MillerKnoll on empowering intentional, inclusive and playful workplaces

Episode 134: MillerKnoll on empowering more intentional, inclusive, and playful workplaces

[00:00:02.210] – Ryan Anderson

The nice thing about working from home is that you can tailor so much to your own workflow and you can control facets of the environment in many cases that you couldn’t in a corporate office. But when we start talking about relationships and what it means as a manager to foster really healthy relationships, anybody who’s been in a long distance romantic relationship can tell you that trust is usually established or if it’s broken, restored through really meaningful times together. So we need to ask the question like how we equip and empower people, but how do we foster really healthy, trust based relationships? By being together in whatever kind of duration is appropriate. And just as a manager, that’s different. Offices in their early origins were designed to supervise work and to express status, and that’s not the function anymore. You can’t operate under this model where I intend to observe everyone doing their work to ensure they’re productive. I don’t think any organization can remain relevant and competitive with that mindset. Instead, it’s all about using these various environments, whether that’s a corporate workspace or a home workspace or a flex space or others, to enable that range of experiences that fosters really, really healthy working relationships.

[00:01:26.080] – Nancy Goebel

It’s hard to believe that 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of a powerful strategic partnership between DWG and Miller Knoll. Ryan Anderson and I decided to celebrate via Chat in the digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. In case you’re unfamiliar with Ryan, he’s the Vice President of Global Research and Insights at MillerKnoll, and his work focuses on designing workplaces that support healthy, inclusive and productive communities. We anchored today’s conversation around Ryan’s vision for 2025, a year in which he says organizations will focus on inclusive workplaces, holistic well being, connected, distributed teams, belonging queues, immersive neighborhoods and user initiated changes. With this in mind, we decided to step back and create a call to action for digital workplaces and their leaders to ensure that they make 2024 count. Knowing that this is the direction and we teed up some specific advice about empowering work through intentional design, making room for employees to be more playful and joyful at work, the need for a management reboot that gives way to more inclusive leadership and finally, helping teams manage the balance between strong ties and weak ties. This is your host Nancy Goebel, Chief Executive at DWG, in conversation with Ryan Anderson.

[00:03:13.490] – Nancy Goebel

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you, as always, by Digital Workplace Group. Happy listening.

[00:03:24.770] – Nancy Goebel

Ryan. Happy new year and welcome to the Digital Workplace Impact podcast studio. It’s great to have a chance to catch up with you today.

[00:03:32.160] – Ryan Anderson

Hey, Nancy, Happy New year.

[00:03:34.450] – Nancy Goebel

Thank you. I know it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to catch up, but I know that you’re always thinking about the world of work and the future of work within that context. And I just felt like it would be a wonderful moment for us to come together and think a little bit about the year that we’ve just left behind. The path that we have in helping to advise lots of business leaders around the future of work through our respective circles. And why not bring those two circles together in a conversation like this?

[00:04:15.570] – Ryan Anderson

Sounds good. I’m excited to do so. I’ve had more than a decade relationship with DWG now. That started with debating Paul Miller in the Herm Miller London showroom in 2013 over whether or not offices would be required in an era of new technologies. So I kind of feel like my history with all of you has been very beneficial, getting me thinking about topics that were really critical years in advance of when they may have entered the public sphere.

[00:04:43.890] – Nancy Goebel

And together we’ve seen quite a lot happen over the last ten years, and it’s nice to do a little bit of reflective thinking and also a little bit of future gazing. And so, of course, I follow you on LinkedIn, among other places. And you started the new year by thinking about 2023, and you framed it as all things hybrid. Hybrid work, hybrid workplace, hybrid workers, hybrid meeting spaces, hybrid schedules, hybrid solutions. Hybrid. Hybrid. Hybrid. And so what do you think organizations learned from the year of hybrid?

[00:05:26.070] – Ryan Anderson

I think we learned how that phrase has been taken too far, and that was kind of the tongue in cheek nature of my post. So don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of hybrid workplace location policies. I personally have split my time between home and the facilities that MillerKnoll has here in Michigan since 2014. So love that way of kind of enabling flexibility. But I think the term hybrid got really diluted and maybe confusing and maybe a little overhyped in late 2022. 2023. It was like it started off being useful describing a work location policy. Okay, cool. The company or the organization you’re working for is going to enable more location flexibility. Then it started to be applied in ways that were a little ambiguous, like the term hybrid team would be an example where it’s like, what’s a hybrid team? Is that a team that’s distributed? Because that’s clear to me, or is this a team that’s colocated but with flexible locations where they might not all be in the exact same place? Got a little murky. And then as a reformed marketer, I can say this. The marketers got involved and we started seeing phrases like, you’re going to need a hybrid meeting room.

[00:06:43.540] – Ryan Anderson

Well, what’s a hybrid meeting room? It’s a meeting room where not all the participants are there. So it’s going to need a camera. Well, that’s just meeting room. I mean, we’ve been doing that for 30 years, haven’t we? And so I think a lot of organizations got to the point where it just became ambiguous, confusing, and we work with a lot of human resource and real estate folks that have said, I’m not sure that just a hybrid policy changes a lot. It enables change, but it doesn’t mean the organization is working differently. It doesn’t mean that they’re more effective at using their tools. It doesn’t mean that their spaces are more effective. So I think we hit a little bit of a wall.

[00:07:21.710] – Nancy Goebel

I think you’re absolutely right. And one of the things I was struck by when I did the predictions for the digital workplace and looking at 2023 is that I talked about it in the context of the tug of war that was happening between employers and employees. And there were individuals who got very accustomed to working from home during the window of the pandemic. And so there’s a level of almost a power balance or rebalancing that took place over the course of last year and even into this year to some degree, where there were some employers that essentially put out mandates to require people to come back three days, four days, five days a week to the office, particularly knowledge workers, obviously plant workers and others remained in, in person presence in large part throughout. And so we’re still seeing a bigger push for people to go, quote unquote, back to normal into this year. And curious to see what you’re anticipating now that we’re seeing an even greater shift in working patterns and maybe even some insights about what’s shaping your thinking.

[00:08:48.730] – Ryan Anderson

Sure. Yeah, I think the patterns are beginning to stabilize. The reason I say that is we conducted a survey of about 5000 workers globally at the end of 2023. And I don’t think we were seeing the variability or the kind of ambiguous nature of where people might want to work that we did a year previous. So as an example, I think 49% of the people who took the survey said that they’re working for organizations that have fully in office policies. Now this is nine countries that included places like Brazil and India. When we start looking at remote or hybrid work policies, those are much more prevalent in the UK, US and Canada. We found some interesting information around commute. Commute, we found was not having a statistically significant impact on the amount of time that people who worked for organizations that have a hybrid policy. It didn’t really affect how much time they were spending in the office. It’s like at this point they kind of know why they’re going into work and why they’re spending time in the office versus home office. So some of those patterns, I think, are getting there. What I don’t know that the world fully got a chance to address is the deeper roots behind some of that tension, which I think really boiled down to whether or not organizations are attempting to empower their employees to be more productive or whether or not they’re trying to coerce their folks to be more productive.

[00:10:23.020] – Ryan Anderson

You might be familiar with a framework from Douglas McGregor called Theory X/ Theory Y. It’s been around the world of organizational sociology and other domains for a really long time. But basically his theory was that Theory X organizations think their employees probably don’t want to work and that they need to find ways of ensuring people are productive and that they do their work. Whereas Theory Y organizations believe that people want to achieve and they want to do good work, and it’s more about empowering them to do so. So what we have seen over the last couple of years is, yeah, there’s the top of mind issues around the cost of commuting, both in terms of time and money and other things. But a more latent issue, a little bit deeper down, is really, does my employer trust me to go do my best work or do they feel like I’m not going to do that unless they force me to do so? And I think the world’s still wrestling through that, even though the patterns are becoming a bit more normalized.

[00:11:24.890] – Nancy Goebel

And I do think that to some degree, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the fact that there can be a level of, I’ll call it generational leadership at play. When you think about some of the organizations that did have those mandates and wanted to coerce people back into the workplace on the regular, these are often individuals who learned how to manage by walking around based on Facetime, the command and control model of once upon a time. And there are other organizations that have decided to move into this more results oriented or empowerment driven approach. And so I think that’s part of what makes the work that we do collectively so interesting. And I know, just given the nature of your role inside of MillerKnoll, that you’re always thinking ahead. And I know that you’ve made some directional statements about what will be important to organizations come 2025. And we’ll come back to 2024 because I like to think about from here to there and then the path in between. Thinking about 2025, you talked about the fact that there will be a quorum of organizations that are focused on things like inclusive workplaces and holistic well being and distributed teams that are connected and paying attention to belonging cues and things like immersive neighborhoods and user initiated change.

[00:13:12.430] – Nancy Goebel

Why spotlight these themes now? And what do you think organizations need to be thinking about in light of these areas?

[00:13:25.010] – Ryan Anderson

Well, I spotlighted them because I think that regardless of an organization’s work location, policy, many leaders have come to the realization that their organization is a community and it’s either a productive and healthy one, with organizational networks that are really solid and where information flows well through them. And groups can be productive or they’re disjointed and unhealthy. And so most of the things that I emphasize there are around how organizations, regardless of the degree to which they want to support people working in office or out of office, can take a look at their own strategies and say, how do we get this community of people in a productive flow where everybody feels like they belong, that they’re part of something that’s meaningful to them, that they feel empowered to go achieve everything that they think they can achieve, both individually and as a team? And I know all of that’s a little squishy, but that kind of is the reality of the nature of our work. There’s this concept of discretionary effort, which is there’s a line of productivity at which you need to meet to not get fired, and there’s a much higher bar that you’re capable of in terms of what you can contribute.

[00:14:44.290] – Ryan Anderson

And this idea of quiet quitting, while we’re not hearing about it as much, was all about people basically saying, well, I’m going to drop down to that lower bar. But there’s a major global talent shortage. And even in places like India, where there’s a lot of great talent, the fight to keep the best talent isn’t any less than it was. And so when we start talking about future of work just in general, my mind immediately goes to how are the smartest organizations going to retain and develop the people they’ve got, while attracting new people that will stick with them? And that’s all about what kind of a community you’re going to become a part of. The more we see oh, I think some of the social isolation and burnout that can come from excesses in working alone and working remotely. And by the way, I’ll be the first to say that I do think entirely distributed organizations can still function as a healthy community. But if you kind of leave everything to itself and don’t really be intentional about fostering that sense of belonging and creating spaces that help to connect distributed teams, I think you end up with an organization that can feel very disjointed, where individual teams might be functioning fine, but the teams don’t necessarily have the cross cutting ties, what are known as the weak ties, the various people to help bring all those teams together.

[00:16:10.520] – Ryan Anderson

So, like I said, the smart business move. I think moving forward is to begin to ask the question, how can we connect these communities as a holistic social network in a way that’s going to be far more productive and impactful than our competitors?

[00:16:27.450] – Nancy Goebel

And I think, as I listen to you, that there are a couple of themes that come to mind for me as umbrellas. One is this notion of really starting to level up around emotional intelligence, but then also given the nature of communities, we need to be thinking more and more about relational experiences, not only in the physical, but also the digital.

[00:16:56.230] – Ryan Anderson

Totally agree with that. Yep, I think that’s absolutely, you know, because MillerKnoll is kind of a family of companies that focuses on physical work environments and other environments like hospitals and homes, et cetera. My mind always goes to the spaces. Right? Like, how do our spaces impact our overall work experience? And the nice thing about working from home is that you can tailor so much to your own workflow, and you can control facets of the environment in many cases that you couldn’t in a corporate office. But when we start talking about relationships and what it means as a manager to foster really healthy relationships, anybody who’s been in a long distance romantic relationship can tell you that trust is usually established, or if it’s broken, restored through really meaningful times together. So we need to ask the question, like how we equip and empower people, but how do we foster really healthy, trust based relationships? By being together in whatever kind of duration is appropriate. And just as a manager, that’s different. Offices in their early origins were designed to supervise work and to express status, and that’s not the function anymore. You can’t operate under this model where I intend to observe everyone doing their work to ensure they’re productive.

[00:18:22.710] – Ryan Anderson

I don’t think any organization can remain relevant and competitive with that mindset. Instead, it’s all about using these various environments, whether that’s a corporate workspace or a home workspace or a flex space or others, to enable that range of experiences that fosters really, really healthy working relationships.

[00:18:43.270] – Nancy Goebel

And very often now, people who do have varied working patterns come into the office because they want to connect or because they want to collaborate in some fashion. And so spaces have evolved very quickly to support that in increasingly better ways.

[00:19:02.510] – Ryan Anderson

Oh, I wish I’ll interrupt you by saying, oh yes, if only that continued to be true. I think the spaces are beginning to evolve. The world of corporate real estate changes more slowly than other facets of our work. I think organizations are realizing that, yes, these spaces need to connect people, but they’re not really sure what that means. Like, does that mean more conference rooms? Does that mean a coffee bar? And they need to get much deeper in terms of what enabling group co-creation or other key activities really means. And then I will point out one other thing, Nancy, which is the connectivity, and that kind of immersion with teams is on one end of a bell curve, and then all the way on the other is the need to do deep focus, concentrative work. And we’ve had about 32,000 people use Herman Miller’s work from home tool, which is just wfh.Hermanmiller.com. And interestingly, the top answer when we ask, what are you challenged with? What do you struggle with? Working from home is still focus productivity distractions can occur, whether it’s good distractions like little ones or pets or whatever, or WiFi issues could be the issue, or any number of things.

[00:20:17.830] – Ryan Anderson

So you almost have to imagine corporate offices as a place where someone can go in and spend really deep quality time with people beyond what you could do on a video call or peel off and say, I need to focus, particularly if they’re working asynchronously on something important. I need to focus on this spreadsheet for 2 hours, and I don’t want contact with any of you. And the challenges at these offices have particularly open office concepts have straddled the middle of that bell curve where they’re not really good at deep connectivity and they’re not really good at focus, and they need to evolve. And I’m kind of hoping that that accelerates, and we’re doing our best to try to make it so.

[00:20:59.220] – Nancy Goebel

And we’re certainly seeing some really powerful examples of these mixed use spaces versus the endless cube farms of old at number of member meetings that we’ve hosted over the last year or so, and certainly look forward to continuing to see how the patterns evolve. We’ve taken note of quite a few member organizations that are in the middle of reimagining not only their real estate portfolios at large, but also how the digital headquarters needs to change in light of the fact that some organizations are capping off at less than three days in the office. And so how they use the space when people do come in needs to change in line with that. And so the physical workplace and then the contents of that workplace is changing quickly. We also know the digital workplace is continuing to evolve. I have to say, when I looked at your list of focus areas for 2025, the thing that immediately struck me was that artificial intelligence didn’t have a call out. And on the one hand, that was super refreshing because it seems to be in the middle of almost every digital workplace conversation at the moment. So it was nice not to have that.

[00:22:25.420] – Nancy Goebel

But of course, I have to prompt it at the same time to say, well, why was that, Ryan, when you put that list together and where do you think it will fit into the future of.

[00:22:36.630] – Ryan Anderson

Yeah, yeah, no, good question. For me, it’s a bit of a given. I know that the focus on AI, and in particular some of the really advanced forms of AI that have become very real for all of us, is super hot right now. But if I zoom out, AI is something that has been affecting our work and our workplaces for a really long time. Yes, it’s accelerating, but if I step back and I say, okay, if we start looking at the way people work in an office environment as an example, what are the effects of AI? Well, one is that AI is really good at helping us to eliminate some of the very rote, complex procedures and processes that people don’t do well. And so the more that we can look at using AI to do more of that, the more it, in theory, should free up people to do more of what they do well, which is the more human relational side of work. The other side relates probably more to how AI can affect our buildings and our spaces, which I think is an exciting topic. I think there’s lots of opportunities, as an example for buildings to adjust to the variable demand patterns that hybrid policies create and to be better about their operational usage, their energy usage, creating safe and healthy environments.

[00:24:01.750] – Ryan Anderson

But my hope is that our customers have been thinking about this for a while and that, yes, it’s accelerating and it’s exciting and sometimes scary. But I guess in my list of things, I was more focused on those topics that I don’t think are being pursued near enough, whereas AI, I think, well, it’s probably an overstatement, but I do think that most organizations are at least thinking about it and have developed some sort of strategy for beginning to harness the power of it.

[00:24:35.420] – Nancy Goebel

And what I think you’re pointing to is the fact that AI is a given in the future of the workplace. But the call to action for organizations is to still lead with people first, while AI creates new ways of addressing some of the very points that you just talked about. So we’re throwing a lot of change at people on a number of different levels, and we still have to remember that people are people. People are social creatures. People need spaces to collaborate. People need places to think. We need to give them the performance capacity to do more forward planning and to be more innovative and creating those safe spaces through things like more inclusive workplaces and thinking about the whole individual and the well being needs. Among those other cues that you talked about really do need to take on added importance. And so we talked about 2023 as the year of hybrid, hybrid, hybrid. We’ve talked a little bit about some of the softer needs that organizations should be considering now as part of the march to AI, in a sense. And so you’ve challenged people to make 2024 count. And so what’s your thinking there, Ryan?

[00:26:04.460] – Ryan Anderson

Well, first I’ll add, if I were to add something to that list relative to AI, it would definitely be, and this won’t surprise you or any of our listeners today, it would definitely be around upskilling and allowing people who do work that might be a little bit more rote, predictable, repetitive to begin to harness a new tool set. And for me, having spent some time in the digital world myself, I think a lot of that, as weird as this sounds, has to do with being able to play most of the people that I know adopt new technologies by playing with them, and to start using a new technology on a critical project where it’s high stakes and other people are watching you is a really tough thing to ask of most people. So I think this certainly could be the year of upskilling, through experimentation and through play and through getting people comfortable with tools without necessarily having AI feel like that term is super heavy or scary or whatever. But the other things on my list, Nancy, were around a more participative approach to including employees in the design of their work and workplaces.

[00:27:21.150] – Ryan Anderson

And when we start talking inclusive design, what we’re really saying is that a lot of whatever we’re talking about the design, it could be a space, it could be a tool, it could be whatever a lot of our design process these days are based on leaders or experts suggesting what other people need. So I’ll pick on the design of offices for a moment. It’s very common in the design of an office for an architecture and interior design firm or others to go to a departmental leader and say, what do your people need? And for that leader to try to step out and say, I think this is the environment that they’re going to need. Or if I pick on IT for a little bit, it’s easy to dog food new solutions and say, I see the capabilities of this platform. I think people will want to use it. And that type of speculation, I think, is a bit dangerous today, given all of the changes in work and work process, people have taken more control over their own productivity. They’ve adopted new tools. They’ve got more freedom to use their physical work environments in ways that they see fit.

[00:28:29.800] – Ryan Anderson

And so the big theme among all those things that I said was around finding ways of including people who use these solutions in the process of either designing or managing them. One of the things that we encourage as an example for facilities and corporate real estate teams is to set up regular time with different teams, just like ongoing evergreen focus groups, to ask questions like, how are you working? What’s changed? How are the physical environments doing in terms of supporting your new processes? What are you struggling with? What parts of the space do you gravitate to and love? What parts of the space don’t feel as helpful to you as they once were? And sometimes we’ll see people try to have those conversations in a really compressed format right before they spend millions of dollars on the redo of a space. That’s not bad, but it’s way better to look at something like that in a more evergreen, continual, participative process, where it’s almost like Sas, right? It’s almost like software as a service. The product owner, in this case, the person who owns the physical environment or whomever, is just designing a model where they’ve got a steady stream of data coming from the people who use it so they can adjust things as they go, rather than something that feels so episodic and so capital intensive, which is the way that most spaces are changed today.

[00:29:57.070] – Nancy Goebel

And fundamentally, what you’re saying as we walk through this conversation is this idea of being playful at the heart. It’s about asking those innocent questions, right, that you see children ask when they come together to play. And so as we’re looking at people’s patterns of work and how they’re changing and fundamentally how the nature of work is changing. We all need to become more naturally curious. So yes, those who are designing the experiences, but even layer in artificial intelligence, and it’s all about the smart questions that you prompt the system with. And so fundamentally that ties back to what do we need to do to become lifelong learners? And that starts with asking questions on the regular.

[00:30:52.310] – Ryan Anderson

It does and for organizations, it starts with saying, I think the days of supervising work need to transition to a new era of empowering it. If this hasn’t been done before, and that happens at a management like a managerial kind of level, the need to go retrain managers for this new type of work. And we like to use or suggest the use of team level agreements and other tools like that where a manager can maybe say to their team, how are we working different now than we were four years ago? What tools are we using? What tools should be retired, what tools do you think we’ve been using more recently that we need to scale up? What kind of skills do we need? And then as it pertains to the physical environments, are we getting together in meaningful ways? Are you finding that your physical environments are supporting your most critical work activities? At a team level, a lot can change. And as I mentioned before when we were kind of talking about the health of organizations, in many cases, if we look at how organizations have evolved in the last couple of years, the individual teams are maybe fairly well connected, but the relationship between teams might not be as well established.

[00:32:01.120] – Ryan Anderson

So I also think the role of team leaders in asking the question, who should we be working more closely with? What other groups do we have relationships with? Or do we have codependencies with in terms of our work process that we just need to know a lot better, and then go hang out with them and go spend time with them and begin to tackle this in a way that bridges groups together is a really powerful thing. But in many ways, not just this year, but the future years, a lot rests on the ability to equip team leaders to work with their teams and work with their cohorts and other teams in really new ways.

[00:32:40.290] – Nancy Goebel

I think language is really important, and I’m not even sure if you’re conscious about the shift in language that you used in this very moment. We started the conversation by discussing the difference between the command and control, or the coercion model versus the empowerment model. And as you shifted from one aspect of the conversation to another, you went from describing management to leadership. I wanted to make sure I emboldened that reboot.

[00:33:19.320] – Ryan Anderson

Nice.

[00:33:19.900] – Nancy Goebel

Which is what you’ve described here.

[00:33:22.270] – Ryan Anderson

Good pickup. I wasn’t even cognizant of that subtlety, but I like that you picked up on it.

[00:33:28.530] – Nancy Goebel

What other ways do you think 2024 will feel different?

[00:33:35.270] – Ryan Anderson

Well, I guess where my mind goes is the ways that I hope it feels different, which is I hope that work starts to become fun again. I know that’s a really weird thing to say, but during the pandemic, during the toughest parts of it, quarantine and all that, it was like survival mode. And then I think in 2021 and 2022, people started to normalize, get back to the state of things. But, boy, we saw burnout levels just skyrocket in our research and in secondary research that we were looking at, we saw burnout, social isolation, kind of like this feeling of exhaustion. I’m kind of hoping that now that people are getting a little bit clearer on their patterns, they know a little bit more about how they work, with whom they work, where they work, that we can bring back the fun parts of hanging out together again. And some of the times that we spend physically together should be without meetings and without agendas. And it’s cliche to say the happy hours and the birthday parties and all that, but even just those quiet moments of bonding with people are super restorative. And I think there’s a lot of people that haven’t really experienced that, and there’s been a fear.

[00:34:56.020] – Ryan Anderson

I think that the encouragement of that is just some veiled attempt at forcing people into being in the office all day long. But I love examples where I hear teams reducing the number of scheduled meetings, finding opportunities to go hang out, to have less structured, more informal times of collaboration, mentorship. But yeah, just like hanging out, it brings a joy to work. And I hope that people can experience the joys of those relationships at work in 2024 in ways that maybe we struggled to do so for the last few years.

[00:35:33.850] – Nancy Goebel

And I just love the feel of that. I think about the fact that in my own work circumstance, I’m home probably 80% of the time. Most people would be surprised to hear that, and then traveling the rest of the time. And the fact that DWG colleagues and I don’t sit in an office day to day. When we do come together, we actually create time to spend with each other in exactly the way that you’ve described. Yes, we have our agendas, yes, we have things we want to accomplish when we come together. But at the same time, the fact that we aren’t in an office day to day, the importance of creating that glue factor, that moment of fun, and just a chance to take a breath and connect with each other is so important. And figuring out the right cadence for your team is certainly key so that it doesn’t feel artificial, as you’ve described, feels like an important call to action for this year. Any others that sprang to mind for you? Ryan?

[00:36:44.830] – Ryan Anderson

Well, I’ll just add briefly onto what you said and then maybe take it a step farther, which is we did this little study with a group of students at Calvin University here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I live, around the nature of business travel. And it was interesting because I think we found that people were trying to lean on events as ways of achieving some of that social cohesion and fun informal hanging out that you just described for DWG. And I know it’s kind of risky for managers to do this, but I think there’s a lot of value in spending the time and money to get your teams together without a super packed agenda. And this is both true at internal events, but also external events as well. If you’ve ever had that experience where you go to some sort of conference or event, you’re going to see people and you’re kind of looking at what’s going on on the stage, and sometimes it’s amazing, but other times you’re like, geez, I just wish I could go hang out with everybody for an hour. And I think that’s true of what’s happening with internal event planning as well.

[00:37:49.180] – Ryan Anderson

By the way, it was interesting, we found in that research with those students that the rate of internal travel to go see colleagues was just as high as the travel to see customers and other external folks, and that people responded far more positively to the idea of an internal event or summit than internal meetings. I think we’re meetinged out. Everybody’s had too many scheduled meetings, dominating their calendar. It’s screwed up our ability to have that social time with each other. It’s screwed up our ability to do focused work. Ironically, people, I think it’s hurt return to office rates because people are like, well, why am I going to the office if I’ve got 6 hours of video calls? Because I’m just going to sit in front of my laptop the whole time. And so, yeah, at a more tactical level, let’s back off a little bit on scheduled everything and leave room for a little unscheduled quality time together. I do think that can happen virtually. I think it’s really rich physically, doesn’t always have to be in an office environment. And let’s try to get some of that fun back into the work based on really good quality relationships.

[00:39:00.750] – Nancy Goebel

No question and of course, I honed in on when we spend weeks together as a team. But those virtual moments can be just as powerful. One of the things we do on the regular is coffee socials, and it’s just an opportunity for whoever happens to be free at a given time to just come together and chat with each other. And we happened to have one of those yesterday, and it was just refreshing to check in with people after the holiday break and our office closure and just start to set a tone for the new year. So there are lots of ways for us to support that human connection that we’ve been talking about, and also really to build on that glue factor, as I call it, in lots of different ways. And we’re only limited by our creativity and time, but making the space for that is an important part of what we all need to do as leaders, and that’s regardless of whether you have direct reports. And so, of course, it’s important for us to do a little bit of an overlay around this conversation. And I would love to hone in on your best advice with two audiences in mind, digital workplace leaders and the physical.

[00:40:30.250] – Ryan Anderson

Oh, you’ve honed in, right, on something that I’m super passionate about. Yeah, I mean, this is going to be like, probably super obvious, but my advice is to find regular time on the calendar to chat. And it can be very informal about how your organization is working differently and how you can equip them to work differently. So there was a strong emphasis to bring IT, digital communications, other technology minded folks together with their facilities, real estate and other physical workplace minded folks, pre-pandemic. And it was fruitful. And there was a lot of good things going on. The topic of prop tech as an example, which are technologies that specifically impact the physical environments, but also digital workplace strategies. I think there was a lot of benefit in just understanding each other and then asking the question, okay, how do we support people together? And then when the pandemic hit, it felt like most of the IT and comms folks that I worked with at our customers were pulled into major deployments of Slack or Zoom or whatever. And interestingly, HR people seem to jump into the physical workplace conversation in really new ways. We’d always talked about this idea of a trifecta between HR, IT and real estate having conversations about just work in general.

[00:42:01.060] – Ryan Anderson

But at a lot of our organizations that we work with today, we see HR and the physical workplace people having really rich conversations. But the digital workplace conversation and the broader IT conversation is just not there as much. And so really good time to reconnect. And I’ll give you one specific example. We worked with a bank in Omaha, great organization, that decided to redo 24 floors of a building in 2021, which was super risky because they weren’t exactly sure what was going on with return to office, et cetera. But they were really closely connected with the folks thinking about their digital tool set. And what they ended up doing was they created. They called it like a little showroom, but it was basically like a little mockup work area where people could come and work for a little bit. And they just had some of the new tools that they were deploying present with people to explain how they’re used, as well as a slightly different physical work environment that was informed by the use of those tools. That was the key. And then they got a lot of user feedback, they made some changes, and as they built out those floors, they were getting feedback from employees after each one.

[00:43:16.770] – Ryan Anderson

And they’ve had a fantastic kind of run that their office occupancy is strong. The adoption of their new tool set is strong because we don’t really use these things in isolation. Right? Like, the work is becoming digital, but we’re physical beings that are always in some sort of space. So ideally, the design of the space is informed by the patterns of use of the digital technologies. And in some ways, you could even argue that it could happen in a reciprocal way. But we don’t support work in isolation. It’s always better if we can focus on the person, understand their tools, make sure the physical environment supports their workflow with those tools. And it’s just a matter of like we described before, Nancy, people having strong enough relationships to be talking about important topics that probably just aren’t on anyone’s agenda at this point in time. We need to be more intentional about it.

[00:44:10.720] – Nancy Goebel

And so even this notion of the showroom, as you’ve described it, hearkens back to this idea of giving people room to play so that they can build confidence, they can build capability, and they can buy into the change and be part of the change.

[00:44:26.020] – Ryan Anderson

You got it. It’s that participatory, more inclusive process, simple things. You get a group that might be using Miro or Mural, okay, are you using those digital whiteboard solutions entirely asynchronously, or are you sometimes trying to look at that content together in a room? If it’s in a room, you’re going to need a big display. Like a big display because the richness of the content that goes into something like that is almost like what you might see in a real heavy Excel spreadsheet. Like you really need to be able to have the visual landscape to be able to soak it in. Or if you’ve got groups that are presenting via video a lot, you might need an environment other than some open workstation or a telephone booth that’s designed for more video presentations. I remember walking through a space in Amsterdam last year that was really, it was almost like a studio, like green screen type studio for some key customer and investor broadcast at this organization. Yeah, it just comes back to what are the tools? Does the physical environment support the use of the digital tools? So what’s the intersection of those physical and digital workplaces if you want to frame it that way, and then a lot of times the solutions are not super complicated, they’re just informed.

[00:45:42.090] – Ryan Anderson

And if you’ve got people to your point that are playing and trying it out and willing to act as your testers for some of this, then you get this group of people within the actual employee base that are there as change agents to share with their colleagues and friends. Like, yes, I tried that. This didn’t work so well, but we did this and now I’m really excited about it and that’s good for everybody.

[00:46:04.880] – Nancy Goebel

So I’m going to pause here because we’re fast approaching the end of our time together, and I’m just going to ask you one final question. What have we missed?

[00:46:16.310] – Ryan Anderson

What have we missed? I think there’s probably two things that we were talking about that I was tempted to get into, but I didn’t. So I’m going to try to edit and be somewhat brief, but I think they’re useful. We talked briefly about synchronous versus asynchronous workflows. I think we’ve seen a lot of success with organizations that are more distributed, more spread out, regardless of where people are working with, balancing the synchronous with the asynchronous. And sometimes we’ve seen organizations that are super asynchronous, say jeesh, we just can’t seem to make a key decision. You got to get people together. Okay, cool. But more often, what I think I see is people relying, as we described earlier on, way too many meetings, to try to replicate things that we were doing, maybe in person in the past. And so I do think there needs to be a more intentional look, particularly at those who are responsible for digital workplace, to say, have organizations found the balance of these features? And this gets a little complicated, but add on to it. Should the people be in the same space at certain times? Should they be colocated?

[00:47:30.580] – Ryan Anderson

Or is it okay for them to always be fully distributed in different locations and we start getting into that kind of nuance? You can get, I think, teams that are really working well, the other thing that I didn’t talk about, and forgive me, as a researcher, I can get a little bit academic, but there’s a framework from a sociologist back in the Stanford called Strong Ties/ Weak Ties, which I think is really useful. It describes the nature of our networks. Our closest relationships in our life are our strong ties. So this is family, friends, close coworkers. These are the people we rely on day to day. And strong ties are really important because it’s how we get through life. But this concept of weak ties, this refers to our extended relationships. These are the people that maybe we work at the same organization, but we don’t talk to regularly. In our personal life it could be old friends, cousins, people that we see, the barista that kind of recognizes us, but we don’t really know. Weak ties are how we feel, a sense of security and community. And so I do think for anybody who’s got digital workplace on their mind, it would be really useful to think about what does it look like to strengthen weak ties?

[00:48:42.380] – Ryan Anderson

Because each of my references previously to sometimes teams work closely together, those are the strong ties, but the teams don’t always work with each other very well. That was kind of a veiled reference to weak ties. And if you look at large organizations right now, they’re often very, very disconnected. It’s like they’re functioning as 200 small little companies. And if they try to innovate or do something different, they can do it within their team, but they can’t seem to scale effectively. I think it’s a useful reference, and it certainly is very useful when it comes to physical work environments to say, okay, we need to support individuals, sure. And we might need to support those teams, those strong ties. But what does it look like to nurture those extended relationships that have probably become fragmented? If you’ve got somebody new to the organization, how do we help them establish those weak ties? How does it really allow us to go from not just teams, but a full community? And that’s got to be a really high priority in this year and in the coming years.

[00:49:45.960] – Nancy Goebel

That’s very well said. And to cap this all off, I will say I am so appreciative of the fact that you are among our strong ties, not only for the DWG team, but for our members as a whole, and certainly calling attention to this idea of how can we bridge the weak ties and create a set of ambition that allows us to hone in on some of these key inclusive and playful and thoughtful elements, really allows us to help instigate some added layers to the 2024 agenda for digital workplace leaders at large. And so, Ryan, it’s always a pleasure to have you in the studio, and I want to thank you for making the time to chat.

[00:50:37.050] – Ryan Anderson

Well, I want to thank you for having me, and again to DWG for reshaping my thoughts. Had Paul Miller and the team not put on my radar back in 2013, what do physical workplaces need to be in an era where you can work anywhere? I don’t know that we would have been nearly as prepared for the last five years as we were. So the partnership is greatly appreciated and mutually beneficial.

[00:51:03.090] – Nancy Goebel

Thanks so much, Ryan, and I’m sure we’ll catch up again very soon. But for now, let me wish you and your team at large all the best for 2024.

[00:51:14.900] – Ryan Anderson

You too. Happy new year.

[00:51:20.690] – Nancy Goebel

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.