When Katrina Kostic Samen took to the stage to give her closing address at this year’s British Council for Offices conference in Berlin, the room erupted. The then president-elect of the organisation – and the driving force behind the 2018 event – was met with not only a standing ovation but also a surge of whoops and cheers rarely seen, or indeed heard, at a real estate event. Not least from a crowd of bleary-eyed delegates on the final morning of a three-day programme following several evenings of networking on the bounce.
But then Kostic Samen put on a very different conference to what many of the attendees had been expecting. The managing partner of interior architecture and fit-out practice KKS Strategy themed the May event around diversity and inclusivity which, though timely, was not ground-breaking in itself.
And yet, through carefully curated content, she pulled off something quite extraordinary. She took an industry-wide discussion point and brought it to life. Not by preaching, not by victimising and not by scaremongering, but by embracing her theme so fearlessly that it was impossible not to feel the impact. This was not an event about women in property. It was not event about men in property. It was an event about change in property.
A lonely place
“I wanted to make it feel different,” says the now president of the BCO, having assumed the role in July. “I think the property industry in general can be a lonely place for some people. This was an event for everyone. I wanted everyone who attended to feel welcome and included, and that they were able to learn but also have a good time.”
From ditching the formal dress code and making bold speaker choices to temporarily reinventing the organisation’s acronym to stand for “Building Communities for Occupiers”, Kostic Samen gave her delegates something totally fresh. And it is this new way of thinking, she says, that she now hopes to demonstrate on a wider scale throughout her tenure as the BCO’s third female president.
“I challenged delegates to redefine the BCO to mean ‘Building Communities for Occupiers’ at the conference to move away from thinking in old-fashioned terms about creating a building, and instead shift to a more diverse and inclusive world where the role of placemaking is central,” she says. “I will continue to extend this challenge to the BCO membership throughout my presidency and I will also work to make the BCO itself a more diverse organisation.”
Here the woman who invited a white, middle-class man to deliver her conference keynote on gender equality sets out her plans to diversify both the organisation and the wider sector across the UK and beyond, looks back over her career in property and reveals how making someone a partner in her business a month before they went on maternity leave was one of the best decisions she has ever made.
Largest female representation
This year’s BCO conference boasted the largest proportion of female attendees to date – 21% out of around 700 delegates. Twinned with reduced-cost tickets, meaning that 81 Next Gen delegates could attend, Kostic Samen has started as she means to go on.
She is well aware, though, that a conference is just a snapshot in time. She is now focused on what she can achieve over the next year off the back of her success in Berlin. That is on top of her day job of running the practice she founded in 2004 after leaving design practice Gensler where she was a partner; she joined the firm in 1985. Kostic Samen is proud that 75% of the KKS workforce is female but emphasises that diversity goes beyond the (albeit extremely important) issue of women in property.
“You have to be bold and brave in this industry,” she says. “I say that every day to my team here. While the conference was generally successful, I think there were definitely people who wanted more answers and more information. Anyone who went there looking for something that would give them answers on Brexit would have been disappointed. But I decided that as I can’t give them those answers – and who can? – I could give them something else. That came down tackling diversity, but not just from the perspective of a woman in the industry.”
Here she touches on the importance of making sure young people in the sector feel supported and encouraged by industry bodies.
“The mentoring of the next generation is really what I hope my legacy will be about,” she says. “The BCO has been extremely successful already but I worry about what happens to people after 35 when they drop below the NextGen radar and maybe they haven’t made all the connections and built the relationships they wanted or needed to.
Focus on over-35s
“So one of my key focuses will be to support NextGen but also make sure the 35+ group does not fall by the wayside, and that they have opportunities to join committees and become board members. I want my legacy to be defined by mentoring and supporting the next generation, whether they are male, female or however someone identifies.”
As for Kostic Samen’s own experience of diversity in the sector, here she does touch on the issues around gender equality and, in particular, how women can be affected by career breaks. “I think there has been a habit in this industry of hiring a great woman, then when she becomes pregnant she finds herself being manoeuvred out of a particular role,” she says.
“There should be a much longer-term view. If that person is really good and good for the business, then you need to find ways to work with them, whether that’s shorter days or different hours. We live in a much more flexible world now. So why not make the most of that? I made my partner Caroline a partner in the business the month before she was due to go on maternity leave. She was away for nine months and she came back and was fantastic because she was very clear about what she wanted to achieve and what her goals were. And as a business we are very focused on what needs to be done to make the arrangement work. It can be done. It just needs to be thought through like anything else in a company environment.”
Ripe for diversification
As for the BCO itself, Kostic Samen says the organisation is just as ripe for diversification on the delivery side. “The roles we have as people working in this industry means that we aren’t just building offices,” she says. “We are building places. That’s ultimately why I changed the BCO acronym meaning because, in my opinion, we are building communities. And communities can take so many different shapes and can be so dynamic.
“We should be thinking about life and life is 24/7. Some people work nine to five, others from ten to seven, some work from home a few days a week. Some people like to work on Saturdays. You start to think of ‘offices’ like that and suddenly it is not so easy to manage. What I am trying to do with occupiers is make sure the BCO is relevant.”
She stresses that this relevance must travel across the UK as the organisation represents the country as a whole. “We have five regions here in the UK and I want to carry on as previous presidents have done before me to make sure that each of those regions is included. We are not a London-based organisation. And it is absolutely appropriate that when it comes to our brand, it is one that is recognised all over the world as one that encompasses the UK in its entirety.”
Kostic Samen adds that she is not interested in “diluting” that brand but rather updating it to take technological advances and a changing way of living, working and playing into account. Her goal is to see the BCO take its place on a global platform as being an organisation primed to look forward rather than backward.
A shrinking world
“The world is getting smaller and smaller,” she says. “Everyone wants to be seen as the best so I am walking a fine line between maintaining the BCO brand and looking beyond the UK to the rest of the world at the same time. We are increasingly one global community these days but we all have a global perspective – or at least we should do. And many of us have experience working on global projects.”
Is she saying that the days of UK-focused building specifications are numbered? Not necessarily. But an open mind and broader horizons are to be embraced rather than shied away from. “We can’t always just look inside. Affiliations with other member organisations around the world is something we have touched on and there are certainly affiliates coming forward, contacting me about how we can work better together.”
She adds that in a world where occupiers – both global and local – have never been more powerful, this is no bad thing. “The voice of the occupier is now clearly outweighing almost everyone else. We should always have been focused on catering for the person inside the buildings we design and develop. But that has never been more important.
“Everything in the world is changing. There is a groundswell now and I want to make sure that by the end of my tenure, and beyond, it is clear that the BCO is changing too and not by taking baby steps. We are prepared to be brave.”
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Read more on this year’s BCO conference in Berlin.
