Place Your BID on Company Culture
I've always admired urban planners who improve street-level experiences, and wished there were some way to bring their perspectives into corporate workplaces. Over the summer, I was introduced to Max Musicant because we were "both working to make places better for the people who use them."
Max is a placemaker who works with owners of public spaces, like atriums and streetscapes, and designs interventions that make people want to visit. He described this work as "a business improvement district in a box," which inspired this article.
A business improvement district ("BID" or "BIA" for Area) is an area where property owners vote to make everyone inside pay a shared fee into one fund. A board spends it on cleaner sidewalks, security, events, and marketing. For HR, IT, Finance, and Comms, it answers a familiar question: who pays for employee experience work that crosses departments?
BIDs are a strong metaphor for the Chief of Work function I have been describing for over a year. That function integrates select experts from people, technology, and place around the employee's actual day, like a fitness tracker for the organization.
This article tests my own view of who pays for it.
Consider who shapes your employees' days at work across HR, IT, corporate real estate (CRE), Comms, change leads, etc. Each reports to a different chief, draws on a different budget, and works with the others on goodwill. I call them misfits: they own outcomes that depend on resources belonging to others.
A BID puts everyone who shapes a street inside one boundary, with one budget and one board. This article draws that line around a workplace and asks what changes when the departments that benefit pay for the team that serves them, and what that team owes in return.
But first, a BID of history.
Toronto Train Tutorial
In the 1960s, a new subway line replaced the streetcars that once carried shoppers through a famous shopping district called Bloor West Village. With store traffic falling, many merchants closed their shops. Remaining owners went door-to-door asking other local businesses for donations to fund improvements. Only a handful complied.
Out of frustration, they sought government support to compel every business on the strip to pay a levy.
In 1970, Bloor West Village became the first BID/BIA in the world. Its members voted themselves a budget and spent it on lights, flower boxes, and benches.
Toronto now has more than 85 BIAs. NYU studied the 44 BIDs that existed in New York in 2002 and found that commercial property values rose about 15 percentage points on average, concentrated in the largest districts.
Max shared three reasons donation drives like Bloor West Village's fail:
- Securing contributions is "a large hidden job in itself"
- Those who skip contributing "still reap the benefits, with no penalty"
- Constant one-time requests make long-term planning impossible
"A BID levy solves all three," Max said.
When HR delivers onboarding for every employee, every team gets better-prepared hires and HR's budget absorbs the cost, a free-rider problem inside the company.
Draw Lines Where Work Happens
Max sees a pattern across public space: each city department manages its slice of a district independently, with no clear accountability to the goals of the people using it. He compares that to a hotel or restaurant general manager "who runs and integrates front and back of house to deliver a great customer experience, clearly reflected in the P&L."
"While integrating functions at City Hall or HQ makes things better, it's still too far from the ground to achieve desired impact."
I've said that execs struggle to break their own silos: redesign has to come from one level down. Max adds that the operating unit belongs there too. Draw the line around a single office and call it a workplace district.
Inside it sit the misfits, now one team. Benefiting teams pay a levy: HR, IT, CRE, Finance, and the business units whose people work at the site. A BID assesses owners by property value or frontage; in the workplace it could be headcount or regular occupancy.
The team answers to those payers and owes them proof that the money worked. In Max's words, the levy "puts consistent authority and resources at the point of impact, accountable to a board of contributors who can change leadership at any time."
A BID adds to what a city provides and holds no authority over its baseline services. In the workplace, HR, IT, and CRE keep running the basics, the way a city keeps collecting the trash. The team goes where the office needs more, like a failing onboarding journey or a stalled AI rollout. I think of the Chief of Work the same way: constant, and present where the work calls for it.
The levy addresses the free-rider problem. Every department that benefits from a better office day contributes to it.
Pilot Small, Then Prove It
Max says many onsite activations cost only a few hundred dollars, growing to months-long campaigns with five-figure budgets.
For one office tower client, his firm ran hospitality programming and surveyed building tenants about their experience. Of those surveyed, 54% were more interested in coming to the office and 45% were more likely to stay with their company. Those are HR outcomes, measured by a landlord's vendor. I've previously argued that place metrics rarely reach HR.
Max explains why the landlord paid:
"We figured out that if tenants saw the common area and related services as contributing to their employee recruitment and retention efforts they'd be more likely to move in and renew."
Internal pilots follow the same logic: a few hundred dollars from one funder, spent where two functions meet, and measured by a number that the funder already tracks. Attrition for HR, adoption for IT, utilization for CRE.
Who Holds the Bag
Is a levy just a chargeback, the internal bill that allocates a central team's cost to business units? In a chargeback, a business unit holds the bag: it pays a share whether or not it sees (or agrees on) value. I described that incentive problem in Below the Line.
A BID changes who holds the bag.
The benefiting parties pool their money, decide together how to spend it, and vote on whether to renew. The team carries the burden of proof. The hotel or restaurant manager in Max's comparison reads results off a P&L. The workplace district team has outcome data but no revenue line; that data sits in HR, IT, and CRE systems that rarely connect. Payers will ask what their levy returned, and may not get a straight answer.
The vote carries limits too. Only payers vote, which lets the largest budgets outvote the rest. In this thought experiment, remote workers and the frontline sit outside the line.
What Can You Do on Monday?
Odds are you live near a BID or something like it, with multiple parties contributing to improve life on the street. The workplace version will not be easy, but the metaphor has me rethinking how companies improve workplace experience and culture. Start urban planning inside your company next week:
- Draw a workplace district. Pick an office, list every person and budget that touches the daily experience there, and mark which function pays for each. The gaps show who benefits without contributing.
- Pilot small, at the seam. Spend small on a visible fix where two of those functions meet, and measure the impact.
- Write the renewal case first. Agree with each funder on a measure they already track, and how you will show results to win a renewal.
Toronto merchants drew a line and asked the people inside to vote on it. Whoever draws yours may be a future Chief of Work, and it's time to place your bid.
Which office in your organization would you draw the line around first, and what would the team show its payers to earn a second year? If this resonates with your work, get in touch.