Business
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. **** 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. *** 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.