Pandox AB (publ) (PNDXB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Pandox Hotel Market Day 2022. Here is your moderator for the day, Jan Wifstrand.

Hello, folks. Welcome to this fantastic event. You've already heard from Petra a little -- sort of warming up for this. I couldn't agree more. You must feel so very welcome. We have a lineup of excellent speakers today, fast, substance-filled speakers, and we have a great crowd. It's you, and it's sort of 180-plus out there online as well. We have more than 400 people attending the Pandox Market Day 2022. Did I hear the sound of it? Yes, yes. Even if it's a bit dark in here, let me ask the people who actually represent Pandox today here at present. Wave to the others, wave to the others. Where are you? Just wave a little. Yes, you are from Pandox. Now I tell you something. This is edition #27 of the Pandox Hotel Market Day. So I think you should give these persistent people an extra big hand. You've already heard about the QR code, perhaps not all of you, but please don't miss out. Get the QR code, and we will be able to communicate in many ways with you. If you wonder who these people here are, you will get to know in a while, okay? I'll return to them, I promise. Do you feel we are ready for takeoff? We are. What about the fixing and mixing team from [ Gabardine and Partners ]? Are you ready? Okay. Let's be off then. So I clear the floor, and welcome, first people on the stage for an opening address. This is the Chairman of the Board of Pandox, Christian Ringnes.

Dear friends, I am so happy to see you here. This is a gathering for friends, and without the friends present, it's not much of a gathering. So thank you from the depth of my heart for being here. Now we are supposed to see a little [ flame throw ], but I do not see it. You may wonder what this was all about. It's actually me making banana flambe for my children on Sunday. And the reason I brought it here was not only to show you the advantages of being half bold, because then the flames don't really touch your hair at all, but it was really also to tell you why I love the hospitality industry. Because when I was a young student, I had a particular program in my little studio, my little hospitality. I used to invite some selected females to come home to me, and it will start with the glass of wine and the soft music of Barry White. Then we will go through dinner, and I would end the dinner with the banana flambe, dramatic to the tunes of Beethoven's 5th. It was always a big success, and that's the reason I love the hospitality industry. Also, these banana flambe, you saw the big flame, it can symbolize what happened in the hotel market this year. It was really an explosion both in ADRs and occupancy. Some of you may remember that I was here on stage last year, and I put on my sunglasses. And what I said was when I stand here 1 year from now, I will tell you that the world, the market is so bright that I need shades. And actually, this turned out to be remarkably correct. But now I almost don't get to take off the sunglasses on fair,, on seeing more inflation, energy scarcity and rising interest rates. So we are kind of both in heaven and hell. Heaven is what we see right now in terms of ADR and occupancy, and hell is what we read about in the newspapers, what the future is going to bring. But you know what? We are adaptable. And if you're used to having 5% or 10% occupancy during 2 years in the pandemic, then a normal recession maybe isn't so bad. I think we're going to do fine. So I'm optimistic, and I'm very happy to see you here. We're going to have a great program today. It's about the future of work. And why is that important for a hotel company? Two reasons. One is the way people work has quite an importance for how they travel and how they stay at hotels. We can ask ourselves, are we working to live or are we living to work? That's maybe an obvious question, but for some ways, it's not so obvious. But what is obvious is that it's important to understand what's going on if you are going to cater to the needs of the traveling public. So that's one thing you're going to get away from this conference. And the other thing is once you have your guests, you have to make them happy. And what's the main ingredient to make them happy? That is the people in your hotels. So you're also going to learn how to attract and retain people so that they can give our guests the delightful experiences that they deserve at our hotels. With these two and well-chosen words, I wish you welcome once more and have a great conference. Thank you.

You can't run a panel in a Market Day without getting an actual status update on the situation of Pandox. Please welcome the President of Pandox, Liia Nou.

Hello, and a warm welcome, everyone. It's great to see you're all here today, and nothing beats the feeling of a full auditorium. And a special welcome to everybody who is following us on the webcast. And as always, it's a privilege to be here meeting you and talking about Pandox, the hotel market and listening to a fantastic lineup of speakers, which will follow here. Today's topic, as Christian mentioned, will be broad and strategic for all of us. The future work and what it means for hotels, both outside in, when it comes to products; and inside out, what it means in terms of services. But before we jump into the program, I would like to mention a few things about Pandox. Long time, I stood here, also 1 year ago, we were entering the lockdown phase. And it wasn't until late March this year, before restrictions started to come down again, and the recovery has also been unprecedented. Overall, occupancy is largely back to 2019 levels, whereas rate has surpassed 2019 levels with a wide margin in all our markets. Leisure travel is strong. Business demand has recovered nicely, while group and event is coming back, improving week-by-week, day-by-day. Again, we see large fair rates and fully booked hotels in Germany and overflow in the rural area revenge, that's a strong word. So let's put it this way. Nothing beats coming back. Even the ones who said they would never, never, never travel again, they're actually back on the road. And we're actually standing beside them in the security line. And that's okay. After all, we're all humans. And speaking of humans, last year, I said that when we look back in this in 10 years' time, it will be from a stronger position. I am a super optimistic person, but not even I had ever thought that we will come back to a new normal in less than a year. Actually, it's 6 months since the restrictions were eased. Obviously, the world is not without challenges. I am humble about that. But it is a fact, no challenge will be greater than the pandemic. As you know, Pandox' strategy during the pandemic has been to be active and to stay open and to plan for a better future. We also remained active with our investments in our existing portfolio throughout these difficult years. In fact, we have invested in 2020 and 2021, more than SEK 2 billion in value-creating projects. And so far in 2022, we invested an additional SEK 600 million. As you know, we have 157 hotels, 15 countries, 90 destinations, more than 35,000 rooms. And we work with more than 30 strong operators and brands in these markets. This is a very, very strong business platform. It enabled us to cross-fertilize insights and development projects and to accelerate value creation for the benefit of all our partners, our guests but also our shareholders and other stakeholders. So let me give you a few examples of some particularly interesting projects that we have been working with for the last 2.5 years. [Presentation]

Fantastic projects. Don't you think? Any applause for that? Come on. Go. There are 5 common traits between these projects: its modernization to match current and future travel trends; its preservation and development, in line with the hotel's original design ideas; its smart and sustainable solutions; its operational improvements where possible; and its careful brand development. All the RevPAR is currently at or above 2019 levels in most markets. Things have changed under the surface, or put it this way, same, same but different. What's different? People are valuing the freedom much more than before. Work is no longer tied to a physical office location, and feeling a sense of purpose is much more important than ever. And this change is what we will talk about today. How changes in work drives changes in hotels as products, and how changes in work, there are changes in hotel as work in places. So ladies and gentlemen, unless Jean has something else figured out, then we should get the program rolling.

Absolutely. Thank you, Liia. I just want to underline one thing, which you perhaps noticed because Liia Nou has a tendency to be too humble, I'd tell you. Did you see this role of projects? One of them in Brussels with Citybox was actually communicated this morning.

Absolutely.

That's really good timing for news, isn't it?

Perfect timing.

Congratulations, Liia.

Thank you. And I think we actually have Morten here.

Morten, are you here, from Citybox. Are you here?

Yes.

Yes. How good. Congratulations to you as well. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Liia.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Now I promised you to explain why we have these guys here looking at reps somewhat, but they are not. They are the secretariat of the Hotel Market Day this year. This is Anders Berg and this is Caroline Tivéus. And they're going to help with the interaction if you now got the QR code and all that. Please tell us a little Anders and Caroline, who are you? Why are you sitting here? Anders?

Yes. I've been working with the Hotel Market Day for many years now, together with my colleagues, Jacob, Racine and not the least. So I guess that's the main reason why I'm here today to be a facilitator between you and the speakers. So my message is, please be active. There are no stupid questions. we will take them up. And if they are stupid, we will rephrase them so they look smart.

That's perfect. Absolutely perfect. Caroline?

Yes. And I'm Director of Sustainable Business. And in that area lies also the social part and attraction of employees. So this topic is what I work with for quite a time. So I hope we will help to facilitate, as you said, the questions and reflections on the subject, which is very important.

Fine. Because I feel very safe then, because if I lose track completely, you can take over so excellent, really. Let's test. Let's make a test because I think you have some kind of challenge for the audience immediately now, have you? We're going to ask something about...

Why are you here?

Why are you here?

Exactly. Can you answer, please?

Yes. Can we get the word cloud up maybe? It's actually a traditional recipe for a good Hotel Market Day. So you're looking for inspiration. You are looking for networking opportunities, having fun, interest in Pandox as well, which is a good fit. Is there anything coming up?

Yes, inspirations, networking. Yes, inspiration is the biggest, I would say, most in common. And we are hopeful that we will deliver on these wishes.

Something very interesting here. Having a nice sleep? No? No, that was not. And we have the [ clock ] [indiscernible] .

Fun as well. I thought so.

Fun as well. Yes, we do hope we're going to have fun. Now don't forget this now. You can use this tool all the way through. And then you, Anders and Caroline, you will pick up the best stuff and deliver and perhaps comment as well. So that's why they're here. Okay. Are we ready for the first speaker, you think? I think we are. Yes, we are. We are. First speaker of the theme, future of work, is actually directing a program called Future of Work. I will call this guy a -- something like a pan-European. He's sort of both German, Swedish and English. Listen carefully. Here he is.

Please welcome the Director of Future of Work at Oxford Martin School, Carl Benedict Frey.

Take it away, Carl.

Thank you very much, John, for that very generous and candid introduction. It's a huge pleasure to be here. And I can assure you all that when it comes to important things in life like football, I'm as Swedish as it gets. Now besides that, it must be a time, I'm happy to do some work on the future of work at Oxford Market School, which I would like to share with you today because what we try to do is understanding how digital technology is transforming the world and what that might mean for the future. Now a few people in this room might be old enough to remember the 1990s when Francis Karen Cross, Alvin Toffler, Thomas Friedman, pundits and journalists all over the place was predicting the end of the office, the death of cities and the demise of business travel. And here we are, 20 years later, the fraction of people who working remotely over the next 20 years hovered around 45%, then took off an extraordinary fashion during the pandemic and have now come down somewhat again. And the key question we obviously are asking ourselves, what does the future look like for the next 20 years? Is there something different this time around? Or is it just a lot of smoke and not much new going on. And to answer that question, I believe we do need to understand a little bit of market economics, and we do need to understand a little bit about technology as well. Because at the end of the day, why do we cluster? Why do we live in cities? Why is it that most people don't spread out through this vast area of space and live by the sea and enjoy their life rather than living in a shoebox in Central Stockholm or Central London? And one of the reasons for that is obviously their cost of proximity, the cost of moving goods, people and ideas. And if we look historically what has happened to economic geography around the world, the interaction between those 3 particular costs and technology can help us explain the vast majority of economic geography trends that we're seeing and have been seeing over the past 200 years. Go back to 1800 and consider what the world looked then. Most people lived in closely knit communities, consumption and production happen in the same place. Transportation costs were extremely high. So if you transported milk from Stockholm to Dale, it would have gotten sour in the process. Along comes steamships, railroads and the revolution in transportation that allows a few places around the world to specialize in the manufacturing in goods and transport them to the rest of the world. That's the first industrial revolution, which takes off in Britain and gradually spreads throughout Europe. And as a consequence of this process, these 7 countries take off, the share of global GDP expands enormously, the share of world trade, they capture expense enormously as well. But something then happens around 1990 when we see that this trend of divergence gives way to a new wave of convergence. And what happens around 1990? Well, we have the ICT revolution. Suddenly with new information and communications technologies, businesses around the world are able to coordinate production at distance, and they are able, at the same time, to take advantage of vast pools of cheap labor in places like China. A lot of the business travel that we've seen in the 1990s is due to the fact of global value chains, which have spread around the world in extraordinary fashion. And needless to say, if you manage a business globally, you have to travel from time to time, at least, that used to be the case. So a lot of the rise in business travel that we've been seeing a lot of demand for hotels around the world is linked to the rise of global value chains. Now a key concern is that global value chains are being dismantled, not just because what's happened in terms of geopolitical tension between the United States and China, but also because the new wave of automation technologies, driven in large part by advances in robotics, are allowing businesses to increasingly automate production and reshore much of that production to domestic markets and so save transportation costs. And even if you look at China, it's now one of the biggest markets for robots in the world. Even in China, manufacturing employment is in decline. And as a consequence of that, some people fear that this age of the rise in global value chains is gradually coming to end. And of course, we're only at a very cusp of this new wave of automation because as we are speaking today, we're already seeing extraordinary advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that promises to transform the world of work much more broadly besides, and in addition to the transformation that we're seeing in manufacturing. Because if you think about it, right, what robots do is what people have programmed them to do, right? It's what computer programmer has specified that the technology should do at any given contingency that mattered for automation in the past. But this new range of machine learning technologies, they are increasingly capable of inferring the rules of the game themselves through trial and error by tapping into the data trails we leave behind. And as a consequence, we're seeing very significant progress in a variety of fields, whether it's medical diagnostics, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it's human translation, all of those things are becoming increasingly automatable. And 10 years ago now, we did a study looking at the type of jobs that are affected by these trends. And one thing that we predicted back then was that fashion models are highly expensed to automation. How many people thought this will be a ridiculous. How can you automate a fashion model after all? So it's been fun to point out that the fashion models that you see on this picture here actually don't exist. They've been created by what's called generative adversarial networks from thousands of pictures. They have their own Instagram accounts. They're already being used in production. And the same type of technology is actually being used to conceptualize things like hotel rooms, using thousands of pictures and coming up with new creative solutions. So it's not the case, but it's just manufacturing that is affected by this trend. It's a varied range of occupations from sales, retail, hotels, health care and so on. But with most of the jobs that have in common that are most affected by this is that they tend to be low-skill low income. Yes, we can now automate things like document reviews, it's no longer part of billable hours for lawyers. Yes, we can automate things like medical diagnostics, but it's not going to replace the jobs for doctors love. The kind of jobs that we're increasingly seeing being replaced are those of people in call centers, those of receptionists, those of cleaners, and those of a host of transportation and logistics occupations around the world. And what that means is that going forward, if low-skill, low-income jobs can be automated. Well, what's the comparative advantage for developing countries as primarily 1 thing to offer big pools of cheap labor? And a concern that many people raised is that this will somehow mean the end of globalization. After all, what we've seen in the financial crisis since then has been slow-balization with a very slow growth in the share of goods as a fraction of global GDP. But I think this misses something important, which is that the nature of globalization is fundamentally being transformed. Yes, we've seen a stagnation of trading goods, but we've seen growth in the globalization of professional services, although they've been growing from a slower base. And if that the pandemic teaches us something, it is that if a lot of jobs can be done remotely from home, they can adversely exported and traded. And a lot of people, including myself, have been writing about this for some time, arguing that as a consequence of this, we're likely to see a new wave of globalization this time, driven by professional services, financial activities, education and other types of tradable service jobs. As I usually tell my students, the future of development looks more like India than it looks like China. And what many then, obviously, wonder is that where does that leave us then in terms of which places that are likely to prosper and which not from these developments? If we go back -- because I started off talking about the 1990s, if we go back looking at what happened since the 1990s, what happened was actually faster urbanization, more clustering in places with huge pools of skilled labor. We've seen that since the computer revolution really took off, places like Stockholm, Silicon Valley, Munich, places with a lot of talent of those that have benefited by being able to export their services to the rest of the world. But going forward, a key difference this time is obviously that face-to-face costs are no longer the time. Video conferencing technology means that, in principle, the clustering, the key constraint that existed back in the 1990s, it's no longer quite there to the same extent. But as we all know, because we are all here or most of us are here, there is still a very critical component to being together, to being in person. Digital technologies can't substitute for every type of interaction. And in particular, they can't substitute for the sporadic types of interactions that we are experiencing here during the breaks, during the sessions and so on, right? Every digital interaction needs to be planned at least on one end. And as we see that more of these routing [indiscernible] tasks are becoming offshore and automatable and the growing share of our economies specialize in interactive types of work, cities and place is actually likely to become more important than less important. Even though we're going through a period of transformation which is highly disruptive, in the end of the day, when we look back on this 20 years from now, I think that more people will be living in Stockholm as a fraction of the Swedish population than it does today. And this is, in my view, the new division of labor. We're going to have some hubs of highly skilled people, working in interactive professions, but we're also going to have some secondary hubs in places like India, Philippines, Bangladesh, where people speak good English, but people do much of the work that we offshored. And there's going to be plenty of business travel, particularly between those places. Thank you for your attention.

Thank you, Carl. So I draw the conclusion that we have no problems at all. I saw the headline. Services are the future. Fine. Should we go home? That's a good message, isn't it?

Well, I think, I mean, obviously, there are opportunities and challenges here. So a key challenge when it comes to service trade is that, obviously, when you trade in services, there is language content and there is cultural content as well, which is not the case for goods, right? I think Finnish movies are probably not that particularly well liked in Bollywood, and Bollywood movies are not that popular in Finland, I suspect. And the reason for that has to do with cultural content. A reason that the United States is doing so well in technology, in particular, is that they have a huge market, English-speaking market, where they can scale up extremely swiftly. In Europe, we have a Swedish market. We have a German market. We have a French market, the Spanish, so on and so forth, right, that introduces barriers. And I think Sweden has been particularly well-placed in this because we speak English, we grew up with watching Fawlty Towers and Seinfeld and all of these things. So there are some cultural language affinity between us and the Anglo-American world.

And I also draw the conclusion from the slides that you don't mean in general really, because if you study these, you had this graph of susceptible professions. I mean there are service industry professionals as well. So will we be very automated in the hospitality industry as well, you think?

So I think it depends very much on which segment you're looking at, right? So if you go on a holiday with your family and you want to have a jolly, good time, you don't necessarily want to interact with a robot that much, you want the human experience. If you're going on a business trip and you have a series of meetings and you don't want to get out as soon, check in and get out as soon as possible, I think there are very significant opportunities for cost cutting. And I think that we're going to see more of automated receptionist on that kind of thing.

Is there anything happening over there in the secretariat? Do you have something?

It's very quiet, actually.

Is it? Yes? Yes? Don't hesitate to come up with you -- perhaps you have something.

We have a question. And I guess we talk about automation and robotization. But on the other hand, there is shortage of labor, actual people. So the question is whether we are seeing a true bargaining power shift towards employees versus employers? Or we had the cusp of a change there?

I don't think so because the COVID-19 pandemic has been truly unprecedented. And they have created a lot of shortages, which are temporary. It has also led to a lot of churn in the labor market that is truly unprecedented. And if you look at the past 3 decades, I mean, the COVID-19 pandemic starts out at the blip. So you have to sort of ask yourself what's so new that's going to be a real stepping change when it comes to labor shortages? And I just don't see that step change. So I think when this thing blows over, because many of these bottlenecks are still with us, we're going to be in a situation, which looks fairly similar to what I said before the pandemic took off. That doesn't mean that there won't be challenges, right? And there are some good things in here as well with offshoring, potentially pushing down on inflation, we've seen that the pandemic as such has created additional demand for housing because young people increasingly want to live themselves rather than in flat shares. People want to have additional space to be able to work from home. So in terms of housing, it's created more demand as well. So there are some changes that have taken place, but I don't think that the labor shortages, in particular, are likely to persist.

Anders and Caroline, don't forget to save good questions also because Carl will return to a group talk a little later on, so we can come up with all the reflections you have once more. Later on today, I will touch upon the observation I make almost every day. And I've made a lot in my work as well. People are sort of resistant to change. You talk about change, the change that happens all the time. But don't we exaggerate a little how fast this goes because people don't like change.

Well, yes and no. I mean, we like change for the better. We don't like to change for the worse.

But ideally change that threatens the profession or the actual job you have now?

No. I think that is definitely true. So if you look back at the first Industrial Revolution, for example, there were a lot of people writing against the mechanized factory as it arrived. If you look at the United States today and you look at the old factory towns, in particular, where jobs have been automated away, people are not very happy about the working lives in general. So that is certainly true. But then if you compare United States to Sweden to Germany to France, you find quite different patents and these interact with labor market institutions as well. In Sweden, we have quite general safety nets compared to United States, for example. Even during the first Industrial Revolution in places where the poor loss were more generous, there was less resistance towards automation. So it does depend on which type of job you're in, where you live, the institutions in place to help you transition, but there's no doubt that when rapid change happens, that causes us to shift into new equilibrium, and that creates winners and losers.

Carl, you remember, I mentioned when I introduced you, I said that you're a real pan-European citizen with your background. Would you say that there are differences in this within Europe, this development you described?

Absolutely. So if we look at robots in the United Kingdom, for example, they read to -- there are very few robots, to begin with, in the United Kingdom. So they're slow in adapting. And if we look at the impacts of it, it's been quite significant and negative for the communities being affected by them in terms of employment, I should say. We don't see the same pattern in Germany. And we see -- just no. And we see different patterns across the board. And in Sweden, for example, we have a highly skilled population. We have, I think, as a percentage of the total population, the greatest share of people with a college degree. That population is much more mobile, not just between occupations, but also geographically. And it's suppressed the skilled premium, which has reduced in equality quite significantly. So Sweden is a bit of an outlier in this regard.

That's interesting. Did you find it interesting? You did? Really? Fine. Sure. One more from the secretary.

Yes. Do we have time for one more?

Yes.

And this is a super. I really love these kind of questions. Maybe you can read it?

John Nesbitt wrote about high tech, high touch. "Do you agree that the future of work becoming more high tech will push society towards more leisure based on high-touch experiences?"

Beautiful question.

Nesbitt was the one with megatrends, wasn't it? Yes?

So clearly, we've been seeing increase in leisure over the past century or so, but we're actually not seeing it play out quite as we would have expected, right? So it used to be the case in the 1980s that the CEO of the company was the person who left -- leave the office first and go play golf. And today, we're actually seeing the opposite. The CEO is the last person to leave the office, and on balance, people in highly skilled professions, doctors, lawyers, professional services and so on, work longer hours than use it. So we're actually seeing that as we grow richer, people are substituting away from work to the same extent than one would think. And now part of that might be preference that we like to be able to buy a lot of nice things, and some things have been getting cheaper like computers. But other things like travel and hotels, I mean, I went on holiday during pandemic, it wasn't really cheaper than when I went traveling before the pandemic, I have to say. So -- and there are nice experiences that we want to have ourselves and one for our families as we grow more welding. So as a consequence of that, it seems that we are not really substituting away that much to as leisure. And those -- but we see on the lower end of the income distribution that are actually taking more leisure, that also seems to be that there are fewer opportunities for them in recent years.

Carl, thank you very much for this. We will welcome you back later in a group talk. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Some of the changes in the work life we encounter, we hardly notice or we forget them very fast. You need professional observers and analysts to describe this process. Our next speaker is what we should call an expert in the workplace culture change. Here she is.

Please welcome Total Workplace Partner at Cushman & Wakefield, June Koh.

It's all yours here.

Thank you. Thank you. All right. So thanks, everybody. I'm really, really glad to be here. And firstly, thank you so much to Pandox for having me here. A lot of pressure to be an excellent speaker so I'll try, okay? So me and my team were primarily based in London and the Netherlands. And over the last 18 months, right, like what we've been really focused on is working with clients or large corporate organizations, helping them define what their future workplace strategy should be. So today, what I'd like to do is kind of share with you some of the lessons learned, some of the key observations that we've kind of gleaned over the last 18 months. And hopefully, you'll find that helpful and insightful. So one of the first things that we've learned is that we're not going back. Okay, there's no going back to the way things were. So this is in terms of what processes but also office occupancy. One of the most common questions that we get asked is, is there a benchmark? So our clients ask us, is there a benchmark for how many days people should be in the office? And the answer is no, okay? Because even within the same organization, you have very, very different views. And so I know it's a bit of a struggle. But on screen there, you'll see, right? So on the top left-hand corner, you have what we call the individual contributors. Now these people or these guys and girls, they don't actually want to come back in the office. 30% of them actually said that they don't ever want to come back, or maybe if they come back, it's in a very rare manner. And you kind of juxtapose that on the other end of the spectrum with your most senior leadership. 20% of them still think that they want everybody to come in every day or nearly every day. And I don't think that really matters if leadership actually recognizes that their opinion is their opinion, and they shouldn't be enforcing this opinion on the whole organization. But what we have seen a lot of times is that even when we go to leadership and we say, "Hey, guess what, people actually really want to come in maybe 1 or 2 times a week max." And when they hear that, they get really nervous and they say to us, "do you think we can kind of increase that to 3 to 4 days," okay? So that's where we're at with leaders. One of the main reasons that we're not going back to the office is that for the very routine individual task that we do. We got a lot better at doing them at home. So over the last 2 years, we have better workplace setups in our house. Oftentimes, we find it much easier to focus at home. And guess what? Sometimes our Wi-Fi works better at home than it does in the office. So not a lot of reason to come back in the office. I think what we find particularly alarming is that in 2020, 5% of the people that we surveyed, and we surveyed almost 200,000 people, said that they saw no benefits to coming back to the office. 2 years later, that figure has tripled. 15% of people are now saying that they see no benefits coming back to the office. And then what the consequence of that really now is that you get like a lot of empty offices. So this is some information from the U.K. offices. So over the last 2 years, even in November, which we are in right now, I have to remind myself. We've not seen average occupancy gone up above 35%, okay? And you're starting to see dips even on Mondays. Now the problem with this is that it puts you in a vicious cycle because we know that people want to come in to connect with people, right? That human aspect is so, so important. You come in and all you see is a sea of empty desks. It's a pretty huge turnoff, okay? And then we're still -- you check your diary and you realize, actually, all I have to do today is be on Zoom calls. So why am I even here? So the key message for us here really is if you don't change working patterns, if you don't change working behaviors, if you don't change your workplace design, you're not going to get out of this cycle. The second thing that we learned is really this idea around the intangible matters. And what do we mean by that, right? So unanimously, when we speak to people, whether it's employees or leadership, what is it that drives them back into the office? What do they see as the future role of the office? And it's all really, really centered around being human and being connected, right? You want to be with people to socialize, you want to be with people to collaborate, and you want to be with people to connect. So if you really take that into -- take that to heart and start to design out your offices and what the workplace experience should look like, it looks very different than it did 2 years ago. I love this slide, so I'll tell you a little bit more about it. One of the things that we learned very, very quickly is that we shouldn't be designing anything based on the leadership view because in the last 2 years, this group of people, the executive and the C-suite, they have had a very different experience. If you look at the yellow, they have scored 15% to 18% higher than the average employee when it comes to feelings of belonging, connected culture, inspiration. And then you look at the managers, and they're really struggling. They're struggling with work-life balance, and they're struggling with finding time for themselves to focus or just to get away from work. So the experience is not equal. And if you only design your future workplace strategy based on what the leaders or the decision makers tell you, it's not going to be a good one, okay? So what else have we learned? We've learned that choice and autonomy makes a real big difference. We found that employees who felt that they had the choice, either in terms of where they worked or when they work, just did a lot better when it came to feelings of connectedness, bonding, collaboration, focus. And when employees actually feel that they had the choice in terms of like schedule flexibility, they scored, on average, 40% higher than people who felt that they had no choice. We sincerely believe that the future of work is bigger than buildings, right? Again, when we first start our conversations with client organizations, people get very fixated on this idea that hybrid working is about working from home versus working in the office. The truth of the matter is that you are going to be working across an ecosystem. We see that primarily there are 3 models of hybrid working. On the left-hand side, the pinkie circles, it's where most organizations are today, right? So you tell your employees, okay, we know from employee experience, go off, go and work from home 1 or 2 days a week. Okay, do that. But everything that's important, everything that's valuable still happens in the HQ. It's still the mother ship, okay? So everything revolves around it. You have companies who have kind of veered off the right-hand side that said, you know what, we've done fine, we know how to do this, remote working works for us. And actually, it gives us a much bigger advantage competitively. So let's go there. We're not saying that there is a right or wrong model. I think what the key thing here to note is that you have to be intentional about which model you want to adopt for your organization because then it drives the kind of workplace culture you need, the kind of work processes that you need, and even the kind of technology that you invest in to make sure that your organization and your people do well. Regardless of which model you pick, one of the things that we're pretty sure of is that work is spilling outside of the office building, okay? It spilled out into a vast ecosystem which may also include hotel buildings. Now this concept makes our real estate clients very nervous because in the past, when they create employee experiences or workplace experiences, they are doing it in a very contained manner. They're doing it in a floor, a building, a singular vessel. Now that work has spilled out across an ecosystem, that same real estate team has to deliver a great employee, a great workplace experience across an ecosystem of places, many of which they don't even own or control. So in our industry now, which is really interesting, they're taking a huge cue from you guys. They're thinking about how do we do this better, how do we design experiences the way retail has, the way hospitality has to make sure that our employees get that good quality experience across an ecosystem. We often get very, very, I think, in our industry like a bit narrow because we're just always about the office workers and with media kind of talking about it a lot. But in actual fact, if you look at something like the U.K., not that many people actually work in offices. Of the people that actually do work, less than half of them are in the offices. And when you primarily only focus on that people, that conversation becomes very narrow. A lot of our clients see this as an opportunity to really think about how do you use your real estate better. Can you use this to make a better, more positive impact on the communities around you? So the final lesson I want to share with you guys, is this idea of being good, right? Especially in the last 12 months, we've conducted, I would say, about 300 leadership interviews, leadership interviews with clients just across Europe. Every single person that we interviewed would have mentioned sustainability, ESG, diversity and inclusion. But the interesting thing is that not that many of them actually have thought about how you would practically apply some of these values in a workplace environment. One of the things that we're fundamentally interested in understanding is this concept of have we built everything that we need. So is it about reusing, repurposing, refurbishing? In 2018, we wrote a book about the future office. And then back then, one of the predictions that we made is that work will leave the cities. And when work leaves cities, so will the people. Little that we know that we didn't have to wait until 2038 for that to happen because it kind of happened because of COVID. And in countries like, say, India, that's where it's most prevalent, right? So you have these large organizations that have built up support centers, call centers, and during lockdown, they equipped everybody to work from home. And guess what, they've moved back to their villages, they moved back to their small towns, and they really, really don't want to be commuting and traveling back to the cities. We all know that well-being is super, super important. That's something that, as an industry, we've been talking about, and we know that it makes people perform better at work, et cetera, et cetera. When this first started, one of the things that we kind of assumed wrongly was that hybrid working was good for well-being. And we kind of now realize that it's not. So what levels of productivity has remained pretty constant in the last few years, levels of well-being has dropped significantly. Now what that is telling us is that there's a massive misalignment between organizations' hybrid working strategy and what and how people actually really work, right? And if we don't solve this now, this is a massive red flag for a crash and burn. People are going to burn out, and then organizations are going to suffer. The last thing that I just want to share with you guys is something that our team cares about a lot deeply. One of the big things that we're going to try -- that we're trying to do and we're trying to do well is this idea of designing for inclusion. And it's just a little bit of a lesson learned for us personally. I think when we started on our journey, we thought about diversity in a very physically obvious way, right? So we thought about the things that you can see: gender, race and physical disability. But that really didn't help us. They think about it more broadly. So we started to think about what are actually the traits that make us a lot different from each other. And when you start to list all of that out, the first thing that you realize is that it's so much more relatable and relevant to everyone. So we're in a journey right now, but we're primarily focused on how do we design a workplace experience that is truly inclusive and is not just about designing. It's about how do we operate the building, what does facilities management look like and how do we impact culture and what kind of technology we put in. So I hope you found that useful. That's pretty much it for me. Thank you so much.

Thank you, June. Thanks a lot. Thank you. I've loads of questions to you, but I have to save them to the group talk a little later. I guess most of you and most of you out there have recently experienced the problem to find the right staff, have you? To recruit good people, perhaps not perfectly trained, but still recruit people who can do the job. I also guess that you try new solutions in many ways, do you? No? We have a little video clip on that here. [Presentation]

I have no comment. Our next speaker is a man whom I would call slightly disruptive. I had this idea that he is disruptive, and then he tells me over the phone when we prepared this that, "I'm a bit disruptive. I just warned you." So I was pretty right. He is also a man -- according to an exact quote from their own home page, a man who enjoys la dolce vita. Here he is.

Please welcome the Chief Development Officer at Edyn, Eric Jafari.

Go ahead for the la dolce vita.

I actually don't remember saying that. That must have been the PR agent. Listen, I was asked to talk about the future of work. And when I was thinking about the future of work, I wanted to dissect it into 2 parts: the future and work itself, which I believe is defined by human behavior. When I think about the future, the first thing that comes to mind is looking at the young, and as it relates to this talk, I'm going to talk about the young specifically but, more specifically, those between 20 and 39 and, specifically, those that live in urban markets. In 2019, The Economist released a report where they analyzed the differences in consumer behavior between those that live in the country and those that live in the big cities. I found it quite insightful because what they found is that people who lived -- who didn't live in the big cities perceive themselves as defender of values, rituals, a family. As such, how that manifested itself in consumer behavior meant that they associated a little bit of fear with change, with experiencing new things. In fact, they went on to say that they associated anxiety with trying new products. And as such, this is why a lot of the larger brands, they find affinity with consistency. Urban consumers couldn't be further apart. When you think about the urban consumer, they associate the past with difficulty, sexism, racism, slavery. And the future provides hope. How does that manifest itself as it relates to consumer behavior? Well, they love trying new things. They live for new things. And as it relates to products, larger chains, from their perception, they have a distrust that they will be able to provide meaningful, unique experiences. Now this is all -- now what's interesting about this consumer -- and I want to walk you through the day of the life of this consumer, the 20- to 39-year-old, the one that lives in London, the one that lives in Berlin. They wake up, maybe drink -- go and do 5 minutes of mindfulness on their Headspace app or their Calm app. After which point in time, they'll go wait 10, 15 minutes in line for third-wave coffee. They would never be caught dead at a Starbucks or Costa for all the reasons we discussed earlier. And then they'll go work in an open-plan work setting. By the way, this is all 2019. After which point in time, they would maybe go to some place that was a bit Instagrammable where they can go have a drink or eat, before which point in time, they would go and watch something on Netflix. Now what was interesting about that 24-hour life is you heard nothing about their home. And why? Because at this point in time, real estate prices were so expensive that most of these people were either sharing a place with friends, living in a co-living unit where the room was tiny, or they were living in a flat, maybe that their parents afforded. But their home wasn't anywhere that they did other than sleep. And then on March 20, 2020, all of this changed. The place that they were asked to sleep in only now, all of a sudden, overnight, became a place where you had to sleep, eat, work, play, gym, maybe even host others secretly, all within the confines of what they had perceived as just a place to sleep. And this consumer, this demographic had 2 choices: either, a, adapt their living space to those needs; or b, go and move in with their parents. And they fell into 2 different groups. They say that a traumatic event, one event, even within a few minutes, can rewire the neural pathways. The question is, what happens when that traumatic event, of which this was arguably the most traumatic for most of this demographic, is extended over 18 months? What happens then? And I was thinking about this. I read an article over the weekend. I don't know if you guys read the same. Mehran Nasseri, he showed up at Charles de Gaulle Airport in 1988 in August, didn't have his passport, paperwork. There were some issues. And he thought he'd be staying there for a couple of days. Few days turned into a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months. And he wasn't able to leave that airport until 2006. I'm sure some of you guys have seen the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal, which is about Nasseri. The most remarkable part of that story, though, from my perspective, wasn't the fact that he stayed until 2006. It was the fact that earlier this year, he went back to the airport to live the last few months of his life. See, the thing about trauma is that it takes moments to rewire your neural pathways. But for many, it's a lifetime to try to restore them and, in many cases, may never get restored. So the 20- to 39-year-old, yes, June said it, there is no going back. Their neural pathways have been rewired. So the question is, what is it that's going to compel them to come back to the office, if that's what you're looking for? To go to a hotel, what type of hotel is it that they're looking for? What type of co-working venue is it that they're looking for? And I would say that the answer perhaps lies in 3 studies. The first one I think we talked about, which is The Economist, which is the fact that it depends on the type of consumer that you're catering to. Are they from the regions? Are they living in the big city? We're going to talk about in a second. Second, we did a study. As many of you guys know, we do design-led hotels and so on and so forth, and we asked 10,000 people why they stay in our hotels. We don't have a big brand. In fact, 6 years ago, nobody even knew who we were. And I spent so much time trying to figure out how is it that someone like myself who has no background in hospitality was able to create something. But in summary, what a lot of these consumers say that resonates with them as to why they stay in our hotels is design. I guess to explain this for a demographic that is obsessed with visuals, with aesthetics, with Instagram, with TikTok, there's no getting away from design when it comes to this demographic. But I would say that the answer perhaps lies in the third study. In 1942, Harvard commissioned 2 studies, the Grant study and the Glueck study. The Grant study analyzed 256 Harvard sophomores, and they tracked the entirety of their lives. The Glueck study analyzed the lives of 458 intercity kids. And George Vaillant published the results of this study in 2012. It's fascinating. If you go into Wikipedia afterwards, you can look at it. The reason for why I didn't show it up here because you'd spend the whole time reading the study as opposed to listening to me because it's far more interesting than I am. But at the end of the study, there's one thing that said that resonated with me, and it's this: the quality of their lives, for single one of this, was defined by the quality of their relationships. So the average modern urbanite checks their phone over 100 times a day, and yet rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety have gone up twofold over the course of the last 10 years. Social media promises connection, and yet we've never been lonelier. And the issue is, is that Ferrari says this, we're not designed to be lone wolves. We have this image in our mind as to what life would look like if we went to the Highlands, if we lived on a beach in Bali, if we lived in the forest, and it sounds beautiful. But the number of times I've heard friends of mine try that and, after a few weeks, say, "It just didn't feel right." Why? Because we need belonging and we need tribalism. And in my opinion, the organizations, the brands, the products that find ways to deliver tribalism by understanding their consumer and the consumer needs are going to differentiate themselves from everyone else because it's not about the function, it's about the person. Thank you.

Thank you, Eric, thank you. Have a seat. Thanks a lot. I think I should start with asking you to tell just a little about your actual work with hotels because it's really interesting, I think.

Listen, I -- not having a background in hospitality, approximately 12 -- but I've always had a passion for travel. But the way I travel seems to conflict with the way that other people travel. When I try to...

In what way? How do you mean?

I want to get under the skin of a city. I don't want to stay for a night. I want to stay for a week or 2. And the irony is that we talk about sustainability. The reality is if you're flying in, staying 1 night and going back, it doesn't matter how sustainable your product is. You're doing immense amounts of damage to the environment. And so from my perspective, the greatest thing that we could do from a sustainability standpoint is really create a product that compels people to stay as long as possible, get under the skin of a city. And the challenge is -- and I know I'm going to upset a lot of people here and apologies if I appear to be very good at this. The issue is this -- is that if you stay in a hotel room for more than 4 or 5 nights, it just feels weird. You go buy something. You put it in the fridge. The fridge is tiny. You order Deliveroo. You're sitting on your bed trying to eat Deliveroo. You want to work, but you're staring at a wall while you're working. And I -- just not having a background on hospitality, I was like this doesn't feel right. I want to -- first and foremost, I'm experiencing loneliness. I want to go meet people, but I'd like to meet locals. I -- being from London, I do care about my coffee. I happen to be one of those people that's obsessed about third-wave coffee. I don't want to go to Starbucks across the -- I'd like to go downstairs and work in an open-plan co-working setting that doesn't feel sterile. And I care about design. I guess -- my father was a lead architect for Disney...

You are also involved in designing hotels. You must tell something about that.

Yes. So one thing, I have no experience in it, but I guess I'm just passionate about it. But I realized very early on that restaurants appear to be far more effective in delivering meaningful experiences as it relates to design than hotels did. So when creating this idea of what is it that would resonate with this demographic, I threw out the rule book, and I said, okay, I'm going to put kitchens in every one of the rooms because that will compel someone to stay in the city, maybe go to the farmers market, maybe meet the locals, maybe meet a local chef to teach them. I have a living area where you can lounge. I have a table and chairs where you can actually have a nice meal. Maybe I have a wine shop downstairs. We can pick a bottle of wine. The difference being is that, unlike Airbnb, I still want the community. I still want to go upstairs to the cocktail bar and meet people. I want the co-working space down below. I want the gym. And so I created, I guess, what would be perceived as a village from the eyes of this modern consumer and put it under one roof. And instead of hiring a hotel designer, I went and hired a food and beverage designer. And what I found is they're 10x cheaper. You get the principles that I've never done in a hotel before and what you get is something really quite unique.

Okay. I think I will return a little to that question a little later about how hotels and offices might be the same in the future. I don't know. I wanted to return to you now, June, because I've seen so many, so much research about this issue about that the office is out, or the office, we are not that reliant anymore as you expressed it. To me, it's kind of transient. To me, it's kind of some things people say, but they don't live that way. Am I wrong or right?

Look, I think like for us, like I work for a real estate company, right, so I can't tell you -- of course, I don't believe that the office is going away forever. I think the important thing here is that physical place, environment, as a human race, it will always have a prevailing significance to our lives, right? But if you don't step in now and rethink what the role of that corporate physical thing is, so let's stop even calling it an office anymore, okay? Every corporate organization wants to have this physical thing that all of these employees could feel a sense of belonging that belongs to everybody. And that place just doesn't really look like an office did 3 years ago. So you really just have to reconsider what is it that you're going to get people to come in to do. And if everyone's telling you that the most important thing for them right now is to be with each other, to make meaningful connections to each other, trust me, that doesn't look like rows and rows and rows of desks. So what should it look like?

Okay. June, do you see the point in what Eric is saying about if you want a place where we want to stay for more than 1 night, then it has to look the other way, the combination of work and living and sleeping?

Yes, yes, definitely. I mean the idea of like combining work and life, and I'm going to defer to you because you're like the professor guy, is that we've done this for, like, forever, right? If you -- I don't know like Swedish examples, but in the U.K., for example, this Port Sunlight, in the U.S. that used to be Eastman, which is where Kodak was, right? So all these organizations went into towns. Their factories are there. Their offices are there. Their people live there. Little businesses popping up on the Main Street to support employees. And if you think about what Google or Facebook is doing today, Facebook, for example, they're building like a huge, huge, huge development right now in California. What are they essentially doing? They've been -- they're doing something that companies have done hundreds of years ago. They're trying to keep it contained. We don't really know if it's for the benefit of the company or the people that we can leave to debate, but it's still something that's happening.

Yes. What I was going to add is this. If you think about the modern consumer, the urban consumer standpoint, the symbols of tribalism at this moment in time for a while, and I'm going to give credit where credit is due, was the likes of Soho House because it was a member's club. I'm part of the member's club. And what's happened is this, if you look at what the likes of WeWork and some of the other -- and lifestyle hotels have done is they've taken some of the visual features, the symbolism behind that environment, perhaps what was perceived as a restaurant, and they've kind of applied it to the hotel. And so -- and then eventually, WeWork applied it to the workplace. If you come to our hotels or if you come to our office, they look the same in our case. They look -- you can't tell whether you're meant to -- I mean not just there, you meant to go have a drink, are you meant to party, are you meant to sit on your laptop, are you meant to -- the reason for why we've designed our social spaces that way is because I've got one purpose with our common areas in our office, and it's to forge meaningful connection. That's all I care about.

Can I?

Sure.

Yes, you're like, I'm trying -- so I headed up the workplace strategy team for Europe and Asia at WeWork for a couple of years, right? And the #1 question that corporate organizations, so your big, like, banks and your pharmaceuticals will come, and they will be like, "Can you give us a tour of WeWork, and we'll do it," right? And then the question that they ask is like, "How do you guys do this? How do you make it so energetic, so incredibly buzzy? Can you come and do it for us in our building?" And we can't. We can't. We can't. And even if we put in the exact same design, you just can't do it because you can't physically change their workplace culture, the inherent, like, hierarchy, the bureaucracy of these organizations by just physically changing the place. And then you kind of realize that like actually the key elements of it really boils down, back down to culture. It boils down to behaviors. And I think the president said something, I think, really, really important in her opening, which is like people are looking for a meaningful connection and purpose, okay? And that doesn't just exist in a physical way.

Okay. Thank you, June. Soon, I want some help from the Secretariat. If you have something because I'm going to change track completely in this discussion now. Do you have anything now already, Caroline?

Yes. I'm very interesting in the leadership role now in this new setting with remote working place. It's new actions that will be needed. Do you have any suggestions here, how to adapt to the new...

Let Carl start with that.

First of all, I think it really depends on what you produce, right? So if you're a manufacturing company, you're churning out the same goods day in and day out, right? You can monitor what people do quite easily, right? And you will do very well in being a bureaucratic, hierarchical organization. If you don't produce anything that is standardized good and if people work remotely and you have very little ability to monitor them unless you use sort of technology like monitoring people's keystroke and looking at when they log in and out, which might be tricky because of GDPR and not in the interest of people's well-being either, what you need to do is to align incentives. And that's what we do in academia, for example, right? People have incentives to publish. If you don't publish, your career is over, but there's nobody looking after -- over your shoulder every day, right? In similar fashion, as people start to work in a more distributed manner, what you will need to do is to change incentives. So you rely less on monitoring, and you rely more on bonuses, and you rely more on variable compensation in general to give people the autonomy at their request. So with autonomy, though, I have to say, comes responsibility. And when you look at people that are self-employed, for example, they are more content with their working life. But they're also a lot more anxious because, obviously, if you're self-employed, you don't know what the next month is going to look like. And if you work in a flexible manner and rely more on variable compensation, I suspect you're going to have the same sort of...

I surely know what you mean, Carl. I know what you mean. Changing track completely, this is -- my weird question is based on Carl's presentation earlier, but I'm sure you all have an opinion about this. Who owns the future? Is it the nerd? Or is it the multi-talent? Do you understand what I mean?

The generalist versus the nerd?

Yes, yes. Who is really prepared for the future? Who is it? Even in the hospitality industry, do we need the real specialists? Or do we need the generalists? What do you think?

In the end of the day, both, right, unfortunately. So I mean if you're in science, for example, there's no way you can be a generalist scientist, right? Today, you have to process an immense literature. And one of the reasons we have stagnation in science is because there's just so much knowledge out there that you need to process first before you can push the frontier. But obviously, if you run the company and you're not a generalist and you don't understand various parts of the organization, the environment that changes around you, you're in trouble, right? And so you needed both. And when you come to the hotel, you need somebody who has an overview and knows what's wrong during the day and what worked well and whatnot.

What's your take on this, Eric?

Listen, I want to answer hers because I think it's actually related to yours in a very weird way. Listen, you asked about what is it that we could do. Here's my take on this: flexibility and high pay, alignment of pay are table stakes. If you're not doing them, you're not going to be able to retain your team. But in the end, it's a sense of belonging that's going to define engagement and collaboration. And in order to provide that sense of belonging, you need to know who it is that you're catering to from a consumer standpoint and from a team standpoint. And if you can create a product that caters to both, you hit the jackpot because then your consumers and your team members are the same. Now in response to what you're saying, I'm concerned, and I pray that I'm wrong, I really do, I'm concerned it will end up as a tale of 2 cities. And what I mean by that is you say the nerds, the first thing that comes to mind is people who will spend their entire lives on the metaverse versus those who want to spend their time in front of people. And that's perhaps -- and then now the reality is typically will it fall somewhere in between. There must be some form of augmented reality that facilitates both. That's what I'm hoping. But I think that you might end up with both dictating where we'll end up in very different places.

Caroline, wave if you have anything more. Otherwise, yes? But make it just a quick one because I have another one that I have to ask also.

Yes. Very, very quick one, and that's about if -- it's a question to June, I would assume. If your research has shown what an ideal office situation would look for managers referring to your favorite slide, especially in terms of work-life balance.

Yes. I really, really think it's back down to the whole thing around work patterns, right? I think we picked up a lot of bad habits during COVID. So say, for example, before COVID happened, and this is a very simple example, you didn't have back-to-back meetings, okay? That wasn't just like -- it wasn't a natural thing to do because you can't because you actually have to walk somewhere else to do a meeting. You actually were in an office where you had to give time or carve time out to talk to people around you. One of the craziest things that has happened during lockdown is like you would immediately get off a call, you're probably 30 seconds late to your next call, and you're always apologizing at the start of the next call, okay? We do that so much. That leaves you with absolutely no breathing space to do the things that you have to do as a manager. And if we don't change that work pattern, again, we're fundamentally stuck. And then there are obviously the obvious things, right? Like a lot of people, and I think back to the question around managing people, there are 2 things that leadership and managers are worried about. One is performance, and actually, that's the easier thing because when you start to quantify what good performance means, you can easily manage that, right? So for a lot of professional services, that's billable hours or operating margin. You can measure that. The second thing that they're so afraid of that you can't easily solve is that there's a feeling that people are becoming a lot less connected to the company culture, but you don't know what to do about that, right? But that's because we're so stuck in the mindset where we rely on seeing each other, observing norms. So I will see how Eric or Carl speaks to a boss or each other, and I'll mimic that, right? And you just kind of build it out where everybody kind of just like picks up behavior cues, you do that. When you're sat in a room half the week, you miss out on that. One of the most interesting things one of our clients said to us is that all the people who started working for us during lockdown, all the graduates, think that we're incredibly conservative, hierarchical and just a bunch of old guys, and that's completely not true because they've never seen us hanging around the T-point, they've never seen us just like grabbing a coffee or the fact that our offices, our doors are never closed, but they don't know that. So how do you replicate that in the hybrid world, I think, is like the big thing to solve.

That's interesting. June, time is running, but I have one that I really want you to answer, all 3 of you. This trio, all of them, live in the London area, right? London vicinity, at least. Oxford in the middle. I want you to tell me that if you look at the world with the future of work eyes and you shall move to another city and you should enjoy and experience work in the future in your own way, where do you move, June?

Are you trying to get us to say Stockholm?

That's an answer. Absolutely. Carl?

Well, as much as I love Stockholm, I do think it's probably London or New York because what's happening is that we are getting much more mixed in terms of the populations that we see across the world. People are becoming more mobile. Stockholm is still a Swedish city. Paris is still a French city. Berlin is still a German city. London is a truly international place, and it's the only international place in Europe.

So you choose London. But you are not allowed to choose London.

New York. New York.

New York, in that case. Well, I guess, Eric, you have quite an interesting answer on this. I think so.

I've changed my mind.

You did? Okay. Tell us.

Yes. I mean I've gone back and forth on this. My original response, if you recall, was Austin, Texas, partially because as a result of kind of this remote work ecosystem, you're seeing a migration to a better quality of life for cheaper. The fact that I can be compensated but work within a sunnier climate but still get my sense of belonging by knowing that like-minded people are living in the likes of Lisbon or Austin. So you're seeing migration of these -- people used to call them hipsters, I just -- I don't know if we should call them hipsters anymore. But I think the second answer to that would probably be Singapore. Because of there's so much of a geopolitical shift happening in the world, I feel like we're not -- having a finger on the pulse as to what's happening in East Asia.

We're going to test that answer on another speaker after the break. Yes, we will. I'm a bit late. Eric, Carl and June, thank you very much for your speeches and also the conversation. Thank you, Secretariat. We'll be back to you after the break. And it's time for a break now because when you have intelligent conversations, I get tired. Did you? Yes. We need a coffee break. We have a great program after the coffee break with some interaction again. But now listen to me, be back 3:00, please. We start sharp. We'll talk again. Thank you very much. [Break]

Ready? Fine. Did you have a good coffee? Fine? It's time for a little interactivity. You see these funny signs you have gotten on your chairs, and we want you to use them now. So 3 questions to you. You either disagree or agree. I hope I can see what you show. It's a little dark in here, but I guess I will be able to see it. And Secretariat, ready, go.

My employer gives me enough flexibility to meet the needs of my personal life.

What do you say? What do you say? Do I have a hand microphone? Yes, I think it was 99% saying agree, but I think there was 1 saying disagree.

Well, I was actually thinking as I'm an employer, and I think I am giving the employees too little flexibility.

How nice of you. Thank you very much. Okay, that was a vast majority, wasn't it?

Yes, it was clear.

I am self-employed. And I would say disagree to myself. Absolutely. Do we take a second one?

Yes. My company has a clear purpose.

Yes, now I expect a little more differences, but I don't get it. Yes, a little, little. Anybody wants to explain why you disagree? No, you're a bit scared. Yes, I can see that. That was kind of 90/10, just about. Caroline, what do you say?

More lesser time is more valuable than higher pay.

This is interesting. This is really interesting.

Some hesitation at least.

What do you see? Can you see better than me, Anders, perhaps from your angle? There's still a great majority for green, but there's more red, really. [ Umrad ], I see you disagree. Yes.

Maybe it's correlated to the actual pay you already have.

Or senior leadership [indiscernible].

Isn't it quite interesting that the Chairman of the Board of Pandox disagrees, isn't it? What do you say, Christian?

Well, I mean this to make money.

Okay. Perhaps we use them some more time later on. What do you say? It worked very well. People were a little afraid of disagreeing, but yes, we'll see. And I know also that in the Secretariat, you have loads of questions now that have come in. The stream has sort of increased during the event. But now we're going to go on with the program, do we? Fine. I said about Carl Frey that he's a real European. Well, referring to that, our next speaker is a real global citizen as I see her. Traveling all around, talking about generations, selling a best-selling book really and has a very, very interesting background in her life because she changed kind of directions in her professional life like 4x something, has a lot of experience due to that. Here she is.

Please welcome the Founder of XYZ@Work, Rachele Focardi.

Rachele, welcome. The floor is yours.

Thank you so much, Jan, for such a wonderful introduction. And thank you to Pandox for bringing me here today to talk about a topic that has been one of my biggest love affairs over the last 20 years. I am a big fan of generational diversity. I am a big fan. I come from Italy, so we are -- we have big families. We love to spend time together and learn from each other. And I believe that there is a lot of value in bringing together the knowledge, the life experiences and the skills of the different generations. Unfortunately, in the workplace, most of us are not equipped to work with each other, and there is very easy and explainable reason for that. But generational diversity has become now more than ever, I believe, any organization's competitive advantage. So I only have 15 minutes. I would love to talk for 6 hours about this. So I will try to keep it brief as much as I can as an Italian. Jan, don't worry. But I would like to walk you through some of the insights that I have collected over 18 years of experience working with close to 1,000 organizations over 4 continents and supporting companies in really understanding and unleashing the power of intergenerational collaboration. So why is generational diversity so important right now? Why are we hearing so much about it? Well, there's a few things, obviously. We have big demographic shifts. You have countries that have very young workforces and aging workforces. We have, for the first time in history, 5 generations working alongside each other. You see them here labeled in colors: the baby boomers, Gen X, millennials in yellow and Gen Z in pink. We also have many traditionalists still in the workforce and going strong, but those who are still very close in age to the baby boomers. So for the purpose of this, I will keep them together. So what this means is that organizations need to be able to create the best possible environment for a vastly diverse group of people. We also have a new era coming up. We have Gen Z, an entire new generation, the new kids on the block that are really transforming the way organizations operate both as businesses and as employers. The other thing that's interesting is that there's a lot of talk about the Great Resignation lately, and what business leaders fail to understand is that there is a direct correlation between a nonharmonized, multigenerational workforce and people leaving the company. And we've seen it even more during the pandemic, right? During the pandemic, people lost control, lost a sense of agency. They lost connection with each other. Communication between generations started to become complicated. We saw the XYZ divide syndrome where we don't really understand each other. We start to reevaluate our lives and priorities. Business results suffer, and ultimately, people leave, with the younger generations most likely to leave. And not understanding the direct correlation between generations that understand each other, value each other and workplaces where everybody feels equally valuable and able to contribute and people leaving means that organizations and business leaders are missing out on the opportunity to help their employees reconnect, reenergize each other and redefine the way they work through understanding and collaboration between generations. One thing that I think we can all agree regarding the pandemic is that COVID has shown us that the interconnected problems that we will increasingly be facing in society and in business simply cannot be addressed through the hierarchical and traditional way of doing business, but that it will only be by being able to combine the creativity, the tech savviness, the ambition and energy of the young generations alongside the incredible and invaluable wealth of experience, knowledge, wisdom of the generations that came before them. And companies that can really bring these 2 together will be able to see a level of progress that we have not seen before. Those who cannot do that, well, it will be a matter of merely surviving. So what does it mean for business leaders in a multigenerational workforce? What it means is that you will be able, you have to be able, to guide people digitally in real life business situation, which means you're going to have to be able to think about how to manage people adopting progressive strategies to keep them engaged. You're going to have to think about, as we've heard from our incredible speakers earlier in the day, how to organize these people together, so shifting office norms to make sure that people can truly collaborate. And then you'll have to be able to drive innovation by capturing the individual but also the collective talent of your workforce to drive innovation and bring the business forward. So business leaders will need to be able to understand a wide range and priorities of different generations in order to operate successfully. So understanding the why that underpins different generations in the workplace will be fundamental in order to manage and lead a generationally diverse team. Now there's a lot of talk recently about whether generations even exist. Should we even talk about generations at all? There was an article recently in The New Yorker that said we should stop talking about generations because they don't really exist. And I very strongly disagree with the statement, and I don't want to sit here and explain why I disagree with that statement. I will instead share some research that comes directly from thousands of employees in the workforce across generations. 89% of baby boomers, 87% of Gen X, 94% of millennials and 96% of Gen Z say that generational diversity is incredibly important and should be on the top of any organization's DEI agenda. However, very few companies are focused on it. In Asia, less than 8% of companies, for example, have it in their DEI agenda. There was a recent survey by Deloitte that said that 70% of CEOs worldwide say that addressing the challenges of a multigenerational workforce will be critical to their success, but less than 10% are ready to tackle that challenge. So obviously, it's real, right? And why is it real? Of course, we shouldn't be bunched under an umbrella where all individuals were all different. But the story behind the story matters, right? As a Gen X, the way the world was, socioeconomic, political climate, pop culture, parenting styles, all -- the way the work was, office norms and so on, influence the way I see the workplace. And so it's only natural that people that grew up alongside me in that particular time period would be able to understand each other more than people who didn't. So it's really about creating that understanding. Now what's interesting is when I saw the Deloitte study, which reflected my study, so less than 40% of employees say that they feel their company is committed to GD, to generational diversity, and less than 23% of HR professionals say their company is doing anything about it. And so I decided to explore why. If it's so important, if you recognize that it's important, why are you not focusing on it? And the answer is fear. Business leaders and HR professionals are scared. They're afraid of offending people. They're afraid of being politically incorrect. Should we use older? Should we use younger? Is it an offense? Well, why should it be? The world operates on time. We either come before or we come after, and there's only positive things that come from that. So I started looking around and really, being able to ensure fairness and bringing everybody under one vision is the reason why companies are not talking about this. Now the problem, however, is that this leads to a series of underlying conflicts in the workplace. So there's discord among workers. There is unhealthy competition. There is lack of alignment. There is stagnated innovation. There's low employee engagement. There's a lot of issues that happen in the workplace because generations don't understand each other and because employers are not making an effort to facilitate that understanding. So one thing that George Orwell said at the turn of the century is, "Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it." So the question often is why is generational diversity such a big topic now? Generations have always worked together. Maybe there wasn't 5 of them, maybe there was 3 of them, but this was never really a problem. Well, as a Gen Xer who was, at one point, a rookie in the workplace, I can tell you that, of course, I had opinions that differed probably from management. But because of the hierarchical structure, I kept them to myself. Everybody followed the chain of command. So yes, there were different opinions, but we followed a chain of command. Then millennials came, and this incredible generation forced people to recognize one thing: young people matter in the workplace. They have great ideas. They can start great companies. And of course, they led to the demise of the pyramid hierarchy, and they led to a more flat organization where everybody has opinions and everybody wants to share those opinions. And of course, it's difficult for older generations, for example, who had to wait 10, 20 years to get to a position where they would be heard. So as a result of that, we see the XYZ divide syndrome where generational diversity is not seen as a productive element. And you can see here, 59% of boomers and only 40% of Gen Z think generational diversity makes the workplace more productive. And this is a real shame because I've worked with companies for 20 years and there is no team that covers most blind spots in decision-making than flat multigenerational teams. So another thing that, of course, is interesting here and I can't focus too much about it is we have an entire new generation coming into the workforce. So millennials drove the workplace transformation, the workplace revolution, forcing us to change our workplace culture: value diversity, be friendly and so on and so forth. And we can all agree, those of us, especially Gen X and boomers, that the world today is very different than what it was a few years ago. The new generations, the new Gen Zs, they will lead to a new transformation, which is linked to purpose and impact. They are literally worried that the world is about to end, and they're literally worried that there will not be a world left for their children. So for them, being able to hit the ground running when they start working for you and work on things that allow them to create an impact and contribute to something meaningful will be absolutely a non-trade-off. It will be something that they will need to have. And you see it in your own -- very own Greta Thunberg how many incredible Gen Zs are moving along to drive that transformation. But unfortunately, because of this misunderstanding and the fact that generations don't know much about each other, there is a lot of intergenerational conflicts in the workplace. You guys have probably heard about OK boomers, this term that I hate, that is meant to dismiss the out-of-date supposed opinions of older generation; and also the Strawberry generation, this idea that the new Gen Zs are so fragile and because they don't know hardship and they haven't experienced the need to survive, then they're not resilient, as if survival depended on trauma. No, it doesn't. You may have survived, but you have trauma that lasts a lifetime. Well, psychological safety is actually what leads to resilience. So one thing I'd like to ask you today is never to use these terms ever again, for one. But basically, this idea that the older generations are resistant to change, they don't want to change the world and don't want to encourage them to do so; and that the young generations, they don't value experiential input, they're so fragile and so on, this is a lot of bull. It's not true. There is so much that we don't really understand about each other. But because of that, as you can see here, intergenerational conflicts in the workplace are very common. I run studies with companies from your Amazons to your investment banks, every industry that you can think of, and it's always the same story. Baby boomer thinks that -- 44% of them experienced intergenerational conflicts daily or weekly. And all the way up to 70% of millennials and Gen Z said they experienced intergenerational conflicts daily, and that they're so hard to solve that leaders across generations really can't get their way around them. Now the good news here, and this is my favorite part and where I come in, is 96% of employees across generations, across almost every industry that I've ever surveyed, say that they know very little or nothing at all about the forces that shape the mindsets and behaviors of their multigenerational colleagues. So here's the thing. We don't have a problem with each other at all. But because we don't know our story, we don't know the story of the generations that came before us, when we encounter a behavior, a mindset that we don't understand, we fall back on the negative stereotype, right? "He is not willing to be authentic or share his personal story." "See, you're such a Gen Xer. You don't trust. You're not a team player." While in reality, I'm terrified to share my personal story because I was encouraged not to do so for most of my career when leadership was not about being nice, right? It was about ensuring productivity. So I think it's important to understand how the workplace has evolved and help generations understand it. For baby boomers, you can see here, work is work, right? It's not about liking your job, but it's about seeing how much c*** you can take from your boss and then take some more. And that was the workplace for boomers and Gen X. And then, of course, millennials came and said, "Work should be part of who I am, not just the way to make a living." And now you have Gen Z coming in and saying, "Why should I work for you? Where is your purpose? How can I save the world by working for you?" So without this understanding, generations will inevitably fall to the confirmation bias and not understand each other at all. Now the good news is 99% of employees want to work together more than ever. 1 in 2 actually is intimidated by the role they play in the multigenerational workforce. Older generations not having enough energy or younger generations not be valued enough because they don't have enough experience. And 97% say that they're desperate to learn from one another but companies don't have the correct programs in place. And fundamentally, every generation wants the same thing. So when I ask what is it that makes you happy in the workplace, every generation agrees that it's feeling valued, recognized and appreciated not so much only by my company anymore, but each other. Generations are dying to be seen. So what happened? And how has COVID changed things? So pre-COVID, we had misalignment, and we had aimlessness. And I've seen this for 18 years. Each individual takes the stereotype approach of each other. We did not understand or lived experiences, and we did not know how to collaborate effectively. The other thing was aimlessness. A lot of us lacked a personal sense of purpose. We had one maybe at some point in our career, but then we got caught in the grind and we forgot about it. And so as leaders, we weren't really as able to enable purpose and others. But what happened with COVID is magical in the sense that generations don't understand each other because they're shaped by large-scale events that typically happen in the formative years, when we grow up, and we're not there at the same time because we don't exist at the same time. But what happened with COVID is like Halley's Comet, right? It's one of those things that is unprecedented. Every generation in almost every workplace all over the world experienced almost the same experience at the same time, and this has brought generations together more than ever. So I ran a study called the Post-Pandemic Workplace study to understand how different generations experienced working together during the pandemic and how they see the future of work going forward. Now a couple of things that are interesting. The pandemic has aligned generations in a way that I have never ever seen. So for example, I was having a hard time actually finding differences for the first time in 18 years. The pandemic forced technology adoption. In fact, the one thing that baby boomers are the most grateful for is the fact that they were forced to embrace technology. And even though people think that baby boomers are techno-pessimists, my research shows that actually they're not. They're quite techno-optimists. And they believe that now they can embrace the workforce and be part of the solution in ways that they've never been before, and they can also communicate with the new generations and embrace flexibility at work. Also, it forced us to redefine leadership. Many leaders who are proud of who they are, as they should be, are trying to rethink their leadership style to be more coaching, more visionary, more charismatic leaders. It also reignited a sense of purpose. So baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z alike say that the #1 way in which the pandemic changed the relationship to their employer is purpose. So senior leaders and older generations are better equipped than ever to enable purpose in the younger generations. The other thing as well is that it moved us from thinking about upskilling to lifelong learning. So in the past, I mean, it's a bit intimidating for an older generation who has to be told, "You need to upskill yourself or otherwise you're going to be obsolete," changing that to in today's climate, we all have to learn. It doesn't matter what generation you belong to. Not learning, not being a lifelong learner is not an option. And finally, it gave us an opportunity to reinvent the workplace to something that works for everybody. 89% of employees say that hybrid is the future. Boomers are the ones who want it the most, and the ones that say that they actually miss the office the most are Gen Z. So generations really kind of flipped and understand each other now better than ever. Finally, it also normalized mental health. This is so important. This generation really spoke up about it, and leaders now believe that actually ensuring mental health in their employees is critical. And finally, it highlighted the importance of intergenerational collaboration. Everybody believes we have equal challenges and opportunities. Yes. So we're done. So the point is this. The only problem that we have is that the frequency and quality of workplace interactions between generations has declined naturally. So if you, as an organization, can figure out 2 things: number one, make sure that finally, generations understand each other. Explain to them what is the story, a day in the life of a young boomer who joined the workforce, how is that different from what generations are experiencing today. And the second thing is create a platform for generations to really connect. Many of our teams are still very siloed. So if you can do that, if you can help generations understand each other and come together, you will experience a level of progress that surely you have never seen before. And I just want to end with this slide, which I really love, and this slide says, "Global crises that crush existing orders and overturn long-held norms, especially extended, large-scale wars, pave the way for new systems, structures and values to emerge and take hold. Without such devastation to existing systems and practices, leaders and populations are generally resistant to major changes and to giving up some of their sovereignty to new organizations or rules." So I think we can all agree that COVID was one of these large-scale global crises that actually forced us to rethink everything. So why can we now not take advantage of this to create a world that is run, in business and in society, not just by the older generation, not just by the younger ones, by both of them working together and senior leaders understanding that the most important role that you have to play in the future of society and work is preparing the next generations for leadership. So Jan, don't kill me. I know I'm done here.

Have a seat. Have a seat.

He's looking at me with a very mean face. I think I'm in trouble. Am I in trouble? I didn't see the timing. It stopped.

You're not in trouble. I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions, and I thought we were going to miss the chance really.

Yes. Go. Yes. I'm here.

And I don't want to be rude now...

Don't.

But I have a question...

Or do.

That is rather mean.

Go.

I'll tell you what I did the evening before yesterday. I was out for dinner with a very smart woman who works in the grocery shop area. She's been working for that around 20 years, sort of middle manager in different jobs in big food supermarkets or smaller grocery shops, and I think she's talented, very good. So I suggested, "Anne, why don't you think about using your experience and trying hotels and restaurants?" And you know what she answered? She says, "Absolutely not." Hey. And I go, "Why?" She said, "Very low wages, awful working hours, bad managers." Is that a dominating view about young or half younger people?

I mean to a great extent, yes. I mean I think hospitality is not the only industry that is having this challenge. I mean this is a new generation that is thinking about industries and how industries should redefine themselves both as employees and as consumers. But of course, I mean, the hospitality industry has its own challenges. I mean when you look at the new generations, the perception is they can't see beyond the front desk, right? So the perception is it's a job where you have very little flexibility. The biggest decisions are made by the manager. I'm not really part of decision process. I don't understand really what kind of careers there are for me. And another thing about Gen Z that they're very open to admitting about themselves is they're not comfortable with personal conflicts. It's something that they need to build as a skill. So the idea of dealing with customers, dealing potentially with angry or difficult customers is something that is not necessarily appealing for them. So I think in order -- but what they don't know is all the incredible opportunities that are available within the hospitality industry. So there is an opportunity to reposition, I think, the hospitality industry.

Well, I don't know if this is a dominating attitude. I just thought that if it is, you've got a problem here, in that case. I don't know. It's just a perception. What about the secretariat? Do you have anything? Go on.

Yes, we have one question from the audience, and that is you talked about 5 generations working side by side currently. And what are the core strength per generation?

That's a really good one. I have...

Hey, this is a full-time lecture, isn't it? Take it short now, Rachele.

No, no, I'll be -- well, I can't promise I'll be fast because I break that promise all the time. No, I have actually -- I can share something afterwards. But I mean, generally, let's look at, for example, the baby boomers onwards. So let's focus on the 4 most dominant ones. Baby boomers have a lot of strengths and many that we recognize in each other. So when I ask the workforce, what do you think about baby boomer colleagues? They're wise. They're dependable. They are strategic thinkers. They are reliable. They have a ton of experience. It's like sitting with an encyclopedia. They have so much life knowledge. My generation, Gen X, we are thought of as the ultimate problem solvers. We are the very first generation of tech entrepreneurs. So we can solve problems in the old way and in the new ways. We can cater to the hierarchical approach because we experienced it at the beginning of our career, but we can relate in an easier way with the younger generations. We're more independent. We're more autonomous. We don't seek the limelight as much as the other generations. But we put our wisdom and our experience to the service of the organization. Millennials, of course, we know they're creative. They're tech savvy. They value diversity. They are agile thinkers. And the new generations, I mean, Gen Z is just incredible in my opinion. I mean they care about the world for real. They want to change the world. They are hungry. They are in touch with the future. They are full of ambition, and they really want to make a difference. So there is a lot. And if you think about it, as an organization, if you can bring all these skills together to solve any problem of strategic importance to your business, you're going to be able to cover pretty much every single blind spot in decision-making. The problem is creating...

This is obviously a very good question, wasn't it?

Yes, it's an amazing question. Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely.

Okay. I've hidden the book down here. Here it is, Reframing Generational Stereotypes, and I'm now into Chapter 25, Page 178. There you write about one of many recipes where organizations, could be in the hotel business, for example, use a special tool to make sure that the young people in the company have a real say. And what I'm thinking about is the shadow boards. Can you tell a little about that?

Absolutely, absolutely. So this is the thing. I mean agile managers and organizations are understanding that workplace culture is an evolutionary process, right? And you have to change, adapt to change in order to cater to these new generations as consumers and as employees. And so one of the things that a lot of organizations are starting to look into is a complete kind of design thinking approach to redesigning models and processes. And one of those ways and one of the things that we know is most important for Gen Z and I've asked this on panels over and over when I say what motivates you at work is 2 things: impact and contribution. They want to be part of the solution. So what a lot of companies -- well, not a lot actually. Quite a few, I have to say, but it's a big boardroom topic are shadow boards. So shadow boards basically are executive committees of young talent. So let me give you the example of GroupM, for example, in India, which is what I shared in my book. They had a challenge of understanding consumers, right, because consumers are increasingly younger, and the people in the executive committees are usually older generations. And they had a challenge also attracting the right talent. So they said, let's hit two birds with one stone. Let's identify 15 people who have been in our company for no more than a year and let's actually create an Executive Board of young people, called YCO, and let's put this Board to work alongside the executive committee. So every single project, every single thing of strategic importance to the business is worked on by both the executive committee working alongside with the youth committee. So what this does is it covers blind spots in decision-making. It removes all the bottlenecks of the executive committee having to understand what's going on at the ground level and with consumers. And also, it creates an opportunity for what I love, which is 2-way mentoring, right, which is me as a young -- youth committee member, I can reverse mentor my executive committee members, all the while they mentor me in return. And so the idea here is that every decision is made together. And you have companies like Accor, for example, in your industry that are doing that. Companies like Gucci, GroupM and so on. But this is a fantastic way to bring in the voice of the young generations alongside the experience of the older ones.

Perhaps somebody would want to try, see if it works.

It's amazing. I mean it's the solution, yes.

Yes, let's see.

Yes. Please do it, and then tell me how it goes.

Rachele, thank you very much. You're going to take part in the group talk later on. Thanks for this presentation. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Thank you. I was wondering about a thing here. Rachele, do you give lectures in how you speak fast without making mistakes?

No. It's just a lot of practice.

It should do. That's fantastic. Impressive. Yes, what was I going to say? You remember the guy who had a little problem in his reception work? You remember? Let's see what happened then. Here it is. [Presentation]

You can just imagine how it goes in the next one. We'll see. Coming in all the way from New York City, a very experienced consultant speaker. Well, I can mention many, many professions. Working with the giant PepsiCo for many, many years. Now in the executive search and advisory field specializing, for example, in a lot of multicultural thinking in workplaces. Well, here she is.

Please welcome Partner at August Leadership, Umran Beba.

You're so welcome.

Thank you. Thank you. Wow! From Singapore to New York. This is great. And I'm originally from Turkey. I lived in Hong Kong, Dubai and now in the U.S. because of my career with PepsiCo. And I was the one who was pushed to move. So my husband and my 2 kids, they were actually moving with me. But why I am here today, because I was the only general manager woman sitting in most of the meetings for too many times. So in 2006, I decided that I had to do something about it. So my gender journey really started with that because I said, I'm working in a company where 70% of the decisions are made by, basically, women. They are the buyers, shoppers, gatekeepers. So they have to be in the decision-making roles. They have to be in the general management roles. So that's the way actually my diversity journey started and really talking about it also because we have to do something about it. And still, we have to do something about it. And then the second part was basically I moved from Turkey after many years. I was at the age of 45. My first expat experience, moving into Hong Kong, managing 25 countries as the president. So working in the multicultural space, I was sitting in a Japanese Board as the only woman and foreigner, as you can imagine, and listening to the Board meetings and being effective actually with translations in the room. So you have to adapt yourself to that while dealing with the Australian and New Zealanders, and the idea of equality is very different for them than some of the other places. And then I have to go to Pakistan and many other places where I have to basically respect their reality, the religion and all that. And after that, moving to Dubai, I had to basically work with 200 different nationalities, different religions. So multicultural and multinational becomes really a reality on the ground every day. You have to respect, understand, win-win together. And then coming to U.S., all of a sudden now, I'm an immigrant and ESL. Do you know what ESL is? English as second language. So I'm not anymore this high-level executive who gets it because, I mean, I learned English. Of course, it's my second language. My first is Turkish. So you start feeling again like you have to prove yourself. With all that, why did I stay in one company for so many years? It's the meaningful work. It's the purpose, we will talk about. And you heard it from other, actually, speakers today. But today, we are also seeing flexibility about everything. It's the space. We talked about flexibility of time, the compensation and benefits. Not everybody wants to be getting the same benefits and compensation anymore and the tailor-made solutions and development. Why? Because we are all unique. We are all different. And that's the whole story about diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging. And it's also about the multigenerational. We are all unique. If we have the time, if we can invest the time to understand our uniqueness and talk about it to each other, we will understand, we will respect and we can enjoy working together, creating value. But the company should offer this -- respect this uniqueness and offer flexibility and tailor-made solutions. And with all that, of course, comes also the values-based leadership. Working in a company for long means your values, personal values, and the company values actually go hand in hand. You don't have as many conflicts, or even if there are conflicts, you can solve them with respect. So the values-based leadership actually is, again, essence of retention and staying in one organization but with all the flexible and tailor-made solutions. So the environment of respect and trust actually comes with that understanding of uniqueness. Again, we will talk about we are all unique in our own way. So having our voice in the decisions, in the organization, in the teamwork, I think, is very important. And do we have a place or do we have an environment, a work space where my opinions are valued? Am I part of the decisions? Do I understand the purpose of the company? And can I contribute to this purpose? And can I contribute to the bigger picture? That's what people want today in the workplace. So if you look at the overall diversity, equity and inclusion era, actually, the whole idea of representing our customers is the essence of diversity. Why do we sit here in this room? Because of our customers, because of our clients. If we don't understand them, if we don't represent them in the decision-making points or front line, then we are missing something. So that is the gender, that's the ethnicity, that's the nationality, that's the age, that's everything about we have to represent. And I come from actually a frontline organization, food and beverage. So if the front line is not getting the support from the head office or the back office, then it's meaningless, right? So we are working for the front line. Therefore, if we are working for our clients and customers, we have to represent them in the workplace, and we have to support them. So how do you then empower the front line? You have to listen to them. You have to make sure you hear their voices. You have to understand the problems in the front line and then find solutions for them, solutions for the issues of the clients and the front line but also using all the creativity and the diversity of the organization. So that's the era we are in actually. And if you look at the organizations, we are now seeing more terminology. In the past, it was diversity. Then inclusion was added. Now there is equity and also belonging. Equity is the part we will talk about, which is about fairness, pay equity or policy equity. It has to be fair where we are working. We have to feel good about it. And then the belonging is really that, I am accepted in this room. I am accepted in this company. I'm accepted in this environment. So those feelings are growing, of course, with the new generations, but also with the new reality of the workplace. So I will go back quickly to the reality of definitions for a minute. Diversity, according to the International Standards Organization new ISO standard, there are 27 different diversity types. They are visible or invisible. So we are all unique because of that. I mean we might be focusing on gender, very visible; ethnicity, sometimes visible; or different abilities, sometimes visible, sometimes not; nationality. But at the end of the day, it's the way we think based on our life experiences. And if we can get these people with the right recruitment processes in our organization, and with the flexible and tailor-made solutions, we can keep them, develop them, that's the core of diversity. I have to represent my customers, clients in my workplace, in my company. I think that's the core. But then I have to give them actually equitable practices. It's the pay. We can't have a pay gap between man and woman, period; or between different ethnicities, period. That's old-fashioned. You have to measure it, that's your responsibility, and find solutions for those gaps. And then we are moving into the idea of inclusion. We have to hear every voice. It doesn't matter if I bring all these 27 differences in my organization and I do nothing about it. I have to give them the space to hear their voice and they feel included. They bring their perspectives. They bring, actually, value to the decisions. That's why we pay. Let's make sure we use this asset. It is actually the reality of why we care for diversity or for having the talent. And then belonging, which is becoming more and more the new idea in town, is that they are accepted with their differences. So it's about the uniqueness, as I mentioned, and how we understand. But now this is also part of the ESG agenda. It's part of the people side, the social side. So we are now in the boardrooms -- and luckily, I'm actually chairing the ESG committee of a U.K. public board, it's about diversity in the company. It's about engagement of the employees. It's about the fairness, pay equity. We have to take care of all these things, and we have to communicate it to our stakeholders. That's also what the investors are looking for today. It's not only for the employees. It's the internal and external stakeholders are caring about social things, especially also with the human rights, the community work. So we cannot ignore these things even if we want because the investors are looking at these realities now. They're asking about it. Maybe not in every country yet, but it will happen. And moving forward, I think we see the purpose, values and cultures in the middle of everything. So what's the purpose of the company? Why am I working here? What are the values? Are they in line with my values? And is this culture supporting me, including me, hearing my voice and adding value to the organization? Is it valued? Do I belong here? I think that's the core. But let's not forget about the managers. So within all that, we have the reality of the managers which has to also demonstrate all of these skills and that the person feels then included and accepted in the organization. So I think this reality of purpose, culture and values working together for a better environment is not anymore the problem of the top management or the Board. It's the reality of every level. The cascading, the understanding, the managers feeling it and making sure they bring everybody to the decision-making because people want fast decisions and they want to be part of those decisions, agile work, responsive working. So if you are bringing all this talent and if they don't add value actually to the decision-making, then we are wasting our time. We are wasting our money. So we have to adopt agile working methodologies and bring those voices. Either it's the shadow board or it's the project teams, whatever it is, we need fast decisions and we need to actually bring all those ideas onto the table. As we are doing that, also the development side of the equation has to be uniquely addressed, tailor-made development. So if you look at all of these things, developing your organization with multigeneration and multicultural, different genders, taking care of all those differences, net-net, what I want to say, it's the era of flexible work, flexible place, tailor-made solutions, flexible compensation and benefits, meaningful work. Let's remember 4 things, I think, out of this session. So we have to focus on the meaningful work with purpose; flexible everything, including compensation benefits; tailor-made solutions; and then hearing every voice in the organization. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Umran. Thanks a lot. And you're going to be back a little later in our group talk. Now we're going to take a look at the questions about the future. Didn't we ask some questions about the future, secretariat? We did, right?

Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

I don't know anything about the answers. Do you?

Yes, we do. The first question was, "My biggest obstacle to travel is," and then we had 3 alternatives.

I'll walk over here so they can see as well.

Flight schedules are less flexible, hotels are too expensive or disposable income is low. And you can see now things are moving a bit because people are feeding in new data. But as it stands, flight schedules are the biggest obstacle to travel at the moment, followed by disposable income and then hotels are too expensive, which is, of course, a happy story for us.

Well, you're quite satisfied with that, Anders?

Yes. Yes.

Totally. What about the next one, Caroline?

Let's see if we -- here. Next year, I think prices for hotel rooms will: increase, 55%; stay the same, 28%; decrease, 17%. Also very positive.

So even here -- yes, good news.

Yes. Thank you for that.

Are you surprised? Or is it what you expected really? What do you say? What you expected? For me, they're going to stay the same because I have such good agreements. Okay. We have one more. Do we?

Yes. Third question. My biggest challenge at work is getting the right people on board, maintaining profitability or improving sustainability. And clearly, it's the people's issue at the moment, attracting the right people and making them stay.

What does the sustainability? Umran what's your say about that?

But I understand this, and I think also getting the right people on board is part of sustainability, I would say, to attract the right people. About diversity inclusion what we heard before. So...

I get your point get your point, really. And it's a good question, sort of passing over to our next speaker. isn't it? Because our next speaker, I think he's apart from Liia Nou, the only one based in Stockholm really, I think so. Our next speaker simply, in my eyes, hire people all the time. Here she is.

Please welcome the Chief Human Resources Officer of Parks and Resorts Scandinavia. Ida Troive.

I hope I was right, Ida.

You are. I hire people all the day, all the time. Hi, everyone. My name is Ida, and I'm a cast member at Parks and Resorts. At Parks and Resorts, we call all of our employees' cast members since we are the one who puts on the show for our guests. When you're at work, you're on stage, our guests are our audience. Welcome to our magical world. [Presentation]

Great place to work. But now our challenges. We need to recruit over 6,000 seasonal workers every year and to train them and have them ready to take care of over 3 million guests, every year. On top of that, we have the lack of -- we had a talent crunch and the lack of talent -- sorry. We have the talent crunch. We have a lack of educated chefs and experienced waitresses. And since many people start working at home, we have a big issue. It seems working at home is seen like a big -- I'm sorry, a lot of people start working at home and that is seen like a big benefit for most. For us, it's a very -- it's -- for us -- I'm sorry. For us it's a challenge. That means that we have to stay relevant in other ways to make our people stay in our industry. Today, I'm going to talk about how Parks and Resorts make diversity and inclusion a business ideal and a key to attract and retain. We recruit approximately 400 people from various diversity initiatives every year. That's critical to our staffing. We need to broaden our perspective to find real stars. And before the pandemic, the talent crunch was already a fact. We hired chefs and waitresses for a double cost, and they had no training in our core values or no service standards. Therefore, we started our own restaurant school among our carousels. Together with the Swedish Employment Service, we got a grant of NOK 1 million to cover costs for teachers. And then we educated people who were far, far away from the labor market. Many of them hadn't have a job since they arrived to Sweden. And many of them were women who was far away from the labor market. And that's one of the group in Sweden where the unemployment is the highest. After a 16-week program, 20 students complete the program every year and get a job at one of our Parks. The outcome for us is not so many costs, temporary hiring and less time on recruitment. Another example is that you see all the attractions we have. We had a lot of height limits. But although we have those height limits, we don't have any age limits. So we recruit around 80 seniors every year in our Parks. The oldest one, he is born in 1936, and that gives us a range in age from 15 to 86. We also employed 30 Ukrainians this year, 30 Ukrainians refugees, and that helped us with the lack of talent because they are educated, chefs and waitresses, just waiting for a job. One of them is [ Elena ] who just now is offered a job as our new pastry chef. We also find a lot of stars among our own stars. And this year over 20 -- over 200 of our crew is a recommendation from on our own. That's a [ chic ] way of marketing work at Parks and Resorts. During Halloween, we had a recruitment event where we rented different cinemas around Sweden. And we offered our cast members, a popcorn and a horror movie, if they brought a friend that we could recruit. Back to the talent crunch. With the success of the restaurant school, we realized that we could train our own people. And at the end of the summer, we had a big event where we needed 16 bartenders. The solution to that was to start our own bartender school, a 3-day bartender school. We got over 500 applications, and the outcome was 25 bartenders in a weekend. And now before my time is up, I would like to give you a little example of how we work with our employer brand to stay relevant and face the new working environment. We have a strenuous work environment. And if you go in to work with [ accommodation ] or as a waitresses, you need to be strong and healthy. Therefore, we employed our own physio therapists and personal trainer. And he's now going to prevent work injuries, both for office rats as myself and for the crew out in the Parks. The goal is, of course, to have less work injuries, but it also shows our employees that we invest in them in the long-term and make them stay in our industry. To sum up, diversity as a business idea is a key for us to recruit. But it also mirrors our guests. One of our value is that everyone should feel welcome at all time. And therefore, having a diverse workforce is critical to our business. I hope you found this lighting talk inspiring and that you have a friend or a family member that you can recommend during the break.

Thank you, Ida. Thank you very much. Very good. See you again a little later Ida. Thank you very much indeed. Yes. I have the sad duty to report that our multi-talent in the reception and with room service now has reached the role of serving breakfast, here he is. It's time for breakfast. Yes. [Break]

Ida he's up for grabs. Yes. Perhaps you can teach him a little. I don't know. I mean -- Okay. Next speaker is, she's representing a giant organization, which most of you know very little about, I think, specializing in many, many fields doing research. In this very case about this business and strategies about hiring, diversity and so on and here she is.

Please welcome Professor at Fraunhofer-Institut, Vanessa Borkmann.

So welcome Vanessa. The floor is yours.

The floor is mine and yours. You are the future employers, right? And that's what I want to talk about. How can you be successful as a future employer based on value-based approaches and I brought you 3 of them. When did you first thought about your professional life in the future? Consider that. I guess it was in childhood, right? You've been a child. And when did you first time get interconnect with your employer with your first employer years afterwards, is there a mismatch? How can we build better connections with the candidates [Audio Gap] acquired and an employee who's working and thriving. If we have a look at this loop, there are different steps. And this is what the journey is about. 10 different steps. You have the recruiting phase for the candidates, then people start working in your company and then at a certain time, they are ready to leave. But at this time, they are already looking for another employer, ready for the market. It's a journey, it's a loop and a circle. And most of you, all of us, have a very strong focus these days on people who are in the business, who are your employees, right? This is what you take care for. But if we talk about a life cycle assessment of an employee, then it's much more. You start in childhood when people are eager to learn more about the future professional life, they want to build up their life, but therefore, they need knowledge and connections with future employers. People who are already retired. What are they going to do? Watch Netflix? No. They want to valuably bring in their knowledge, but not work as hard as before. That's a new approach, we have to have these people in focus. There's a preworking phase for the employer, during and post. That's the loop what I'm talking about. If you build up connections with people in all these 3 phases before they work for you, while they work for you and when they already quit the company, you create a big community of people, potential employees for the future. Although who have been employees in the past, but potentially come back in the future. It's a crowd of people, and I'd like to call it a community. What is the community about? It's the condition of sharing or having certain values. You heard about this earlier today, attitudes and interests those people have in common. And at the end, it's about a sense of belonging, much more than just money you get for your work. It's about communities, building them up, but how can you ensure that these communities have an interest in working with you? It's all about matchmaking, finding and attracting the right people that have an interest in your company and in you as an employer. And this matchmaking is built up on purpose. You have a strong purpose in your company, you can send out this message, and you will have a matchmaking with those people in the community. And they are new values with the people. New values, like, for example, in one of our surveys among 4,000 people working in the hospitality industry. 78% of them answered that hospitality business, they want employers who have a strong sense for some projects. They involve in social products, and they show a social responsibility, this is what people ask for. Think back 10 years ago. You think that this survey would show this result? I don't think so. There's a change in values behavior. And this is what the new purpose should be about. The loop again. There are different value-based approaches for all the different stages. If we look at the post phase, you are not an employee yet. It's the recruiting phase. And today, we see many, many new possibilities to recruit people. Through this matchmaking based on the use of AI, artificial intelligence, based on the use of software, helpful hands that digitalization is delivering. And you can do the matchmaking, finding the right person for your profile and purpose of the company. But also to do matchmaking, for the perfect team member, that's a new world. During working with each other, it's all about trust. And we tackled this before. How can you trust an employee working at home? You have no control if people are sitting on their sofa or if they follow their work. This is about trust. It's really important. And the post phase, people are not part of your company anymore. Very important value-based approach that you think about the benefits. Why should people stay in touch with you? Stay in contact? Maybe come back after a few years because, especially in hospitality, we know this from our surveys, people who are leaving a certain employer, they just want to transform themselves. They just want to evolve. They want to experience another country, another culture, another employer. It doesn't mean that they are not willing to come back one day and work again with this employer. So stay in touch with these people and give them opportunities and benefits that they come back to you and not to the employer next to you, which might not be so bad anyway. So it's about connections. It's about value-based relationships that you build with these employees. And this is a strength. It's about community. But if we look at communities based on values, it's also about networks because those people who feel related to each other who feel connected, who have a sense of belonging, they can easily build up networks, can also call it ecosystems. What are these ecosystems about? It's about working interconnected to build up value co-creation. And I want to give you one example. What can this be about? Think about building up an HR platform, a digital one probably, in a destination. And within this destination, you reach out to talent, to people who might be attracted to this destination and all the different employers over there. If in this destination, a person decides I'm not going to work again for this certain employer, try to find another employer in this region because this is about value, lifetime value of an employee. Why should you let them leave and go with all the knowledge, all the skills to another destination and another employer. And especially with this example, you see it's also about cross-industry co-working. I have to hurry up because I'm already at the end. It's about value-based approaches as a success factor for hotel employers. And to sum up, I presented you 3 of them. The life cycle assessment, which is about the lifetime value of an employee. For you as an employer of for a destination. It's about purpose economy and value matching. It's about cross-industry collaboration and value co-creation. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you very much, and have a seat, please. If you wonder why we push people together like this, it's all about the viewers online because we want the right angles, we don't want shadows on people and all that. We hope you enjoy it also when you follow the streaming here, not only the live audience. We are a bit behind schedule, but still some quick questions to you all, following up what you have said.

And the first one goes to Vanessa because you -- I perceive your message as you think that the people in the business should collaborate more. Can you really collaborate in a war about talent?

Yes. Because if it's about value-based relationships between an employee and an employer, they're not every employee fits in every company profile anymore. And I think this also catches up with a what Rachele said. The different generations, they have so different values and interests and they find the right employer or the right team to work in, and they transform themselves. They develop themselves during their business life. So it's very natural from my point of view that people for a certain time, they are in a certain team in a department, then they want to try out something else. And it's all about supporting them. And in certain years, they want to move and go to another employer or go to a country, let them go, but set incentives that they come back and support them, like you do it with your children. You let them grow, but you are always happy if they come back.

Is it working? Yes. Yes. So I'm sorry, I wanted to jump in. There are some programs called to externships where we can really send to our partner organizations, our employees, and then they go for, let's say, 6 months, a year, come back. So it's really possible as long as you have those partners that you can work with and you have the contract in a way or understanding with the employees for that development, I think.

I don't know if you noticed it in detail. But Ida you had a message that may sound as just a cliche, but you try to prove that it's true. I'm aiming at we mirror our guests. And I got the message that you probably do. Does the business in general mirror the guests? Do they Umran?

Yes, that's -- my message also was about that. We have to really...

But is it just talk or is it true?

No, it has to be true, but you have to put some goals. Unfortunately, that -- or that wish or that inspiration, vision may not always happen. If you don't prepare the grounds to attract women, for example, into your organization, if you don't create the culture, if you don't have policies, then you can't attract them, keep them, they will leave or they will not even join you. So having -- for example, in Pakistan, having a child care center has a meaning for that country to attract those people and keep them. Examples.

Ida, is it hard for you to mirror your guest? Or is it just something automatic?

Oh, it's something automatic since it's one of our biggest core value we want our guests to feel welcome. They would like to mirror themselves in our employees.

I'm just thinking that perhaps it's pretty hard to recruit 65-year olds to your kind of business.

Did you see the movie I showed you? Yes. Everyone wants to work with Parks and Resorts. I think the hospitality industry has a great history in making people develop and may -- many have the first job in the hospitality.

First entry business.

Yes the first entry business. And I think that everyone here should be very proud to be a part of that. But I still think that we can be better, especially when it comes to the top management, both in recruiting women and people from other countries than the Nordics and maybe people with physical disabilities. So that's a lesson we have to learn, but we should be proud of that work we are -- everyone here is doing right now.

Now I have a background as a kind of sour journalist, always asking the sort of negative questions. Here's one, here's one. And I want you all to reflect on this. When I listen to you, when I listen to all the speakers through the whole day I hear that you want to solve the recruiting problem with cuddling and curling and being very nice and good values and all that. Where are all the demands? Where are all these messages, you can work with us if you work hard and want to reach your goals. I'm missing that. Am I just old-fashioned [indiscernible]?

I mean -- that's a really good question. I love it. I mean, the reality is things have changed. I mean we are moving -- there's a paradigm shift here from work is something you have to suffer through. It's something that...

I've done that all my life.

Yes, yes, it's something that we have to do because we want to achieve financial independence. We want to be able to start a family. We want to be able to reach a certain social strata. But fundamentally, it was that healthy. I mean let's look at society today. The amount of people that are depressed. I run leadership workshops all the time. And when I ask senior leaders, let's reflect on your sense of purpose for the first couple of hours, they have a really hard time getting in touch with that because they had to lose that somewhere down the line. So if we think, especially from a multigenerational perspective, the concept of work has evolved. So right now, the respective of the new generation is work not only needs to be part of who I am. It needs to contribute to something greater than myself. It needs to be a place that doesn't force me to trade off on life because fundamentally, life happens as it's happening. And I don't want to watch my kids or lose my kid's first steps or not be able to be a present father. Millennials, for example, they saw their parent's divorce because they were never around or -- and then they saw them put aside all the dreams of their travel around the world for after retirement. And then 2008 hit and they lost everything, right? They lost the chance to travel. They lost the money. They lost their job. And so it is so wrong to think that maybe work needs to enable our life and not the other way around. I think it's a good shift.

Can I jump in? Let's be real. I mean, it's all about performing with purpose, right? So if you don't perform, all of the stuff we said is good, but it's not just real. I mean you have to come, you have to deliver that's the reason we pay you at the end of the day. But I think it's about how you define the new perform management systems. They have to be simpler. They have to be agile and also inclusive.

Okay. Let's hear if the Secretariat has a short one.

Yes. A short question then. Where in the organization should the responsibility lie? Because if we look here in the hotel industry, it's quite diverse until hotel management level, and it's not diverse anymore. So is this a question for the executive management group or is it HR? Or who should set the objectives, the goals, drive it, teach the seniors?

Umran, I think it's yours.

Yes. It starts with the Board and then the leadership team, you have to set goals. Without goals, nothing happens, right? What are those goals? It's the diversity that you are -- I mean what is the diversity do you want? What is relevant for you? You have to put some goals. And then you have to cascade. It's a long-term plan, midterm plan, short-term plan, and you deliver. I mean that's the only way. I haven't seen anything like just talk about it and it will happen. It will not. We need to goals.

Okay. Okay I have a final one and it's to you, Ida.

Do you want a new job in the Parks?

Why not. I'm a multitalented still. Why not. I wonder if -- Parks and Resorts as a unit is not so well known. But the brands you own, they are very well known really. Is it popular to apply for working at Kolmården or Gröna Lund or is it really popular?

Yes, it's popular. We have around 30,000 applications every year. So -- but a lot of that applications are from people that are younger than 15. But still, that's a good base.

Absolutely. You've got to begin early.

It's popular, but still, we have issues due to the talent crunch of course, with educated chefs and waitresses.

I have kind of 30 more questions to you, but time has been a little running too fast. So thank you very much for joining us for this conversation. And I'm going to walk over to Liia and Liia and Jens now and have a little summing up, and they will give their judgment on you too. I think really, really interesting to listen to. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you. That was Vanessa Borkmann, Umran Beba, Rachele Focardi and Ida Troive. Now, do you know this guy? Yes. You know him? If you should introduce him, what would you say? Nice guy. Come on. What do we say? Give me some ideas.

A very gifted mouth and a very hard negotiator.

Very hard negotiated, get very gifted mouth. What else? I know what I should say. I should say, here's a guy who runs 60,000 hotel rooms. Isn't that quite big? Jens Mathiesen, very welcome. Liia Nou. Welcome back and I have 2 major questions for you. One what has been interesting today Liia? What has been really intriguing or fascinating or perhaps worrying what you heard today?

Well, what's been intriguing and what I think is the glue would -- I think everybody is talking about, but yes, I just want to emphasize is the importance of the company culture. You can't have a Hotel Market Day without us talking about corporate dogs, right?

Pepper.

All of the dogs. So I think what is seriously important is that I have a one liner, don't bring work home, but bring home to work. And it's actually -- it's important. It's important for building the culture. It's important, whether it's -- if you're lucky to come to our office, we have dogs. You're enabled to have children there. But it's also a way of -- because everybody has a personal life. So it's important to want to involve the -- also your personal life. And I think that's actually what sort of -- I think everybody has touched upon that, but I think it's important to emphasize it as well.

What do you say, Jens? Have you heard anything that struck you?

I think it was a very interesting day. We started off with Christian saying that right now, everything is booming and there's a lot of worry out there, but we really didn't talk about the future next year. We talked a lot about what is important here now. And I think all these different sessions around how to emphasize leadership give empowerment and trust into the organization. I think it's very interesting all in all.

Yes. A moderator should not have his own opinions. But I was just going to break the rule [indiscernible] so could you ask me what I found interesting?

Yes, what did you find interesting?

Thank you for the question, very happy about that. Then I tell you, there's 2 things. One of them is -- June Koh? Are you still here with us June? She's the only one really touching upon the issue of balance of life. And when you spoke June, I finally understood that I belong to the stoneage because I have actually solved the problem by working all the time and that's no good anymore. Is it. That was one. The second one, that Ida, where are you Ida. You started your little movie clip with a hard rock reef that's very good that's plus. That's too little hard rock in your business. That's my humble opinion. But..

You said I made a lot of notes, and I need to take some of them because take some more. Because I think we started off with Carl saying a lot about how this industry people predicted 20 years ago, he said that people would stop traveling, et cetera, but look where we are, kind of. Then June, you said a lot about this homeworking co-working and whatever. And I have a lot of questions to that because we are operating in the hospitality industry. I have like nearly 20,000 team members and 96%, 97% are working on a wholesale level. How do we talk about working from home when 97% need to work in the hospitality industry? So that's a bit tricky. So I feel -- I try to be modern. I try to be open. But I think I'm getting clever. I'm getting clever when I'm together with you guys than when I'm alone.

You have no idea about how much automation they can -- even if you can't replace Jens Mathiesen with the robot.

We are working on it. We're also replacing you eventually. I think also Eric talked about a lot of good stuff, Eric, and I love the way that you put up things about belonging, everybody wants to belong. So here comes the culture back into the company. We have an extremely strong culture at Scandi, not that I want to brag too much about it, but we have. And that is helping us when we need to employ like 10,000 people after such a lockdown. I didn't employ all of them nearly, not a few of them. So most was actually employed due to the team members finding their friend somewhere, et cetera. So that is the empowered culture.

Second question to you, both. Quite a few of the speakers Carl and Eric and Umran and Vanessa, I think, also stressed the need for innovation and new thinking. Are we good or are we bad in this business at innovation and new thinking Liia?

I think we actually are quite good. And I think we're actually getting better and better. And I think the pandemic has actually forced us to be better, forced us to adapt, forced us to be more agile, the ones who -- if you don't, you're out. So just by looking at the breadth of different products how you recruit people, diversity, et cetera, et cetera. So I think compared to a lot of other industries, I think we're actually quite good.

What do you say, Jens?

Pros and cons or pluses and minuses, I think we are -- like you said earlier, I think we have been fairly okay, but a bit reactive. We have -- we all know that leisures outperforming corporate over time and develop more -- we can one more spa facilities and things like that and for the leisure guests. So we have developed that. We have developed co-working and hybrid meetings and things like that. But a bit reactive, I think when I'm a bit -- not very positive, I think digitally, we are far behind as an industry. There was a survey done, I think, by McKinsey only 2 years ago. And we were even behind the local state communities and offices, which a bit embarrassing. And we are I think behind when it comes to the digital journey and the digitization of the industry, and I think we can do much more.

So that's something you really think about a lot?

Yes. Absolutely.

I know that the Secretariat has around 10 questions for you. I know they have at least one very important Anders or Caroline, maybe you?

No, okay. But yes, but if we'll be talking about general issues, but I think one question that many has in the audience is about the biggest obstacle for the hospitality industry in 2023? If you would just sort of put out a crystal ball, what do you see as the main challenge going into next year?

I think right now, it's the global concerns and inflationary pressure. I think we are a bit more optimistic in our industry, I think we do fairly well. It looks fairly solid, a bit more concerns linked into next year. But I think the economy, the inflationary cost increases, things like that is the biggest challenge eventually.

Liia?

Well I'll echo the same, what will happen sort of when it comes to recession I don't think we're going into a deep recession, but it will some dibble dampening. So...

Okay. Okay. Do I see Peter somewhere here? Are you here? Yes, are we preparing a lineup you have? Yes. Good. Just a moment then because we have to close the session. I would like to ask a question, if you still have your signs, you red and green signs. Is it okay if I make one of my own? Yes. So I want to know, agree or disagree with this very statement from me. The only thing I think about right now is a drink in the bar. There's still quite a few disagree.

A lot of this disagreeing.

Agreeing on this side.

So they want 2 more hours with the presentations about the hospitality. Okay. Just stay here, Liia and Jens, just stay where you are. Secretariat, what do you have -- want to add now before we're closing?

Yes. I would say that you need to embrace diversity and inclusion to be attractive as a leader tomorrow and also be bold and provide a strong purpose, I think, It's very -- belongingness.

What do you say, Anders?

Yes. I think there are a couple of common drivers of value belonging, as you say, purpose, flexibility and offering sort of possibilities for connection. And I think the takeaways for hotels as well as corporates is to create those room spaces areas and communities where people can really try whether you're a hotel guest, or if you're an employee, leading to a challenge in a hybrid world. You need to take the step out into the digital space and to be able to lead, engage, manage people. There is no going back from that. Overcome fear as a leader, [indiscernible]

Wise saying, all wise saying. Can we ask all the speakers to come up on stage? Just a big lineup here. Thank you very much. Come on. come on. So I wanted to start with thanking you for listening. So -- with such patience and interest, the whole afternoon. I want to thank all the web online viewers. I want to thank the secretariat very much. Isn't that an innovation? That is pretty good. Caroline and Anders, thanks a lot. I want to say a great thank you. You can just imagine how much technical stuff it is to prepare an event like this. To [ gabardine ] and motion doing this work, thank you very much indeed. Thanks to lot. And thank you to all our guests appearing on stage, Jens, Liia, Eric, Umran, Vannesa, Rachele, Ida and June. Thanks to you very, very much indeed. See you in the ball.