The Future Offices Podcast

Episode 2 of The #FutureOffices Podcast is ready for your listening pleasure. The topic? How every office has its own fingerprint.

Our guest, Workplace Technology Strategist at Cisco, Mark Miller, works with global customers to find the #workplacestrategies that work best for them and their workforces. He and his team of Cisco engineers develop the winning technology innovations that suit customers needs.

In this episode (which is a bit longer than the 20 minutes we promised when we started this podcast, but only because the discussion was too good), Mark and Kevin discuss:

• The 4 main trends when it comes to workplace and corporate real estate technology.
• A.I. and relationship intelligence
• The role of workplace analytics in shaping everything to do with offices

For more information on the Future Offices Winter 2020 conference, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript:

Kevin: I do have to say I love a good sound bite. I love a good short, sweet quote that resonates with the research I'm doing, the conference, the speakers and the content that we see at these iterations. Last time we spoke you said every workplace has its own fingerprint and needs to be treated like it does. That was awesome and I think I had mentioned, I'm going to steal that at some point and put that into one of our sessions, or think-tank discussions, or something unless you trademark it after this podcast episode, but can you explain what this means in relation to the changing workspace?

Mark: Yes, Kevin, if you think back just 10 years ago, the workplace was dominated by a monolithic, uninspiring and I'd say much maligned cubicle, and the cubicle has been around for years. It was actually conceived back in the mid-60s by a gentleman named Robert Propst, from Herman Miller, as a way to address what he saw at the time was a shift to a more information centric work that was happening in the 60s, and for a generation, the cubicle was the foundation of every workplace.

It was truly a one-size-fits-all model. Something that facilities teams could quickly roll out very efficiently with very limited technology enablement. Then about 10 years ago, the winds began to shift. Organizations started to realize that changing nature of work, what I referenced before around that process oriented work evaporating, and realizing that cubicle bays, that traditional workplace environment, was not designed for the type of work that was really going on, and this led to a wave of workplace design called activity based working, or ABW, where organizations focused on the various activities that were going on within the workplace and they created spaces for people to collaborate, concentrate, learn, and largely socialize. Four big trends. And then balanced not only that workplace design, but also technology and policy to allow a lot more movement within the workplace, allow people to gravitate to the places they needed that were best suited for the type of work they were going on.

And this is where this concept around every workplace has its own fingerprint came to be. Now the workplace was designed around the specific activities of your organization, of the functional group that was in that space, or even as discreet as the team that was occupying a neighborhood. This next wave of workplace transformation that's happening, it's ABW or activity based working, tends to be working its way out. A lot of people have gone through that wave already. What this next phase, what we're calling the cognitive workplace, we're really focused on the employee experiences and using data and cognitive tools, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to increase productivity, to create a more personalized experience, and reduce friction in the workplace and that's going to drive even a stronger sense around very customized work environment, hence the analogies to a human fingerprint.

Kevin: It's a phenomenal quote and it resonates a lot even with all of these podcast episodes, a lot of our upcoming content around that human experience touch point, and it's become very important and where I've mentioned in the past a lot of our content was around more so the physical design specifically only of the workplace has now transformed into understanding your culture and understanding the employees within your workspace first, before necessarily implementing anything, especially on the digital side, especially when it comes to digital transformation.

So, phenomenal quote, kudos again. Now, you are a very demanded speaker when it comes to what we're talking about. You attend a lot of conferences, you hear a lot of these buzzwords and industry terms when you speak. I want to know if you have any pet peeves when it comes to the topic of the future of work, or digital workplace transformation, or technology in the workplace? Is there anything that maybe has become a trend or buzzword in this space that would be considered a pet peeve or not necessarily accurate at this point?

Mark: I don't know if there's a pet peeve. I think this is a very broad topic and I sat one day at home looking at my home office and I saw on the bottom shelf, a bunch of books on business process re-engineering, and it was when I came out of college that was the big rave. Everybody was into business process re-engineering and then the next shelf was filled with a bunch of books on total quality management. What I realized was that was yet another wave. And then for years I used to do a lot of work designing customer relationship management strategies, some contact center technology in real life. That was a wave, and then globalization hit.

I think this is just the next big wave of corporate innovation around the workplace itself and I think it's going to happen for a very long time. It's going to be a lot of solution providers are going to enter this space and everybody's going to try to hook onto it. You leave it up to the clients to help at least understand where you fit and know that we're not going to do this individually. There's no one company that's going to have the magic pill to redesign, or reinvent work, or create the future workplace environment. It's going to take clients and customers to sit down and understand which parts are relevant and how to stitch all those together, and I think as the solution providers in that space, it's our job to be able to work well with others in the ecosystem and be very clear about the areas that we play and the strengths that we have, and the areas that we can help them.

Kevin: No, exactly. I'm thinking back to what you just said about finding the books on business process re-engineering. So, nowadays it's pretty much business process re-engineering on steroids, especially when it comes down to obviously the analysis of not only the workflows now, or design, it's of the people as well.

Mark: So I had this conversation with a client a couple of months back and they said, "Look, Mark, is this really going to take off? Is this really going to be a sustainable trend?" And I said to them, "Hey, remember back 10 or 15 years? All the talk was around E-business." E-business, it was all the talk about Amazon and everything was going on in that space with eBay and everybody else. I said, "You know what we call E-business now? Business." It's a mature trend, and the workplace is going to be a lot like that too. We're going to look back at the time of cubicle-based work, and just think that's when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. Everybody's going to move in this direction where technology and space design and policy are seamlessly integrated together, and we're going to really quickly forget about the worlds that we came from.

Kevin: No, exactly. People are already telling me, "Hey, that concept of the open office, man, that's ancient at this point," and I'm thinking this is some of the hottest news about the workplace and office design only a year and a half ago, so things are moving so quickly.

Mark: I think there's an opportunity here, too. As I said in my intro, everything revolves around an unintended consequence. When people went and built these open office environments, they thought they were solving for the right problem. The great thing about a workplace design effort is, if you get it right, you know right away and if you get it wrong, you know right away. So people are not bashful about telling you how they feel about their new work environments, but largely when we moved from traditional to that activity based model, it was really good for the balance sheet. Companies were allowed to consolidate and optimize a lot of their real estate portfolio. In fact, at Cisco, we optimized almost 25 percent of our real estate portfolio, moving to this new way of working.

People just needed less space and you've got better efficiencies, but what was necessarily good for the balance sheet, wasn't always good for the employee. As people started moving within the workplace, there was a lot of friction that happened. There was a loss of sense of community. I think this next wave around the cognitive workplace is going to fix a lot of that. When you start dealing with the individual experiences, this idea of journey mapping an employee's movement around the workplace, you're really going to understand how you can create much better workplace experiences.

About Mark Miller: Mark's passion and expertise centers around understanding the relationships between workspace design, workplace policies, technology and culture, and helping companies balance these elements in the creation of their next generation workplaces. His focus is not just on the physical workplace, but rather the intersection of the physical and digital work environments. He regularly engages with corporate executives, assisting them in the development and implementation of workplace strategies that drive new levels of innovation, productivity and employee engagement.

Increasingly, Mark is called upon to be a workplace evangelist, speaking at industry events, conferences and with leading companies on the role technology will play in the future workplace. Mark's technology background has seen him hold senior roles at companies including Nokia, Avaya and Cisco, where his work now centres around the transformation of the corporate workplace and the development of next-generation workplace strategies.

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Mark Miller will be one of many experts speakers at Future Offices Winter, taking place January 22 - 24 in New York City! Join his session on Main Day One:

A Cisco Story: The Workplace of the Future | It's the Tech that Makes Great Teams and it's the Teams that Make Great Tech

In this talk, Mark will outline the types of technology Cisco introduced internally and the difference it has made to its workforce, including:

• Increased its workforce by 7%
• Decreased its real estate portfolio by 26%
• Closed 241 buildings
• Achieved annual Opex saving of $196m by optimizing
• Its real estate and realised $294m in building sales
• 17% increase in employee engagement
• 17% increase in workplace satisfaction
• 15% increase in work/life balance
• $806m incremental productivity through mobile devicesand applications

For more information, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com.

The premier episode of "The Future Offices Podcast" just dropped today. Be the first to listen!

As we gear up for our Future Offices Summit in NYC in Jan 2020, we thought we'd invite some of our industry-famous speakers to join host Kevin Steinberger to talk about the stuff that's changing the face of the way we work.

Real Estate, Workplace, Facilities, HR, and IT -- all of these traditionally siloed departments are combining forces to map out a future office like you've never seen before.

To kick things off in episode #1, Michelle Caldwell and Ruven Gotz from Avande share insights on why the digital transformation of the office needs to start from an emotionally intelligent perspective.

For more information on the Future Offices Winter 2020 conference, visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com 

Here's an excerpt from the episode transcript:

Ruven:  So I guess I'll jump in and start with my point of view on that. One of the things that's been really great about attending your conferences over the past couple of years is that normally, both Michelle and I are pretty used to attending technical conferences around the tools that we use. Your Future Offices conference is very much focused on the space that people work in. Michelle and I have found your conferences being a great way to think about this type of thing more holistically.

You talk about human centered, the human is doing work in a space using tools and we've been excited by the idea of how these two things go together and how they compliment each other and how sometimes even they can get in the way of each other. When you think about a lot of people working in virtual collaboration spaces and yet, sitting in a physical environment at work or on the road or at home, and how these things compliment each other is part of the future of work from our point of view. Seeing how these things interact with each other is what drives us to your conference and frankly, teaches us as much as we teach back to the team.

Michelle: Yeah. I would agree with everything Ruven just said. I would add to that that I observed this even now as we're doing this podcast, that my workplace or workspace experience is in many places. Yes, it's in the office, but from a digital and human centered perspective, it's also in a rental car on my way to Napa, it's on a train, it's in a plane, it's sitting at home. So how can we take the point of view of our colleagues in facilities, real estate operations and say, "How do I create an experience at work where even I can be effective as an employee and have a great attachment to brand and my company no matter where my workplace or space happens to be happening at the time?" I find that a lot of the younger generations are used to working in kind of multimodality, right? Multiple device, multiple environment.

I think the other thing that we feel strongly about this at Avanade is when you're looking to redesign a workplace experience, that you also need to look at what are the patterns and behaviors in the culture at your company that you're trying to either enhance your change with those folks work together everyday. They don't always work in teams that have a natural physical flow in the spaces in which they're working in now, so it creates these unique opportunities to change work in ways that both impact the physical space and the digital space.

Kevin:  Right. Now quick question off of that, and I feel that a lot of folks who even come to these shows or experts or executives within the workplace or corporate real estate side of things, don't necessarily understand what is the difference between, let's say digital transformation and then human centered digital transformation.

Ruven:  I think that it requires an examination of who your workers are and what their working styles are and what's happening in the workplace. A worker who comes to that office from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the afternoon every single day has a different need for space to be comfortable. I recall at one point, we moved into a new office and the rule was absolute clean desk. Now, if you're someone who comes to the same spot every single day, five days a week through the year, I think that's a little inhumane to say you cannot have a picture of your child or your spouse on your desk or something that makes it feel like you're home. On the other hand, if you're someone who only comes into the office once a week or even less than that for specific meetings, getting things done, trying to find a spot to sit in because there's junk on every desk making that difficult is also a bad experience.

So really understanding the worker, their work modality, what their expectations are, is an important part. When you think about human centered, you're not thinking generically, you're thinking about your audiences or the personas of the people that use your space and designing that space to be appropriate for them. One of the great things about coming to the office is interacting with your peers, but at the same time, if you have to have a very important call, you want a quiet space, a space without interruption to be able to take that call. Finding the right balance to support that becomes very important in part of the space design.

Kevin:  Right. And I'm thinking there's probably even a financial perspective to this too, because if you obviously don't take into consideration the human centered piece of digital transformation, you're going to spend money or allocate a budget to digital transformation and then probably have to do it over again.

Ruven: Yeah. Or you don't get the ROI because if the day that you come into the office for your meetings, there's no quiet place to take a call, you'll think, "You know what? It's more hassle than it's worth. I'm not coming to that office."

Michelle:  Yeah. I often say, what I see happen a lot of times and sort of recently on part of a campus refresh, we walked into the room and they were super proud of the new space and they said, "We have the best and greatest of all conferencing technology. We've just redone our buildings, all this wonderful open-air space, great natural light," and yet, because they chose to go with best of breed from a technology conferencing room perspective, it didn't all work together. They weren't focused on best experience in that conference space, but by buying all the upper right quadrant technologies, they don't all interplay well together, which created this incredibly high technical debt, high friction and just trying to get a meeting started for the employees in this new space.

So often we just stress the best experience is what we should be after regardless of the quadrant in which perhaps that experience from a technology perspective is ranked because the employee doesn't care if it was a magic quadrant piece of technology they care about, "Does it actually helped me get my work done? Does it work frictionlessly to me as a person that's trying to use this space?" I think there's a great opportunity for people in these executive real estate roles, partner with their technology leadership and even their operational leadership within their companies to really kind of create this cross functional workplace experience or employee experience kind of SWAT team to go solve those problems holistically together.

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Join Michelle Caldwell and Ruvin Gotz at the Future Offices Summit in NYC January 22 - 24, 2020 as they run a workshop entitled:

"Increasing Technology-Enabled Collaboration Through Workplace Strategy"

Collaboration is the workplace and corporate real estate buzzword that most have yet to master through technology implementation. It is necessary in today's competitive environment to leverage the right technology in order to deliver a more personalized work environment.

• Implementing a digital workplace strategy to promote increased revenue.
• New digital workplace approaches to drive innovation.
• Speeding up business cycles and increasing productivity to drive competitive advantage.

The agenda for the conference is packed with 40+ experts and many other experiences you'll love. Visit www.FutureOfficesWinter.com for more details.

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About our guests

Michelle Caldwell and Ruven Gotz both work  at Avanade, a global professional services company providing IT consulting and services focused on the Microsoft platform with artificial intelligence, business analytics, cloud, application services, digital transformation, modern workplace, security services, technology and managed services offerings.

Michelle is the North America Modern Workplace Experience Lead and Ruven leads the Workplace Value Realization Offering in the West.