When Rob Sadow launched the “Flex Index” early last year—now a widely cited database of companies’ remote work policies—it was intended partly to help generate leads for his company. Sadow, the cofounder and CEO of hybrid work management software Scoop Technologies, hoped the index would be a searchable tool for job seekers and HR managers, but also help Scoop build its brand and source reliable information about which firms have hybrid work policies—and might one day become customers.
Just over a year later, it’s “blown up in a way we never anticipated,” Sadow says, doubling in size from 4000 to 8200 companies in just over a year—cataloguing which employers, say, have five-day or three-day onsite mandates and generating weekly press mentions as perhaps the largest repository of such information.
Now, Sadow sees potential for the tool—combined with additional data it aims to collect—to become a revenue source of its own. The Flex Index is free and will remain so. But as one of the most comprehensive data sources about companies’ remote work policies, he’s been getting increasing questions from employers about whether he has more granular real estate and workplace data. Executives have been asking questions such as whether he has data on companies’ average attendance as a percent of desks, how much square feet per employee is typical, and how all those metrics compare to others with, say, two-day or five-day in-office policies.
On Thursday, Sadow plans to launch a benchmarking subscription tool that helps answer those questions for data-hungry real estate managers and workplace executives who face increasingly complicated questions about how to efficiently use office space in a world where hybrid work is here to stay—and many workers fight the idea of full-time office attendance.
“The questions [employers] now have to ask around office space are fundamentally different than where they were five years ago,” Sadow says. Remote work policies, he says, have “become a critical filter on how to think about what I’m looking at in my space.”
The service will use a “give-to-get” subscription model Sadow compares to the compensation data tools many employers already use. To get access to aggregate information, companies will need to share their data about things like number of employees per square foot, desk sharing ratios, attendance numbers, employee engagement scores and turnover rates, as well as pay a subscription fee. (At launch, an annual subscription will be $3000 a year; over time more granular data queries could include additional charges.) Data will be anonymized and only offered at aggregate and industry levels.
The challenge he faces: Building scale quickly, and getting organizations to overcome any hesitations about giving over sensitive data. Sharing return-to-office mandates that are widely reported in the press and already known to every employee is one thing; getting large numbers of companies to share attendance figures or real estate metrics is another.
To reassure employers and encourage participation, Sadow says data will be strictly confidential and never attributable to a single company. To avoid the possibility of inadvertently disclosing an employer’s identity, he says he doesn’t plan to share how many employers’ data he has (though he concedes the data set currently includes “dozens” of employers); rather, he will position figures in terms of the number of office sites, square feet or employees that are represented. In the first six weeks of data collection, Sadow says, he’s collected data for 250 offices, representing 15 million square feet and 250,000 employees; he hopes to grow that figure to 1000 offices by mid-year.
“We want to be careful, and I don’t want to de-anonymize any of the data,” he says. “Giving specific numbers of companies, I think, bears a little bit of risk,” he says, while office counts are larger on a per-company basis.
To build scale, Sadow hopes to launch partnerships with firms that can help build awareness, offer discounted subscriptions to their clients and support data entry. He’s signed up partners that include Toronto-based Avison Young, a commercial real estate firm that operates in 19 countries, and employee engagement firm Culture Amp.
Michelle Osburn, senior director of U.S. workplace consulting for Avison Young, says the firm has long used Flex Index’s policy data in discussions with clients. Watching how fast the tool grew as a source of data was a “proof of concept,” she says, that the benchmark data has potential to scale, too. “Look, the natural tie here is how do you tie [metrics] to policy?” she says. “That’s why this is sort of a natural pairing.”
Sadow says the benchmark data doesn’t represent a strategy pivot for Scoop, an app and software plug-in that helps workers plan and coordinate remote and in-office days, but an additional source of revenue. Scoop has been growing user count by an average of 10 to 20% month-over-month despite more companies returning to the office, he says. “I wouldn’t describe it as a massive departure from where we were already headed,” Sadow says. “Sometimes you just get pulled to something.”
He thinks “in five years’ time, every real estate executive with any meaningful corporate holdings is going to get asked by their board or CEO or CFO ‘are we holding the right amount of space and how much is it being used, and how does that compare to our peers?’ It’s requiring a significantly higher fluency around data and analytics.”
