Savills’ Workplace Strategy Head Takes a Holistic Approach
By Rebecca Baird-Remba October 28, 2020 10:50 am
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Savills has named longtime workplace strategy consultant Rebecca Humphrey as the head of its Workplace Practice Group, the brokerage told Commercial Observer.
Humphrey started at Savills in March, when the brokerage acquired MACRO, a project management firm founded by her father, Michael Glatt. Before her current role, she was an executive vice president at MACRO.
After she finished college in 2005, the 36-year-old mother of three learned the ropes of the management consulting business at MACRO, when it was still a relatively small firm with just five employees. In 2014, she started her own workplace strategy firm, Focal Point Management, where she built a multimillion-dollar business working with clients like Comcast, the University of Pennsylvania and Telemundo. Humphrey’s biggest and longest-running project was the design and layout of Comcast’s headquarters in its eponymous downtown Philadelphia skyscraper, Comcast Center.
These days, she is leading the existing Savills workplace team, and has brought in two of her own employees from MACRO, Kelly Creighton and Alli Hochberg. She leads one of the only all-female teams at Savills.
Humphrey said that she is really trying to get her clients to understand workplace strategy as a more holistic concept.
“We’re trying to shift the conversation about workplace from thinking about furniture configuration to ‘What is the experience of an employee at work from when they get up in the morning to when they go to bed in the evening?’” she said. “Everything that an employee touches where they’re working, wherever they’re working, is workplace [strategy]. Their furniture, their monitor, their technology, their chair, the way their furniture is configured, where they go to have heads-down time versus small meetings, security ramifications.”
She is heavily involved in helping Savills and its clients grapple with the pandemic and how it’s affecting current and future office planning.
“Rebecca embodies all of the attributes needed to be a leader,” Savills CEO and Chairman Mitchell Rudin said in a statement. “Her project experience and longstanding relationships within the industry will position Savills to achieve best-case results for our clients.”
