Data & Community Building

Ryan Anderson leads the Global Research & Insights team at MillerKnoll. MillerKnoll is the new collective of modern design brands that includes Herman Miller, Knoll, Hay, and a host of other brands. MillerKnoll is known for using modern design to create great spaces for people to work in and live in, and it is the job of the research team to determine how to make those spaces as effective as possible. The goal is to provide a higher quality of life for everyone.

"We work with the knowledge that no matter where a person is, that the space they inhabit is affecting their life activities. We deeply consider what it takes for these spaces to support working, but also socializing, learning, growing, contemplating, healing, and playing. Our spaces can hinder or enable these activities to occur," said Anderson

 

The desktop era cast a long shadow, which took a pandemic to escape

The world is experiencing a 15-year acceleration to catch up to where offices should have been, and the industry is trying to anticipate what is coming next. The challenge is to escape the long shadow cast by the desktop computing revolution. Organizations are struggling to come to terms with the fact that work is mobile, untethered and distributed. Workers were, in theory, freed to work anywhere many years ago. Spaces are now on-demand.

There is a fundamental interaction between technology and society where "we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us."[1] The desktop revolution is a classic example, and it transformed the way people work. The desktop revolution hijacked office design for 20-30 years and cemented many assumptions about how office workers should work among many employers and workers to everyone's detriment.

In earlier design eras – the emergence of Bürolandschaft (Literally, “Office Landscape” in the 1950s) and of Herman Miller’s Action Office (1960s) – "they offered a very dynamic model that assumed that people were doing a wide array of activities in a variety of spaces – and then desktop computing sidelined that for a good 30 years," said Anderson. No one in the 1980s realized that [digital computing] would come to dominate work lives and design assumptions. These design assumptions include that:

• all work needs to be done in the office

• individual work needs to be done at a workstation

• individual workstations should be assigned to the user of the technology

• collaborative activities happen in designated meeting spaces

• a manager should supervise workers onsite

• presenteeism was a means of measuring a person's productivity.

Desktop computing fixed people to their desks and workstations through the 1980s and 1990s, and then mobility emerged in the 2000s through the introduction of Wi-Fi, cloud computing, smartphones, etc.

"Distributed working – the spreading out of work – has been emerging for the last 15 years, which is why we saw decreasing utilization rates for desks for ten consecutive years, leading into the pandemic," said Anderson. "I just don't think most organizations ever sat down and said, what does it look like for us to support distributed working? I'm not even sure that term would have been or is now on the tips of people's tongues. Instead, organizations saw things in very binary terms. We've got remote employees, and we've got office employees. I think the world is still having a tough time shaking that binary worldview."

Due to the changes wrought by the pandemic, FMs should ask themselves how can they design for distributed working; how will the assumptions behind these designs shape organizational cultures, reinforce working patterns, and affect working conditions for all?

 

 

In distributed ways of working the office becomes a resource

As organizations consider hybrid strategies to better support distributed working, offices are on-demand and become almost benefits or amenities that should foster productivity and better community experiences. This acceptance is causing many organizations to reassess and ask themselves: “Why do we have [offices]? What’s the return on these investments?”

This reassessment process will have several implications and cause a reckoning for those who work in the facilities and corporate real estate worlds. For far too long, “it was viewed as a given that workers need a certain amount of space, creating a level of predictability.” Pre-COVID-19, this predictability had benefits for those involved in the creation of office spaces. “It was beneficial financially because you were fairly certain that an organization might invest in space, despite not knowing what value they got out of those investments,” he said.

Organizations are reexamining their spaces, including how they are used and function, with CEOs now asking: “What is the value of our physical environments? How do they help? How do these spaces complement or, in some cases, compete with other places where people work?”

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s a path towards better delivery of value, a better understanding of the return on these sorts of investments, but organizations are trying to fit 10 to 15 years of conversation into the last year or two,” Anderson said.

To accelerate their learning, Anderson said the Global Research & Insights team at MillerKnoll has focused on:

1. Reviewing historical insights from organizations that have supported distributed work

2. Identifying best practices that can be applied more broadly in the future

3. Developing new research insights via Future Forum, a research consortium that includes Slack, MillerKnoll, Boston Consulting Group and Management Leadership for Tomorrow

4. Studying early learnings from organizations who have evolved their workplace strategies

They use the insights derived from this process to inspire organizations with new uses for their spaces in the future.

Workplace experience is the subset of employee experience as HR takes the lead

IFMA’s Expert Assessment (October 2020) predicted that human resources should set organizations’ workplace strategies with the intimate support from other functions like facility management. Anderson said he and his team are seeing the trend of the influx of human resources as a function into the workplace conversation.

“(This trend) is one that I am thrilled about and one that is long overdue,” he said.

The switch to hybrid work strategies has a host of HR implications. HR leaders have entered the conversation and are asking new questions that are shaping the workplace debate now and well into the future.

"What I love is that they're asking very human-centric questions. They are seeing workplace experience as a subset of employee experience, and I wouldn't be surprised if increasingly FM teams found themselves reporting into HR or partnering closely with them,” he said.

Other vital conversations involve how knowledge workers can work effectively as distributed teams and the role that the office plays in supporting them. “These topics have been democratized and are discussed in webinars and across the dinner table among people who would not have thought about these issues in the past,” said Anderson. “People are becoming more enlightened about the control they have over their productivity, leading to more autonomy. People are now thinking: "What does it take for me to be more effective?"

These transformations will change the employee and employer relationship.

“Organizations will realize that hybrid working strategies are not a one-way street or concession where they're simply granting employees a lot more flexibility. Employees will also need to become more accountable for hitting their goals, taking charge of their productivity, and communicating across time and distance," Anderson said. “An exciting balance will emerge in the coming years where organizations realize a win-win for delivering employees more autonomy and achieving better organizational outcomes. Offices will play a critical role in supporting this, but differently than they once did. It's going to be a significant transition that we'll probably still be talking about 3 to 5 years from now.”

Placemaking & maintenance will change the boundaries between designers & FMs, leading to a focus on end-user data

The ongoing emergence of placemaking – mainly through initiatives like Baukultur and the New European Bauhaus movement – requires a reconsideration of place maintenance and FM. In placemaking, designs are put together and handed over to FMs but often without thinking about the service component.

With the emergence of placemaking and a focus on employee and workplace experience, the service component will become more important and change the relationships between designers and FMs.

“Really understanding the nature of community, what it takes to build community, and how our physical environments have historically shaped communities are probably the most important conversations that people involved in facilities management should be having. Of the many value propositions that office space can offer, the ability to strengthen and bring together the workforce as a community is probably the single most important one,” said Anderson.

Over the next several years, there should be a reevaluation of how projects and FM are done. He said The Office: A Facility Based on Change, a book by Robert Propst, head of Herman Miller’s research team in the 1960s predicted today’s transforming climate.

"His idea was that facilities need to change and adapt based upon the dynamics of how people and work are changing. I do not know that we have yet achieved this as in most organizations, the facility remains quite static. People have to change their work processes around the physical environment."

Designers and FMs should be inspired by how software as service (SaaS) companies focus on their customers. Traditionally, designers and FMs acted like product managers, and they looked at how the product grew: it was not particularly active in understanding end-user needs daily. Emerging SaaS companies' models show the importance of a deep, data-driven understanding of end-users.

“If you look at business models from SaaS companies, the key to these models is that the people who lead the product are deeply involved in data that helps them understand how the users are doing. That's where facilities management has to go,” Anderson said.

This will change FM because the profession will not only manage the space in terms of its operational efficiency, but will manage its effectiveness over time as well.

"It's about monitoring the work and communicating with the people there and understanding what’s changing,” he said. “How are their work and their team dynamics changing? What's the nature of the projects they are doing? And what does it look like for these spaces to evolve in a much more rapid way to bridge the clock speeds between the building architecture and the actual work being done."

This transformation requires overcoming barriers in accounting, feedback mechanisms & data analytics

Anderson envisions offices where organizations would see fewer of the big projects every seven years replaced with budgeting and management processes that enable ongoing intelligent tweaks.

"After five to six years, the facility would look and feel very different because that's what the work required. I think management will be an ongoing evolution of what that design looks like at a micro-scale based upon the demand patterns that we see among the users,” he said. To achieve this vision, barriers to capital budgeting processes, feedback mechanisms, and workplace data analytics capabilities must be overcome.

Capital budgeting requirements are a barrier to an evolutionary approach to workplace management. With some 55 percent of corporate real estate leaders reporting to the CFO, a change of internal stakeholders or reporting lines could change how to assess workplace budgets.

“If we start to see HR and other functions strongly influence the workplace function, I could see a move towards an annual expense budgeting for the evolution of space and services,” said Anderson.

Feedback mechanisms are lacking. “We lack a feedback mechanism for facility managers and workplace strategists to understand how the workplace is doing, whether or not its effectiveness has improved or decreased in the last nine months. We need something consistent and longitudinal.”

The lack of an actionable feedback mechanism links to a challenge that Anderson sees – the struggle with workplace data analytics and identifying the right data to make sense of the workplace experience in an actionable way. While the amount of data that is available is expanding exponentially, FMs face a problem similar to what marketing departments met over the last several years.

“If we go to the marketing world, there was a period where there was this explosion of data analytics for marketers to try to understand how they were doing. It was too much – until you had the emergence of data like Net Promoter Scores (NPS), which boil down a complex array of marketing data to something simpler that organizations could track over time. We need something similar for organizations to track how spaces serve specific user groups,” Anderson said.

FMs need common standards and the ability to normalize data to enable them to ask meaningful questions and make changes. According to Anderson, “there isn't even a shared industry definition of what ‘space utilization means. If you look at utilization data and ask, ‘how is it calculated?’, it can be wildly different. Everyone should know that.”

Space utilization data has become strategically crucial because, unlike just two years ago, most offices will not function as places where managers can expect people to be from 9-to-5, Monday through Friday. With greater detail about what sort of spaces are they using, FMs can ask better questions: “Where are people gravitating? What spaces are they spending more time in – at their desks or in community areas? Are they using project spaces? Knowing what types of spaces are used helps us to get a clearer sense of the actual work being supported” he said.

With this baseline dataset, FMs can have meaningful conversations with members of teams about the spaces they use and need. In these conversations, Anderson cautions that how often employees use an area does not always correlate to importance

“There may be that space for one-on-one conversations between an employee and a manager that only gets utilized 10 to 15 percent of a week, but if you tried to take it away, people would be distraught if they didn't have access to a space like that,” he said. “The amount of time an office or space is used is only one facet of its value.”

Without having access to good baseline data, it is difficult to imagine a more evolutionary approach to workplace management at scale. It will be hard to see how FMs could holistically identify if there is a return on investments of specific physical work settings. Are spaces contributing to increased well-being and a sense of community? “As an advocate for facility managers, I do not want to see us focus solely on the efficiency side of the equation,” said Anderson.

 

 

 

 

FM's future direction

The FM industry faces several challenges, and Anderson is concerned about their effects on the industry. He joined IFMA’s Research Advisory Committee because he believes it is beneficial to begin creating alignment on the major goals for future facilities.

“If it were me as a director of facilities or corporate real estate, I would begin by identifying key goals for our facilities and resourcing my team members based on those goals,” he said “There should be a member (or members) of each facilities team that has deep expertise in, for example, sustainability, including issues like embodied carbon and indoor air quality. The same should occur for understanding user needs so that the FM team can uncover and meet those needs. This type of forward-thinking organization could help facilities be less reactionary and more proactive in achieving organizations' long-term goals business goals. This way of thinking can enable facilities management professionals to lead with a visionary voice of ‘This is how we're going to create spaces that enable our organization to be successful.”

The proactiveness of FM is not only a challenge that the industry is facing, but it is one that many organizations are facing.

“You should be able to look at the organizational chart and follow the goals right through it. What are the three to five priorities that the company is trying to accomplish? How is each department responsible for contributing to these goals? What does each person need to do to contribute to that goal? Facilities management is in that mix.”

FMs should consider what the organization is looking for from its facilities and how this impacts the organization’s talent goals.

These transformations – especially the focus on using facilities to build community – will require FM to become more informed by other fields like the social sciences.

“At MillerKnoll, we look to the social sciences like sociology, environmental psychology, and organizational psychology to help understand the power of our workspaces. Urban planning also influences our thinking. We can learn a lot from how organizations outside the world of work –schools, clubs, or hobbyists – self-organize and use space to innovate and create a community in new ways,” Anderson said.

MillerKnoll’s research team focuses on understanding how space influences interpersonal ties – especially weak ties as they are more instrumental than strong ties in new ideas and information. Herman Miller highlighted this topic in an episode of its Looking Forward podcast about on the future of work. The concept of interpersonal ties suggests that people close to us constitute our strong ties – our family and friends in private lives and our team members at work. We interact with them a lot throughout the week. Weak ties are our extended networks, and these are the friends or colleagues that you do not get a chance to talk to all the time, and you do not necessarily have a reason to have a Zoom call with them over the week.

Anderson said, weak ties are critical to a sense of community, innovation and belonging.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have struggled to create common cultures and innovate across teams as organizations have become siloed. It is as if each organization is behaving as many smaller organizations within it due to strengthening strong ties within teams at the cost of weak ties among teams.

While workers in teams have closer relationships with their nearest colleagues, they have also become detached from other parts of the organization. According to Anderson, “This challenge creates an opportunity for designers and FMs. This is where the physical environment can bring an organization’s disparate groups together by giving them the chance to experience each other's work and bump into each other. The physical environment allows colleagues to speak with one another and say, ‘Oh, you are working on that challenge? That relates to something I did 18 months ago. Or did you know that Sue is working on something similar? You should talk with her.’”

Working purposefully with serendipity and strengthening weak ties are probably the most challenging aspects for those managing a distributed workforce. This is what corporate office spaces must do effectively in the future. “I see very few spaces that I look at and say, ‘that is a space designed to help strengthen community.’ I most often see rows of open workstations and generic conference rooms that support a very limited range of activities and that were designed with the assumptions of the desktop computing era,” said Anderson “We need to design and maintain places to foster and strengthen community with the understanding that offices can be highly valuable in a work-from-anywhere world if they support experiences employees cannot find at home.”