Despina Katsikakis

Despina Katsikakis is an industry leader with an international reputation for thought leadership and innovation, on the impact of the workplace, on people and business performance. Established through long term client relationships and over 35 year experience of leading innovation, research and implementation of transformative business environments and exemplary real estate developments worldwide.

In her role as Head of Occupier Business Performance, Despina leverages her global expertise to provide input across the firm’s global business on the changing context of work and its impact on employee engagement, productivity and wellbeing. With these factors increasingly determining leasing decisions, her global insights benefit corporate clients and landlords seeking to attract them, through a holistic approach that links the real estate industry to occupier priorities to navigate today’s complex business landscape and reposition real estate to drive top line performance.

As the former Chairman of international consultancy DEGW and recently with Barclays Corporate Real Estate, Despina has worked with corporate occupiers at board level, guiding them on how to use their workplace to affect culture and how to align corporate policies and processes to support innovation and employee engagement.

Despina pioneered the role of workplace consultancy in the 1980’s with global corporations and real estate developers. Working at board level to understand business needs and connect culture, technology and organisational processes to the working environment. She successfully engaged leadership teams to create a vision, build alignment, enthusiasm and ownership of the necessary changes to workplace and behaviours to improve employee experience, engagement, well-being and business performance.

Through long term relationships with clients including Accenture, BBC, BP, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, GSK, Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Siemens and Unilever, she has developed ground-breaking initiatives and has an extensive track record of successfully implemented global workplace programs that have delivered significant improvements to people and business performance.

Despina is passionate that the built environment should have a positive impact on the performance, health and
well-being of people and is a member of the Delos advisory board; the pioneers of Wellness Real Estate and
founders of the WELL Building Standard. She regularly lectures around the world, writes and contributes to
media, research and publications on the future of the workplace.