sense of everything when I’m running in an industry that is changing very quickly.
• What happens daily? What happens weekly? What happens monthly? What happens quarterly, annually, every three years? If people understand what is that pulse that your organisation has, and that something must happen every day.
• You also need to explain to people what they're part of and that their role contributes to the bigger whole. They need to know how that contributes to the P&L statement for that particular workspace. They need to know how that ultimately contributes to the 12 month plan or the three year plan.
• If people don't feel connected to the bigger part of the organisation, then you lose that connection with the company and you know what? They're probably the first person that's going to walk out the door.
• We do something called our Daily P.L.A.Y. We all go into Slack each day and people post their number one Priority for the day, the one thing that they Learned yesterday either at work or outside of work, then something Awesome at work or outside of work, and then Y (why these are important to them or how are you feeling each day from one to five).

On building engaged teams

• I've seen with creating teams that if you can connect people to feeling like they're being part of something bigger, it goes a long way, and it doesn't matter which industry you're in.
• I always start with intentionality as this stuff does not just happen.
• Secondly, this is not a project with a start and an end. It'll never end. You've got to sign up to this commitment forever.
• Finally, you've got to make this someone's job. Someone has to own the outcome. In smaller business, they'll give that job to the Office Manager or to the People & Culture team, but then forget to make it a KPI for every one of their leaders. It needs to actually be something that you measure and that you make someone or everybody accountable for. Otherwise it's just not going to happen.
• All of these things help with making it about more than just a job. It's connecting people with experiences that they can relate to and really bring some meaning into their day at work.
• Don't try and have a hundred good things in your workspace, try and have three to five amazing things in your workspace, because otherwise it just becomes noise and so many of them will drop away and then you'll get to the next year and somebody will say, “Why didn't we do this?” And usually they just forgot.
• If you can figure out how to connect it to something local it really helps. I use the words “intentionality” and “thoughtful” and not something you got at the top of a Google search. The small little things that made the difference are what you came up with and they were thoughtful, considered and they are the ways that you’re going to create that experience.

On the role of a workspace in the hybrid model

• The role of the workspace and going into work may actually be so critical to so many parts of how you identify as yourself, what your self-worth is, where you create those connections.
• It's important when you're sitting there as the exec, to know that what you think you need your office for is not necessarily what your team thinks. And in particular, we see a lot of execs seeing that the office improves morale whereas what the team is actually looking for is something more basic as they simply just want to feel connected with their colleagues.
• The execs will also think people are more productive at the office but remember that there's lots of different types of people and types of working styles.
• We've seen recently more attention to how extroverts work compared to introverts, or how a neurodiverse person will work differently to a neurotypical person.
• People might be looking for a quiet area, an active area, more social areas, a learning area, or where's the area with the really good tech?
• It's really hard for any one company to build out all of those different spaces in their one workspace, which is another big reason that we see that people put their businesses at Hub.

On the best advice from a mentor

• One of the biggest things that I've learned from mentor relationships over the years is to remember that it's you who is making the decisions. You can learn, you can pose questions and what forth to the mentor, but they're never actually going to know your business as well as you do.

On his number one interview question

• Most people that join Hub, particularly in senior roles, come from a different industry. And so what I like to ask them is to give their predictions for Hub and our industry. You really put them on the spot with requiring them to have thought through where the industry's going.
• You're really looking to see them having applied a thinking process, because particularly when you're interviewing execs, you need people who can bring strategic thinking. Like we'll have to solve day-to-day tactical things, but really what we are looking for is a wing person to help me on the strategy, to help me figure out what I'm not seeing and figuring out which direction to steer the ship.

Final message of wisdom and hope for future leaders 

• Be courageous. I think as we go forward, particularly in a world of AI (Artificial Intelligence), we need to question what we as people are still going to need to be really good at that machines are not going to be. I think being courageous is a really good trait that you can focus on and is going to be particularly important to everybody when they're looking to grow businesses and organisations in the future.

Stay epic,

Greg