IWG CEO Mark Dixon: The Enemy Is The Commute, The Internet Is The Competition

Bisnow's podcast, Make Yourself At Home, hears from members of the commercial real estate industry about how they are managing this new reality and gaining insight into their day-to-day approaches. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music.

This week, WeWork’s CEO raised eyebrows by suggesting that the “least engaged” employees are those who want to work from home. But Mark Dixon, the CEO of the world’s biggest flexible office space company, has a different view.

“It’s about productivity, and some people are going to be far more productive if they can get up in the morning, they’ve got a little office at home, they can get their stuff done,” the IWG chief said on this episode of Bisnow's Make Yourself At Home podcast. "It doesn’t make you more productive to go to an office."

In the past few months, IWG has reached deals with global firms like Standard Chartered and the Norwegian division of EY to set up hub-and-spoke office models for the companies. The deal with Standard Chartered will allow for the bank’s 95,000 employees access to IWG facilities around the world. IWG will also be providing 10 coworking spaces across the UK to provide options for civil servants.

Dixon, who started in this business with Regus back in 1989, says there has been a seismic shift in how offices are going to be run.

“Standard Chartered and other companies, what they are doing is listening to their workforce and their colleagues who are saying, 'Actually we don’t see the need to come into an office every day,'" he said. “The real enemy here is commuting, it’s the time it takes to commute, the cost of commuting — that is the enemy. That can be completely reduced and eliminated by the use of technology.”