Kay Sargent — Covid is impacting building culture, mentoring, ideating, growing and connecting.

Kay Sargent is a Senior Principal and Director of Workplace at HOK. With 35 years of experience, She is a recognized expert on workplace design and strategy issues. She is an award-winning designer who has worked with several Fortune 500 companies to optimize their global real estate portfolios and create innovative work environments. As director of HOK’s WorkPlace team, a practice that supports organizations undertaking multiple projects in various locations, and a member of HOK’s Board of Directors, Kay is responsible for helping clients redefine how, when and where their people work, working in tandem to support a holistic design approach that integrates an organization’s people, processes and technology.

Kay is considered an industry thought leaders on workplace. She has authored multiple white papers and articles on a variety of design related topics including wellbeing; next gen workforce; technologies impact on the workplace; space fusion and the rise of the human factor.

We love her call to arms at the end of the interview, something we can't take too lightly in the current climate."Everybody is saying 'what is the future of work?'. We have the world’s attention if all we do is address the things that are immediately at hand, and we ignore the things that weren’t working before, and we ignore the things that are on the horizon. This absolutely will be our Kodak moment, and our industry will be in a world of hurt. But we have the options and the ability to see that to embrace the change and to make some fundamental pivotal shifts in the way we work in the way we deliver space and the way we think about it, that we may not have again, for a long time.

"So I implore everybody to think big to think beyond just the immediate crisis at hand, don’t be reactive, but really, truly address all of those things that we need to be to move us forward as an industry."