Senior workplace hire for Unispace

Neil Usher

Unispace has appointed Neil Usher as Executive Consultant based in its London studio, as part of an expansion of its client partnerships’ team.

With an industry-leading corporate real estate track record and award-winning tenure with Sky, as workplace director, Neil has more than 25 years of industry experience to bring to the Unispace team.

He spent nearly four years transforming Sky’s approach to workplace, agile working, creative hubs and software engineering centres alongside other innovations.

Anthony Hazell, Managing Director, Europe at Unispace, said: “Bringing Neil on board is a fantastic development for Unispace given his experience, reputation and award-winning track record. His approach recognises the great changes that have taken place in workplace in recent years and Neil is proven as a thought leader in his field.

Neil’s project “Sky Central”, a 37,000 sq m NIA new-build agile workplace facility for 3,500 people won a BCO ‘Best-of-the-Best’ award in 2017. The amenity-rich environment and leading-edge change programme challenged much industry practice and set a new benchmark for space people want to work in.

Prior to his time at Sky, he was General Manager of Group Property at Rio Tinto, and he has also held roles at Honeywell, Warner Bros. and Polygram. Neil’s blog workessence.com includes his thoughts on the future of work, property and the workplace and he is a regular conference and academic speaker.

“Everyone deserves a fantastic workplace – it’s been my passion for many years, during which I’ve been committed to simplifying our understanding of how we achieve it” explained Neil Usher, Executive Consultant at Unispace. “There is something amazing happening at Unispace. It’s a challenger business, and its methodology is showing that there is a new way to create fantastic quality workplaces at pace. No-one else is doing that right now.”

“I’m here to look at how we get involved earlier in the process, from the first thoughts of improving the workplace through developing the brief and searching for space, to how we ready the organization for the highest quality service offering when the space has been created. Unispace has the potential to manage the whole property lifecycle, and I’ll be looking at how we extend this capability.”

Neil will be based Unispace’s London office but his role will also take in the firm’s studios across Europe.