Sara Andersen is Executive Director and Head of Real Estate and Workplace Effectiveness at Genentech. Her organization is responsible for ensuring the work environments support desired business outcomes for the business units at Genentech’s South San Francisco site and beyond, in addition to reaping value from our 200+ acre site in South San Francisco. Sara’s role at Genentech allows her to exercise her passion for providing healthy, sustainable, financially performing environments which allow people to do their best work. As a Real Estate and Financial services professional with more than 25 years of experience, she has focused on setting overall business strategy for her group, running business units, building relationships and developing cross functional teams. Her engagement with Genentech began in 2012 with the development of their shared work environment program which has an emphasis on the social engagement of the employees, user friendly technology that allows a “work anywhere” philosophy, and a healthy and sustainable work environment. This focus on flexibility significantly impacted Genentech ability to ease into WFH in early 2020. Her ongoing work focuses on using the workplace to support business initiatives, measuring success in faster time to market vs. square foot per person.. Sara is educated and licensed as an architect, her education includes a Masters in Architecture from Washington University with an undergraduate degree from Lehigh University in Architecture and Computer Science. She was honored as a Northern California Real Estate Woman of Influence by the San Francisco Business Times and has spoken at both Workspaces, CoreNet Global Summit and NeoCon.