Voice of the Occupier - Allison English & Steve Wright

Voice of the Occupier is brought to you by the UK Chapter of CoreNet Global and hosted by Allison English, Co-founder of Aéto.

In this episode, Allison speaks with Steve Wright, Global Director of Workplace Design at GSK and the 2026 CoreNet Global President, to explore the evolving role of workplace design and the challenges facing occupiers in today’s corporate real estate landscape.

Together, they discuss the opportunities shaping the future of work and what organisations need to consider as they design workplaces that better support people, performance, and business outcomes.

Listen now for insights from across the global occupier community.

#VoiceoftheOccupier #CREInsights #CoreNetGlobalUK

Thanks for listening. Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Transcript

 Welcome to Voice of the Occupier from Cornet uk. We explore what it really takes to create spaces that work for people and organizations through candid conversations with the leaders, thinkers, and doers behind the decisions. I'm your host, Allison English. Let's dive in. I'm delighted to be here today with Steve Wright, who's the global director.

Of workplace design at GSK as well as the Cornet UK chapter president for 2026. Steve, it's a pleasure to have you. Welcome. Thank you very much indeed for inviting me, Allison. Absolutely. We're gonna talk today about some of your experience in GSK as well as your double hat role as the Cort UK President.

And if it's all right with you, let's start there. Can you tell me a bit about your main areas of focus during your term as president this year? That's a great question. I think, yes, the issues for me are really framed by the fact that I'm also a coordinate member as well as being the president, and I think that gives you a bit of an insight into asking yourself the question.

What would I want from my own membership and the benefits that I get from being a member of this great organization? It's those questions that allow us to bring back to our audience and our members, the hot topics, the things that really matter to them, the things that they're dealing with in their day to day work lives or where trends are going.

And to reflect that voice to see what it is they want back for their membership funds as I do. It's about introspection and it's about respect, I think. And hopefully if I can deliver on those things for our membership, it'll be a good year. It sounds like worthy goals to, to strive for. So that's really great.

You've been a member as both a supplier and an occupier in your current capacity at GSK. Can you share a little bit about what that transition was like from being on the supply side to the occupier role? It's a another great question. Yes, having spent most of my professional career on the service side of the business, doing the things that I now purchase and procure for the organization gives a very good insight into the way that everything works dynamically. My own journey has always been one of. Trying to reflect solutions that work for clients and beyond the aesthetic. I think that things need to work. And if they work and they work beautifully, then you have a double win.

So not just focusing on the color of the ceiling or the carpet, but much more down to how do we actually enable and equip people these days. I. As well as being a designer and architect have been working in workplace strategy and workplace strategy really allows you to take a part in the organizations that you are providing those services for and to see how we might put them back together again, that involves asking an awful lot of.

Pointed questions. The questions that I would normally be asking of a client I am now giving the answers to as a client to the organizations that support us. But understanding the way that the industry works and what both parties are in that relationship for, I think gives you an additional focus on the level of outcome that you're actually looking for.

And it makes the journey quite clear. I am actually trying to deal with X, Y, z, set of problems, issues, questions, future proofing, thinking. How do I iterate that into a brief? What would I want back as a brief if I was back on the other side of the fence? And how would I then respond to the client to answer that?

So I think that what it's done is given me a position of clarity and the phrase. PO termed Gamekeeper has been used many times. And I'm not quite sure it is exactly that, but it, I think it's about equity in a relationship, but it's a position of trust. How would I have given that trust, how would I have received that trust and how do I perpetuate that now in the role that I'm doing?

Oh, that's brilliant. It sounds like with experience on both side you, you come to the table more prepared than most probably to ask tough questions but also be able to answer them. And I think bring maybe sometimes a little bit of alternative thinking. One of my key journeys into the world of workplace.

Was really asking the question what is it like to work for the brand? What is it like to be an employee of an organization that portrays a particular, set of values out to the, to its customer base. What's my experience as a person working within that? That takes things beyond, I think, the aesthetic and beyond the physical surroundings because you're start to get into some behaviors and those things which actually underpin all of the.

The human nature that we need to bring and how do we make people comfortable? So maybe that alternative thinking does give me a slightly different perspective on it, but certainly a very interesting journey. Sounds like it. You mentioned earlier about things working beautifully in the space. How do you try and.

Identify that. How do you quantify that? What is, what exactly does that mean for you if a space works beautifully instead of just being aesthetically beautiful? I think that's I, and some people would've heard me say this before, but I do use a little bit of a phrase, but design without purpose is art.

And I think that's almost, that's stripping it back way too far. That's been a bit unkind to designers and architects. But we have to understand why we're designing certain things. What are we trying to do? How are we trying to enable, and I do use that term enable as well. It's the people who work for an organization who needs to be getting on with their day job with the minimum fast, the minimum problems that they can actually have.

So the functionality. Of what it is we deliver has to be there in the first instance. It's, it also goes beyond functionality. It goes now into inclusion. And we're looking at a world where we now recognize that there are many different neuro types who work for any organization, but not everyone receives an environment in exactly the same way.

So we should be conscious and cognizant of the fact that we need to. Provide solutions that do actually include everyone. And that could be down to coming back to the question of beauty. Red might look great on a wall, but if you put it in a meeting room, it can actually be a trigger color. So it's that kind of thinking and also recognizing that maybe somebody with a neurodiverse perspective on life does want to sit with their back to the wall.

How many times do we actually pause and just to think how comfortable would that person be if they're sitting in an open plan area? So it widens that thinking out. If you then say that, okay, we've got the functional elements thought through here and the constituent parts of how we put a workplace environment together.

It is not to say that the materials and finishes are a veneer because I think they're an intrinsic, interwoven part of how we do all of that, but they should be seamless and they should be very well thought through in terms of how that gives us a continuous effect across any workspace in enabling environment to make sure that it actually does deliver with some style and panache.

And so yes, the marriage between the beauty and the functionality, I think are intrinsic. So it needs to have the aesthetic, the mark of the brand, not necessarily in a logo form but showcasing that in the environment as well as catering to an inclusive environment. It's marrying those two things.

And this is where I think branding is probably, I think we understand branding now probably an awful lot more than we did at the maybe in the nineties. Who's we? When you say we, what do you mean? Designers. Okay. And the design profession. But also I think branders because people and marketers who were.

Bringing forward an awful lot of things. You had to put a stamp on everything. There was always an Apple logo on something or there was a so and so logo on something. But we don't work in a letterhead. We work in a building or we work at home. So how relevant is the 2D if you start to strip that back, when you start to look at what the brand values are inside an organization, that is much more the softer things that are harder.

To determine and sometimes a little bit more intangible in the way that you actually had to try and get to grips with them. But do I need to be reminded where I work with having a massive logo, 10 foot high on the wall behind me? Maybe not. 'Cause I'm pretty much sure I do know who I work for and where it is.

Yeah, that makes sense. But a, as the person then responsible for design globally, for GSK, how do you wrap all of that together and how do you manage that across a global portfolio? In GSK, we're very fortunate to, I think, have the foresight to think about things from a slightly different perspective.

I think working. For a pharmaceutical organization nothing is released to the market unless it has been through rigorous testing, proof, empirical data and things that sit behind that to make sure that what we are doing is safe and it will also have an effect on people's lives. But the same level of thought we try to bring to some of the research that we do.

So for us. Almost having the human lab where you can look at the impacts of the kind of solutions that we're pointing for people, whether that's a single screen, a curved monitor the ease of plug and play. Between devices, the human benefits that come from that. Are people actually more focused? Do they have a better decision making?

Are they getting better sleep, or is the screen keeping 'em upward because they've been so active during the, it is those things to try and get underneath that skin to understand that is one thing to deliver it at scale is another thing. And the cooperation you need between the at cooperation and level of understanding and commitment to what the goals are across any professional team.

Is maybe one of the harder things to harness because you do need to be people to be on that page and to support those overall objectives. I think once we've got to that point, which I know an awful lot of people have seen our hq in the industry, and it's a place that we're very proud of, and it's somewhere that we've actually taken all those ideas and brought them together.

But the second part of the question you just asked me is what do we do with that at scale and how does one deal with. That because we're not fitting out and HQ premises is every week, right? And we're not gonna stop the program and go back and Okay revisit that site. But what we can do is bring workplace improvement measures to bear.

And that's about taking scalability from the macro solution and making it into something which is deliverable out of smaller scale and in a different location. And globally. We also do need to be aware, and we are cognizant of the fact that we. Operate across a world with many different cultures and that sometimes those solutions do need to be massaged into the cultural environment in which they're going.

So there's a degree of sensitivity that sits around all of that, but I think we think long and hard before we do, and we add the research to that and we try and deliver proven benefits from the solutions that our staff benefit from themselves. Fantastic. Do you have an example maybe when you were just talking about some of the scalability and bringing some of the elements maybe from the HQ to something that's more easy to distribute globally again on scale?

Is there an example that you could share of how you've done that? If we were to, let's take this away from the design. Discussion and take it more into an enabling discussion. If we look at the the meeting solutions, everyone's been on this huge journey and we were going to hybrid before COVID and we had enforced hybrid and now we're in a kind of accepted hybrid situation where meetings take place.

Over the airwaves. How do we actually make that as seamless and easy as possible for the people who need to be used? How many times have you walked into a meeting room and tried to plug in your laptop and then been asked for a code and you're trying to find a meeting code when you're already under pressure?

So one of the solutions that we have here is through our technology. Single cable plug and play. Enter a room, plug in your laptop with A-U-S-B-C and you are in it repeats straight onto the screen. We have that level of connectivity now being delivered globally that means changing our tech solutions.

But it also does, going back to what I said before, give you a scalable improvement that you can bring to bear and some other thinking, which actually will do. What I would want it to do for me as an employee as well, is to make my life as easy as possible. It's more important what I'm saying in the meeting than it is for me to sit there fiddling with a keypad.

So yeah, sets the whole meeting in the wrong tone. If you waste the first half of it. Dealing with tech. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. And I think it's a, that's a great initiative. Your question from earlier, how many times have I been stuck in that situation? The answer is too many. I think most of our listeners would probably agree they've had a similar issue.

So I guess if they head to one of your offices, they shouldn't be experiencing that. You mentioned also within the hq it was a huge initiative in London, you said. Many people have seen it. I've been incredibly lucky to have been in that space and seen what you guys have done there. And the objective there was incredibly clear you wanted to set out to build one of the world's healthiest offices.

That was as you had mentioned, as a pharmaceutical company, it marries in really nicely with kind of the principles of health and and really helping people. Can you talk a bit about that initiative? The project, what went well, what didn't go well? Learnings can you sum that up for anyone who hasn't been able to see the space?

So we set out through those pieces of research that I started to describe earlier on a journey, which preceded our relocation by three years. Which was to have a space whereby we could go and try. A lot of those initiatives and coming back to the things I said about are people happier are they healthier?

Are they getting better sleep? It's all those things which play into the the human need. And by going through that, what we did was allowed ourselves to pick the things that had. The most impact for people. So when we picked up on things like circadian lighting, yes, it does have an impact.

Most people don't notice it and most people don't know it's there. Having a sound system which mimics biophilia in background for us, but also using a lot of biophilia in the environments. Certainly in this building, it's very green for something in central London. And knowing and understanding the effect that has on people, what is that relationship with nature?

When we're actually inside a a box all day long, how do we actually start to break the walls down and take ourselves beyond that space? So it's really around the impact of that. It does come back to certain other things like color palettes, working with color palettes that work with nature, which we have here.

Everything is pretty much earth toned or natural in terms of the materials like timber. And there's nothing here, which is really harsh because we discovered that the harder you go on some of those things, the more radical you are. That the impact could be visual, but not necessarily in a good way, in the way that people receive that messaging and.

People need to be comfortable, right? Inside an environment you need to be comfortable temperature wise, everything else. So all of that stuff, even the way down to acoustics. And we consider all of the different areas that we provide for people across a workplace from a quiet zone through to a more noisy zone, which is a semi-social space but allowing people to choice and to find their own way within that.

So it is almost like we are creating, a world of a world of personal choice, in the way that people equip themselves when they are in the building. We also do try to be mindful of how that affects people when they are not in the building. So people who are working remotely or in a hybrid fashion when they're dialing in to understand the environment that their colleagues are in the meeting room.

And those things are experiential. If we can deliver on that experience, then I think I. That is the responsible thing to do for a workforce. Yeah. Brilliant. And when you talked about, the way GSK brings drugs to market is lots of research, lots of empirical data, lots of testing. You spoke about.

Having happier people, healthier people, better sleep. How did you try and quantify some of that? How did you try and how did you measure that in the workplace and then know that there were, that what you were doing is having a change on people? That's a another great question and very valid.

The way in which we started out on that was on a workplace science journey. And we were fortunate to have the benefit space whereby we could create a test zone for people which accommodated 50, 60 people. And with their consent, they could work in that area knowing the elements were going to change.

So we would change the lighting, we would change the. The desking, the chair, the amount of planting that was in that space, the soundscape and some other physical elements including the technology. So I mentioned briefly the curved monitor. Curved monitor has very surprising results for people.

But how did we harness That is a really great question. We used, a series of apps on there, which were all about set up for testing. So after people had been working for half a day for a day in that space, what we did do, and we got them to sign up to do, was to contribute to that research by taking those tests.

So cognitive behavior, the decision making, the other things that came with it. So they were measured in the morning. They were measured at the end of the day or a lunchtime alongside some of the other measures that we did and all by volunteers are hasten two ads. Nobody was ever forced to do anything but two.

Use the Fitbit or your own personal device, which would then monitor your sleep quality and the other physiological elements of what were going on. So we measured those against what was going on inside people's heads their comfort levels. And their performance, the cognitive performance captured by those apps and those programs were run over a period of months.

It was not just over a sort of short week and you got forced results. You actually got a bedding in period for all of those things. So the empirical data we came out with from came out with, at the end of that exercise was actually meaningful. That then informed. The elements that we knew we should be building in or would really like to build in as desirable components of what a workplace should be.

So we backed ourselves with science in a world of science, imagine that. But it's logical. You took the principles of test and learn that I think are often talked about, but not, maybe not executed, certainly not to the degree. Degree that you were able to do that. And I think also, Alison, you have to adopt.

A degree of realism, and that is a fail fast mentality too. So if you can see that things are maybe not panning out in the way that you hoped they may or in you're starting to explore a new avenue, which. Is unfamiliar, recognize early and don't necessarily push things to the nth degree. If you can see that it's fundamentally flawed at the beginning, so fail fast, change course and actually fix that solution and come up with something that does work.

If you had one major takeaway from the project, would that be it? Or any advice to someone who might be undertaking something similar? What I would say to anyone who's gonna be undertaking a similarly significant, change or commitment to making that change is to think at the front end, spend some time thinking at the front end about what you want the end result to be.

And this is then pick your starting point and how you're gonna get there. And I think that the way in which I went on the journey with this organization and the partners that we worked with. It was actually about establishing that really quite early on and creating the buy-in for that. But remembering with a professional project team you have, you're not just looking at the colors on the walls, you're looking at everything from the furniture to the finishes to the program, to enabling the the MEP systems and how they're working with the integration of the technology.

So it's about setting several courses running at the same time. Recognizing that there needs to be points of convergence when you come back in together on a regular basis to check where you are with that, analyze how things are working, and we will see then I suppose better cumulative results because you've got more than one person working on it.

Yeah, superb advice. So fail fast be realistic and start with the end in mind. Amazing, Steve. This is my first time taking over as host of the podcast, but one of the things Adam used to do at the end which I really liked and want to carry on as a tradition was. Asking about the future. The future is in the young leaders, new people joining the industry or thinking about joining corporate real estate.

So Steve, with your I guess diverse background, ex like expansive career in this space what advice do you have for them? What would you suggest that I don't know that a nugget you could leave them with to think about for the future? Never stop learning. I think that's a quite a simple message.

I think that all of us who have had some time in the industry or a career will maybe remember one or two leaders who gave us not just a foothold, but also demonstrated to us ways that things can be done. And I know I certainly have that in my background. It's recognizing what you can maybe draw from those people as a mentee, but those people acting as more of a mentor and not be afraid to ask those questions.

But to equip yourself with the knowledge. I think that for the future at the moment, I think we're gonna see a blend between AI and hi I, human intelligence alongside the artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence at the moment. Can do is answer an awful lot of questions, but it doesn't necessarily give you a personality.

And I think that's one of the other things that is quite important in an industry such as property. So hopefully we'll have some people there looking for some support and some people in positions like mine being able to offer that support to the younger generation coming through. You've been a fantastic guest.

I appreciate you answering our questions, taking us on the journey with you of your career, your role as the Cornet UK President and all the brilliant work you're doing at GSK. So Steve, thank you so much for joining. Thank you very much. Big thanks to everyone for listening. Be on the lookout for our next episode next month.

Take care, everyone.