Dylan Ferguson, a Simplus account executive, recently spent some time on the Everybody Wins podcast with Mark Jensen to share his insights on the future of the commercial real estate (CRE) industry, unique benefits from the widespread work-from-home phenomenon, and the role of cloud tech like Salesforce. Mark Jensen is EVP of Investments at Colliers International, a top international commercial real estate firm, and host of Everybody Wins. Mark and Dylan discussed the industry at large and how to best move to a remote workplace culture. For Dylan, it comes down to two things: trust in human capital and data security.

“The two most valuable assets any company has is first and foremost, their human capital and secondly their data. That’s where our two worlds come together,” said Dylan on Everybody Wins. “Because everyone’s competing for the most talented resources. So the people who build the best relationships of trust with their employees are going to have the best outcomes, the best people. And those people will hopefully create the best cultures, and that’s what’s going to drive the best strategies.”

To Dylan, the current situation and its unique demands on businesses around the globe have been transformative for forging stronger, more personal relationships with clients and colleagues. Cloud computing solutions like Salesforce are a vital element to encouraging this collaborative, remote environment across industries with high-quality security measures to protect data at the same time.

“You’re getting to see an intimate portrait of the people you work with. You see the rooms that they live in. You see their dogs; their kids come in,” Dylan said. “We’re giving them permission to be people. Of course, your kid’s gonna come in. Of course, your cat’s gonna walk across your keyboard. And when you can give people trust and permission that they can be a real person that has interruptions. Like for me, it was my five-year-old daughter’s birthday. And I was on a call with a pretty big company, and I just owned it. I asked her to come in, I introduced her to the conference call, and I said it’s her birthday. And they actually sang her happy birthday. And I walked away from that experience with those people with more of an intimate relationship than if I had flown on a plane to talk to them.”

As a long-time remote worker, Dylan is no stranger to working from home. But having the business world at large all working from home has increased the number of personal moments shared and made work more of a productive, integrated part of life rather than a daily block of hours. Mark concurs, noting how much more productive and present he is for both work and family, raising the quality of both his professional and personal life.

“I’m getting interrupted by people I love, not people I associate with,” said Mark. “At other firms, I would get interrupted every five minutes. And I love to give back, but the mental capacity and the time it takes and the teeny seconds it takes to say ‘wait, what was I working on before?’ is taxing and it doesn’t move my life or my business forward or benefit my family. Working at home, my ability to just focus and just do the work has been epic. I think you will see more productivity in the people that can be trusted with productivity.”

For more on how Salesforce and tech are changing how business is done—in real estate and beyond—check out Simplus’ case studies to learn more about the work we’ve done with clients across all industries. And listen to the complete podcast here!