Open Office Truth: Love It or Leave It Podcast Transcripts

INTRODUCTION

Rob Kirkbride: The number of people who are just dissatisfied with their office. I mean there’s a certain percentage that even if you gave them a gold plated throne, they’re not going to be happy in their office. I mean, it’s called work for a reason, right? We’re not here to give you a La-Z-Boy.

Dave Lathrop: Perfect.

Host Katie Pace: Welcome to What Workers Want. The new 360 real time, a Steelcase 360 podcast about how the places we work, learn, and heal are changing to help people thrive and ideas flourish at work. I’m your host Katie Pace. I’m here today with Rebecca Charbauski.

Co-host Rebecca Charbauski: Thank you.

Katie: She is our 360 realtime producer and this is the first episode in our five part series, the Open Office Truth.

Rebecca: That sounds kind of ominous, but I’m really excited we’re doing this because we started to talk about the open office and how it’s such a conversation out there. And we really thought we needed more than just one episode to talk about the open office. So this is the beginning, and if people want to get all five episodes, they can go to Open Office Truth page. We wanted to put everything in one place. So the question is is Rob right? Rob Kirkbride, who you heard at the top of the show, which is pretty funny. Are we after a Holy Grail here? I mean, is it impossible to make everybody happy in the workplace?

Katie:  What we know is that 70% of people work in some form of an open plan. And when we asked on Instagram on our channels, 74% of people say they do. So we know that organizations want to attract and keep the best people and that the workplace is a major factor in doing it. But there are such strong opinions about the open plan.

Rebecca: So to get to the truth of it all, we embarked on this five part series and we’re going to talk about the open plan history today. We’re going to hear about the privacy science. So the neuroscience behind what people need for privacy, including new research nobody’s heard before about the open plan and what actually can help. And then designing social spaces. A lot of these informal spaces, shared spaces sit empty and people are spending a lot of money to create these places for people to work, but they’re not working. So what’s going on there? And then collaboration, which is a big driver in creating the open plan. So how do you make that work? And we want to remind everybody right now to subscribe so you don’t miss any of it. And tell your friends if they work in an open office or if they have an opinion about the open office, they’re going to want to hear this series.

Katie:  That’s right. So we’re going to expose the good, the bad, the ugly, all in these next five episodes. And privacy is really important. It’s a super emotional topic, how we work and how we find time to focus at work. But collaboration is important and serendipity is important. So we’re going to explore how we get the balance right. But before we dig in, let’s just hear from some workers, some regular people on what they think about their open office plans.

Anonymous Office Worker:  So I would describe my environment as a glorified call center, where in the past I’ve had walls all the way to the ceiling. I’ve had partitions. Now I have no walls whatsoever. It’s a carved out cubby in my mind. I come in actually early every morning, so I have some quiet time. I can be working and as people are coming in, as I’m working on something, I may have two or three people in the area starting to talk loud about what they did over the weekend while I’m trying to focus in on a project, I’m listening to what’s happened over the weekend. So it’s very hard for me.

Anonymous Office Worker: Yeah, I think the best part about an open plan is just the freedom to sit anywhere you want. So it gives you that freedom to not be restricted to one spot on that whole day. I do like the idea of an open plan. It’s cool because it gives you that freedom, it sparks creativity, allows you to work well with other people.

Katie:  So a little good, a little bad.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Katie: And we heard the same when we asked on Instagram. By the way, if you don’t follow us on Instagram, you should follow us on Instagram.

Rebecca: Totally.

Katie: We asked our followers, how do you focus in the open plan? And some of the answers we got were, “I wear headphones, I minimize my visual distractions. I get up and leave to get water.”

Rebecca:  I like that one.

Katie: “I just get up and leave.”

Rebecca:  “I just go.”

Katie: Actually a lot of people said they thrive on the open plan or that because it was so open, people were actually quieter because they were more sensitive to the people around them. So it was a real mix and it wasn’t super negative or overwhelming. And this is kind of surprising given some of the headlines that we’ve seen.

Rebecca:   They are rough, these headlines. So here’s a few. Here’s one from Vice. “Open offices should be banned immediately.” “Open office plans are as bad as you thought.” That’s from the Washington Post. And this is my personal favorite. “Open offices were designed by Satan in the deepest caverns of hell.” That’s the Guardian. I mean they make it seem like fire and brimstone and just one or the other, right? Like it’s yes or no.

Katie:  So dramatic.

Rebecca:     So dramatic.

Katie:  Designed by Satan. Yikes. Sheesh.

Rebecca:    Right.

Katie:  But it’s not as simple as a headline. And there are studies that show that the open plan increases collaboration, reduces loneliness, decreases the amount people sit. And these environments allow people to be more flexible.

Rebecca:  So I was recently in Boston visiting PTC, which is a high tech company that just moved to this beautiful tower overlooking the sea port and they moved into an open plan. And I was there talking to John Civello who was their vice president of real estate at the time. And here’s what he had to say about their move, which is very different than what you read about the open plans’ bad reputation.

John Civello: When we first talked to people about that, the sky was falling. And really the open plan and no office is really a … it’s got a bad reputation as you know. And we’re fighting against the fact that some people haven’t done it I don’t think in the most thoughtful way. But having a hundred open seats in two [inaudible 00:05:52] rooms, that doesn’t work, right? So we really tried to be purposely conservative and put a bunch of interior spaces that people could use when they needed them. And I don’t get any complaints about people having problems finding a private space to have a conversation when they need to. So that really validates the strategy.

I know from my own experience, I can always find a room to go into and have a conversation if I need to in private. But I also love the fact that I’m out in the open and I’m engaging my employees and my colleagues all throughout the day.

So I think people that have done it the wrong way have really hurt all of us because if it’s done correctly, like I think we did it, really you get the best of both worlds I think.

Rebecca:     John says people have done it wrong, but that you can do it right. So that’s what we’re here to figure out. So how do we do that? How do we do it correctly?

THE HISTORY OF THE OPEN OFFICE

Katie:   Right. So let’s start with a conversation I had with two people who have combined close to 60 years of knowledge about the workplace. Today we’re going to get started by trying to understand how we got here. So we invited Rob Kirkbride, editor in chief of Bellow Press.

Rob:    How are you doing, Katie?

Katie:   Thanks for joining us. And he’s been writing about the office furniture industry for more than two decades. And Dave Lathrup who retired last year from Steelcase after more than 35 years with a career in research strategy and consulting and lots of other things.

Dave:    Hi Katie.

Katie:  Hi. I just want to dive right in to this conversation and ask you guys starting with the basics. How did it get so crazy where we see these really provocative, crazy headlines?

Dave:  Yeah, I think as an industry we tend to kind of whipsaw from one extreme to the other. We’re trying to follow the trends. We’re trying to do the best jobs as possible and sometimes we get too overzealous in the application of some of the ideas that we have.

Rob:  You know, it’s a classic in human psychology that unmet needs result in anger. And when you see those kinds of headlines, those are people expressing an unmet need and we need to listen.

Katie:   So I’m wondering if we can back up a little bit. One of the pictures I have in my mind and we can post to the website for our listeners is that image of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax headquarters. I guess that’s an image from 1939 and there are no partitions, right? It was divided with white columns, filing cabinets designed by one of the most famous architects in the world and the metal office furniture company, which of course later became Steelcase. We were one of the few companies that could produce this futuristic design. And so I’m wondering what was going on then that created this futuristic design?

Dave:   Well, I think one thing that Rob said is really right. I mean the idea of openness as Wright expressed that at the Johnson Wax headquarters was very much the way office work was always thought of at that time. The boss needed to keep an eye on what was going on. Usually from above in the case of the Johnson Wax building. And the changes though that were starting to happen and the Wright building for Johnson Wax and a number of other iconic buildings in that era were starting to think … the work itself was evolving and it was no longer purely clerical work to be done essentially by lowly paid employees. Increasingly the work was becoming more complicated and more demanding, more like engineering and less like clerical work. And this was very much the open phase of the World War II economy for example.

Rob:  And at the same time you’ve got this emerging consumer economy in the late 1930s where before that you had small towns or even larger towns that were served by companies in that area. In the late thirties you’re seeing corporations arise, places like Johnson. And at that time in 1930 the first supermarket opened, and by 1939 there were 5,000 supermarkets. So this idea that consumerism had changed as well as the workplace, which gave rise to these companies, which gave rise to the office.

Dave:    In many ways society was simply evolving.

Katie:   And more so they were going to an office. And then by 1959 Peter Drucker coined the term the knowledge worker. So now there’s this move from efficiency to effectiveness. And I’m wondering if you guys can talk about, sort of moving on in history, fast forwarding a little bit in the fifties and sixties, what was happening in our culture at that point?

Rob:  I think at that time work was really evolving. You know, people were starting to think about the idea of a workplace that works for them. And I think that maybe that period was the first time people really thought about that.

Dave:  Yeah, well up until that point, remember we had a supervisory culture in most organizations. We hired you to fill a slot in the machine. We expected to see you at your work doing that work. And that resulted in not only a cultural way of thinking about work and space, but it reinforced the idea that work was sort of a thing you did to survive. And what Rob’s beginning to hint at is that work was becoming something that was in and of itself much more fulfilling. It became something more than a way to simply provide for a family. It became a way to establish your own worth and to express the value of your ideas far beyond what organizations had thought in the past.

Katie:   Yeah. In the 60s we had the first cubicle and then by 1973 you had Steelcase executing the largest cubicle project in the world filling the Sears Tower.

Rob:   I think the industry gets a bad rap for the cubicle. I really do.

Dave:   Why is that?

Rob: Because it was never designed to do what designers tried to make it do. And I don’t want to place all the blame on interior design, but I think they have a share of this too. Because if you look at some of the early cubicle designs, they were never meant to be lined up in rows. They were never meant to be a way to shove a bunch of people into a space. In many ways, if you look at some of the brochures from then, it could be a workspace today.

Dave:  Very much so. It became more and more and more of an issue of managing the complexity of a building that was now filled with a disproportionate number of people or the bulk of the workforce, which was very expensive to change. So we had this aging building stock that had had systems furniture thrown into it as we threw technology, originally electrical and later electronic and later wireless and on and on. But we threw all these new things at these buildings and hoped somehow they could cope. And we mixed that with the status and hierarchy orientation to the way space was assigned. And you ended up with something which was fundamentally untenable. So the cube was more a result of that, I think, than it was really the cause of it.

Katie:    Yeah. You know, the eighties you have this cubicle land, productivity, productivity, productivity, and then a bunch of things happened, right? So technology, we started to think more about humans, but really it was this rise of wifi and laptops and all of a sudden I could work anywhere and oh, by the way, collaboration needed to happen. So I needed to have these serendipitous interactions. In between the 90s and early 2000s all of a sudden you start taking down all the cubicles and opening everything up.

Dave:   Yeah, in some ways that was done I think with the intention of reflecting a new kind of corporate culture that was starting to emerge in the beginnings of it in that same time. So the baby boomers who grew up in the 60s were now running companies and starting to make some of these decisions and they had a distinctly less formal attitude about work and organizational design. And we ended up starting to open things up and make it vaguely more usable for people to find places that were about who they were that was more expressive. So instead of it just being, you pick the kind of rug you want in your office, CEO of past, it was increasingly you can use the places that are provided to you in any way you want because this technology now enables, as you said Katie, people to do what they need to do, where they want to do it. And I think this evolution in the direction of taking down partitions is probably a good idea, but we have to recognize also that it’s not the only thing people need when they’re working.

Rob:    Yeah. I think the move from cubicle to open space was allowed because of technology. If technology wouldn’t have changed, the workplace wouldn’t have changed. Because we had to have cubicles to deliver power to people to have giant CPUs sitting on their desk. I mean really the whole design of the office was around the technology of the day, which had to be in a certain place. Since the last 10 years or so all that’s changed.

Katie:     And it was the type of work too. Right? The type of work you needed to do was very desk based. I went to my desk, I did my job, I went to lunch, did more work. I went home.

Dave:    Yeah. The machine defined work as it had during the Industrial Age and increasingly it doesn’t at all. The machine is simply a tool in the hands of the artists and how we get to that next design of organization, which will be reflected in the next designs of spaces too, is the process we’re in right now.

Katie:    So then all the walls come down and we’d say we’re going to have serendipitous interactions when we walk to the bathroom and we’re going to have instant collaboration and there’s going to be no private offices anymore because we’re all going to be out in the open. What could possibly go wrong?

Dave:   Well, I’ll just take a quick shot. I think the biggest thing that went wrong is we began to assume that that was the new way and everybody was going to work that way and that is fundamentally wrong as was putting everybody in cubes or putting everybody in office boxes down a long gray hallway. None of these things are right. What’s right is what that individual is, needs, does, wants. That’s what we need to be thinking about.

Rob:   Yeah. And in the two early 2000s, for the first time, you started seeing companies wanting to emulate other companies and how they work, which is really interesting. I mean if you look at Google or Facebook, at that time everybody was saying “we want an office like Google, we want an office.” And that doesn’t work for everybody. If you’re a law firm, you’re not going to have a a slide in the middle of your office. I mean that doesn’t fit culturally. So I think people were starting to try to stick round pegs into square holes that didn’t fit.

Dave:    That’s really right. That’s so right Rob. I mean, you really need to engage those people in a fashion that allows the system to be designed, not the cubicle system, but the system of place and technology to be designed where they can have meaningful choice

Rob:    And that’s a lot harder to do. Then you’ve really got to come up with a design or products that not only serve people but make them want to come into the office because they have choices. That’s really fascinating to me. The choice, the idea of choice in where people work. You don’t only have to create a nice place to work like you used to, Steelcase or any other company. You’ve got to create the best place to work. I mean the absolute best or people will go to Starbucks or home or somewhere else.

Katie:      Or they’ll leave your company altogether.

Dave:   That is right. Exactly right. I couldn’t agree more Rob.

Katie:    For organizations today that are considering an open office or they’ve knocked down all their walls, how do you talk to people about the open office today?

Dave:   So I think the key is to be less deterministic about what they need, quote unquote, and more open to a dialogue about who they are and what they want to do as they become these high performing humans that we hope they will be. So my answer to “is there a future in the open office” is of course there’s a future in the open office. It’s part of the scenario. It’s part of the landscape. It’s not the answer.

Rob:    Yeah. I think the easy answer would be to say choice. You give people choice in where they should work. That’s the obvious answer. I think we also need to create products that help them to do that, to make good choices in the office. The industry does a good job in addressing some of these things. Not so good in other ways, but obviously the open office is not a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just the way that the design is applied, and if it’s applied well, people are happy with the place that they work.

Katie:     Well Dave and Rob, this has been a really fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me.

Rob:       Thank you.

Dave:    Thanks Katie.

Rebecca:    Those guys are great.

Katie:     And you can really understand after listening to them that the workplace was always designed as a way for the type of work that was being done.

THE FUTURE OF THE OPEN OFFICE

Rebecca:    And when you think about where the workplace is going next, we wanted to talk to somebody about the future. So we got in touch with Verda Alexander, she’s co founder of O Plus A, a design studio based in San Francisco. And you know what else is based in San Francisco? All those really progressive Silicon Valley companies, a lot of which are being copied.

Katie:   We called her because not only has her firm designed some of the most iconic offices in Silicon Valley, but she also wrote this article for Fast Company where the headline was, “I’ve been designing offices for decades. Here’s what I got wrong.” Let’s listen in. Hi Verda, welcome to What Workers Want.

Verda Alexander:    Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Katie:   So you guys were really early on in the open office trend. When did you start seeing those come into vogue? Would you say it was in the early 90s?

Verda:   So the nineties there was a growing awareness that the work environment was important and it contributed to a company’s bottom line. And I think that that’s when people really started to look at the office more through this microscope. If workers were happy and excited to come to work and felt more creative, they could do more and create more and contribute more to the bottom line and the company would profit and retain their employees and things like that.

And then there was other things too. I think there was this idea of democratization of the office and that’s also a concept that’s been around for a long time. Huge in the Silicon Valley, this idea of flatter everybody contributing and this meant bringing down sight lines, being down the cubicle wall so that employees at every level in a company could look around and see each other. And tech firms just really embraced this way of working. Everybody being accessible and every single employee being important. And I think it’s no coincidence that people like Mark Zuckerberg embrace this and want to sit out in the open.

And then I think the third thing is technology and not being tethered to your desk. There’s an allure and a freedom to this idea and how could we not want to be able to work not just at our desk but anywhere.

Katie:   So in your article, you use the words “when it all went crazy” or “the moment it got crazy.” And I think it’s really interesting because if you look at some of the headlines or some of the images of the office spaces that are being designed today, you might think that’s a little nuts. What was it that’s wrong and that got so crazy?

Verda:   So we’re talking decades now. Going into the 2000s and then this decade that we’re in where things just started to get more outlandish and it felt like it was starting to become a contest of who had the coolest amenity, who had the slide or the wildest thing that might give them an edge up actually on recruitment. This is when I think needs and wants started to blur. What an employee really needed to get their work done versus what they wanted or what maybe someone assumed they might want. In this last decade, I think we’ve seen a lot of critique of tech firms not doing the right thing, of turning their back on communities, of being ostentatious and things like that and just not tuned into reality. And so this is when I really started to question what we were doing and how that contributed and why. And just not feeling that same satisfaction that I thought when I was starting out and breaking down those cubicle walls. So was it really the right thing for us to provide for every possible need or want in the office.

Katie:  At the same time, we know that the workplaces of the past are not the way to bring people back together. Right? I mean, I’m sure you’re not proposing to put up the cubicle walls and put everybody back in a private office again. So talk a little bit about what that does look like. Is this still an open office or what does it look like?

Verda:   Yeah, I feel like there’s been a lot of critique on open office for good reason and I think that designers taking a step back and really understanding what the implication is of their designs is a great thing. I think what I’m proposing at this stage is more of maybe philosophically, it’s this idea of reducing what’s unnecessary and getting back to a focus on work. So I see a refinement of different types of spaces to work in that can accommodate all different types of people. And that’s I think where the open office has gotten its biggest critique is it just doesn’t accommodate the introverts or people that need extra privacy. And so I think the office will be landing somewhere in between. We’ll be going back a little, but we’ll of course not lose the progress that we’ve made in so many areas. Definitely open office is not going away.

Katie:    Thank you so much for joining us Verda.

Verda:  Thank you.

CONCLUSION

Rebecca:  So we got to hear from Dave and Rob about how the workplaces over the decades have changed based on the kinds of work people need to get done. But then it feels like with Verda that things kind of tipped to where organizations were almost trying to give people everything under the sun that they could possibly want so maybe they’d never leave work.

Katie:  Yeah, I mean think about some of the images you see online or pictures in magazines or articles, workplaces featured. Like there’s ball pits and there’s beer on tap and there’s ping pong tables and there’s a slide.

Rebecca:   I can get behind the beer on tap.

Katie:   Yeah maybe. But think about it. If we slide down a slide, are we going to make a better podcast?

Rebecca:   Probably not. Probably not.

Katie:     I know. Probably not.

Rebecca:   And I think what we’re seeing now is this desire for purpose in people at work and what makes them feel purposeful is to be able to meaningfully contribute to work. And so you’re seeing this shift to giving people what they need. And our next two episodes of the Open Office Truth are going to be about privacy, which is something people need. And there’s actual neuroscience behind the privacy that people need. And we’re going to get to hear new research that hasn’t been out there before, tests done on people in the open office and what kinds of things can actually help them have a better day at work.

Katie:     Well we’re looking forward to that. And so I want to thank everyone who joined us for this episode. Dave Lathrup, Rob Kirkbride, Verda Alexander, and thanks to you Rebecca.

Rebecca:   Happy to do it.

Katie:    And remember to subscribe to What Workers Want and share the series with a friend. If you’re interested in more about the Open Office Truth, including the next episode and more resources, visit steelcase.com/openofficetruth. Thanks for listening.

Return to Open Office Truth Podcast Series page.

INTRODUCTION

Chris Congdon:   Collaboration really cannot be a group sport the entire time. And so if we have all of our spaces designed where you can never get apart and you can never get kind of alone to be able to process, then you’re inhibiting that whole process.

Host Katie Pace:    Welcome to What Workers Want, the new 360 real-time, a Steelcase 360 podcast about how the places we work, learn, and heal are changing to help people thrive and ideas flourish at work. I’m your host Katie Pace and today I’m collaborating with our producer Rebecca Charbauski.

Co-host Rebecca Charbauski:    Hi.

Katie:    We’re in the midst of our most ambitious podcast yet, a five part series on the Open Office Truth.

Rebecca:  We are, and we don’t collaborate all the time because as we heard at the top of the show, if we did, that wouldn’t work either.

Katie:   Yep.

Rebecca:   So for those people who are just joining us, they can join us right now. Listen to this episode, you won’t be lost. But if you’re looking for our previous episodes, we’ve put the entire series at Open Office Truth page. In our last episode, we got to hear brand new research that teaches us how we can focus better in the open plan. And Katie, you got put to the test that you passed.

Katie:   I passed.

Rebecca: You did a good job.

Katie:   So today we’re going to focus on how teamwork is changing and what that means for the way we work and how that impacts the open office. We’re going to spend some time with experts and solutions for privacy in the open plan. So that means what does it look like when we need four walls and a door. And we’re also going to hear from the creative director of Orangebox, the UK-based company that’s been designing for work away for the desk from its inception in 2002. And we’ll also hear about an emerging privacy solution pods and how to find the best pod for you.

Rebecca:  Have you found your best pod, Katie?

Katie:   Oh yes. I love my pod.

Rebecca:  We’re going to start with new research on teamwork and you and I work together on a team and we know teamwork is very different than it was even 10 years ago.

Katie: True, yes.

Rebecca: It’s very fast paced. It requires a lot of collaboration back and forth. 360 Magazine recently published an issue called New Work, New Rules, and it says the average person spends more than half of their day at work working with other people.

Katie:  Yeah, that’s really true.

Rebecca:  Yeah. But for some people, the truth about the open office is, they’re just trying to figure out how to do that.

Katie:  Well, to figure all this out for real in a way that doesn’t involve pizza boxes for privacy-

Rebecca:   Or scored snaked across the floor.

Katie:   Or scored snaked across the floor. Yes. I sat down with 360 Editor, Chris Congdon, and she told me about this fundamental shift from designing for an individual in the open plan to designing for teams. So it’s a very different way to think about the workplace. Let’s listen in.

Chris, thanks for joining us.

Chris Congdon:     Thanks Katie. It’s always great to be here.

Katie:   So teamwork isn’t new, but your article reports on how teamwork has changed. So why is that?

Chris:   Well, I think there’s a lot of factors that are kind of coming together at one time. I mean, one, every organization feels pressure to innovate. We’ve got to come up with something new, different, faster, better. So all of us are on a quest for innovation, but it’s got to be fast innovation. So, we can’t dawdle about getting solutions out to market.

Katie:    Right.

Chris:    So everybody’s feeling the pressure for speed and just go faster and faster and faster. And you add to that, that it’s just a lot more complex. There aren’t easy answers for everything that’s out there in the world, so the problems that we’re trying to solve are just a lot trickier. And so you have these things coming together where it’s the speed, the intensity of the need to innovate and the complexity, and that’s causing teams to have to work fundamentally different than we ever have before. And how is that different?

And the analogy that just popped into our heads as we started thinking about, of course a sports’ analogy, and started thinking instead of being like a sport where each of you is doing your own thing, like running a relay, you’re running your leg of the relay and then you’re handing off the baton or the project to the next person and having this very kind of linear progression through your work. It’s a lot more like playing soccer or basketball where it’s like this super fast pace. You can’t do your thing alone. You’ve got to have a team around you. And it’s constantly going back and forth and back and forth. And it’s just a fundamentally different way of working than what we did, even five years ago.

Katie:   Yeah, it’s more intense.

Chris:   So much more intense. Absolutely.

Katie:  So with this new kind of teamwork, is it fueling some of these frustrations? Is this some of the reason why there’s so much frustration? And we just heard a little bit earlier, like so much anger about the open office.

Chris:    Well, I think part of what’s going on is it’s pushing people in different ways. So for example, if work used to be kind of this linear paced kind of thing, the office used to be designed around that. And it’s not so much about the open plan overall, but some aspects of an open plan space might be having lots of people kind of sitting in rows and kind of sitting individually, whether it be in cubicles or benches or that kind of thing. And that’s okay when the work that you’re doing is very individual and I just do my own thing and I kind of keep my nose down.

But now when you’ve got people who are needing to be together and interacting, not just two people shoulder to shoulder, but a group of people, where do you go to do that? And a lot of open plan spaces haven’t been designed to really create a home for teams. So a lot of times teams are feeling like, they just don’t have the kind of space that they need to work in. So it’s not designed for the kinds of interactions they’re having. They don’t even actually have their own space where they can do that kind of work.

And then I think another thing that people are really starting to feel is, because they’re being asked to innovate, a lot of the spaces that we have to do work weren’t really designed for innovation. And I think we’re still frankly figuring out what it takes spatially to help people come up with new ideas. But some of the things that we know for sure is sitting in a very traditional conference room is not going to cut it, because people tend to be in very kind of passive behaviors that we sit, we listen, we watch a presentation, but that’s not innovation. That’s just being a bystander. To actually get people engaged in innovation, they have to get more physically engaged, standing up, moving around, trying new things. And our workspaces for the most part just haven’t been designed to support that.

Katie:   Yeah, and they haven’t been designed to support the individual. Right? So now we have all of this teamwork and, “Hey, we’re all going to work together all the time. We’re going to take down the conference rooms. We’re going to have collaboration all the time.” And that’s good and right, but you also have to think about the individual. Right? You have to think about me. I need to work alone sometimes too.

Chris:  Yeah. I mean, collaboration really cannot be a group sport the entire time because we know enough from our work on collaboration that it’s an ebb and flow between being together as a group and then you need to go away as an individual to develop your own thoughts and your own ideas or just to digest some of the ideas that you’ve generated as a group. So it’s this kind of dance, if you will, between together, apart, together, apart. And so if we have all of our spaces designed where you can never get apart and you can never get kind of alone to be able to process, then you’re inhibiting that whole process.

So, individuals need to be able to have that freedom to be able to be in close proximity where we can see each other and work together, but I also have to rapidly toggle into a mode where I can focus and concentrate and then be able to go back and forth and back and forth.

Katie:   Right.

Chris:  Yeah.

Katie:   Well Chris, thanks for joining us.

Chris:    Thanks Katie.

Rebecca:   So that sounds like just how our team works, Katie.

Katie:    Yes, we are totally a basketball team.

DESIGNING FOR WORK AWAY FROM YOUR DESK

Rebecca:   We are. So the question is how do you design for these spaces? We caught up with Orangebox Creative Director, Gerry Taylor on the phone. He’s been with the company since it began in 2002.

Katie:    And if you aren’t familiar with Orangebox, they’re a new part of the Steelcase family. They’re based in South Wales and since the beginning they’ve been designing for this work away from the desk.

Rebecca:  Gerry, can you start by telling us how you approached design as a creative director?

Gerry Taylor:     Well, I think it’s a unique [inaudible 00:08:32] of Orangebox and it’s intrinsic to our success. I always described that the circle completes itself. We all talk to each other. And part of the success of Orangebox is we’re not a hierarchical company, but a flat company and that circle has always completed itself in the sense that ideas don’t go on for years before they’re coming around and having discussions with the senior sales guy.

And my job is a Creative Director is to try to always be pushing, sometimes just maybe pushing a little bit too much, but one great asset I tell everyone about the company is a great CEO is someone who directs a company but then needs enough space for everyone to occupy and to rise in and do a great job. And for me that’s a perfect description for the way that Mino has always setup and run the company. And he’s just allowed me the privileged position of being incredibly close to the development of Orangebox.

Rebecca:  I love something you’ve said to me in the past. If you’re going to ask people to work away from the desk, which is a very mature piece of furniture, very refined, then you’re going to want the places they’re moving to, to be serious as well. You want them to have comfort, performance and function. How do you do that? How do you know when you have a great design idea?

Gerry:   I think design struggles when it isolate its sales and it becomes a little bit too precious about itself. I think great ideas should always be able to stand up. Sometimes you have to not share something. You have to let something mature before you expose it too much, but I actually believe good ideas should be communicable, even quite early on in the process. I mean, in fact, I’m doing that now. I’m working on new projects now for Orangebox and what I’m actually doing is writing a narrative for what this product is about before based on research, based on observations, before even starting to think about what might this look like. It’s describing the culture and I’ve always found that more important because something I fundamentally believe is you don’t sell furniture, you sell narratives.

Rebecca:   I love that you don’t sell furniture, you sell narratives and not just because I’m a storyteller. You’re always thinking about how people fit into what you’re doing, so the stories behind the products you’re making. And I’d love to hear the story behind one particular system that you have. It’s called Away from the Desk and that’s the actual name of the system, Away from the Desk. So for listeners who haven’t seen it, it’s a soft upholstery system. It can have really high backs so it can feel really private or it can have a low back and feel more open. It lets two people sit across from each other or next to each other in a lounge posture. There’s just a ton of options. Can you tell us how that came to be?

Gerry:   I think one thing that we knew was important is this idea of away from the desk being a system and systems come alive when you give an intelligent matrix to really good designers and really engaging clients who can then take that product and use it in their way, even using the fabrics on the product. And one really clear asset with Away from the Desk is the ability to use the [block 00:12:22] upholstery and to play with the fabric specification within that block upholster. We’re all trying to make great work environments that allow people to work in a better, happier, more fulfilled way.

WHAT PRIVACY LOOKS LIKE WHEN IT MEANS FOUR WALLS AND A DOOR (PODS)

Rebecca:   It was great to talk to Gerry because one of the things Orangebox also does so well is pods and while for a lot of people, pods are this new addition to the workplace landscape. Orangebox’s actually on its fourth generation of pods.

Katie:   And it’s really this interesting, emerging solution and we can see why. We asked our Instagram followers if they had a place to go to make a personal phone call and 66% of people said, yeah, they do.

Rebecca:   Really?

Katie:  But what’s amazing is that more than one third, 34% of people said no, they don’t actually have a place to go if they can make a personal phone call. I mean, could you imagine if you had to walk to your car to make a personal phone call?

Rebecca:  That would break the workflow for me. For sure.

Katie:     Yeah.

Rebecca:   Yeah. I mean sometimes you just have to call your doctor or check in on your kid. I mean, there are things you have to get done, right? And you don’t want to have to leave the building. So pods are a good answer, but pods are not chairs and tables, they’re a very different kind of solution. And people have to ask different kinds of questions. Like, have you ever been outside a pod, and you can actually hear the person inside the pod?

Katie:     Yes.

Rebecca:   So the acoustics aren’t so great and it’s actually disruptive instead of helping with privacy.

Katie:      Yeah. It’s not effective at all.

Rebecca:   Yeah.

Katie:   There’s no visual privacy so you feel like you’re in a fishbowl.

Rebecca:    Totally. What makes a good pod?

Katie:    So we sat down with Niki Watt, the Steelcase Category Manager for Architecture about just that. What makes it good and what questions should we be asking (Take the Interactive Quiz)? Well, Niki, thanks for joining us.

Niki Watt:   Thanks for having me.

Katie:  The news articles about our industry recently are about pods. Right? They’re everywhere. So in the most recent article, the BBC reported that in 2015 only one company showed a pod at NeoCon, which is our big industry show. And then this year there were more than a dozen companies that did. And for anybody that goes to this show, there was like pods everywhere, in the hallway in everybody’s showroom. There were just pods everywhere. So tell us a little bit about why is this, why are the pods so popular right now?

Niki:   I think they’re growing for a couple reasons. Just from a people perspective, we’re all so very overwhelmed with information and work to do, in charge with creating and innovating that I think individual people are looking for a little bit of respite to make a private call, to think for 15 minutes without any interruption.

Katie:  Right.

Niki:   So I think there’s that side of that. I think from a organization standpoint, they know that this demand for enclosed spaces is continuing to grow. So how do they solve it and how do they solve it quickly is at the forefront of how they’re making decisions right now.

Another benefit to organizations is really quick installation. So if you need an enclosed space, if you need a room, if you built that out of traditional construction or drywall, that would take two weeks for a smaller pod. And these pods in the market, including ours, they’re installing in half a day. So there’s a real benefit there just in terms of time and money and loss of productivity for being in a space.

Katie:   Yeah. Talk a little bit about what they’re used for because I also wonder, do people put pods in and then somebody sits in there all day and it’s like, “Forget the open plan. This is my office.”

Niki:    Yeah. So what we’re seeing really is two main types. We’re seeing these foam booth pods that are really designed for individuals, stand up, quicker phone calls or meetings or a place to recharge. And then there’s pods that are more suited for smaller teams. So think in terms of two to six people is what we’re seeing a lot of. And I would say depending on what type of work, how long you’re going to be in there, that’s typically how we see people making decisions on which one they’re going to use.

Katie:  So a lot of it is, it’s just bringing that choice, right?

Niki:  Absolutely.

Katie:   Like, I need a place to make a phone call or call my doctor or sometimes I’m on the phone with Europe and not everybody wants to hear that conversation. Right?

Niki:  Exactly. And I think the one thing that’s really interesting, pods have come to the market so quickly. I think some of the user experiences and workers or employees while they’re in there are really discovering, “Oh, while I’m in there, I would really still like a nice experience.”

Katie:  Yes. So talk a little bit more about that because there are some quirks in designing for pods like, I think we’ve heard people like, “We just took two by fours, we put it up in the office and we said that’s good because we just need some privacy.” But you have to think about these things, right?

Niki:    Right.

Katie:  It’s not just visual or acoustic privacy.

Niki:    And I think there is a little bit of that, well, something is better than nothing. And you’re right, something is better than nothing, but as more and more people use pods, how do you create that great experience inside there? Because the two by four is not creating a great experience for work ticket done or thinking to get done.

Katie:  So how do I know? How do I know this is the one I should be looking for? What should we look for?

Niki:  From that standpoint, organizations are looking at how to choose right now in terms of do they need a foam booth, do they need larger pods? And one of the big things that we’re seeing and that we offer with our portfolio is UL certification, Seismic Certification, ADA requirements that we’re meeting. And just because these pods are new to the market, doesn’t mean it negates the need from a safety standpoint for those things within your workspace.

Katie:    Right.

Niki:   So organizations are making decisions on who is new to the market, who is new and fancy, and now they’re starting to peel that onion back a little more and go, “Okay, if these things really are going to live within my floor plan, how do they meet those top line needs?”

Katie:   Talk a little bit about some of the implications related to a power and maybe fire safety that people wouldn’t think about.

Niki:     Sure. And it’s one of those things. They’re new to the market so we always say check local codes because we’re seeing some different things. But we also offer some great products. So Orangebox pods for instance and the air pod and the Weber ceiling that opens up and closes, typically negates that need for the fire suppression and to be hooked up to the sprinklers of the building system. So that has been fantastic and a game changer in terms of the pod market.

Katie:    Right?

Niki:     And how organizations are making decisions and choosing them.

Katie:   There’s also sort of the plug and play, like I need to plug it in and go and have power and I need that power to be like, not burn my building down. Right?

Niki:  Exactly.

Katie:  That’s what we have in SnapCab, right? Which it’s a plug and play solution that’s safe.

Niki:  It is. It is a plug and play solution. It’s also on casters. So in terms of future flexibility for it, it works out great for a lot of organizations.

Katie:   Right. And it’s small enough. And what I love about SnapCab too is the way that… in our partnership with them is that we’ve been able to customize it. Right? So you can really express your personality in that.

Niki:   Absolutely. Yeah. So we offer a foam booth size, that smaller size unit for someone and then up to supporting six people inside the pod very comfortably with technology, access to power, great air circulation.

Katie:    So that’s good when I’m, “Okay, I need to make a phone call, I need to go away.” I pop in a lot of SnapCabs here and then in our space in Chicago too. So the third pod solution that we offer is from our partner IRYS. And that’s great because then if just you and I need to have a quick connect, we can go away. And they also have this really nice front porch where we could kind of go under the quote unquote front porch. Right?

Niki:   Yeah. The excellent thing about the IRYS pod is it ships in two weeks. So when we talk about quick responses to organization needs, it really solves for that very well and a very architectural way. It’s a very beautiful pod. And to your point, there’s two spaces in one there. You have that front porch underneath the canopy and then you have inside the pod, too, with access to marker boards or technology if needed.

Katie: So when we think about providing privacy, it’s more than just shutting the door. Right? Do you want to talk a little bit about what else we need to consider with these pods?

Niki:   Sure. There’s usually when we’re looking at products in what they can offer organizations or people that are working inside of them, there’s four types of privacy we typically talk about. Visual, territorial, acoustic and informational, and with the pods, the two that really stand out the most would obviously be the acoustic number one. I don’t want to hear you. If you’re outside the pod, I don’t want you to hear what I’m saying inside the pod and then the visual privacy. So to what extent, the amount of glass, do you feel like you’re in a fishbowl when you’re inside that pod or is there three solid walls and yet some glass offer access to light? We think about that quite frequently too, because you want that almost psychological safety in order to be focused or in order to be rejuvenating yourself, giving yourself a break from your day.

Katie:  It’s interesting. So I feel like more organizations are starting to learn that and think more intentionally about that with pods. I think you’ve said one time we may think of pods as this is a bandaid solution. Right? Like, “Oh shoot, we went too far open. Let’s put some pods in here so we give people some privacy.” And certainly we’re seeing organizations use pods like that, but we’re starting to see this more strategic shift. Right? Where they’re actually being planned thoughtfully and thinking about these different types of privacy that people need.

Niki:   Yeah, we are starting to see it earlier in the thinking about workspace and just more of a proactive strategy I would say versus a solve a problem to your point. And with the proactive strategies, organizations really are starting to think through where can we use these today? Where might we move them next month? How could we take them with us when our lease is up? That type of thing. And we’re starting to see more and more projects where there’s hundreds of pods that are on there. So it’s nice to see that organizations are thinking about how do you balance that open plan and what does that look like? Whether that’s with demountable walls or with pods. And that strategy’s starting to take off.

Katie: There’s been a lot written about the culture of pods. Right? So some of this is kind of quirky. I go in the pod at lunchtime and I eat a tuna sandwich and then the pod smells like tuna for the rest of the day. So there’s been a lot of like news articles that have been written that are sort of poking fun at pods. And I’m curious, do you have any thoughts about the culture of pods? Or maybe this is even like, things organizations should think about as they’re putting pods into their workplace.

Niki:  Yeah, I think you’re right and people are having fun with it. Right? It’s something new that we’re seeing over the past two years. So that aspect of it’s less formal and that has been fun. So knowing what you’re putting into your space again is really important. And what is that user experience? Especially here at Steelcase, right, we’re offering our expertise to help design IRYS, to partner with SnapCab and share our research and insights, and the same thing with acquiring Orangebox, giving them feedback on what we know for the North American market to really create those great user experiences.

And then the third thing I would say is more around warranty and quality too, because as organizations are looking at these as flexible assets that can be used past an initial installation, what does that look like longer term?

Katie:  Right.

Niki:   And how you manage that asset is important.

Katie:    And it feels like there’s this balance too, right? If you have an organization where people are camping in these all day, maybe there’s some other unmet needs that we should explore too. Right?

Niki:   Absolutely. [crosstalk 00:24:27]-

Katie:     Pods are a great solution, but let’s make sure we’re meeting all the needs of our workers.

Niki:    Right. It’s definitely a balance and we’re definitely continuing to see this increase in demand for enclosed spaces. That’s not going to go away.

Katie:   That’s interesting. Well, Niki, thanks so much for joining us and being here today.

Niki:    Thanks for having me.

Rebecca:  So when we talked to designers, they made an interesting point about pods that they should go in high trafficked areas so that people feel like they can use them and they see other people using them. And I know Katie, I talk to you a lot on video conferencing in Chicago and you use a pod a lot. Why do you think?

Katie:     I do. I love my pod. I really, really love my pod.

Rebecca:    You have a nice pod.

Katie:    I do. I have a beautiful IRYS pod and it works for me because I’m on the phone a lot with you guys here in Grand Rapids or our teams all over the world. We do a lot of videos, so people need to see me and people in the open plan that I work with in Chicago, they don’t want to hear our conversations. As interesting, as exciting as they maybe. Right? So when we’re on the phone, when I have those meetings, we’re able to pop in the pod, shut the door. I know that it’s acoustically sound. I don’t feel like I’m in a fishbowl because there’s good visual privacy. It’s really been designed for those needs. I will say I use it a lot, but it is not my private office.

Rebecca:   Okay.

Katie:    Right? So you do have to share and that’s the thing.

Rebecca:   There’s some rules.

Katie:   Yeah, there are some rules. You have to set up a culture around it, right? You have to clean up after yourself when you leave. You have to not hog it and sit there all day. Right? You want to be courteous when you’re using a pod.

Rebecca:    That makes a lot of sense. I think you’re courteous when you’re using your pod.

Katie:     Thank you.

CONCLUSION

Rebecca:    So we want to let everybody know if you want to learn more about pods or Orangebox or anything we’ve talked about in this episode, or if you want to listen to one of the other episodes of the Open Office Truth, please go to Open Office Truth page where we’ve put everything you need. And we want to thank everybody who is included in this episode, Niki Watt, Gerry Taylor and Chris Congdon. And we want to remind you to subscribe to What Workers Want so you don’t miss anything.

Katie:    So this episode had a heavy focus on creating privacy with four walls and a door because sometimes you just want to shut the door. Right?

Rebecca:  Right.

Katie:     But our next episode is going to explore what privacy looks like when it doesn’t mean four walls and a door. Why do we have all these beautiful Instagram spaces? Is that the best thing for people to sit in? And sometimes why are those spaces empty?

Rebecca:   Yeah, you walk by them, no one’s there. So we’re going to actually hear about a new framework. It’s almost a checklist where you can diagnose what’s really going on in those spaces. And especially as companies spend more money and real estate on those types of spaces, you really want them to work.

Katie:    Well, I can’t wait to hear that. So for now, thanks everyone for joining us.

INTRODUCTION

Jim Keane:  So when people think of collaboration, they think of meetings and when they think of meetings, they don’t think of their favorite experiences in the workplace. They think of boring long events where they’re sitting in a chair, in a formal conference room and there’s just a few people talking. And in fact, if you watch how people who are adopting new practices around innovation are actually working, they’re using design thinking, they’re using agile, and these are naturally processes that are about activity.

Chris Congdon:  That are very interactive.

Jim:  There is a sense of progress and energy and everyone’s participating, but they’re all participating differently, because they’re all different people. So active collaboration is that idea. And yet when people try to practice that today, it’s clear they don’t have the tools they need.

Host Katie Pace:   Welcome to What Workers Want. A Steelcase 360 Podcast and the new 360 real time. We’re a Steelcase podcast with behind the scenes conversations about what we’re learning about the places where people work, learn and heal. I’m your host Katie Pace and I’m here today with our producer Rebecca Charbauski.

Co-host Rebecca Charbauski:   Glad to be back.

Katie:   So Rebecca, this is our final episode in our five part series about the open office truth. We’re almost at the end and as you heard at the top, a Steelcase CEO, Jim Keane, he’s going to talk about collaboration today, the last piece in his open office puzzle. So we’re going to bring you the conversation that Jim had with Microsoft chief product officer, Panos Panay, in New York a few months ago on how to improve collaboration in the open plan.

Rebecca:   We want to let people know that if you haven’t been listening to the podcast series, you can start with us right now. Listen and learn about collaboration, especially since I recently read a study from Microsoft that says you and I, Katie, were on two times as many teams as we were just five years ago.

Katie:    Wow.

Rebecca:   Does that feel right?

Katie:   Yeah, that sounds right. There’s a lot more collaboration today.

Rebecca:   If people want to hear the previous four episodes that can go to Open Office Truth page where we put them all in one place. We have episodes about the neuroscience of privacy, about designing for privacy with new and exciting solutions, and about how to create shared spaces that people actually use instead of they sit pretty and empty. That’s at steelcase.com/openofficetruth. And we want to make sure people subscribe to What Workers Want because we have some really good conversations coming up with authors and CEOs that you’re not going to want to miss.

Katie:   Let’s go back a minute to the first episode, when we talked about the history of the open office, we established then that the intentions weren’t bad, right? Organizations wanted to break down walls, build trust, add collaboration, serendipity, all of these really good things that were going to supposedly lead to more creativity, more ideas, more innovation, better business results, right?

Rebecca:   Yeah. We were going to figure out teamwork the best way to do it.

Katie:   But throughout, we’ve also learned that maybe knocking down all the walls and opening up the plan, maybe that wasn’t really the one way or the right way, and that the way we’re working, the way we’re collaborating is fundamentally changing. And what’s interesting is decades ago it was changing and it’s still changing today, right?

Rebecca:   And people spend more than half their day. We know collaborating these days. In fact, I think Harvard Business Review said 80% more of your time is spent than two decades ago working with others, that’s everything from meetings to emails to phone calls. And we learned from episode three that the way we work is changing. So instead of a relay team where I hand the piece of the project to you and you do your piece and hand it to someone else, we’re more likely to go back and forth like a basketball team and to be iterative. So we’re going to start the conversation about collaboration with Jim Keane, the CEO of Steelcase talking about this fundamental shift.

Jim:   So, five years ago or 10 years ago, maybe everything was fixed. You’d come in the morning, you went to a very predictable place to work. That was your assigned workstation. You didn’t move from there unless you went to a meeting room and then maybe you came back. That began to change, it started really when laptops came along and then we were able to be more mobile because of Wi-Fi and suddenly people were able to get up and move, maybe people used less assigned desks. But for the most part, the furniture, the technology, most of these things were still relatively fixed. When we really give people the tools they need to do what they want to do naturally; what we’ve found is that they want everything to be moving. So they want to reconfigure their space on demand. They want to be able to change the furniture, change the privacy screens, go from individual work to collaborative work and do it in a way that’s super frictionless.

And when they tried to do that, they get 90% there, and the last 10% is what kills them. They try to move that desk, but the cords won’t come apart and they… it’s these easy details that stop you from being able to do what you want to do. Or they want to move a device, a technology device from the conference room back to their desk. But to do that, they need to turn it off and they have to unplug it and you have to reboot it, and that period of time breaks the continuity of work that they really desire. That’s what’s changing all the stuff in the office, it has to be more fluid. Everything has to be reconfigurable, not by facilities managers, but by users themselves.

Katie:   So one of the reasons Jim and Panos were in New York was to introduce new designs in this new technology that helps people work together.

Rebecca:  Right. You were there, Katie, Microsoft had this big dramatic moment where they pulled back this beautiful black curtain to show this dazzling large scale Surface Hub 2X, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s this interactive, slim, sleek device. And it also can come in a really small footprint

Katie:   And Steelcase actually worked together with Microsoft to create Steelcase Roam; a mobile cart in an easy to hang wall mounting system that allows you and allows workers to pull the hub or take it anywhere. It’s literally a cart on wheels and 360 editor, Chris Congdon was there with Jim and the Panos in New York. Let’s hear the part of her conversation with them about how new tools like this will help improve collaboration.

Chris Congdon:   One of the things I’d love to find out a little bit more from your perspective about, it has to do with this study that we did earlier this year where we were looking at what are some of the ways people are collaborating and the things they need to collaborate. And we found something really interesting that the vast majority of people actually do want to have devices like the Hub to be able to collaborate together. But when we broke it down, we saw that it was kind of interesting that the people who are doing the vast amount of collaborating don’t have as much access as some of the other people, particularly people in like the C-suite who have more access to devices. I’m just thinking about the design and the form factor of the Hub 2X like how is that going to make this technology more accessible to more people?

Panos Panay:  Yeah, it’s a great question. There’s something about the mobility of this device that changes it. When you get into the static nature of a piece of tech or the static nature of a collaboration device in its traditional sense, it’s going to be in a room and maybe that’s not in a room that’s accessible to everybody. And I think that’s maybe one of the physical blockers up there.

But as the workplace changes and there’s more work, open workspace, less offices, the idea that we can take Roam, which was created by Steelcase, just incredible idea between the teams coming together and then we’re able to move this product to anywhere it wants to be used, you start to unlock some of these barriers that are in front of… hey we have a piece of tech but it’s only in a certain space. I think that makes sense that the tech is in a certain space today, but I think the future kind of begs us to make sure as the workplace changes the product can adapt to it, and this is part of it. When we designed the product, we made it modular so you know you can have this product with the Surface Hub built in, you can have it as a two way screen that’s modular that you can connect to any Surface device. I think there’s so many different ways to get access to this product. It’s pretty exciting.

Jim:   It also feels to me as I was watching you demonstrate it today that it’s not simply a display, it’s really something that integrates with Microsoft Teams in a new way. It’s almost like as you’re developing Microsoft Teams, you needed something like this to be the primary device you would use when you’re gathered as a team.

Panos:   Yeah, it is. Teams is all about collaboration, it’s an incredible product. I mean Microsoft Teams has done outstanding job of bringing teams together. I’m a Microsoft person telling you that, but I will tell you it is a powerful tool, and having an integrated version of it with the device is pretty incredible and that it not only, it’s inspiring to me, but it’ll enable so much more collaboration to happen.

Katie:   So Rebecca, this really all circles back to this conversation we’ve been having about the open office.

Rebecca:   Yes.

Katie:   Like the way we’re working is changing and the work we’re doing is actually changing. And so then their spaces need to change as well. And these shared spaces away from the desk, these collaborative spaces, they become even more important and it puts so much pressure on them to help us do our jobs well.

Rebecca:   Exactly. It’s not enough for them to sit there and look pretty. I need to be able to get work done. And Katie, when you’re in Chicago and I’m here in Michigan now I can finally wheel you in instead of just pulling you up on a little cell phone or even a small laptop, you can actually be part of the conversation almost like you’re right there with us.

Katie:  Like in my own little robot in the space.

Rebecca:   Exactly. And think about how that can be different within a meeting room as well. So instead of everyone just sitting around the conference room table, it’s about being up and active and engaging with the content. It’s this idea of using our bodies to activate our brains. So Chris had this conversation with Jim in New York and let’s pick up there

Chris:   Jim, what Panos was just describing really feels a lot like the concept that you introduced today; this notion of active collaboration. And it had its Genesis and some of the work that we’ve done in learning and in the classrooms and understanding how that happens. Can you tell us a little bit about what active collaboration is and where that idea came from?

Jim:   Sure. So when people think of collaboration, they think of meetings and when they think of meetings, they don’t think of their favorite experiences in the workplace. They think of boring long events where they’re sitting in a chair, in a formal conference room, and there’s just a few people talking. Maybe somebody is making a big presentation and you’re just trying to get through it. And it reminds us of what it felt like to be in school in the old days when students would sit in a classroom and the professor would talk on and on, and your job as a student was simply to take notes, memorize everything, and play it back on the exam.

Chris:   Yeah.

Jim:   So we’ve already learned in the world of education that if you really want people to learn, you have to engage them more completely. And different people learn in different ways, so some people learn by building things. Some people learn through debate and dialogue. Some people learn by thinking deeply, maybe writing their own version of what they just heard. But however it is you learn, it’s clear that you learned by being active, not by being passive. So if we take those same lessons about what it means to be human in a classroom and think about that in the workplace, we need to activate these spaces more, to activate these meetings to bring more energy. And in fact, if you watch how people who are adopting new practices around innovation are actually working, they’re using design thinking, they’re using agile, and these are naturally processes that are about activity.

Chris:  That are very interactive. Right.

Jim:  You’re brainstorming, you’re generating ideas, you’re going through the divergent phase of innovation. Then you begin to synthesize and make choices about what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to discard. And, you’re developing a point of view, and then you go through it all over again. There is a sense of progress and energy and everyone’s participating, but they’re all participating differently because they’re all different people.

Active collaboration is that idea. And yet when people tried to practice that today, it’s clear they don’t have the tools they need. They want to work that way, and they walk into a conference room with a big table and chairs and it’s beautiful…

Chris:  And it will be weird if you stand up.

Jim:  Yeah. And you’ve got art on the walls. I want to use those walls. I want to write on those walls. I want to put my ideas up on the walls. But they’re not set up for that. So teams are struggling to actually do active collaboration because they don’t have all the capabilities from architecture, from furniture and from technology, but we’re getting ready to change that.

Chris:  Yeah. That was one of the big findings in our research that a lot of people want to be able to move themselves and move their furniture and be empowered to be able to make those choices themselves.

Rebecca:   Now Katie, you know as much as anybody being a distributed employee can be hard.

Katie: Yes.

Rebecca:   Sometimes you miss a lot.

Katie:   Yeah, it can. It can feel like I’m really missing a lot.

Rebecca:  We’re in those meetings and we’re having the conversation and we say, “bye Katie” And then the conversation continues.

Katie:  The conversation continues and I miss it. Or you’re walking through and you see somebody at a bench and you say, “Hey, let’s talk about this, let’s talk about this, let’s call Katie” and you know, you call me on your cell phone or something, and it’s now with the Surface Hub 2, imagine if you could roll me over, call me and… Oh Hey, let’s pull up the content. Let’s collaborate on this piece together.

Rebecca:   It’s like you’re right there.

Katie:   It’s like I’m right there. So Chris talked to Panos about this and asked just about those distributed employees. Let’s listen to what they had to say.

Chris:   So Panos, you’re a global organization. We’re a global organization. A lot of us have teammates who are scattered all over the world, all over the country. And that’s always been a challenge. It’s been a challenge we’ve been trying to work on for a while. So from your perspective and where you guys are going with the Surface family, and particularly with the new Surface Hub. But how was the design of the device changing the way we’re going to have remote participants contribute in collaboration?

Panos:   Here’s what’s amazing about the idea of companies that are continuing to be more global and using the global workforce to connect with each other and create. The amazing part is that the diversity that comes within product making and the inclusion of so many different voices and cultures coming together. I remember 15 years ago you were designing a product in the US you didn’t have that many filters for what is it that somebody in Southeast Asia really wanted relative to this product, but now that the teams are all working together, we feel like we’re in the same room and answering your questions.

This technology enables you to feel like you’re in the same room. And all of a sudden the global scale has been shrunk down to all of us connected visually, we are at a point where we can see each other, the micro tells us that we talked about before or the behaviors, the expressions when you… you might be overseas, but you feel like you’re in the same room.

I think the power of that is so incredible and that’s what this technology is meant to enable; remove all those barriers. And it enables so many new opportunities like cultures coming together to create. And we see that, we see that in the design of our products showing up, we see it in inclusion when we think about how we want to continue to make our products more inclusive, how we want to draw into the world of how to make them more accessible. And what you start to see is so many people with different filters come to play and there’s not one voice stronger than the other. And this is what I’m in love with; What Steelcase does because they understand room dynamics so well. They understand the concept of how people are communicating and who owns the room or how many people are talking at one time.

Jim mentioned today he was used to these meetings that are tiring and just two people talk and everybody watches. And this product, this technology starts to remove those cultural dependencies We used to have in creating with a classic meeting and we started opening the window and doors to more of it. And then now you take the modularity and the movement of the product and where it can be and could be, it may not look the same like oversees, the room changes. There are all these little dynamics that change the emotion and I think we’re going to see that this product specifically is going to enable more diverse perspectives.

Chris:   Inclusiveness.

Panos:   It matters a ton to me and I think seeing that and feeling it and hearing our customers talk about how they now connect globally and how we build products now and how we think about it, it’s pretty inspiring.

Katie: So another reason everyone was in New York was to introduce the Steelcase Flex Collection. Super cool collection designed specifically for teams to empower them to adapt their space however they need to.

Rebecca:   Exactly. And if people haven’t seen the Steelcase Flex Collection, it’s this moveable collection of desks, tables, whiteboards, carts, space dividers, accessories.

Katie:  It’s cool.

Rebecca:  It is. And the height adjustable desk is super cool. You can stand at it with your laptop and it won’t move if you push it or lean against it. But if you come to it sideways, you can literally push it with a fingertip. It is really unique in the way that it’s made it easy for teams to move it around and create the spaces they want to create just on the fly.

Katie:  So much of the magic of this collection is in a details and the designers, they didn’t miss anything, and they really watched teams around the world work in agile ways. And it’s cool to see the pictures that they brought back of how these teams work, the little tiny details that they need. So since we can’t show you all those details, let’s listen to Chris and Jim talk about them in more detail.

Chris:   So with the Steelcase Flex Collection, there’s a lot of interesting things about it. So I’m curious from your perspective, Jim, what are some of the things you love the most out of that collection? Are there, are there a couple of favorites that you could pick out and say, this is really cool?

Jim:   Yeah. So the first thing I love the most is something that’s sort of meta, but it’s the fact that the team that developed Flex actually used Flex prototypes to develop the product line. So from the first week or two I saw them working, they were already prototyping ideas, like the Acoustic Boundaries that are now in the product line were just crazy ideas. I remember standing there next to that team space and looking and thinking, there’s no way that’s ever going to turn into products.

Chris:   Yeah.

Jim:   It was big. It was unclear to me what it was going to do, but they kept iterating on it and now I look at the Acoustic Boundary as product and I say, of course, and everyone who looks at it says, of course, that’s exactly what we wanted. We really had no idea. It was all about experimentation and by using it themselves, they discovered what was useful and what wasn’t.

Chris:   Yeah. The Acoustic Boundary for people who are listening to the podcast, I remember one of the working names was like a Sound Tree because in some ways almost this fabric that covers it. To me looked almost like bark, at least that’s how I associated it, but it almost looks like a tree, but it actually has sound absorbing properties, right?

Jim:   Yeah. It first of all, it helps you create space, so it’s a stand on wheels, you can move it around, it’s this gigantic monolith. It’s very difficult to describe it, but you grab it and you move it and suddenly you have a wall right where you wanted a wall just for a few minutes. It also absorbs sounds, so if you’re having a discussion with your colleagues and a few feet away, someone’s trying to concentrate, there is a sense of separation that’s also acoustic.

And finally it works pretty hard. It can hold whiteboards, it can hold tackable surfaces. It’s tackable itself. It does so many things. I think the reason it’s turned into such an interesting product though is because the team didn’t design it for someone else. They designed it for themselves.

Chris:   Interesting. So they designed it based on their own experience of what they were struggling with.

Jim:   That’s exactly right. And we, we put them in exactly that kind of space. So they were in the middle of this sea of people, sea of teams and by creating that product as a prototype, they began to surround themselves with the product and they would reconfigure it. Every time I went back there it was different somehow. I think they discovered… And so many parts of the Flex Collection actually grew up that way where the teams were using it for different purposes.

Another one is the simple product that we use to hold up whiteboards; this is the stand that you connect to whiteboards so you can set down your laptop. Again, it’s kind of a multipurpose device. It’s very simple, very elegant, and it does what it does very well.

Chris:   Yeah. You can surround yourself with literally whiteboards. You can, you can make your own little room out of whiteboards if you wanted.

Jim:   Yeah.

Chris:    A lot of teams do that.

Jim: I remember being in one of the product reviews, and of course in any product development project you have 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 different ideas and you have this moment where the team has to now begin to cull it back to what is actually going to have enough meaning for users that it stays in the line. And they had all these boards and all these ideas up on the boards and they were using the stand prototype to hold all those boards up. And I remember a point in the meeting where we said, well that’s definitely staying.

Chris:  Yeah. That was cool.

Jim:  We couldn’t have had this meeting without that product.

Chris: Yeah. That is really cool.

Jim:  I’m happy to see it make it to the end.

Rebecca:    So that’s cool to hear. Jim described the development process and what that looked like. And Steelcase Flex recently introduced a new part of the collection, which is Mobile Power. And it’s literally the idea that when you come into the office, you pick up your cup of coffee and you pick up your Mobile Power, take it with you, you can work in the cafe, you can work in these informal spaces and you have power with you for you and your team. Wherever you go.

Katie:  It really solves that need of what our VP of design, James Ludwig calls, power deserts?

Rebecca:   Yes.

Katie:  Right. These beautiful spaces that look good for Instagram, but nobody sits there because there is no power. Steelcase Flex Mobile Power is designed to solve for that.

Rebecca:    And this is nearing the end, Katie.

Katie:  This is the end.

Rebecca:  The part of our series, but before we go, we want to put a bow on it and we asked a lot of the people we talked to throughout these five episodes, what do they think the future truth is for the open office?

Katie:   So we’re going to hear from researcher Caroline Kelly first, then retired industry consultant, Dave Lathrop, journalist, Rob Kirkbride, and of course, O+A founder and designer Verda Alexander.

Caroline Kelly:   The future of the open office is human centered. I think the more we understand about how people really work, how their brains work at work and how their social constructs matter at work, we’re going to be able to more responsively both design open plan offices for them, but also empower them to adapt the office to their needs as their work evolves.

Dave Lathrop:   So I think the key is to be less deterministic about what they need, “and more open to a dialogue about who they are and what they want to do as they become these high performing humans that we hope they will be.” So my answer to, is there a future in the open offices? Of course there’s a future in the open office. It’s part of the scenario. It’s part of the landscape. It’s not the answer.

Rob Kirkbride:  Yeah. I think the easy answer would be to say choice, give people choice and where they should work. That’s the obvious answer. I think we also need to create products that help them to do that, to make good choices in the office. The industry does a good job in addressing some of these things, not so good in other ways, but obviously the open office is not a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just the way that the design is applied and if it’s applied well, people are happy with the place that they work.

Verda Alexander:   And so I think the office will be landing somewhere in between. We’ll be going back a little but we’ll of course not lose the progress that we’ve made in so many areas. Definitely open office is not going away.

Rebecca:   So before we go, we want to thank Chris, Jim and Panos for bringing us that conversation from York and we also want to remind you if you want any information that you’ve heard us talk about here, if you want to see Steelcase Flex, Steelcase Flex Mobile Power, Steelcase Rome, you can go to steelcase.com/openofficetruth where we’ve put all of that information along with a link to all five episodes in our series.

Katie:   Well Rebecca, this is it, this is the last episode.

Rebecca:  I’m sad, but I also know there’s a lot more good stuff to come.

Katie:   Yeah, there’s a lot more good stuff to come. So we have coming up a conversation with James Ludwig, our vice president of global design and engineering and he sat down with Steven Yang, who’s the CEO of Anchor Innovations, which is the organization that we worked with to develop the Steelcase Flex Mobile Power. Great conversation there. We also talk to Ingrid Fetell Lee on her book Joyful: the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Bring you Extraordinary Happiness. She was really interesting. Let’s listen to what she had to say.

Ingrid Fetell Lee:   Oh, it’s such a misconception, right? That joy and work are separate, because the reality is that little moments of joy can radically improve our performance at work.

Katie:  So that was a really fun conversation. And to make sure you don’t miss it by subscribing to What Workers Want, a Steelcase 360 Podcast and share this podcast with your friends in case they need a little joyful design or a little truth about the open office,

Rebecca:   I could always use a little more joy, right?

Katie:   Yes.

Rebecca:   So reminder; if you want to hear any previous episodes, go to steelcase.com/openofficetruth. We want to thank everybody for joining us. Katie. Thanks for hosting all of these episodes.

Katie:  Thank you, Rebecca, and that’s it. I can’t believe we made it.

Rebecca:    It’s a wrap.

Katie:   Five episodes that’s a wrap.