Looking Forward: Conversations about the Future of Work

Welcome to Season 3 of our Looking Forward podcast. To kick off this season, your host—and our VP of Global Research and Insights—Ryan Anderson offers his thoughts on the state of the workplace today. Get his take on the variables affecting the future of work around the world, how the workplace can better support flexibility (hint: it's not just through hybrid policies), and why organizations need to do more to address employee wellbeing. We hope you're looking forward to going even deeper into these themes throughout the season.  For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

We've come to the end of another season of Looking Forward, but there's still time to look back in our season wrap-up. Host Ryan Anderson puts a bow on Season 2 by sharing new data that challenges listeners to shift their focus from returning to the office, and toward a reimagining of the office for this new era of work.   

As our Digital Marketing Strategy Lead at MillerKnoll, Chris Coleman has been helping Ryan Anderson answer questions from customers wondering whether they should start hosting meetings or other work functions in the metaverse. These questions get asked so often that Ryan invited Chris to join him on the podcast to share a digestible explainer of all things metaverse—or, as Chris prefers to refer to it, Web3. If you've ever found yourself lost in conversations about blockchains, NFTs, virtual reality, and the like, Chris breaks it all down and explains what it means to the future of business and our lives. For more insight into the future of life and business, check out our POV on the future of work: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

This week, we welcome Corinne Murray, founder of Agate Studio. As a leading workplace strategist, Corinne helps organizations think differently about how they approach the creation, management, and evolution of their places of work. In an enlightening conversation, Ryan and Corinne explore the nuanced world of the future of work, touching on several approaches employers can use to evaluate both the built and social work environments to improve employee experience. For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Disruption has been the theme of Ronen Journo's 28-year career, so his perspective on this period of rampant experimentation in corporate real estate is particularly prescient. Ronen is Senior Managing Director and European Head of Management Services & Operations at Hines, a privately owned real estate investment, development, and management firm. In this episode, he and Ryan discuss how the pandemic provided an accelerant for challenges that had been on a slow burn for decades, and the need for corporate real estate professionals to focus on the experiences of the people who use the built environment in order to fully realize its value. For more ways to keep people at the heart of the built environment, check out our POV on the future of work: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Inclusive design is a topic not nearly enough people are talking about. This week's guests are working to fix that. Jolene De Jong is an Applied Insights + Design Specialist at MillerKnoll and Joseph White is the company's Director of Design Strategy. They recently collaborated on a white paper for the peer-reviewed CRE Journal. In it—and in this episode—they unpack the need for architects and designers to move beyond accommodation of unique needs and toward a more widespread adoption of the notion that spaces that follow inclusive design principles simply work better for everyone. Inclusive design is also a key part of MillerKnoll's POV on the future of work, which you can read here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Host Ryan Anderson could not wait to share this episode with you. Our guest, Cali Williams Yost, has spent her career helping organizations reimagine not just where, but also how and when their people work to improve performance and well-being. With a mix of infectious enthusiasm and the truth-bomb directness of someone who has been advocating for these shifts for 27 years, Cali makes a strong business case for embracing flexible work and remaking the office into an intentional enabler of a more flexible operating model. For more ways to help your organization with these shifts, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

On this week's episode, we chat with Craig Robinson, Chief Growth Officer at flexible workplace provider, Industrious. With more than 20 years of experience in the commercial real estate business, Craig helps organizations to be more innovative in their approach to real estate by expanding their concept of "workplace" and providing greater employee choice while managing costs and risk. Join host Ryan Anderson and Craig as they discuss ways to support optionality, flexibility, and environments that promote belonging and purpose. For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Our guest this week is on a mission to convince organizations everywhere to take the double disruption of COVID plus inflation as an opportunity to change for the better. Debbie Lovich is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group. She brings her sharp wit and analytical mind to this conversation about the need for leaders to model flexibility, how our reasons for being in the office today have increased demand for shared space, and what the future of work looks like for the 70 percent of the global workforce in manufacturing, retail, and other industries where employees can't work from home. You'll find Debbie's article on that topic here, and you can find MillerKnoll's POV on the future of work here.

Season 2 rolls on with a visit from Samantha Fisher, Head of Dynamic Work at Okta, an identity and access management company that's actually expanding its number of offices even though it does not require its 5,000-plus employees to come into the office. In an insightful conversation with host Ryan Anderson, Sam breaks down the implications of enforcing a standard eight-hour workday and shares how a dynamic work schedule and environment encourages productivity, equity, and empowerment. For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Host Ryan Anderson welcomes Phil Kirschner of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. A self-proclaimed “accidental workplace strategist,” Phil fell into managing workplace strategy transformation efforts at Credit Suisse more than a decade ago and never looked back. As a result, his openness to supporting new ways of working fuels this fast-paced exploration of the need for executive-level change management, for widening our perception of what “hybrid” means, for using AI to identify moments that matter in the physical workplace, and more. For a deep dive into MillerKnoll's point of view on the future of work content, visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/.

Kristin Leimgruber, Ph.D., joins us to kick off the season. Kristi is a behavioral researcher at BetterUp, the virtual coaching and mentorship platform whose science-based approach helps people thrive in the workplace. She and host Ryan Anderson link the rise in workplace burnout with the decline of our sense of social connection at work—an unintended consequence of remote work. It's an important and timely conversation—and ultimately, an optimistic one, as Kristi and Ryan explore strategies for identifying burnout and strengthening social connections across organizations. Read the Connection Crisis Insight report from BetterUp here https://grow.betterup.com/resources/build-a-culture-of-connection-report. Visit https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/designing-better-tomorrow-millerknoll/ for more content geared to help organizations thrive in the future of work.

Host Ryan Anderson takes time to share some highlights from Season 1 and set the stage for Season 2 by answering the two most frequently asked questions he gets asked once people find out what he does for a living: What is the current state of return-to-office? And what does it mean for the future of the workplace? 

For the final episode of Season 1 of Looking Forward, we welcome john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. After a thoughtful discussion of belonging in general terms, john and host Ryan Anderson pivot to focus on what organizations can do to foster belonging in the workplace. From the impact that belonging has on employee retention to the long-term effects more flexible work arrangements will (or won't) have on workplace culture, it's a fascinating exploration of this fundamental human need. And we hope you're already looking forward to Season 2, which will launch in 2022. In the meantime, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork for more insights into the future of work.

Our guest this week on the Looking Forward podcast is Andreas Hoffbauer, Ph.D., a sociologist by trade and the founder and director of the organizational and behavioral design studio Atelier Kultur. In a heady conversation with host Ryan Anderson, he explains how our organizational networks have been weakened throughout the pandemic—and how prototyping spatial interventions can help strengthen them. For more content about the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.

This week on the podcast, we offer a glimpse behind the scenes of our recently renovated Design Yard facility in West Michigan. Home to several teams that have embraced hybrid working, our transformed Design Yard provides choice and bolsters engagement. Matt Stares, Senior Vice President of Global Real Estate, Architecture and Development here at Herman Miller, and Gretta Peterson, our Senior Manager of Global Workplace Strategy and Development, join Ryan Anderson for this enlightening conversation. For more content about the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.

Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes, Founder/Lead Architect of AKKA Architects in Amsterdam, is the type of guest we could talk with for hours—but you'll have to make do with 37 minutes on this week's podcast. She joins host Ryan Anderson to discuss how organizations can design spaces in a more participative manner and create environments that are ready for the future of work—a future in which workplaces actually support the diverse needs of the people who use them. Their conversation is a master class in people-centered design for a post-pandemic world. For more content about the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.

Our guest this week is Steve Todd, AVP, Global Head of Workplace at Nasdaq, and creator of Open Sourced Workplace—a resource for real estate and workplace information. Steve joins host Ryan Anderson to share how he's been able to move Nasdaq beyond a spreadsheet-driven understanding workplace ROI and toward a more user-centered approach—including some of the factors he's identified that influence productivity. If you like what you hear, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork for more content. 

This week, Ryan welcomes Andrea Chegut, Ph.D., Director of the Real Estate Innovation Lab at MIT. A data scientist first and foremost, Andrea's work involves listening to data and leveraging what she learns to help designers and business leaders align the built environment with the needs of people. In a fascinating conversation, she and Ryan cover the four biggest struggles corporate real estate needs to address and touch on how the pandemic has surfaced connections between physical space and health and well-being like never before. For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.

This week, host Ryan Anderson welcomes one of the most experienced and insightful leaders in the workplace strategy space: Adrienne Rowe, Head of Workplace Strategy at Raytheon Technologies. Their conversation starts with the current state of workplace strategy as an evolving field of practice, and springboards into a range of topics, from activity-based working to the challenge of balancing flexibility with providing an equitable experience for all employees. For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork. 

This week, Ryan tackles remote work with one of the world's foremost experts on the topic, Darren Murph. Darren is Head of Remote at GitLab, a DevOps platform that helps co-located, hybrid, and remote teams collaborate and build software. Darren shares lessons that GitLab has learned as a completely officeless company with more than 1,400 remote employees—including boundary-setting at the organizational level, balancing synchronous and asynchronous tools, and the benefits their people have enjoyed working remotely. For more insights on the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.

For our inaugural episode, Ryan welcomes Brian Elliott, Executive Leader of Future Forum, a consortium launched by Slack to help companies rethink work in our digital-first world. Topics include managing distributed teams, the effect of the pandemic on employee expectations—including the ripple effect those changing expectations are having on HR policy—and avoiding "false flexibility." For more content geared to help organizations prepare for the future of work, visit hermanmiller.com/futureofwork.