Drive in the fast lane @ UBER

We are designing the office not only for tomorrow but also for the next few years to come. But I tell you, we were talking about AI. So very soon, we already have self-driving cars in the streets. Yes, you've seen those in San Francisco. Yes, yes. We have a partnership with Waymo. Yesterday we announced another partnership with Volkswagen. We have Austin Waymo's, our under-our-app. Hello, hello, Ketal, Koma Estas. I hope you're enjoying this Peeka Friday at the office podcast. And I'm your host Ram Puranam. In this freshly brewed episode, I finally managed to catch up with Luis Varajan, head of Global Workplace Operations at Uber. In this episode, Luis shares some of his personal experiences and practical insights on workplace of the future. What is trending at Uber? What's the magic they've created to get people back to their offices? And most importantly, why the physical workplace is not going to go away anytime soon. Here we go, listen, we're almost. Right, very good morning, Luis. We have made probably on three continents so far. Also, three different cities. San Francisco, Amsterdam, Bangalore. That was the last time we met in person. I just fascinating and finally we are here on this podcast, "Precock Friday at the office." And I see that you are at the office in Google office. Where are you working today? Firstly, thank you very much for making time. Thank you, thank you. Ram, it's a pleasure to be finally in your podcast. I was looking forward to participating on it. I have been following you so thank you. It's an honor and a privilege to be with you. In fact, yes, we have been three times in our offices. We've met in our own Exifo Bangalore. I think in Bangalore, we met in the rest of us. You met in the nice place, please. Yes, yes, yes. I hope you will put the pictures of us in different offices. On Fridays, I work from this office. I am in the Bay Area. We have the headquarters of Uber, are located both in San Francisco and Sonnyville. And today, I work, I'm working here from Sonnyville, the headquarters of Uber in California. Super. So the office where we met was right next to a fabulous football stadium. This seems to be another office. Maybe next time I will make a lot of buzz. Yeah, buzz. Yeah, buzz. Yeah, buzz. Buzz buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Very serious. They were in the body of the app. We are still in the playoff. So we need to play I think tomorrow on Sunday. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I wish you all good luck and it's over stadium. So I also like your LinkedIn posts. You keep everybody on that post by asking simple questions. Figure out where am I today? Where am I traveling today? So just a little bit about what keeps you going, what really keeps you enthusiastic, energy, take this coffee, a thing for you. How did your day start today? That's a great question. I used to be a coffee drinker, like a big coffee drinker. Normally, espresso during the pandemic, I quit coffee. Okay. Well, I quit coffee. I still like it and I drink occasional, but I'm not. So what keeps me going is basically what I do and I don't need coffee to be energetic in the morning. That said, I am a tea drinker. Okay. So I, that's my first thing in the morning. I drink a cup of tea at home and in my way, normally my way to during my commute, have my tea, my first tea. And then when I arrive at Uber, especially if I go to San Francisco, we have a nice barista there. You've seen that one. Absolutely. But yeah, yeah. So there, there recently, I like ginger to many old me latte. It's a very fun thing, but it's not a coffee coffee. And that, that is an amazing combination that I started to like like a few months ago. And I'm crossing my finger that they keep that in the menu, because it's something that I take in the morning when I arrive to the office. If not, I do like today. This is a Maroka Mind, which is great. Very refreshing and very Mediterranean-wide. Exactly. I feel like home. I feel like home. I'm just a bit out of the beach, but still having a great time, great conversation. So what rating would you like to give to the coffee corners at the video, the Uber offices? The one in San Francisco, I've seen is a clear five-star. Also, when we entered, the Amsterdam office in Zaid, that also is, I'm really sick. While I did not say a barista, but there's a great offering there. Lots of drinks including various varieties of teas. Is it the same? Because you run the global operations, workplace operations, or Uber. I don't know how many countries, 60 plus countries, is it the same experience? 68 countries. 68. Yeah, 68. Yeah, I wish we could do the same experience as you experience in San Francisco. Unfortunately, you don't have in every office the spade and the possibility to create a barista bar. But we have, in fact, we are building another one now in San Francisco because we have too many people there. It's such a nice bird that people use it a lot. So we'd realize that one barista would not be enough. But I think coffee is a big thing for us in New York. I just came back from New York a couple of weeks ago and we have different types of espresso machine and different coffees. More on your cell service type of style. In India, we do a chai, obviously more. We try to localize. So obviously coffee is such a big thing globally. But in, depending on the countries, we utilize the local customs and make available for our employees so they feel like home when they are there. And yes, it's a great thing. I still like Chicago. You haven't been there. Next time you are in Chicago, you're more than welcome to visit us. We have their barista bar. Very nice coffee too. So, coffee is a big part of what we want to do and we want to offer to our employees and visitors and partners that come to our sites. During, during. So, yeah, what was the most memorable conversation over tea or coffee in recent time? Because we've been globetrotting from San Francisco to Japan. You've been there several times and also various places across continents. So, what was the best conversation of the most memorable conversation you had with anyone? Many, many, many, many because around coffee you have so many conversations. Especially if you are in Italy, back in the day, I used to work a lot in Italy. So, I can tell you 1000 of conversations that I have had. And in Italy coffee, it is a big deal. So, you cannot miss that one. It has to be good. It has to be good chart of espresso. So, I had many of those. But because we are talking about workplace, I think it's an excellent question because yesterday, we had some visitors that consulted that we are using. We are going to start using to build or rebuild or revisit our guidelines, our design guidelines. And then my last conversation yesterday, after launch, was around the barista bar in San Francisco talking about what we want, what we want them to look at when revisiting our workplace guidelines. Mostly design and workplace experience guidelines. So, we are going to start up that job very soon. And my team and the strategy team will be very engaged on developing that, let's say, workplace guideline, two or three put 0.0 because we have lived many lives here at Uber. But that's a conversation, very, very engaging conversation that I had yesterday with some people from Australia, from LA, and from San Francisco. And my head of workplace also Uber places head of workplace experience louder than I've went there. He's leading that effort. So, it was a great setup around our coffee table to discuss about that. Great explanation. And let's rewind that tape a little bit. Maybe several years, I'd like to go down maybe 25 or even 30 years. Probably that was when you would have started your first hustle. Could you explain a little bit from your memory what was office like during the mid-90s? Maybe late-90s when you started. And also comparison. You said another situation, I don't know, the global company like Uber, you might have 68 countries, the profile, it's a very large portfolio. So do you compare this? What has changed in the last couple of decades, the last three decades? Yeah. Well, I would not discover any secret how big the changes have been in the office environment since the 90s. I started working in 1992, my first job, and obviously as a joint engineer, you have a kind of open space outside of the office, but there were a lot of offices when I started to work in the 90s. And then until 2005, I used to have an office. So I was locking off and I had many roles, but that was really fast. In my career, I had some managerial, mid-manager or low level managerial roles, with allow me to have an office, which was bad education for me. Okay. I mean, what like a private office? Yes, a big huge deal. Yeah. Nice for me with my own printer. With my own printer. Very privileged. Exactly. My own printer, my own bean, so I can throw things and things like that. Some offices are even the shredders, That's crazy. So honestly that was very inefficient way to use the space at the time, especially for a manager like me, 2000 at the time. Obviously since 2005, I must say, because people tend to speak about the pandemic, at the changes, I started to work outside of an office around 2010, but since 2005, I have seen the big shift into more open, more collaborative. If I hate to say open space, I want to say more collaborative environment with many, the MNU of spaces and solution, space solution for employees to work in a different setups, different environment and different tasks. So when you talk about space, you need to literally go back to activity-based working. What are you doing? Then we design for you the space for data-specific tasks and that can vary during the day, not during the week or the month. It can be, so I am sitting now in this meeting room because I'm recording this with you, and it's a big meeting room because we have a, so I didn't want to go into a small, see, light up. But after this meeting, I'm going to another meeting room because I have a meeting with another person, so it would be inefficient to be in such a big meeting room to have a meeting too far. So all of those things have changed significantly and not only the space because we are not only talking about the space, is there a behavior of the employees that have changed significantly over the last 10 years, not 10, 15 years, and then obviously it has accelerated big time after the pandemic. I think the new generation of employees are more open to utilization of different type of spaces depending on the activity they are doing. Fantastic. So that was the one thing what I wanted to ask you in terms of inclusivity for different sets of people. You would definitely have a multi-generational workforce across different continents, different cities. Also within the same office, you could have maybe three, four, five, judicious people working. So how do you arrange for aspirations of each of these? For example, you and I probably would look at things in a very different way from a Gen Z or a Gen Alpha, they are going to be at the office at the work with physical work place very soon. So how do you manage for things and make sure that in the end everyone who visits office goes back full, pretty happy? Yeah, that's the most difficult task that any workplace, especially as a professional will have. We have already titled that but the reality is that now we're talking about narrow, neurodiverse, diverse design. So not only we have so many diversity in the workplace right now. Yes, we have cultural diversity. So if you go around this office today with C-Prolly, I don't know, I haven't counted but I would literally say 20 nationalities. Yes, with their own characteristic, the way they feel temperature is a big thing that I learned back in 2005 when I was running the C-Square account in Madrid and they had literally a big team of international managers with a lot of different examples. Can you explain about that because there's a very interesting conversation about the temperature part of it. Just a little, can you elaborate on this? Well, it was in Madrid 2005, Spain, it's a hot place in summary, it's very hot. We reach hundreds, firing high, 40 degrees. So it's difficult to keep the temperature and definitely you can know, have a very cool environment, cool environment because it's too hot outside. So you try to find a way and at the time I was a young general manager of Johnson Controls which is a temperature, basically, we have full temperature and we can play a conditioning. And we had around 40 nationalities in that team working in Madrid, IBM was another case and it was so difficult to because a Swedish person understand temperature, believe me, different to Spanish, what to be called for a Latino and myself born in the Caribbean or an Spanish person is. You can even say somebody in India, South Africa and Bangladesh. We never get to see snow. Exactly. So that's one piece of diversity. So by the way, it was almost difficult. It was almost impossible to resolve that conundrum. Okay, because of the open space, you can control the temperature in these enclosed environment whenever you have open space, collaborative space, it's more is way more difficult and you cannot put an air-honey union on top of everyone. So it wasn't a very difficult task to control, but also the interesting part of this, it wasn't an education of the employee that when you are in the office with self-diverse, you have to also understand the other part. And that is big time now. What is happening in the workplace with people that are the one to work more in a enclosed environment, you need to resolve for that. We're not giving office anyone, but there are people that require booth to sit down and to program, to sit down and think deep analysis or there are other people that want to collaborate and then one not only the space to be open, but also have all the tools around to collaborate, their screen, or a screen board, or whatever you call it. There are other people that prefer they don't want to sit down in a classic normal office chair. They want to so far and sit down there with a coffee in their hands and continue that conversation in the different set up. So all of that, by the way, light, air, air quality, sound, proven, all of those details of the design have to be taken in consideration. And I'm not an architect very far from that, by the way. I have learned about that throughout the year because after the architects, I am the operator. So I need to have a prover, yeah, my team, and I, we need to operate whatever the construction team delivers and the architect design and the vision they have, but that has to be useful. That has to be helpful for the task that the employees are executing at certain time in a day. So that's a big part of what we are doing and trying to collaborate with that team from the beginning. In fact, from the selection of the site, this selection, where that place will be to the final operation, which is the longest period of any real estate asset, is the operation. You select, you design, you do the construction, then you deliver, and then you operate that for 10, 15, 20 years. So that's, that's the difficult, the most longer, not the most difficult, but the longer part of the of the real estate asset life, life cycle. Exactly, beautiful explanation. So if I recall, I visited you before you joined Uber at Lumaq, also at several locations, now I'm trying to follow out those San Francisco, Amsterdam, by glue, and it always, I think three or four occasions were invented. Always was a Friday and when I visited your office, especially Uber, even on a Friday, it was fascinating to see so many people at the office. So what sort of gets people back to the office in a city like San Francisco, where I would say most of the other companies are really struggling to get people by and how come Uber is really racing it? The office was buzzing with a lot of energy, a lot of vibrancy. I see the same thing in Amsterdam. You said when you were visiting that time, and we had a bit of a hard time finding a meeting room because we have, I did get exactly what we wanted, but we still managed, but then what sort of these motivates people to still come to a Uber office and work? Well, magic, you're, what's the magic you're spending a little work? Yes, I wish I could say is the space, but it's not, it's not only the space. I think our spaces are super engaging, are beautiful. You have seen some of them. Yeah, we try to make this space inviting, engaging people feel proud about the spaces we have and the offices that we have. We definitely have a lot of the coffee is a big part of it. The food that we provide that you have for the business. It was amazing. It was like my team in the continental, I was quite a choice. I could eat and you can eat only so much. So there's so many things. Exactly. We try, but the reality is that I think what brings people back to the office at Dober is the purpose of the company the thing that amazing and very poor looking things that the engineers and our teams are doing here. Our motto is we change how the word move for the better. That I think creates a mindset of I am changing the word. We are Uber have changed the word forever. In the way that the word move are now the way we deliver things and all of that. So the reality is that the office is just the background of that big stage. That means that is Uber purpose and Uber projects and the things that people are working on. So when you have a good idea and you and that idea become a plan and become a company like this one is a 16, 17 years old company. So very young you could say is a teenage company becoming very quickly and I don't want to have so many teenage troubles. So all those two, your current CEO Dara the way he has been able to shape an absolutely fantastic the collaborative culture ever since he joined the company. Otherwise you wouldn't achieve what Uber have has chosen become the the brand that we have become in such a period of time. If you look at all the companies to reach that global brand recognition like ours in such a short period of time. I mean, I'm going to talk about 15 years. Uber is a verb already. Yeah. And it is, we have millions of people in the app using it. And we have millions of earners, people that work for Uber and earn their wages and the way to the leave and support their families through Uber. It's an amazing story that created that environment for people to come. And one more thing. I think, and I had said for myself and my team, the teams here, they're great. If you come to the office, it's to collaborate with your teams. Yeah. And I think the most important perk in the office is the human being. So you call see, and we, the reason we are not, we're doing this today, after so many conversations is that we try many times to do it in person because it's different. Okay. And I have seen some of yours recently in person in different countries. I wish I could do it in person with you. We'll be more absolutely. We would have a different set up. It would be more interesting. But the reality is that is the important thing in the office is to bring more humans so they can interact. So employees are want to interact with their colleagues. Yeah. Absolutely. And also big relationships and seek advice, seek mentorship, guidance. What have you multiple things? Yeah. So yeah, that's as someone really at the forefront of like global workplace operations, that's the role you're handling across 68 countries. As we mentioned, Uber is a high tech company. What do you see happening and what do you see changing? changing kind of does everybody's talking about the AI and obviously Uber as a tech company would be using a whole lot of this artificial intelligence. But how do you see impact of AI at workplace and also the idea of one as the workplace operations leader? Yeah. Well, a lot of things are changing. And I'm one of the things different. We are, Uber is a technology company and we want to be our place as team, want to be at the same level of our innovations in this technology world. So we are embracing AI big time. Like it's one of our priorities. So our head of corporate real estate has set up that as a priority and that priority comes also from our ELT and what we want. So it's a huge productivity booster. I am using AI a lot. Last Friday, we cancel our you remember that cancel. I see a higher AI training last Friday, the whole I was the whole day training on AI. So we are using so an AMIC core is my team to use AI. Many capacities are obviously the number one that we already using probably a couple of years is writing and improving your writing and improving your analysis of emails and things like that. Easy. That's I think is adoptive. Now we are on this next level, which is processing all the data that we have over the years. Our team here. I'm here only one year. So the team was prior to me. I have gathered so much information and now the big thing is how to process that information and how to create actionable insights from that information. And when you have so many touch points of information gathering points, you need to have an an a prior analysis to see to separate what is noise from what is real music. And once you have the music, you need to act on it. So that's our technology thing was working on that. We have a company supporting us and a good partner that is helping us with that. And I am using AI to in right now doing a pilot to track or co-pancy at the level of work workstation or at least neighborhood at the level of cafeteria. That's the big part of what we do. The cafeteria users. So we want to understand how people are using it. We want that experience to be listened and obviously if everybody is at the same time. So people cannot find where to see it or how to control that traffic. So we are using AI for that. And we are going to be using this is the year of the places organization to embrace AI 100%. Amazing. And as I'm looking forward to Ubers playlist on this, especially from a place of standpoint, I have one last question before we start. I just need to ask you a question because because I went up AI now. When I was talking about agent AI, AG I know at some point in time, we'll also have the physical agents staying at us. Do we still need offices? Do we still need physical buildings? What places in three to five years from now? At least five years from now. Well, yes, definitely yes. We are signing deals for five years. Oh, yes. But yes, that's not only that. I think I have this belief that the office is a democratization. The level of democratization of the usage of the space. You can only get in the office and I explain you that. So my house is different to your house. Yeah. Good. People working from home is great. It gives you flexibility. It avoids doing the commuting in the morning. All of that is great. But I have an office in my house and I know many people that don't have it. Yeah. If you come to or have an espouse or a partner that works in the same office or have small kids that are noisy and they're doing these. So when you come to the office, when we provide the office, we are democratizing. Okay. They use us. So everybody is the same here. Basically, I can use this meeting room, which is now a five, six, mid room, like anyone at Uber can use it. Yeah. Just by booking in the system. So number one. So yes, the office will exist. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Number one. The second thing is how we are going to use the office. It is a ball. It is evolving. We are using the office today differently to the one to how we were using it five years ago. Yes. We are going to use these offices different to five years five years from now. But we are still using it. And that's when I started the conversation with you. I told you that we were the redesigning the guidelines or our office. That's what we are thinking about our strategy. We have a very strong, very powerful strategy team here at Uber for the places for the workplace. And that team is looking at that with our insights with our employee insights with our managers inside what do we need? What kind of employees are recruiting? And with that in mind, and where is the use of the office? We are designing the office not only for tomorrow, but also for the next few years to come. I will see. So very soon, Uber, we already have self-driving cars in the streets. Yes. You've seen those in San Francisco. Yes. We have Austin Waymo are on their own. So it's like asking me, do you think commute would be needed five years from now? Yes. Okay. People will still need to meet each other in some places. So yes, the office would be needed. And hopefully you will come into a self-driving car or self-driving bus with other employees. And then you would come to the office interact with your human co-workers and with your AI co-workers. Yes. And robots and things like that. Then you go back home. And in the same self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles and or flying wherever who knows. And you will enjoy your afternoon with your family. Yes. We will say five years from now and then. Then yeah, I really love the fascinating aspect of what how you explained it, what you explained about the future of everything. I would say future of mobility, future of office, future of workplace. So wonderful talking to you Luis on this. We can go forever on this and discuss topic where really envisioning things which are not there. But at some point in time, these things will become a reality. And thank you so much for making time talking to me on this week of Friday at the office. We finally made it time. I hope the audience will really love the new damage which is brought in by you very practical. And giving a really global exposure in terms of how the workplace of the future is going to look like. Thank you so thank you very much. Thank you for the ride. It was a pleasure Ram. Always. Okay. See you. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you are like listening to this, do subscribe and refer your friends also to enjoy this Fika Friday experience.