From Serviced Offices to Servant Leadership: A Coffee with Bex Moorhouse
Fika Friday Season 2, Episode 17
Sometimes the most powerful workplace insights come from someone who's seen the industry from every angle. Bex Moorhouse has managed serviced offices before WeWork made coworking cool, shaped culture at Nike when "progress over perfection" was more than a slogan, and now leads global workplace strategy at WPP, one of the world's largest advertising agencies.
In this episode of Fika Friday at the Office, recorded in London, Bex and I talked over coffee about what actually makes workplaces work. Not the surface-level stuff, the gym that nobody uses or the wellness room that's just an empty box, but the experiences, behaviors, and leadership approaches that create environments where people want to be.
The Coffee Order
Bex is an espresso or black Americano person. "Highest impact with the least amount of fuss," as she puts it. She's also partial to matcha, alternating between the three depending on the day. Her current recommendation? Blank Street in London. It's efficient, which matters when you're commuting into the city after an early morning gym session.
That non-negotiable morning workout is recent. This year, Bex built a gym at the end of her garden, a personal aspiration realized after recognizing that long commutes were cutting into the wellbeing practices that made her effective at work. Now she lifts weights at 5:30 AM, walks into town, and doesn't eat until she reaches the office. Movement, mobility, and mindfulness. Not necessarily in that order, but at least two out of three, always.
The Serviced Office Origins
Bex's career began in 2000, landing at Executive Offices Group (now Argyll Group) without really knowing what the industry was. Back then, serviced offices weren't just about flexible space, they were about legitimacy. Businesses needed a prestigious address to seem viable. It was high-end, process-driven, and deeply customer-focused.
She moved through MWB and eventually Regus, where she managed iconic buildings like the Gherkin and New Broad Street House. This was well before the pandemic made "space as a service" a buzzword. "People talk about WeWork like they created this coworking phenomenon," Bex said. "I feel a bit bad for Mark Dixon because he started it. He was the first at scale to do this."
It's a fair point. The real estate industry used to look down on flex and serviced offices. Now they're trying to learn from them. Bex witnessed that full arc, and it shows in how she thinks about membership models, shared spaces, and activation strategies today.
Nike: Progress Over Perfection
A client at Converse, then owned by Nike, liked how Bex showed up. When an office manager role opened, he asked if she wanted it. It was a pay cut. A responsibility decrease. But something about it felt right. So she went for it.
She stayed for eight years.
At Nike, Bex learned two lessons that stuck. First: progress over perfection. Coming from Regis, where processes were rigid and deviations were punished, Nike's culture was liberating. People cared about outcomes, not the path to get there. It gave her speed. She stopped overthinking risks and started piloting ideas, learning from failures, and moving forward.
Second: everyone's opinion matters. In meetings, interns contributed as much as executives. When Jose, a cleaner, told Bex the cleaning products weren't working, she changed them immediately. No bureaucracy, no hierarchy. Just respect. "Everybody was contributing towards what this workplace was going to be," she said. "They really mattered the most."
Reinvigorate Spaces and Work Reconstructed
After Nike, Bex launched Reinvigorate Spaces, a wellbeing consultancy born from her own transformation. By taking better care of herself, moving daily, drinking water, eating better, giving up alcohol during lockdown, she became better at her job. That clarity led her to focus on changing workplace behaviors, building case studies to influence senior leaders, and advocating for flexible work policies rooted in what people actually wanted.
She loved it. She also felt the loneliness of solo entrepreneurship.
Enter Work Reconstructed, co-founded with Chris Early in 2024. The two met at industry events and shared a frustration: too many conferences were surface-level, and workplace professionals operated in silos. Work Reconstructed brings together people from real estate, HR, IT, and beyond to have deeper conversations about trust, data, and the human experience of work.
"We realized if we wanted to make work better, we couldn't just complain about it together. We had to actually do something about it."
WPP: Campus, Membership, and AI
At WPP, Bex runs global strategy, operational excellence, and a Centre of Excellence covering both procurement and real estate. WPP operates as a creative transformation company with six main agencies, including GroupM (now WPP Media), each with distinct brands but housed in shared campuses.
It's a serviced office model, in a way. Different organizations, different work styles, one roof. The concept is "membership, not ownership." Every agency gets access to shared spaces. Nobody owns them. You take what you need.
Bex's team focuses on creating a world-class experience for everyone who walks through the door. That means guidelines, frameworks, and principles at the center, supported by regional teams and a global capability center in Mumbai handling remote work.
Her take on AI? It's a friend, not a nemesis. WPP has built its own system, WPP Open, which teams use safely for tasks like procurement automation.
"A lot of those boring or repetitive tasks drain energy. If we had AI agents doing those bits, it would free us up to really listen to people."
She's particularly interested in predictive maintenance. Instead of replacing equipment on a fixed schedule, AI could flag when something's near end of life. Proactive, not reactive. More sustainable, less wasteful.
The Coffee That Mattered Most
When I asked Bex about her most memorable coffee conversation, she paused. Then she told me about a security guard from Nike who reached out years later to meet up. Over coffee, he shared the impact she'd had on him, how she'd treated him with respect, made him feel seen.
"Sometimes we work so hard and we give so much into something and your energy's depleted," Bex said. "Those moments where someone says you made a difference, it's just enough to keep you wanting to keep doing more."
It came at the perfect moment, too. A dopamine kick she didn't know she needed.
What's Changed, What Hasn't
Bex has been in workplace for over two decades. I asked what's different now.
The fundamentals haven't shifted much, she said, especially if you started in serviced offices, where shared space and flexible membership were always the model. But activation has improved. Gyms, wellness rooms, and social spaces are more common, though many are still underutilized. The missing piece is programming: the experiences layered on top.
Cultural appropriateness has evolved significantly. Workplace teams now celebrate a broader range of festivals, accommodate neurodiversity in design and programming, and think harder about who's in the building and what they need.
Looking ahead, Bex hopes for more user control. At home, people have perfected their setup, their music, coffee, lighting, temperature. Returning to an office where you can't control anything creates friction.
"I would hope that in the future, FM teams will give a bit more freedom to the end user."
Servant Leadership
Bex describes her leadership style as servant leadership: empowering her team, helping them thrive, leading with full heart and intention. It's not easy. "Sometimes you can find yourself thinking, oh, I just need to lie down in a dark room as a result of it," she admitted.
But feedback, both positive and negative, makes the difference. Those moments when people tell you the impact you've made, or challenge you to show up better, shape how you lead.
Sports taught her that. Whether football, cricket, or tennis, each one offers lessons in resilience, teamwork, and showing up even when it's hard. Working for Nike reinforced it. Treating everyone, from interns to cleaners to executives, as equally important wasn't a policy. It was culture.
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