How Allstate’s workplace futurist is shaping employees’ distributed work experiences

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, employees at insurance company Allstate worked similarly to their peers at most other US companies. They spent five days a week in an office, either in the company’s Northbrook, Illinois headquarters or in one of its global outposts, which included India, Northern Ireland, and Canada.

Fast-forward five years, and those Northbrook headquarters are mostly gone—the company announced it would sell the majority of this campus for $232 million in November 2021. Allstate has cut its overall office footprint in half, and almost 90% of the company’s employees now work from home.

Enter Lauren DeYoung, who was appointed as Allstate’s “workplace futurist” in March 2023 to help the company’s 54,500 employees navigate this new world of distributed work.

Customer experience → employee experience. Though DeYoung has worked at Allstate for more than a decade, this is her first HR role. The position is also brand new for Allstate.

“It was created as an acknowledgement that how we work is different,” said DeYoung. She described her job as “running point” across real estate strategy, HR policy, communication, and collaboration technology to ensure teams are supported in this new way of working.

For DeYoung, who previously spent time working in customer experience roles, the switch to employee experience has been “pretty seamless.” She said she tends to take a “product mindset” to HR, not unlike how she approached customer experience. With distributed work, “We’re using feedback, we’re bringing in employee voices, we’re iterating on our design.”

Betting on pods. If DeYoung’s role is akin to customer design, then the office is a product on which her team is constantly iterating. Allstate describes the spaces where its employees work as “pods,” and has a strategy for “building a brand around that word, pod, to describe the spaces we connect.”

These workspaces include “global connection pods,” which are owned or leased by Allstate, “flex pods,” which are on-demand spaces that supplement owned or leased pods, and “digital pods,” which employees use to collaborate virtually. Allstate employees primarily connect on Microsoft Teams, but the company also uses tools such as virtual work platform Mural.

The offices where employees meet in-person don’t look the same as they did prior to the pandemic, and DeYoung said her team has been working “in lockstep” with their real estate partners to transform them for employees. Pre-pandemic, most of Allstate’s office space was designed around individual workspaces and conference rooms; today the company has a mix of café, library, and collaboration spaces. Most Allstate employees do not have an assigned space.

In some cases, employees had to test out the spaces before figuring out what really worked, she said. “People can tell you what they want, but the reality of how they work, once they’re here, is sometimes different. You think you want collaboration space, but then you realize, once you’re here, it would be nice if there’s a quiet zone where people actually know not to talk to me.”

Solving distributed work challenges. Outside of the office, DeYoung’s team is focused on helping leaders manage distributed teams.

To help foster engagement between employees, she rolled out a $10 million “connections budget” for mid- and senior-level leaders last year. The funds were distributed based on the number of employees, and leaders could spend the money however they wanted, provided it gave them the chance to bond with their teams, in a way that drove “connection, engagement, business outcomes,” according to DeYoung.

Team leaders used the money for a wide range of activities, from flying a far-away colleague to meet with teammates in person, to pairing a business meeting with a sporting event, to facilitating a virtual Lego-building contest, in which team members were shipped kits and tried to build the tallest tower.

The connections budget was a success, she said, allowing for 3,300 different “activations,” i.e., teams coming together virtually or in-person. Some 91% of Allstate employees who participated had positive feedback about the events, and DeYoung sees it contributing to the fact that about 84% of Allstate’s workforce is “engaged,” according to internal data.

Looking to the future, DeYoung hopes to find additional ways to bring employees together, even if they’re not on the same team. She noted that while 90% of Allstate employees feel connected to their immediate team, only 68% feel connected outside of their immediate team.

“Where we’re really doubling down, is how can we drive that cross-department integration?” DeYoung said. That might look like refining Allstate’s focus on “pods,” investing in programming to help employees grow networks outside of their departments, or connecting people with similar skills and interests.

“What we’ve learned is that in a distributed environment, with new employees coming into the organization, people not sitting in the same area, we need to be a bit more intentional.”