Pandemic was brutal, but home office is not our competitor, says CEO of WeWork

Brutal. This is how Claudia Woods, CEO of WeWork in Latin America, defines the impact of the pandemic on the company’s business. In a flash, the office-sharing company saw its occupancy rate plummet by more than 80% due to a crisis that disrupted the world of work.

After the worst moment of the health emergency, WeWork says it is resuming the momentum, with sales growth and a record number of customers in Brazil. In the face of the good scenario, the company even made peace with remote work.

According to Woods, the home office is not a competitor, but a complementary model to WeWork. “A company that adopts a 100% remote work policy still needs to meet with its employees from time to time. It needs to have a planning meeting, happy hour, training”, he says.

In an interview with Sheetthe executive – who was also CEO of Uber in Brazil – tells how she managed to break the “glass ceiling”, a term that refers to the invisible barrier that prevents women from moving up in the career.

She says she has even developed tactics with colleagues to avoid situations such as interruptions and mansplaining — when a man explains obvious things to a woman, including about subjects that she dominates.

In WeWork’s highest position in Latin America since May 2021, Woods has championed diversity as one of his banners. Today, 54% of the company’s workforce in the region is composed of women.

“If the company doesn’t look at the recruitment process and doesn’t create barriers, it will continue to bring in only a majority of men, because it’s easier, the networks are more established”, he says.

You arrived at WeWork in 2021, during a pandemic that has disrupted the way we work enormously. What was the impact on WeWork’s business? The impact was brutal. The company saw a drop in occupancy and, consequently, in revenue of more than 80% in lightning time.

We went through several phases. The first is a support phase for members, because at the same time that we were being impacted, the companies inside our buildings were also being impacted.

Imagine the amount of members who saw revenue falling and called desperately saying they didn’t have money to pay the rent. This stage of providing support and renegotiating the contracts was very important.

The second step, like all other impacted companies, was cost reduction. The building was going to be empty, so that involved everything from turning off the electricity to organizing the cleaning system. It reached this level: understanding how to reduce the frequency of cleaning, preserving the floor, furniture and all that environment.

Step three is resumption. Here in Brazil we can already see the business resuming, with a view to sales growth. We’ve been positive for 18 months now. We ended this first quarter with the highest sales revenue in the last 12 months, but mainly with the largest number of clients in Brazil in history.

We also see a big shift in the profile of companies looking to WeWork. We started with a great attraction for startups, which were, more or less, 50% of our membership. Now, in the post-pandemic period, we already see large companies representing more than 60%.

This symbolizes how all companies are redefining the way their teams work.

Is the home office then not a competitor of WeWork? No, on the contrary. In fact, we see the home office as something complementary. If someone is at the home office, they don’t necessarily want to be there every day.

The company that adopts a 100% remote work policy, still needs to meet with its employees from time to time. She needs to do a planning meeting, happy hour, training… WeWork turns out to be a perfect complement to that. Today, we have already worked a lot with the format of renting a meeting room by the hour or by the day.

We had to create that flexibility, revisit our products to really create an environment where these formats work and are simple to hire.

recentlyMeanwhile, the CEO of Airbnb said in an interview with Folha that, ifand the office didn’t exist, I wouldn’t invent it the way it is today. What do you think the workplace will be like 15 years from now? I imagine there will be no tables. This world of arriving at work and sitting at the table, I think it’s over. It’s already pretty low, right? But the main change is the purpose of the work.

Why am I going to an office today? Is it supposed to have a quiet place to work because my five kids are screaming in my ear? Maybe, and then I’ll need, that day, a table or a booth.

I think that, more and more, offices will be collaborative environments. There will be rooms with several paintings, relaxation rooms, training environments… Maybe very playful, where you can use metaverse tools, holograms, 3D interaction environments, simulation….

Increasingly, office time will be for the things that the professional really benefits from doing together. The home office moment will be for this individual work moment.

You are one of the few women in charge of a large company in Brazil. What was it like to break through that barrier? It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a senior role and somehow I got used to a career where I looked up and never saw another woman. This has always been my natural habitat.

When I arrived at WeWork, the amount of messages I got from women talking about the importance of looking up and seeing another woman was huge.

I never had that privilege. I’ve worked my entire life with male bosses, I’ve never had a female mentor to help me navigate in a targeted way, understanding what the unconscious biases are, what battles I should buy into and which ones I shouldn’t. But I had the privilege of having many sponsors [patrocinadores] throughout my career. Many men who saw value in my work.

I’ve been lucky enough to have a few that, at the most critical moments — where I really felt like I had hit the famous glass ceiling — these people helped me. Help is a word that even has a pejorative connotation, of “come here and I’ll help you”, but it wasn’t in that sense. It was really very strategic and tactical.

Strategic in the sense of understanding who are the stakeholders that are “at the table”, who might want to leave me behind for some reason. With this mapping done, we went to the tactical. It was something like this: if someone interrupted or started with a mansplaining, that sponsor would come along, ask the question and return it to me.

In the most critical moments — of breaking through the barrier from manager to director and then to CEO — it made a big difference.

Are there still, within the corporate environment, some professional attributes that are seen as pejorative for a woman, but not for a man? I would love to answer that this distinction no longer exists, but I would be talking about the top of the pyramid of companies, which have this self-awareness of behavior, which have their very structured whistleblowing networks, support groups, diversity goals, etc.

Unfortunately, when we look at the universe of companies in Brazil and in the world, the volume of companies that have this level of awareness is still very low.

But I think some attributes are no longer accepted for either gender. A man walking into a meeting and swearing at someone, raising the bar or lacking respect is not accepted in the same way. The difference is the repercussion. This is still very different.

The man might get another man yelling to tone down. The woman will have a process that will not be so easily resolved there. And then it gets the famous stamp that the person loses control. The man is not crossed out, because it is something more common.

We are evolving very quickly so that the requirement for this behavior is similar, but we still have a lot to evolve. Women still suffer medium-term consequences due to a moment of explosion compared to men.

This shows that inclusion is not just about allowing women to access certain positions. It is also a change in behavior so that, in these roles, they are treated equitably. How can this be resolved? As long as there are no more women in leadership this will take much longer. The quickest way to speed this up is to have a higher parity within the room. In the same way that one man might feel super comfortable telling another to tone it down, I’m going to feel super comfortable talking this to my namesake. For me that’s answer number one: we have to raise parity at all levels.

The way I’ve been working on this issue in my career for over 10 years is that all equity work needs to work in three groups. The first is looking inward. How are my numbers? This seems like a subtlety, but it’s very common for you to ask the proportion of men and women and the company doesn’t know.

I also believe that we are goal-driven beings. If a company does not put this topic in the same basket of revenue, Ebitda, growth, will always be in the background.

Then comes a very diligent work of operation. Because if processes are not reviewed and leadership changes, the company returns to where it was. The only way the company doesn’t come back is by creating a process where this topic is part of the OKRs [sigla em inglês para objetivos e resultados chave].

If the company does not look at the recruitment process and does not create barriers, it will continue to bring in only a majority of men, because it is easier, the networks are more established.

Today WeWork already has a majority of women in all our countries. When we look at the C-level [cargos executivos de uma companhia]this number is absurd.

I am the CEO of Latin America. The regional CEO covering Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica is a woman. The CEO in Argentina is a woman. The CEO in Chile is a woman. These were changes WeWork made after my arrival. These were positions that we identified that needed to change and we specifically sought female leadership.

How to extend these diversity concepts and principles to the companies that are inside WeWork? This is work that we are starting now. The most important thing is to promote a respectful environment. Imposing that the company that is inside WeWork has more than 50% women goes far beyond my role. I think it would still be too audacious to say that a company within WeWork has to change parity.

Step number one is to look at the work environment. Since the essence of WeWork is the exchange that takes place between members inside the buildings, the first step is really making sure you get there and are treated with respect. That you are in the common area and that you are not picked up on, that you are not treated disrespectfully by an employee or other member.

These people need a place to talk about how they’ve been disrespected. That’s my priority this fourth of the year. This starts with tools and has a very important procedural part, which involves ensuring the confidentiality of information, having a team prepared to carry out the investigation…

Reporting without in-depth is not an improvement. It may even turn into an action—in the extreme case, expel the member or fire the employee—but it doesn’t turn into an improvement.

X-RAY

Claudia Woods, 46

Graduated in Economics from Bowdoin College, in the United States, and Master in Marketing and Strategy from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Claudia Woods was CEO of Uber in Brazil and is currently CEO of WeWork in Latin America. In 2020, she was named one of the most powerful women in Brazil by Forbes and, in 2021, one of the 500 most influential people in Latin America by Bloomberg.

WeWork x-ray

Operations in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico
members in the region: 28 thousand
Employees: 288 in Brazil and 560 in Latin America
Offices in Brazil: 32 units spread across São Paulo, Osasco, Alphaville, São José dos Campos, São Bernardo do Campo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre