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What does the serial entrepreneur think about the future of work?
The serial entrepreneur explains how the technological revolution –and old-fashioned people skills – will continue to be the dominating factors in the workplace
In a wide-ranging podcast interview with legal services firm Mishcon de Reya’s property expert Susan Freeman, the founder and CEO of IWG Mark Dixon reveals his business philosophy, what’s next for the industry that made his name – and for the future of work as we know it.
In 1989, Dixon was living in Belgium when he realised that companies and entrepreneurs searching for business premises weren’t getting a good deal from traditional leases. “The customer just doesn’t want to be involved in the real-estate industry and dealing with 15 different suppliers to put together an office,” he said. His hunch –that what they did want was serviced offices with “good coffee, clean centres, smiling people” – paid off, and Regus was born. Thirty years on, what’s grown to encompass five disparate flexspace brands under the IWG umbrella is now a FTSE 250 company with a market capitalisation of £3bn. And the best bit? Before starting the business, “I had never even had an office – I’d only ever had factories.”
Today, the way we work is very different from 30 years ago – and even the last three to four years have seen exponential changes, according to Dixon, largely thanks to rapid growth in the power of technology. No longer do we all need to meet in a central location to access local infrastructure like fax machines, word processors and telephones every day. This is supported by IWG’s 2019 Global Workplace Survey, which found that 50% of employees globally are working outside their main office headquarters for at least 2.5 days a week. Instead (and for better or worse), work can be done from pretty much anywhere: “When you are on holiday, when you are in the bath, when you are out running,” says Dixon. And it’s the tech revolution which he partly thanks for IWG’s success.
That, and the ability to put the customer first – by identifying what it is they actually want rather than what a business is capable of giving them. “All of my businesses have always been around what I think people want,” Dixon says. “Not what businesses provide but what does the customer – what does the individual – want.” This is sage advice in an era when many a tech startup exists for the sake of making things just because it’s possible, and when the business-news website Quartz produces a podcast called Should This Exist? It seems that, 30 years on from that first Regus office in Brussels, some things haven’t changed despite the accelerated pace of life. Satisfying consumer desire still comes first and, as Dixon says, “If you can provide that then you will go far.”
Despite all this, and tech like cloud computing, mobile communication and superfast Wi-Fi allowing us to work from almost anywhere, human nature continues to have a huge impact on the way we work – and where. According to the IWG survey referenced above, 70% of those polled believe a choice of working environment is a key factor when evaluating new career opportunities. But this doesn’t necessarily mean working from home, or too close to it. Five thousand properties in, Dixon is of the firm opinion that people “don’t want to work too far away” from home – but what they do want is “to come out of where they live, walk 100, 200 metres, grab a coffee on the way and go into work, and then come home again”. As ideas about what matters most for work/life balance continue to evolve, this observation provides a valuable insight into the ability of tech to make our lives easier – but only when it’s coupled with the age-old need for community and (real-life) connection.
It’s the combination of tech and old-fashioned people skills that are at the heart of IWG –and Dixon’s latest business venture, which he calls his “Saturday job”. His vineyard is the largest producer of rosé in Provence, a feat he says couldn’t be achieved without modern machinery like the drones he relies on to manage the estate. “All of the automation doesn’t just keep your labour costs under control, it actually helps you make a better product; so we know every vine we have logged, it is all GPS-logged, we know if it’s got enough water, we know if it’s got enough nutrients.” That said, one thing that can’t be automated (yet) is intuition, which also has a vital role to play. “I’ve got a great management team,” he says. “There is a lot of crossover between what you do on a farm and how you run your business.”
For someone who’s achieved so much, what’s the future of work for Mark Dixon himself? You’d be forgiven for thinking retirement might be on the cards but his focus is much the same as the largest active age group currently in the workforce – millennials. According to a recent report by global learning and teaching marketplace Udemy, 42% of them say that “learning and development is the most important benefit when deciding where to work”. And according to Dixon, “I am still learning… am I the finished article? No.” For him, it’s human contact and who you meet along the way that truly makes the difference: “If you are working with some great people, you will learn more than any other circ*mstance.”
Read the 2019 Global Workspace Survey report
