Gaia Arzilli is exactly the sort of person the real estate sector needs right now. Not just a key player at HB Reavis, the workspace developer where she is innovations and partnerships lead, Arzilli is catching the attention of the wider industry – and for good reason. Astute, unwaveringly positive and unafraid of failure, she is perfectly placed to inspire HB Reavis’s 800-strong workforce in six European countries to innovate across a 14m sq ft development pipeline. But that, she says, is the tip of iceberg. The rest of her role is about approaching innovation on a purely human level.
“HB Reavis was looking for someone who could bring together a community of individuals spread across Europe and excite them about innovations and new technologies,” says Arzilli. “But they also wanted someone who could bring humanity to the role.” It makes sense given how crucial compassion, encouragement and reassurance are when it comes to inspiring positive change.
“You have to reassure people,” she says, earnest and emphatic in equal measure. “How would you feel if you went to university, became a highly skilled engineer, worked successfully in the industry for decades and then a young person comes through the door one day and says: ‘you know what? Everything you have been doing for the past 30 years is wrong. This is how you need to do it now.’ How would you take it? Not well. That’s when the barriers go up and people become so protective of their work they are scared to engage. So, yes, we need to innovate but we must also remember we are dealing with people. That’s the starting point and that’s the thing we need to address first.”
It is an approach that has certainly worked for Arzilli. Just two years into her role and she is contacted by colleagues with new ideas so regularly that she is unable to process all of the requests and needs to expand her team. That’s not to mention the innovations already up and running, including an analytics tool to help clients tailor their office design to directly boost productivity. The trick to making all of this happen, says Arzilli, is to help people understand that change is positive and that failure is an inevitable step in the process and one that should not be feared.
Critical support
There is no quick fix when it comes to gathering support to innovate within a company, or indeed across the wider sector. Real estate is in the midst of a digital movement where no one is really sure what the future holds so it requires a degree of trust to bring someone like Arzilli on board to instigate change. It is this trust, Arzilli says, that is so crucial. “If you hire someone like me you have to trust that person and let them do their job,” she says. “I didn’t have to convince the leadership team here. They said: ‘OK, we like you and we like your ideas. Off you go to the market and do what you wish’.” This support is critical not just to get results, she adds, but to get the rest of the workforce on board. “Leading a department that works across different European countries like mine can be difficult so it is important that innovation teams are not secluded on the side but are allowed to infiltrate every aspect of the business. When it becomes a fundamental part of the entire strategy and everyone’s jobs, that’s when people will start to get on board.”
Even with the support of management it can take time to build momentum. “When I first started here I had to go out to people and say ‘OK, 10% of your new workload will now be dedicated to new solutions’,” says Arzilli. “The reaction was very much ‘who is this person and why is she doing this to me?’ Skip forward two years and thanks to workshops, events, newsletters and face-to-face interaction and a focus on people, planet and productivity, so many people come to me with ideas. The excitement has spread through the company like wildfire.”
Events and newsletters aside, surely it’s Arzilli’s personality that is instrumental in fuelling this excitement? “I am biased,” she laughs, “but I can say that knowing colleagues doing similar roles to mine in other industries. You do need to be a particular type of person. You need to be inspiring, open to change and, the thing people don’t like to talk about, you need to be able to positively deal with situations when they don’t go your way.” Failures after months of working on a project are par for the course. No one likes that, she says, but that doesn’t make it a bad thing. “The innovations department is like a start-up within the company and failure is simply part of innovation,” she says. “So if you expect to only have wins, this job wouldn’t be for you.”
Arzilli says as long as the real estate sector continues to fear failure, moving forward will prove difficult and painful. She points out that now is the time to try and, potentially, get things wrong, learn from them and move on as everyone is in a similar position.
“We are at the beginning of a movement that will affect every aspect of this industry,” she says. “But it is comforting that we are all kind of new and we are all trying to use technologies we have never used before. That means we are very much in this together and the idea of working on this kind of innovation across the industry is the most exciting thing I have come across in a very long time.”
Setting an example
It is hard to believe that someone as perennially upbeat and positive about innovation as Arzilli could ever reach peak excitement. But given the fact that industry-wide collaboration is where we will see the biggest and most significant steps forward, it is no surprise that this is an area that particularly inspires her.
Her work around her Venture into Proptech event, which took place in December last year, is a prime example of how she has leveraged her role at HB Reavis to support the wider industry. A digital competition to attract the best global start-ups and scale-ups and give them access to funds and clients, this is a pitch day with a twist. It is not just about the opportunity to secure investment. Paid pilots are also offered, meaning the solutions and products have a chance of being picked up, deployed and tested across the portfolio.
In an additional Arzilli touch, the event was, and will continue to be, as close to 100% sustainable as she can make it. “I go to a lot of events and I am appalled by how much waste there is,” she says. “So I made it my top priority to find a caterer who didn’t use plastic and the most important thing was that there was no food waste. We can’t just chuck food away like there is no tomorrow. So we took all of the food waste and had it delivered to a homeless shelter. I know it’s just one drop in the ocean but if each and every one of us acts this way we will create a ripple effect. And now is the time as sustainability has shot to the top of everyone’s list of priorities really only since Christmas.”
The greatest innovator
Arzilli’s positivity and passion can be in no doubt. But what about the results? The real-life examples where she is driving change?
There are plenty. And with HB Reavis’ 14m sq ft pipeline – “one thing we are certainly not short of here is space” – there will be room for many more. Ever the innovator, Arzilli says that the greatest ideas stem from challenges.
“We haven’t always had the right amount of data on how people utilise space and we know the more data we can aggregate, the better we can design our spaces and the better the experience we can create for occupiers. We developed a product called Symbiosy, which creates a digital twin of a workspace to match environmental data with movement and occupancy data. It is all anonymised but it allows us to understand what kind of space people need to develop certain activities. We realised we can identify and predict functions within the space and can also see how different teams are negatively or positively affected in a variety of spaces.”
Then there is Origameo, HB Reavis’ analytical tool that can provide clients with a “data-based understanding” of their company’s current set-up and insight into future needs. A strategy is then created based on the usage of the current office and future goals. “We can collect quality and quantity data and report back on what you do and say: ‘Why do you think you need 15 meeting rooms when your staff spend so much time collaborating and co-working?’.”
Creating heroes
Arzilli is surprised when people say real estate is slow to adopt. It used to be, she concedes, but so were most other industries. “People forget how quickly things change,” she says. “Not so long ago, banking was very slow and not at all innovative. It is only in the past few years that has properly changed. But real estate is changing too, so I think it is a bit negative to say it is slow.
“Anyway, there isn’t really a choice now. Do we want to be scowled at in 30 or 40 years’ time when people say the real estate industry had the chance to create a positive impact but didn’t? Or do we want to be the heroes who said ‘we can be different, we can do it together so let’s join forces and build the future cities of the world today?’ This is a new era and we have a moral and an economic duty to change and embrace innovation.”
To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@egi.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @estatesgazette
