Oct 17, 2025
Corinne Murray, Director of Global Workplace Experience Strategy at American Express, and Sara Escobar, Founder of Wielding Workplace, are co-authors of newly-released ‘WORK then PLACE’. Corinne and Sara draw on rich backgrounds from Gensler, WeWork, Hulu, and Netflix to share insights on culture, workplace experience, and productivity. They explain the need for intentional work design driven by employee experience—digital, physical, and experiential—and how human-centric, flexible approaches empower performance in the distributed modern work ecosystem.
TAKEAWAYS
[01:50] Sara starts out in TV production and then moves to Hulu.
[03:01]
Joining Hulu as a startup, Sara chooses to develop their workplace
experiences.
[04:10]
Corinne’s time at CBRE, Amex, and Gensler, inform her strategic
research at WeWork.
[05:23]
Strong cultures at Hulu and Netflix differ but are both developed
with intentional design.
[06:12]
American Express builds its strong culture based on benefits
resulting in long-tenure norms.
[07:02] Organizations are not prepared for formal hybrid models before 2020.
[07:56]
Employees pushed experience and flexibility into focus
post-COVID.
[09:20] Architects’ and Real Estate’s periodic interventions limit impact on ongoing work design.
[10:45]
Flexibility jumped to a top employee after their pandemic
experiences.
[11:36] Empathy influenced leaders to formalize more balanced, hybrid work options.
[12:45]
Executives reacted emotionally to shifting work models, resisting a
major overhaul.
[14:30]
Mandates fail to justify office returns since workplace experience
is not just physical.
[15:44]
Corinne and Sara connect in 2021 amid return-to-office
debates.
[17:08]
Sara launches a consultancy to inform and facilitate new workplace
strategies.
[17:54] Sara reaches out to Corinne to co-author a book, sharing practical strategy frameworks.
[20:05]
Corinne shifts focus from productivity to effectiveness.
[22:56]
To ‘fix’ productivity, it must be shared across teams, not owned by
workplace.
[24:56]
Managers must hold accountability and measure output, not observe
activity.
[26:02]
HR, IT, and workplace must partner to enable teams’ effective
outcomes.
[27:21]
Physical-first remits clash with flexible work goals.
[28:36]
Employees now better understand what makes work function
well.
[30:17] Team agreements are key to performance in modern work environments.
[30:48]
Trust grows from enablement, not perks or parties.
[33:27]
Change must be incremental to facilitate adoption and avoid
burnout.
[37:10]
Start with high-impact, low-effort changes for users.
[39:40]
Strategy must flex for global, regional, and role
differences.
[41:03]
‘Standards’ can allow interpretation, like principles, to enable
adaptability.
[41:50]
The “Daisy” model supports incremental workplace changes.
[42:59]
Corinne highlights knowledge work – its growth, volatility and
success factors.
[47:01]
Sara highlights external research, such as parenting models, that
offer workplace insights.
[48:30]
WORK then PLACE encourages humans to focus on what technology
cannot replace.
[49:15]
Start by auditing what works to incorporate rather than rebuilding
from scratch.
[51:25] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: To shift workplace experiences and outcomes, find an executive sponsor, then clarify why and how the change should happen, and how to measure progress.
RESOURCES
QUOTES
“The companies that I've worked with where the culture has been truly wonderful and truly driven forward the company's mission are where that culture is intentional.” — Sara Escobar
“We are workplace people. We do believe in the value of the physical place. But it's not the catchall for everything.” — Corinne Murray
"The workplace environment is truly physical, digital, and experiential.” — Sara Escobar
“Productivity is the responsibility of everyone from the individual to the executives to workplace to HR to IT.” — Sara Escobar
“We need to do this in a way that doesn’t feel threatening and doesn’t feel like an extra burden.” — Corinne Murray
“If you think about, you know, old factory lines, you watched the widgets being produced. That is what we've still fallen into in knowledge work. But you can't watch knowledge work get done.” — Sara Escobar
“We've identified things that are fundamentally harmful to the ability of knowledge work succeeding. And if knowledge work isn't succeeding, that means the humans doing the knowledge work aren't succeeding” — Corinne Murray