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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. **** 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.