Kate Lister, Founding Partner
Nida Mehtab, Senior Partner
Lisa Whited, Senior Partner
Kate is a widely-recognized thought leader on workplace, workforce, technological, and other trends that are changing the who, what, when, where, and how of work.
She has been helping public and private sector employers optimize their remote, hybrid, and flexible work strategies for nearly two decades.
Kate’s recent client work includes the development and roll-out of hybrid/remote workplace and return-to-office strategies for a global law firm, an automotive industry giant, a regional insurance company, and a behemoth tech firm.
In 2020, Kate was one of only three witnesses invited to testify before a U.S. Senate committee regarding the post-pandemic potential for remote work in government.
She has written dozens of white papers on workforce and workplace topics, and written or co-authored five business books including, the U.S. chapter of “Telework in the 21st Century” (Edward Elgar, 2019—a multi-country peer-reviewed study on remote work), “The ROI of Well-Being” (chapter for the IFMA Foundation’s “Work on the Move 2”) and “Optimizing Remote Work Programs” (chapter for the IFMA Foundation’s “Pandemic Manual”).
Kate produces a wide range of primary and secondary research and is a trusted source of insights about the future of work for news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and dozens of others. She has appeared on NPR, The Today Show, CNBC Nightly News, Voice of America, Fox News, and dozens of other TV and radio news programs.
Kate is a member of the strategic advisory board and leadership team of Workplace Evolutionaries (WE), a global group of leading workplace thinkers and doers who are dedicated to “changing the world one workplace at a time.”
As a resident of San Diego, Kate charges extra if she has to travel anywhere with temperatures over 75F or less than 65F, humidity greater than 75%, frequent rain, or bugs. She’s willing to make exceptions for Hawaii and New Zealand. She’s over-the-top nuts about dogs and gardening (as long as it’s not too hot out).
Superpowers
The employee, employer, environmental, and societal business case for workplace change, hybrid and remote workplace practices, pre/post-change metrics for success, science-based design principles, the future of work, board presentations, workplace research, and more
Nida offers a wealth of experience in commercial real estate and global workplace strategy. A trained architect with a master’s degree in Commercial Real Estate Development, she has a unique understanding of real estate portfolios at both the strategic and detailed construction level and is comfortable working with senior executives and project teams alike.
Nida’s has an uncanny ability to triangulate data from a wide range of real estate, workplace, workforce, and other sources to identify gaps and opportunities and deliver out-of-the-box solutions to her clients. She has successfully completed projects from 50,000 square feet to 500,000 square feet and provided project management and portfolio planning leadership for multi-million square foot programs with construction values of over $1B.
Some of the projects Nida has worked on include Barclays‘ expansion into emerging markets, Standards Chartered bank’s rebranding and real estate capacity planning, and managing multisite and multi-million dollar programs for financial and utility giants like J.P. Morgan Chase and Pacific Gas and Electric.
Nida has served as a trusted board member for Women Leaders in Commercial Real Estate and the Goldie B. Wolfe Miller Foundation and was recognized as ‘Woman of the Year’ by Barclays.
Superpowers:
Workplace strategy, leadership alignment, space optimization, cultural transformation, portfolio planning and optimization, capital planning and programming, employee experience, survey design and analysis, workplace analytics, project management, and more
Lisa believes in the art of possibility. She helps her clients understand that “the way things have always been done” must not be a barrier to “how we want things to be.” She respectfully shakes up the status quo and has a gift for seeing things from a different angle.
Lisa’s innate ability to put people at ease coupled with decades of experience in design thinking, change management, interior architecture, leadership, and community-building, allows her to deliver unique holistic solutions to workplace problems.
Years of experience, research, and candid conversations with employees in their work environments led Lisa to create a consortium of collaborators who are experts in their fields: organizational ecology, evidence-based design research, brand development, environmental design, strategic planning, interior architecture, and project management. Together with Global Workplace Analytics and her other partners, she is able to leverage the connection between leadership, employee engagement, and physical workplace design.
Using her own proprietary process for streamlining results and transforming cultures, she has delivered results for a number of “Best Places To Work” and CEO’s who don’t want to settle for “good enough.”
Lisa holds a master’s degree in Organization and Management, is a trained mediator, and sits on the advisory board and leadership team of IFMA’s Workplace Evolutionaries. Lisa is passionate about making a difference in the climate. Lisa’s first book,?Work Better. Save the Planet?is a guide for building employee engagement through workplace change, with the goal of using resources wisely to positively impact climate change. Lisa was also a contributing author to the Sustainability + Planetary Health chapter of Work on the Move 3 published by the IFMA Foundation in 2021.
Superpowers
Workplace design and transformation, change management, cultural alignment, DEIB in design, sustainability, ESG planning, circular economy, stakeholder engagement and alignment, facilitation, consensus building, agile program development, organizational development, and more
Why Global Workplace Analytics?
Sure, there are lots of larger firms that offer the same services we do, but we’ve managed to beat them on bids for top projects for a reason, actually several reasons:
- Our holistic approach ensures that strategies are aligned with the organization’s goals and that solutions address the needs of all stakeholders.
- We have worked with employers from a wide range of industries including technology, healthcare, insurance, utilities, transportation, finance, non-profits, and more.
- Our team brings a unique perspective that comes from having operated as both end-users and consultants.
- Our work is informed by a proprietary database of more than 6,000 research papers, news items, and case studies that allow us to provide the data clients need to make informed and evidence-based decisions about the future of their workplaces, workforce, and work practices.
- We don’t have any junior associates. Your engagement will be managed and delivered by the principals of the firm.
- We have a variety of proprietary tools for developing ROI/breakeven analyses, capital planning and prioritization, location strategy, leadership alignment, visioning, and more.
- We have nothing to gain or lose from your real estate decisions.
Kate and her team frequently collaborate with some of the most respected names in the industry to develop and share workplace and future of work research.
Kate and her team have collaborated with some of the most respected names in the industry to develop and share workplace and future of work research.
Conducted dozens of webinars and delivered scores of speeches on a variety of workplace and technology topics.
Written or co-authored five business books including the U.S. chapter of Telework in the 21st Century (Edward Elgar, 2019).
Written numerous white papers and scores of articles for major media outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
