Bob Cicero never planned a future in real estate, yet a quarter century into his career, he's now creating office spaces for telecommunications giant Cisco during a major debate over how best to use the modern workplace.

As the leader of the Silicon Valley-based company's Americas Smart Building division, Cicero helps Cisco adapt to changes in where and how work is done, a shift fueled partly by the pandemic. Combining countless data points, technology, connectivity and environmental sustainability, his job can appear complicated. But it's focused on a simple objective: Make the office a place worth the commute.

"We think the office should be a magnet, not a mandate," Cicero said. "When you think about the built environment and office space, we used to build 30% 'we' space and 70% 'me' space, but the pivot to hybrid work should flip that. That notion underpins how to think differently about space since it's not just about the physical experience of before. It's about bringing the physical and virtual together to make sure everyone is included."

By incorporating features such as camera technology, noise suppression and language translation, Cicero said in-office employees can easily connect with those who are operating remotely. Plenty of environmental attributes including natural light and precise, data-driven temperature and air-quality controls aim to make the space far more appealing than a stuffy apartment or a home office underneath a noisy flight path.

"The office needs to earn the commute," Cicero said. "Technology is always moving forward, and the job requires adapting quickly. In the real estate world, though, it doesn't change that fast. Structures are built for hundreds of years, so we need to think about how to bring the two worlds together. We’re going to continually push and move the world forward.” 

Similar to the metamorphosis unfolding across the national office market, Cicero's career has transformed to lead Cicero to where he is today — though his work changed more slowly, spanning two decades.

Before graduating with degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University in New Jersey at the height of the turn-of-the-century dotcom bubble, he landed an internship with Cisco that led to a permanent job.

Starting as a lab assistant, Cicero rose through the ranks, holding multiple engineering positions before earning a promotion to take over as the business development manager for Cisco's Sports and Entertainment Solutions Group. In that position, he worked on the company's first high-density wireless venue at Sporting Kansas City.

It was then, Cicero said, that his career trajectory began to align with the company's real estate ambitions.

"There's an ongoing project at Cisco to look at the value of space and the transformation of real estate," he said. "That means we now look at the real estate we do have and transform it to accommodate the new way of work. We may live in a 21st century, but most people work in a 20th century space."

Across the country, companies have worked to entice workers back to the office after several years of largely operating remotely. Corporations such as Disney, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Meta, Salesforce and dozens of others with global real estate footprints have implemented varying degrees of mandates in an effort to push employees back to in-person work.

In some cases those mandates have been met with resistance as employees argue the costs associated with commuting, childcare, updating wardrobes and eating out more frequently aren't worth the effort in working from physical office spaces. Especially when some argue they can do their job just as well at home.

More than 1,000 workers at Amazon even walked off the job last month in response to the company's return-to-office requirement.

Cicero lives in New Jersey with his wife and two young children and commutes to his office in New York City. So he understands the frustration some workers feel as they commute. The solution, he said, is rebuilding office space to become a place employees want to be.

"You need to fundamentally transform how to design space and think about the experience, the technology and the design to fit around everything a company might need and workers will find attractive," he said. That means thinking about sustainability as well as elements such as natural light, automated shading and real-time radiometer data to control air quality.

Cicero is using Cisco to measure how successful its approach to office space design can be. The company has opened Smart Building offices in New York and most recently in Atlanta. The Atlanta location is a 64,000-square-foot hub in the CODA complex in the city's tech-heavy Midtown market.

"It's a consolidated space in the neighborhood and is a talent play for us since it overlooks the Georgia Tech campus and the talent at neighboring HBCUs," or historically black colleges and universities, Cicero said. "But it's a building constructed in 2019 before Cisco saw what was happening in the world and everyone began grappling with the notion of what the value of space was. We knew the built environment had to be different."

After an extensive renovation, Cisco’s Atlanta Collaboration Center opened in April with a renewed focus on collaboration and socialization. It has about 175 desks employees can reserve if they need to work independently. The rest of the four-level space is built to accommodate workers operating both in and out of the office.