hey robert thanks for joining us today for this discussion on the future state of the workplace you know if as we kick this off robert i'd like to have you start and share a little bit of your background in corporate real estate and your workplace experience i've been working with you for a number of years and love to have you share some of your perspective on all that's changed in the workplace over the last few years thank you for uh for having me here today and to share a little bit about what's going on uh with me and in sort of the future work um so my background i've been in in and around corporate real estate in workplace for three decades and that's really all i've ever done is is things in and around kind of the workplace uh and so you know i've done that in a couple different ways i've done that as an end user occupier for most of that three decades but i've also been a service provider at different points working for some of the large uh real estate service companies so that kind of you know that's my sort of uh real estate workplace experience if you sort of fast forward to today what i'm doing right now is i've stepped away from the corporate arena and i'm working for myself i've started my own firm doing sort of three different things uh executive coaching some strategic advisory work where i'm working with early stage startups and then also a little bit of consulting and so that's kind of i'm taking my three decades of experience and folding that all into those three different things with a real focus on what comes next for us in in and around work and workplace that's great robert and that's you know quite a background when you think about the workplace and all the experience you've had over the years there now as we look at your new role can you tell us a little bit more about your focus now at the integra group yeah the past year my focus has been um it's it's been a lot about you know when i was with servicenow and i left servicenow in may so the last year until may it was all about laying the groundwork for servicenow's next way of working and you know we had moved sort of beyond the um crises of of the pandemic and started to do the forward thinking of what's the next workplace going to be for servicenow and that's really where i just fell in love with this idea of focusing on what comes next and then when you look at sort of may forward my entire focus has been across those sort of three buckets that i mentioned you know how do i help companies that i work with leaders that i work with really get their mindsets right and get some of their practices right around setting themselves up for the next way of working so it's it's a lot of sort of rethinking um how we're going to move into our next way of working robert as we think about work no longer being a place you know putting people at the center of the workplace experience is clearly a passion for you let's talk about that yeah it's um it really is a passion of mine and you know for the three decades i described two of those decades i focused primarily on the built environment with this sort of idea that the building was the customer and that the people that worked within the building were almost secondary you know if you built really cool spaces you know people would just come and about 10 years ago that really shifted for me to be much more about the experience that the employees were having within the workplace and i made this real transition into sort of human uh center design and really trying to get the workplace right and the experience right so that the the actual physical environment became secondary in the in the employee and the customer etc became primary and so i've carried that forward into the work that i'm doing now and i think i was frankly just well positioned um when the pandemic happened and we became very focused on employees employee experience and employee safety my brain was sort of already there on you know the whole reason we do this the whole reason we create workplaces and work environments whether that's virtual or physical is really for the employee and the employee experience you know we think about the current state of the industry and it obviously varies industry by industry right robert but how are companies actually creating adequate workplace experiences for their employees yeah we're sort of in this massive transition period there's a lot of confusion a lot of uh ambiguity and a lot of companies and employees trying to figure things out and so when you think about you know the way we sort of exited the workplace in 2020 we did it in one fail swoop there wasn't a lot of options it was you know knowledge workers at least go work from home and you know there wasn't a lot of ambiguity to that it was you know that's what we're gonna do and nobody appreciated that it was going to be for as long as it was but it was a pretty clear message now as we've started to return you know folks to the workplace and think about future of work and think about you know how do we do this in a way that's fairly orderly what we've figured out is that you know the way people want to work is very different and from where it was when we all went home you know in 2020 and people have sort of discovered um a couple things i think a couple really important myths have been broken to be quite frank with you one of them is that culture can only exist in the company office that's certainly been blown up because companies haven't fallen apart in the last you know 18 19 months and the other is that you know productivity is reserved for the company office well that's not true either we've all been very productive and thank goodness for you know sort of the digital transformation that many of us have gone through because that really held up uh the you know the companies and and the employees ability to do their work over the last 18 19 months so you know those myths have been busted there's a lot of ambiguity employee sentiment is hey we want choice and flexibility on whole that's what you're hearing companies are trying to figure out what that means because there's still a fair amount of thinking that you know culture exists in the company workplace and i it's going to be very hard for me to to have a distributed workforce even though we've all been distributed you know for the last 18 19 months so companies are trying to figure out what that means for them and how to how to make that transformation or not some of them aren't actually going to make it and they're going to sort of go back to the way things were employees sentiment has changed a bunch they're trying to figure out what's important to them they're trying to figure out you know do they want to go back do do they want to relinquish this um power of choice that they've now inherited because of the of the pandemic and because of those myths being busted and so it's really squishy period right now that folks are figuring things out what i find really interesting is that you know we're trying to in the workplace industry we're trying to figure out how to plan how to bring people back you know how to plan our real estate portfolios etc and we're still missing a really key component which is the employee behaviors we actually don't know how employees are going to behave how they're going to come back are they going to come back we're sort of missing a lot of that and we probably won't really know what that looks like i would bet for the better part of about the next six months we won't really have a strong sense of what those behaviors are going to be so that we can really start our planning efforts so with all this ambiguity robert you know what is the future of the workplace then yeah i believe and i i've said this really since about april of 2020 that you know that the power of choice and flexibility is now in the hands of the employees and that's around where they work and i think you can even look at that as being extended to when they work and i think the future of workplace and i don't think it's the future i think it's actually the next workplace that we're starting to move into is really uh going to be one that's that's built on that choice and flexibility uh at the uh of the employees and and that's really limited to knowledge workers but over time that will probably extend into the broader workforce as well so you know that idea of choice and flexibility really sort of changes the way we've worked for decades you know now that choice and flexibility where i do my work the choice and flexibility of to to a great extent when i do my work which modes i do my work you know that's going to be a lot more fluid in that choice and flexibility the power of that decision making rests with the employees and employers are going to have to come along with that and and then that changes a bit that sort of the contract if you will i don't mean in the literal terms but sort of figuratively between the employee and the employer and it's gonna it's gonna really sort of change the way we think about work and workplace the way we think about digital tools the way we think about culture the way we think about collaboration those are things that are going to shift and transition while we sort of watch employees take control of this choice and flexibility that they have so robert when we think about the employee experience being the number one priority of companies right now you know what would you tell a company who doesn't have this as their top of mind right now you know why does this matter to a company at this exact moment well i think there's a very simple idea behind that which is you know we've we've talked about this um this term is such an aggressive term but the war for talent and you know it's it's been the case for the last several years that that talent is scarce for many of these firms and so there's already that perspective that the the talent being scarce there's a bit of power buying power if you will in the hands of of the employee right so that's already there now you take these shifting winds of you know employees who want to have choice and flexibility around their where if companies don't sort of embrace that employees will will vote with their feet we're seeing that i think the the great reshuffle the great resignation whatever you want to call it is a real thing there's certainly data that would support that that's happening and that's going to be employees that are voting with their feet and at the end of the day what what these companies never want to have happen is a disengaged workforce and that disengagement is going to come if if the employees aren't met with the things that they need and want in their lives and choice flexibility is certainly one of those things so you know i i think that the big uh aha moment for a lot of companies is going to come when they start to see uh if they don't embrace kind of this next way of working when they start to see their attrition numbers go crazy or their engagement numbers start to drop all of a sudden companies will be chasing uh falling all over themselves to try to fix that so robert how exactly can employers actually create this option for their employees for flexibility and choice with how they do their jobs and how they work yeah you know a lot of it is going to be based on how they enable the work that the employees do and when you know we were very fortunate that the pandemic hit at a point in time when many of our digital workflows and technologies and virtual tools were already in place because i actually can't imagine if the pandemic happened 10 years ago what what that would have been like because our ability to work in a distributed fashion then versus now is so different and so you know we were we were fortunate that we had a lot of enablement already in place so in order to continue that and to continue forward on creating these great experiences it's going to be a lot about how do you enable the employee to do their work with this really you know strong infrastructure of uh digital tools and collaboration tools and ways to do async and synchronous communication and collaboration so a lot of that i think is there's a technology layer that's incredibly important i think there's also a really important layer that doesn't get talked about enough but it's it's starting to show up which is how do leaders lead when their employees are distributed and how do managers manage when their employees are distributed and there's a whole i think a whole um sort of body of knowledge that's going to come out of you know the of that experience that we're having of leading and managing people in a distributed environment in a way that doesn't try to replicate when we were in the office together because that was a different way of managing and leading it's a way of really embracing this idea that that folks are distributed we really need to keep them engaged we need to keep them enabled we need to figure out different ways to do performance management and different ways to do learning and development and we have to keep you know at the end of the day if this is all about employees we have to keep them feeling included so this inclusivity piece is going to be really important we want to make sure they feel like they belong so that's going to be really important and we want to make sure that we've got diversity in the all the other pieces that sort of fit into that inclusivity and belonging while we're in this new distributed way of working and that's going to be a challenge you know there's no doubt that that's going to be hard for companies but they have to focus on it they have to have intention and they have to build all that on top of a very strong technical infrastructure that supports all that so robert i'm curious you know i follow you on linkedin and i see you talk about this concept of the five generations in the workplace you know can you explain a little bit to me on how this flexible choice or flexible operating model for the workplace you really can meet the needs and the of of the these different generations in the workplace yeah and i think that's even a stronger argument frankly for choice and flexibility because you can't create a workplace that's geared towards one or two generations and and i know we've talked you know a lot you know of late of millennials and and you know i think it's you know the more choice and flexibility frankly that companies embrace in the way um they do their work and they'll enable their employees to do their work the greater we can span those five generations because every one of them are going to want to work a little bit differently they all got different things they need to learn in order to transition into this next way of working but but that choice and flexibility really broadens that spectrum on on how those five generations can work together and and then back to the leadership and management you know how you manage and lead it's that frankly you know you're going to have that same challenge if you will if we're all in the workplace or not where you have those multiple generations and so you just you're already having to focus on that with intention now you've just got to focus on it understanding that it's it's distributed and you know the way you might bring um folks into that might be a little bit different based on where they are sort of in their learning curve with technology and digital tools and comfort with those tools but we you would have to deal with that anyway if we were all in the workplace right so it's that five generational challenge isn't new we've just sort of laid it on its side now because we've distributed the work in the workplace robert to that point i think it's also important for people to understand that you know you are truly pro-flexible choice of the workplace right and you know you seem to steer away from sort of the verbiage of hybrid work or all the buzzwords that are out there hybrid worker you know why is that i so i think our current language i struggle with all of it to be quite honest i don't think i'm not remote first or remote centric i don't think that's the the right approach [Music] i worry about the way some of the hybrid methodologies are being interpreted i'm all about choice and flexibility and that actually means that if an employee wants to work in the office five days a week that's okay it's their choice and so i think we have to get away from prescribing a way of working and instead enable multimodal ways of working i i like this idea of sort of omni work if you think of omni channel in the retail sector right it's it's sort of this all things always doesn't matter we just sort of figure that out i actually prefer um sort of that line of thinking versus remote first or hybrid i like the idea that choice and flexibility gives the employee the choice and flexibility to work you know where they work best and that means the company really should try to avoid prescribing and oddly enough i think the more you prescribe the more employees will do the opposite of what you prescribe and so i think the more choice and flexibility companies give the more the behaviors will start to show up naturally and people will probably migrate back to the company office for those moments that matter or things that are important when people are together and so the less you prescribe it and the more natural you let that happen i think i think it will actually happen that way where people do come together for those moments that matter and then they they go do their headstone work elsewhere so i that's why i think we have to be really careful in some of the prescriptions that are out there and then some of the definitions and frankly hybrid is one that worries the heck out of me just because people are using it to define way too many ways of working so you know there's a there's this idea that a hybrid that's embedded with choice and flexibility means yeah i can wake up today and decide where i do my work there's other versions of it that are very extremely prescriptive that say yeah you can you can work wherever you want but you have to be in the office on monday wednesday friday and so that's a prescription that i think doesn't really create choice and flexibility for folks because they're not actually given the choice and the flexibility to integrate their personal lives into into a schedule that works for them and so i just i'm much more of let's definitely want to have some guard rails right we don't want this to be the wild wild west but at the same time too prescriptive i think will backfire robert choice and flexibility for sure is continuing to be a theme but when we think about another theme you bring up around work is not a place can you share what do you mean by this yeah i think it's it's interesting i was having that um discussion over the weekend with a colleague and this this free for decades really you can you can date it back for probably a hundred years work and place were the same thing because in order to do your work you had to go to a place and you know even as late as 15 years ago we were tethered to a desk you know or we didn't necessarily have a prevalence of laptops uh you know we still had a lot of folks that were physically tethered to their to their you know workstations in telephones and so you know that idea that work in place we're kind of the same thing it's very true because we had no choice really but to go to a place to do our work that got conflated it's been kind of conflated for decades and decades and decades now we've been able to sort of decouple work from place and frankly the digital transformation has really allowed that to happen when you think about digital workflows you think about uh zoom and teams and all these other collaboration tools slack is certainly a big part of that we've been able to sort of say you can do your work away from a place it doesn't it really you're not tethered to that place anymore now there are many jobs that do have a tethering effect and those have to be you know thought about in this next way working as well but the vast majority of knowledge work would suggest that you can sort of separate the work from place that means that when you come to the place the the work that you're doing there may have it's a non-tethered type of work and so i think it's just really important to keep in mind that we've sort of decoupled work from place and as we go forward there's it's unlikely that those things will become coupled again um in fact they'll probably be continued to be decoupled and you'll probably see that decoupling happen you know more and more across the the work force even as you think past knowledge workers and so um it it really isn't a place anymore and arguably it hasn't been one for a while the pandemic just really sort of forced that decoupling to be very obvious for everybody so robert you've mentioned some technologies you talked a little about slack microsoft teams you know collaboration tools that really help empower employees to do their very best work right now as we think about transitioning to technology solutions like an integrated workplace management system or iwms you know how do you think this can empower employees to do their best work right now i think it's you know when you think of the employee experience and you look at some of these strategic platforms servicenow is one i think there's you know there's others that you can think about in the enterprise those really work to enable the employee because they have the potential to stretch across the enterprise and kind of touch every part of the employee journey and it really has no bearing on whether they're in the company workplace or not that's just the digital platform that they leverage and so iwms in the legacy sense probably doesn't fit into this equation um very well iwms in the in the more modern sense and the way iwms is being built on top of some of these strategic platforms and i really think about that as being workplace service management or some other terms that aren't really iwms ish if you will that it's kind of the the modern version of that but the idea is that it's being built on top of a strategic platform that services the employees across their entire sort of journey and and what i love about thinking that way is that it's no longer about the functional differentiation between hr and i.t or workplace it's that you know you can create these apps that service the employees that sit on these platforms and the employee doesn't care which function is servicing them it just they just need the service that's getting delivered and uh now when you start to distribute people and they're no longer in the company workplace that becomes even more important because if i'm working from home and i need help whatever that is i don't want to go figure out which you know point solution i need to go figure out i want to go to the company's you know portal or whatever it is and go ask that question you know hey i've got this issue and let the platform start to help me figure it out whether rather than me having to figure out where i have to go and so iwms in the in the legacy sense i don't honestly think helps us much i think you have to fast forward to today and really think about iwms in the in the current setting being built on some of these strategic platforms so robert i'm curious you know how did your teams collaborate you know in the past you know and if we think about how should workplace leaders really set the stage for collaboration in the future yeah i think you know what we spend a lot of time doing uh is leveraging all the the you know virtual collaboration tools that you can think of so we were i with my team uh zoom and video was was the way we we communicated and collaborated uh visually and we would use tools in the background like miro and and some others to really help try to um allow us to collaborate as as we would if we were all together and we you know we spent a lot of the first several months sort of trying to replicate the way we worked together in person in a virtual setting and then over time you sort of we sort of moved away from that replication and some new patterns and behaviors and and sort tools emerged we were a heavy slack user and you know i think that there's a lot of power and the ability to use slack or whether it be slack or teams you know the idea is that you've got this place that you can go collaborate with with folks and you know so those are some of the tools that we use but quite honestly it was the biggest shift i think was the behavioral shift video on most of the time and we would start every meeting honestly whether it was me one on one or me one on 150 spending a little time just checking in how are people doing you know what's going on and recognizing that not everybody was in the same you know space health-wise mental health-wise physically and sort of just using these tools as a way to check in and have conversations where you know honestly before we wouldn't take that time to sort of do those check-ins and we sometimes we would spend a good 15 minutes just having those conversations before we got down to the business at hand and the the tools the collaboration tools really helped enable that because it leveled the playing field for everybody we were all in on the conversation it didn't matter if you were you know physically in the room which obviously wasn't happening or whether you were you know the furthest distance away you know zoom really allowed us to to be together and have those conversations and then the digital just sort of helped enable all of that and uh and then you think of you know how our work moved around well obviously digital workflows was very critical in that and then using you know different tools to um you know at servicenow we obviously have uh the the whole emergency um app suite that we had obviously working with novolo we had our digital all of our spatial information together so it allowed us to really leverage the tools that we already had in new ways and figure out kind of different ways to use them than than we might have done you know when we were all physically together in the same place so robert in terms of the clients that you have today and the ones that you're working with if i'm a workplace leader an audience member viewing this video you know what are the main things that i should really be focusing on within the next six months you know to ensure that i am not missing the mark yeah i think it's starting with it's all about the employee and so in any any process you build any tool you implement any policy you're building you have to build it from the employee out not the company in and i know that's backwards for many companies but that's really going to be the need needs to be the focus and the intentionality behind start with the employee and work outward and uh and i think that's going to really serve employers in enterprise as well if they they do that this idea that the sentiment has shifted and employees i believe do own the power of choice and flexibility in in where they work employers have to over the next you know six seven eight months really appreciate that understand that and try not to take that back because i think if they try to take it back uh employees won't give it up willingly and so it'll just create a lot of tension that doesn't necessarily need to be there i would also say none of this is about real estate to be quite honest all of it is about allowing the behaviors of the employees to start to show up before we make any massive decisions in other words leave a lot of room for experimentation leave a lot of room for things to change more pivots to happen you know we've been serving employees for the last 18 19 months in in hearing what they want where they are are they healthy safe etc and then what do they want in the future of work we're asking them all those questions without them actually having gone back into the workplace or to have a lot of context yet or the context they do have is the 2000 you know early 2020 late 2019 experience and so until the employees start to return to the workplace figure out what really works for them and establish kind of their own behavioral trends i would definitely encourage employers to stay pretty loose um and then you know as the some of those norms and behaviors start to show up and the data starts to demonstrate what those behaviors are then start to make you know the more structural decisions around real estate portfolios and things like that but i would not rush i would not encourage anybody to rush into that to massive change at this point until until we know how the employees are going to behave [Music]