David Fano, WeWork's Chief Growth Officer. PHOTO DIRECTION: NOAH RABINOWITZ
In the future, you’re going to love going to the office. Everything you need to do your job effectively will present itself without effort. You won’t have your own desk, because your employer will know you only use it for 63 percent of the day. But you won’t mind sharing it, because said employer will make sure you have a private room with green leafy plants, soundproof walls, and warm light between 2 and 2:20 p.m. so you can call your daughter. At 3:30 p.m., when you need a conference room for the product managers’ meeting, you won’t even have to book it. It’ll just be there. And everyone attending remotely will already be invited.
“This isn’t right away, of course,” David Fano tells me. “But it’s not that far out.”
We’re standing in the epicenter of WeWork’s cavernous New York City headquarters, where Fano, the company’s Chief Growth Officer, has set up a demo area to show off new technologies for prospective clients. A balding guy with a shaved head and dark eyebrows, Fano stands 5’11”, and when he touches his phone to a desk, it recognizes him and raises itself to rest at his standing height. The smart furniture is just one of many ways that WeWork is wrangling data that it’s collected over the years to quietly reorganize an office around its workers. To Fano’s right is a touchscreen the size of a chalkboard where he can, with a swipe or a pinch, pull up real-time information about any of WeWork’s 164 open locations. Want to know when the air filters were last cleaned in WeWork’s Mexico City offices? Curious how many conference rooms are currently occupied in Charlotte, North Carolina? This program can tell you.