Savills Bolsters Workplace Practice Group With Three New Hires

Workplace strategy is evolving, and Savills is too. The firm has expanded its workplace practice group with three strategic new hires, GlobeSt.com has learned exclusively. The three new professionals will help the firm address new concerns about workplace strategy and better service clients.

“We wanted to make sure that we are meeting the demands of our clients, which continues to grow and grow, as we move through the pandemic,” Rebecca Humphrey, workplace practice group leader for Savills North America, tells GlobeSt.com. “We are servicing the demand that is flooding in. We are also looking into the future and the way that we talk about workplace strategy down the road. We are making sure that Savills as an organization putting ourselves into the world as progressive thought leaders and that we are at the forefront of what it means to talk about workplace.”

The firm hired Marty Festenstein and Surabhi Raman as senior managing directors and Tonya Williams as managing director. A 25-year industry veteran, Festenstein joins the firm from Nelson Worldwide and has an expertise in major law firms. Raman has 20 years of experience and specializes in technology and platform-level clients. She has worked on the Google campus at CBRE and led JLL’s workplace consulting practice for Southeast Asia before joining Savills. Williams joins the firm from CBRE and has a decade of experience in the field. “These three new hires are a perfect fit. They have added so much value in the short time since they started,” says Humphrey. “They are helping us to meet client needs as well as thinking through that critical and strategic mindset that needs to be in place to take this conversation into the future.”

Since the pandemic, workplace strategy has shifted, and clients have both short-term and long-term concerns. At the moment, short-term conversations are centered on the Delta variant and the latest surge in cases. “We are helping companies figure out their plans to return need to land as a result of the Delta variant we haven’t seen many people cancel their plans, but the timeline is being pushed out to January 2022 as a return date,” says Humphrey.

In the long-term, companies are interested in the trends that will stick five or 10 years down the road. “Companies want to know what this means for the future and how employees are going to work,” says Humphrey. “Companies are looking at things that they can and should implement today from a workplace practice perspective that will really position them for success down the road.”