Rethinking the Workplace with Keilhauer’s Meghan Sherwin

In this Snippets episode, Leon speaks with Meghan Sherwin, President of Keilhauer, about how the workplace has evolved in the years following the pandemic and what leaders are still learning about culture, collaboration, and employee connection.

Drawing on her background in strategy and advertising, Meghan reflects on her transition into a family-owned manufacturing business and how creativity, curiosity, and innovation have shaped her leadership approach. She also shares how Keilhauer navigated the disruption of COVID, adapted to changing workplace expectations, and rethought the role of office environments in a hybrid world.

The conversation explores the importance of mentorship, flexibility, and designing spaces that support collaboration and meaningful connection. Meghan also discusses how shifting employee expectations are influencing workplace design and why organizations are continuing to rethink how people gather, work, and create together.

Listen in for a thoughtful conversation on leadership, workplace culture, and designing environments where people can do their best work.

Transcript

Speaker: 0:00

Special thanks to Sherard Kuzz for helping us bring you today's PEO Leadership Innovators Alliance Snippets Podcast. Hi everyone, I'm Leon Goren, CEO of Leadership and Innovators Alliance, and welcome to another PEO Snippet. Today I'm joined by Meghan Sherwin, president of Keilhauer and also a member of the PEO Leadership Innovators Alliance. Keilhauer is one of Canada's leading design-driven manufacturers known globally for creating workplace environments and helping people do their best work. Now, before we start recording, Meghan and I were talking just how much the workplace has changed over the last several years. not just where people work, but how leaders think about culture, creativity, collaboration, and even wellbeing. And that's what makes this conversation so interesting. Keilhauer has spent decades building a reputation around innovation, sustainability, and exceptional Canadian craftsmanship. What's also interesting about Meghan's story is that she didn't grow up inside the business. She came from the strategy and advertising world, working with major global brands before eventually becoming president of one of Canada's most admired design-led manufacturers. She's also become an important voice in sustainability and design, including participating in United Nations discussions around circularity and sustainable manufacturing. I hope I got that right. And Meghan, bring something I always appreciate in the end, a thoughtful balance of business discipline, creativity, and people-centered leadership. Meghan, it's great to have you with us. Thank you for having me. Awesome. So I was starting at the beginning, starting with you in the leadership journey. So you came from the strategy and advertising world before joining Keilhauer. And today you're leading one of Canada's most respected design driven manufacturers. I guess the question is, what do you think allowed that transition that works so well? Very different, right? It is very different. think in reflection, I think the muscles that I grew in advertising and strategy were really around creativity, curiosity in the businesses that I worked on, and a drive for innovation. Cause that's the crux of every ad agency. It's the crux of successful strategy. So being able to build those muscles, always remaining curious, always trying to look around the corners and being creative and trying to find different ways into things really has served me well across the business. When I joined Keilhauer, I came into the marketing department and when I took over sustainability, it was new. I had never led a sustainability team before. having curiosity in terms of, okay, how do I take on this part of the business? What does this mean for Keilhauer? What are the different tools we need? And how do we innovate in this field and remain true to who we are? Those are all skills that I learned truly through advertising and strategy. And uh yeah, it's been successful so far. Well, it's amazing because when I even go to the website, like I can see the transformation. right, over the last few years and how it's changed. thank you. I'm thinking that's definitely come from the culture where you've come from in terms of innovation, Brandy. It looks fantastic, by the way, everything you guys have done. Thank you. We've worked hard. And the new team leading the marketing department has done an extraordinary job. I give them all the credit on that. So they're doing great. I know I didn't prep you on this question beforehand, but you entered a family business, too. So you did a couple of things. You moved from professional services into a family owned manufacturer. Were you hesitant about that? Has it met your expectations on that? People always worry about that. For me, the biggest difference was going into a brand. So being on the advertising, on the professional services side, you're always acting as a consultant, right? You're creating solutions, you're solving problems, and then you're kind of throwing it over the fence and then they run with it. And when I got to the point of my career where I needed to make like some new decisions. The crux of it was do I want to own the brand or do I want to continue on the professional services side? And for me, I saw a huge upside on being able to own it, right? Take the football all the way through across the line. So I think for me, it was a bigger change moving to brand ownership than the family side of the business. I had a lot of conversations with the family before I joined and they were at a point where, yes, it was family owned. The family wanted it to be professionally led. They were in transition as well and they knew to get to the next level, they needed to bring in additional leadership with outside skills. So they were growing, they were ready for the transition and I wanted to take the football across the line. So it was a... It was a perfect fit. You it was a leap of faith for both of us or all of us. I was definitely a wild card, not coming from the industry, but it's been a huge opportunity that I'm thrilled I took. What year did you join them? Oh, geez, eight years ago. So you went through COVID with them as well. Yes. That's like 2018. So it's an interesting question because you've gone through, I mean, you guys were in the furniture business. You went from COVID. which may have been big panic initially. Yep. To actually huge, probably upside because everybody now working from home. Now there's a sense of people starting to move back to the office a little bit. Actually a lot from what you hear, at least what you're reading. What are you seeing around that? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it helping with collaboration, innovation back in the office place? Oh, that's such a big question. Okay, so to start, yes, we were... We were doing really well moving into, guess, was it? 20 March, 2019 was the start of COVID. think it was 2019 or 2020, I can't even Yeah, so we were stronger than we've ever been. Sales were, we were on a rocket ship, best in class for us, and it was extraordinary. And it stopped like immediately, because we're a capex cost for businesses, right? So when everyone's sent their employees home, business stopped, no one needed office furniture. ah So what happened really right during COVID was new orders stopped, but then there were contracts and things that were still going through. So it definitely was a transition period for us in terms of how do we protect the business during a time that is so volatile and still protect our employees, right? and keep them safe. And at the same time, culturally, purpose-wise, we believe in the power of the office. We think, and we have to think this because we're office furniture, the power of the office is important, right? And there is value to us being in the office, right? So how do you balance those three pieces of the puzzle? You've got incredible headwinds business-wise. You've got safety of employees and then you have, you know, a pandemic really coming up against our purpose. So that lasted, oh God, three to four years. We knew things were changing when we started hearing from the real estate community that all the tech companies were buying up office space. So what was happening was the markets and then the media were saying, everyone's going to work from home forever. And we are now. going to be a work from home philosophy. And what we were seeing was different than that. So the media was saying one thing and what we are hearing from customers, from the big five techs, which frankly, if anyone can do work from home, it's going to be digital professional services. We knew we were transitioning to hybrid work and that's OK. So we did a huge study. We did a mega study of 50,000 workers in the US and in Canada from 20 years old up until 70 years old. So we captured every generation. And there was a lot of noise in the market place about, oh the younger generations just want to work from home and the older generations want to come back and they don't want to change and they don't like technology. And it was a real generational discussion. And what we found in this mega study is it had nothing to do with generations. What it had to do with was your connection to work emotionally and your leadership and your management team and how connected and valued you felt by your leaders. And for us, that really, really solidified for us that the value of and the power of the office is really that connection with people. the connection you have with your team members and the value you believe you bring to the office. So for us, you know, there's a lot of media talking about hybrid and we're like, you know what? This study reaffirmed for us that the workplace has value. People get value out of it and we just need to continue going down this path. So we started focusing on what are those attributes that workers, employees really benefit from in the office and that's collaboration. You mentioned that, right? Collaboration, cooperation, which are two different things, know, mentorship and coaching that casual, you know, after a meeting someone says, hey, I really loved what you said in there. And, you you, you spoke your mind or, Hey, did you think about this? Like those soft touch points of coaching and mentoring are inherently important to growth and development. So we looked at a couple of different aspects of that work culture and started designing furniture for that. At the same time, there was the insight of during, so to backtrack a little bit, during COVID, workplaces reduced their footprint in buildings and they scaled back their square footage. After COVID and then during hybrid, that was okay, because it was, you know what? The marketing team and finance team will come in on Tuesday and operations team will come in on Thursday, right? And uh where we've evolved to is either everyone's in all the time or everyone's in three days a week. Well, if everyone's in three days a week, that means you need enough seats and spaces for 100 % of your staff, but they've reduced the floor plate. They've reduced their square footage by a floor or whatever. So the other insight, and context we had was that spaces needed to be more flexible and needed to work harder based on what the employees wanted because during COVID, well, if I was doing head down work, I would go to my desk. If I was going to have a conference call and brainstorm, I might go for a walk or I might go sit in a lounge chair. workers, employees really started having agency. over their space that they didn't want to give up when they got to work. The design firms, the workspaces needed to work harder with the agency of employees having control over their spaces. So there was a lot of flux for us at Keilhauer with trying to navigate all these new contextual requirements for the workplace. And frankly, we're still like, I would say last year, 2025, was probably the first year that we felt the pandemic was behind us in terms of the workplace and people getting that. It took a really, really long time for people to get back into the mindset of kind of post pandemic and what is the workspace need. And in 2026, you know, our industry is reporting roughly about like a three to 5 % growth compared to GDP. And I think that's like my hypothesis on that is because people have now resolved what their workplace needs are. And now they need to furnish them and really deliver back to the employees to make sure that they can do what they need to do in the workspace, right? Long windage. Sorry, there's my TED No, it was good. It's true. when I flip through a number of your products that you were offering, I mean, they truly... It's not chairs. And I think people think about chairs. It's not chairs. It's everything else that you're doing totally reflects the collaboration and the cooperation, right? The lounging and the elements there really comes to the forefront. So you guys seem to really have sort of shifted gears. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time really trying to understand what employees need. Like, for example, there was research done on what is the most productive meeting size? So is it a group of 12 people? Is a group of five people? What is it? And all the academic research show it's four to six. So then we briefed a team, an industrial design team, and we said, design a workspace for the perfect meeting size of four to six people that are gonna be there for an hour to 90 minutes. What does that space look like for them? And we came back with a new style of chair that's more of a lounge chair, but it allows you to sit at a desk and still write, but in a little bit more casual way than a typical chair. And the table is perfectly sized for four to six, because that's perfect meeting space. So the challenge with that is then educating the community and the industry and the end customers on why we did this, because it's a bit esoteric. But as meeting spaces mature, in this post pandemic world and people fully realize the power of collaboration and office space again, I think we'll win because we've put in the thinking and the effort into really truly trying to understand what workers need today, which is different. Well, I'm going to have to close this out, but thank you so much for the conversation and the wisdom. I mean, you shared a whole bunch of you got me scared. Four to six people is the perfect meeting size. Now I'm like, oh my God. We've got a revamp of our organization now. But it's all good. And I wish you and the Keilhauer team all the continued success as we go forward. Thank you. Keep watching. We've got big plans and ideas. Very exciting. If you're a leader looking to connect with a trusted community of peers committed to growing personally, professionally, and organizationally, we'd love to connect with you at PEO Leadership and Innovators Alliance. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time on PEO Snippets.