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Season 5 / Episode 14 / 48:38
Place attachment at work with Ryan Anderson | VP Global Research & Planning | MillerKnoll
Transcript
DA: Welcome to TEN, the Tenant Experience Network. I’m your host David Abrams. In each episode we bring you conversations with leading CRE industry professionals and experts who all have something to say about tenant experience and the future of the workplace. In today’s episode Ryan Anderson, VP of Global Research and Planning at MillerKnoll joins me for an insightful discussion around the intersection of furniture, place design and technology. We explore how Ryan’s dual passions, design and technology, come together to shape environments that foster connection, collaboration and well-being. From MillerKnoll’s mission to design for the good of mankind to the evolving purpose of workplaces, Ryan shares how well-designed spaces can now offer more value than ever before. We discuss the shift from individual desks to team-oriented neighborhoods, the concept of place attachment and how thoughtfully created environments like internal event spaces with a clubhouse mindset can nurture meaningful relationships among teams. If you’re curious about how workplaces can reimagine themselves to meet the needs of the modern world and how we can feel reattached to offices instead of merely returning to them, this episode is for you.
Now I’d like to welcome Ryan to the show. I am really glad you could be with us today and I am really looking forward to our conversation.
RA: David, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
DA: Awesome, awesome. So I always like to go back to the beginning, the very beginning. I’d love to understand your journey to your current position role and how you got started.
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RA: Yeah, it’s been 30 years for me in the furniture industry and it began with me as a student at Michigan State University telling my roommate, if there’s one thing I’m never gonna do it’s work in furniture. Could anything be more boring than being in furniture? But I was wrong. I live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This industry has been a part of what we do in this part of the world for a really long time. I got an internship when I was still in school at Michigan State with one of another furniture company that’s not one of our competitors but as I got involved in the industry, I was so surprised at how much interesting research was being done around physical spaces and how much care was taken in terms of really creative design, particularly around chairs, but not just chairs and I got hooked. I was like, wow, this is actually really interesting. We’re supporting people in all these different ways and in the 30 years since, my career has kind of toggled between a few different domains a lot of it’s been around research and development, but another major thread has just been around technology, looking at the effects of technology in terms of its impact on our business, but also on the world. So I’ve bounced between some digital roles and some R&D roles. I left this industry briefly to go into the prop tech world, which was a joy. I really, I really had fun but overall, the goal has always been how do we provide better work experiences, better experiences in physical environments that helps people to have just better lives.
DA: Amazing. I think your experience and your view of the world is going to be a really interesting lens to look through for this conversation. So I’m just curious, in looking through your resume, I did notice that there were a couple of moments where you were somewhere, you left, came back and I think that pattern was repeated. So I do have to ask, you know, tell me about that. What was that? I mean, you did it twice, I think.
RA: Oh, yeah. I’m a repeat boomeranger in this industry. So yeah, I started my career with another furniture company called Steelcase. Great company, treated me well. They’re also an excellent competitor. They make us better. I think we make them better and, you know, I got into it in the early years of college and was pretty much working full time by the time I graduated and I found it really interesting but there were a few times where I thought, did I fall into this or did I choose it? And so at one point in my career, this was right around 2000, I had moved to Chicago. I had met my now wife in Chicago and thought, well, I’m going to live here. Do I still want to be involved in an industry that’s a little bit more based in Michigan? And in particular, I’d grown really interested in purpose driven businesses. So this is before B Corps were necessarily around but there was this movement towards trying to understand how business could be better leveraged to improve the world. This is not just ESG goals and DEIB goals, but much more broadly and so I went back to grad school for a couple of years, left the industry, actually worked at the school where I went, but then ended up getting back involved in our furniture industry, in the world of interiors and corporate real estate, partly because I felt like there were some opportunities to improve the world from within this part of the business community. That led me to Herman Miller in 2012. I had read this book in grad school called Leadership is an Art by Max Dupree and my professor was like, this is the book you need to really understand about servant leadership and about progressive business practices and I opened up the first page and I learned it was written by a former Herman Miller CEO that I was unaware of. So ultimately, I started working at Herman Miller, found all sorts of just like awesome creative energy being within that part of our business. But it was what I mentioned earlier, it was this kind of fascination with technology that ultimately led me away from Herman Miller for a little while. What had happened was that I was starting to look at the role of physical work environments. Oh, I don’t know, late 90s, early 2000s. I remember the first organization I worked with that deployed Wi Fi, they didn’t even call it Wi Fi at the time, they just called it wireless and I saw all of these use patterns change, right? People were untethered from their cubicles. I remember thinking this is a seismic shift in how work is happening and so the more appetite I got for tech, not just in my previous life at Steelcase, but then at Herman Miller, I did occasionally think, should I go into the tech world? Is like this something that I’d be good at? And so yeah, I left to be head of marketing for a prop tech company that did resource scheduling, room scheduling, indoor wayfinding, etc. We sold that business to WeWork, where I spent a rather unusual six months of my career. It was fascinating and interesting. But during those six months, I thought, going back to Herman Miller, it feels like the right thing to do and it was just before the pandemic and in my first stint at Herman Miller, I’d actually spent years looking at the effects of remote and distributed work on teams and how different environments supported it and so while, you know, 2000 to 2003, were really challenging times, I had come back right around 2019 and a lot of what I had able to, you know, I had learned at Herman Miller, but also that I had learned just within the world of tech, was particularly useful in helping us to like move forward, as we thought about different versions of the workplace in a post pandemic world and then when we formed Miller Knoll, as this collective of 16 companies that includes Herman Miller, but also Knoll and others, I just had like a once once in a lifetime opportunity to create a pretty amazing team that conducts research and provides a bunch of help in designing these workplaces. So that’s a long way of saying I took like the scenic route a couple times, only to find that what I could do in this industry was more than what I had originally thought and so those digressions or those divergences from my original plan were really helpful and I still think every day about our mission, which is designed for the good of humankind, and what it means to work for a design led group of companies that hopefully are making people’s lives better.
DA: Right amazing. So a little bit off script, but two questions agree or disagree that during the initial days, maybe months of the pandemic, you wondered what role your business might have going forward? Agree or disagree?
RA: Disagree and here’s why I had this is really bizarre. But I so I do a lot of speaking. I had on two separate occasions done a talk and the last one I did on this topic was in November of 2019 at the Festival of Innovation in Sao Paulo and the talk was basically if you want to understand the future of the office, you should imagine closing your offices for a couple years. This was just like a thought exercise that we had gone through and we had already done this. We already looked at remote first companies and other organizations that had decided to close their offices and go go entirely remote and then decided that no, some physical hubs were really useful, but in a whole different context than what we viewed as the traditional office. So no, I personally believed that while what was happening was extremely challenging and tragic, that this would be a massive acceleration, a 10 or 20 year acceleration in how we viewed offices and I got a chance to write a piece for Work Design magazine right in 2020 that that basically addressed the question I was being asked the most, which is, do we still need offices anymore? And my take was, nobody’s saying that about restaurants. You’ve been cooking in your home for six months, and you’ve learned you can do all this, but you cherish something about the dining experience and about the role of restaurants in your life that you’re not getting from an office. So we have to get to the point where we say, of course, we could work from our homes indefinitely, but there are limitations and at the edge of those limitations is where the next generation of office begins. So for me, it was an accelerant.
DA: I think I no doubt it was an accelerant, but I think you had the advantage of having gone through that thought exercise, you know, without the pandemic in sight and so you already potentially saw that future. You, that was a little visionary, I think and, you know, because my point was, you know, I was thinking maybe you would agree that, you know, there was a moment in time when we wondered, but I think my next question would have been, I think you’ll agree also that your business now is so critically important in this conversation going forward, and maybe more so than ever before.
RA: I hope so. I hope so. I also just need to give a shout out to all my colleagues. We were pretty diversified. Like Herman Miller was already doing residential furniture, outdoor furniture. We launched our first gaming chair for gamers in July of 2020. So I’m very thankful that, yes, we had a vision of what the workplace might look like in a world where no one had to go to an office. But we also had these other parts of our business that kept us rolling during some really lean financial times, allowed us to expand into becoming Miller Knoll. But, yeah, actually, I’ll tell you just a quick side story. I used to be a high school debater and a debate coach. I’ve always felt it was the most formative activity of my career and in 2012, this guy named Paul Miller, who led this group or leads this group called Digital Workplace Group, kind of a consortium of organizations that were really into remote, challenged me to a public debate in London on whether or not offices were needed in an era of mobile technologies and so it was prepping for this debate with Paul in 2012 or 2013 that caused me to say, I better go look and try to understand how companies that don’t have any workplaces are doing and how do they make it work, only to find that the vast majority of remote first companies had spaces. They might have called them hubs or studios or something else. They weren’t just rows of desks to come do email. They were a little bit more like what we saw from consulting firms in the 90s, where the consulting firms were saying, our people are at clients three days a week. Let’s build some sort of hub where they want to gather on Fridays to build culture and and so that whole exercise was kind of serendipitous in that it forced me to try to argue the case that physical work environments weren’t valuable, only to find that they’re very valuable, even in a situation where you never are required to be in an office.
DA: Right, super interesting. You know, since launching this podcast, we’ve always strived to provide sort of a real time view into the commercial estate industry, you know, what was really happening and we launched in July 2020. So, you know, in any given month with any given guest, it was always, you know, let’s just talk about what’s really happening and get away from sort of the the media hype and, you know, our conversation was always around the future of work and how and where people work. You know, my feeling today, and I think you’ll agree, is that we’re at a point in time where the conversation should just be about doing great work and not where we work and that, however, that being said, that, you know, places and spaces can be just, you know, you so with such importance and provide such a and to contribute to this whole notion of building great companies. So I’m interested in discussing how commercial real estate is going to continue to respond and evolve to these emerging needs of people. You know, what role technology will play in this in-person and virtual world, you know, how and how the two shall come together. So let’s dive in. Great. I’m curious if you can share with our listeners, you know, how your business is continuing to evolve and innovate to meet the needs of your customer and sort of what factors are driving or influencing the direction you’re taking.
RA: Yeah, I would say there’s some amazing things happening on the product side, which I’ll get to in a minute. But probably the biggest thing we’ve had to do is just amplify the ways that we help make sense of the world for a lot of the organizations we serve and this would be true of, you know, businesses doing corporate space, but also health care, higher education environments, less so on the residential side but I think we believe more than ever that if we look at offices as an example, that a well-designed office can offer more value in this world of highly distributed work than they once did. If I look at some of the research we’ve done around how spaces can positively impact relationships, how it can strengthen community, how being together can improve psychological safety, which improves smart risk taking, like there’s a lot of business outcomes that anybody involved in commercial real estate I think needs to be able to link to in ways that maybe haven’t been done in the past, because it’s not just an assumed necessity that if you’ve got X number of people, you need X amount of square meters or square feet of space. We’ve got to get intentional about saying, hey, technology allows us to do a whole bunch of things, but it also has some major limitations and in particular, if you look at how the user faces of today’s software, interfaces of today’s software, I’m thinking like Slack and Teams and Miro and Miro, wonderful tools. They really are optimized to be used individually from individual devices. You don’t see the emphasis on group technology so much anymore and if we let the use of that technology continue to its extreme, it pulls us apart. It actually is causing fractures in the ways that we relate to each other on a deeper level. We’ve worked with some research partners to better understand how in recent years there’s been an increase in the amount of digital interaction that people have had, while simultaneously seeing a decrease in the sense of belonging, interpersonal connectivity. In the U.S., our Surgeon General has declared an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness at a time when the tech usage is very high. So when we think tech and real estate, my brain immediately goes to what are the technologies that help to facilitate in-person connection? I mean, those I think are of immediate value but then also, how does the space, yes, support the use of tech, but counterbalance some of the negative extremes? I mean, we need spaces where people can have really rich, unstructured, content-rich dialogue in ways that you just can’t over a Zoom call. Typically, we need that informal tacit mentoring and learning. We need people to be able to connect that have no reason to be on a meeting together, what sociologists call wheat ties and so these physical environments, I don’t ever want to sound like a Luddite because we can use technology to make them richer, but we should be doing it for the sake of creating richer in-person experiences, knowing full well that most people are not saying on a daily basis, I’m going to go into the office because I really want to take a video call. Like, you can do that pretty well from home and elsewhere, but they are saying, and we’ve got an overwhelming amount of data to support this, that I really will go in if I can find some sort of meaningful interaction with either my boss or my co-workers or members of other teams that I’m just not getting very well from the average day using my common technology tools.
DA: Right. I think that’s a perfect segue to my next question, which is all around the office footprint and we’d love to hear how you think space requirements are changing and more importantly, from utilization perspective, what are your observations around the purpose of space and how in turn does that purpose influence engagement and the experience? Because I’m hearing stories of some companies taking more space to facilitate this new world and some people taking less and maybe taking less, but perhaps in different locations. So I’m just curious what you’re seeing.
RA: Yeah, we’ve seen that variety too. If I had to generalize, I would say we’re seeing more organizations, and this won’t surprise you, going with a smaller footprint, but better space, better fit out, better quality of engagement, better buildings, while overall shrinking their portfolio a bit. But having said that, I think what organizations are discovering is that we’ve been using, I’m going to use some design lingo here for a bit, we’ve been using activity-based working as a basis for design for 40 years and what that means is a typical office design, you’d say, well, what are the activities that these folks need to do here? Do we have the range of spaces to support those activities? That’s still a really good thing to do, but there’s this underlying risk because most of those activities you can do somewhere else and if you can do them in your home, then you have more control over that environment and so as we move towards what we have kind of nicknamed a more relationship-based approach to planning, where organizations are saying somehow, and they use different terms, somehow the culture or the connectivity or the collaboration or camaraderie, all those words, somehow we have to see people relating to each other in new and better ways as that becomes a priority, it drives different space requirements and I’ll give you a few examples. One would be, we’re seeing a resurgence in what’s called neighborhood-based planning, which is basically a way of saying, maybe individual desks aren’t owned by individuals, but a grouping of desks and other types of spaces like project space, maybe some focus space can be owned by a group and the benefit of that is that there’s a predictability that if I come into the office, I might not know who’s in on Tuesday, but I know where my team’s going to be and we have ownership over that space and we can make it a little bit messy and we can change a few things and we can bring in some team artifacts that maybe live on for a while, even if we’re not in the space. It changes the occupancy planning for sure. It’s different than a completely shared group activity-based working sort of environment. It’s different than traditional occupancy planning, but it has the scalability of, if you add a few people, you’re not adding desks, but also that predictability of, I know where my people are. Other examples would be, we’re seeing a bunch of organizations taking excess space and building internal events spaces, like really well-designed events environments that are also supported operationally, where you can turn a space and have it be way better than a hotel ballroom. But in that case, you’ve got different teams coming in for strategic planning sessions, all-hand meetings, maybe it’s 30 people, 60 people, or a hundred people. If an organization decides to do that, it drastically changes the space requirements and in many cases, we’re seeing organizations that maybe own and occupy their facilities using extra space for that sort of things. But dedicated project space, cafeterias, all these different types of environments that can connect people, it’s different than just saying we’re going to do X number of square feet per employee and most of it’s based around a desk. So it has changed. I don’t think it’s the wild, wild west. I don’t think it’s totally unpredictable, but it all relates to, can we identify for this given project, what we’re hoping to improve in the ways that people interact with each other?
DA: I love the notion of the neighborhood. I think that’s really interesting thinking. I know that hoteling, and I know you wrote about it in a recent article in Forbes, has not necessarily translated well or produced positive impact, particularly with the users, the end user who now don’t have any sense of belonging or connection to space. This notion of neighborhoods where you can have not necessarily an assigned desk, but an assigned space where you can come and go and create some ownership. I love that. I think that’s brilliant. Very cool.
RA: Yeah, it’s kind of a clubhouse mindset and we’ve got, I had the privilege of hosting a friend who leads real estate at Genentech on our podcast recently talking about their approach to neighborhoods. There’s something about the ownership of it as a group that still allows you to connect and I’m fascinated by many kind of frameworks from the world of social science that can improve workplace, but I know sometimes it makes me sound like a geek, but one of them is called place attachment. Place attachment is an idea from the world of environmental psychology that suggests that we have relationships with places. It’s why we sit at the same chair at the dining room table most days, or we have the same seat at temple or church, or we love the same table at the bar. Like we might say we’re creatures of habit, but it’s actually way beyond that. We form these connections with these environments and they have a meaning to us and I’m concerned that I’ve seen a lot of organizations implement shared desking in the last couple of years in a way that worsens, not improves this disconnect that people are having. I don’t think the goal is returned to office. I think the goal is reattached to office and if you take the one thing that has someone’s name off, you risk exacerbating the situation but the idea of a team neighborhood is you’re here in the office to interact largely with others, and there’s no group that’s more important than your immediate team and so take this space and make it work for you and you might not have the picture of your dog on a specific desk, but you just get this vibe that this is ours and I think that’s a powerful concept, and we’ve seen it in many parts of the world be successful. I think we’re going to see a lot more of it in the US and Canada.
DA: Right. Well, along that lines, I think the language maybe needs to be love where you work. You’ve got to love it. You’ve got to want to be there. It’s got to be a place that you choose to be, right? I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. Just curious. I like to give our guests an opportunity to sort of dream. If budget and resources were not an issue, what three, one or two or three new initiatives would you undertake to position your business for success over the next three to five years? You got a blank check. What would you do?
RA: And if I understand the question correctly, it’s a blank check within Millerknoll to be able to go do.
DA: Yeah, within the sphere of influence, within the sphere of work that you do, what would you love to sort of really reimagine or innovate or create something new?
RA: Yeah, I probably would create, and this relates so much to what my team does, because we not only do research, but we’re providing advisory services. I would go launch a bunch of workshops or other engagements with CEOs and CHROs and others around the topic of, do you know what this space can do for your business? Like, let’s just start there. Like, have you ever considered, you know, if you’ve got DEIB goals, have you ever considered the power of the space and helping people to feel like they belong? If you’ve got innovation goals, have you ever taken a stronger look at the physical environments as you have your tool sets? Because what I find, and it’s always a privilege when I hear this, but when we really engage with an organization, there’s usually this moment where someone says, I had no idea you could help with this stuff. Like, I saw you as furniture or textiles or the things we do. I never thought that we would be in a conversation about what it looks like for this space to help our employees take bigger risks and smarter risks. But if you get into, you know, kind of the science behind this, it’s not difficult to draw those connections. I just fear that our whole industry, and it’s not just Miller Knoll, it’s some of the best design firms out there, commercial real estate firms. We’ve got a ton of knowledge. I’m just so concerned that it doesn’t get to all the people who could use it to go transform these environments in ways that I see happening more in healthcare environments or more in some cases in educational environments. Somehow that magic wand would allow me and others to just completely disrupt whatever comes to mind when most people think office. Because I don’t think it’s a good connotation for a lot of the people who think that way.
DA: Well, maybe there’s a project for 2025 coming out of this conversation.
RA: Maybe, maybe and you know, what I never got back to, and so I’ll just add on to my answer, is from a product innovation standpoint, what’s going on at Miller Knoll is my counterpart in product development, Sean McDowell, who came to us from Nike and a whole host of other amazing roles, is going through this sustainability just like revolution in our product portfolio, decarbonizing it, thinking about life cycle in ways that in 30 years I’ve never seen and so it just hearkens back once again to, you can view all this stuff, you know, you can view a lease and you can view the interior design services and the furnishings as necessary evils in order to support work, or you can begin to say, if we really are intentional about this, how did these investments produce a much better world in the end? And I think it’s totally within grasp. I just don’t think most people think that way.
DA: Right, you know, it connects to so many other, you know, goals and objectives, you know, either by the occupier or by the real estate owner operator that, you know, that they have in and around ESG, sustainability and so forth. So it’s really closing that circle and just connecting them all together. It’s pretty interesting. I think we can agree, you and I are probably aligned that, you know, building owners, operators are no longer in the space rental business, that they really need to help create what I call destinations of choice, places where people want to be and that experience, and we’ve been talking about this all over the place is really becoming, you know, the new driver and not unlike the hotel industry where, you know, this notion of hospitality, where people come into a different hotel every day and they’re, you know, every day it’s something unique and special and I think that commercial real estate used to be sort of built, you know, build it and they will come and, you know, you didn’t think about it again for five years or 10 years. So, you know, I think we now recognize that we need to cater to the person each and every day that walks into that building. So, you know, we lump all that in and around the notion of customer experience. We see that as the huge driver now of utilization and engagement across all asset classes, not just office. But I’m just wondering that notion of experience, customer experience, how do you see that, you know, impacting your business? Is that phenomenon playing out in some unique way for you as well?
RA: Oh, it is. Yeah, and I think we’ve thought this way for a while. I won’t go too far back, but in particular, if you look at the roots of Herman Miller’s design, it was based in a philosophy that was sometimes called office landscaping back in the sixties and seventies that we were trying to create urban planning type environments with a mindset of like city dwellers within the environment and desktop computing kind of steered the whole world towards cubicles and a whole different work experience but having a more user-centered idea that we could have workplaces be desirable and kind of a rich tapestry of experiences isn’t new. But in recent years, I think for better or for worse, having more remote technologies and more distributed teams has caused a lot of people to see offices and workplaces as a product that have competition and that whether it’s a landlord or an owner, like those are product owners and you have to be in touch with the people that you serve in order to, much like if I go back to the world of software as a service, to be able to evolve the product in a way that responds to their evolving needs. If I look at our research in the last year, my mind, David, immediately goes to what we’ve seen in Australia. We did a whole series of site visits across Melbourne and Sydney and Adelaide in September and you’re probably familiar with this, but the incentives from a lease standpoint are pretty high in Australia and a lot of the tenants and various workplace strategy consultants are very open to more experimentation and so going to like a nice building in Sydney, you’re gonna see end of trip resources. So like bike storage, showers, towel service, in some cases massage as a building amenity. You’re gonna see flex space beyond just a little room of coworking. You’re gonna see a dynamic set of group spaces that can be used on demand. Lots in the way of rich restaurants, bars, co-located within commercial areas, right within businesses and then when you get into the actual tenant space, they do, they have a feel of like a really upscale airport lounge in some situations where you can toggle between very social moments and very heads down moments. So whatever the proxy wants to be, a hotel or an airport lounge or a restaurant or whatever, I don’t think we’re literally creating those types of spaces but I think we’re using them as a proxy to say what about that experience has to translate into coming into the office and then ultimately the office still needs to be a really excellent place to go do work within those experiences. The last thing I’ll share with you is if our listeners haven’t ever checked it out, I find the report from Atlassian, the technology company, who’s, I’m very thankful, they’re a great customer of ours, which is called 1,000 Days of Distributed to be a fascinating report because here’s an instance of a tech company who in 2020 decided to allow people to work wherever, never have to come back to the office, but since then have expanded their number of locations and are building a new headquarters and in that report, they list the reasons why they still have spaces and one of them is all about like the connection between their employees. The second one is this sense of belonging within the brand and the third one, this is their term, not mine, is getting shit done and so if we really hone in on what people are looking for and treat them as customers in this new kind of era, it’s about going and being able to do your work as part of a community of people that are really in it together and connected and feeling that sense of shared purpose and that’s very different than what the traditional office layout has communicated.
DA: Right. I love it. Great example. Thank you so much for sharing that. Let’s take a short commercial break and we will be right back to continue the conversation.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
DA: And now I’d like to welcome back to the show, Ryan Anderson, VP of Global Research and Planning at Miller Knoll. Thanks again so much for being with us today. Thank you.
Let’s talk, we’ve skirted all around tech. You’ve left the furniture industry and done some tech. You’ve recognized that there’s so much tech conversation to be had within your industry.
So commercial real estate is continuing to be impacted by the introduction of new technologies. They’re playing a huge role in helping to shape the way building operators and occupiers are engaging with their customer, the end user, their tenants, their employees. What are you seeing from a technology perspective in terms of tech stack, either in your business or around your business that’s really having impact for you?
RA: Well, I don’t think this will surprise you at all because I’m pretty sure we have a shared philosophy here, but some of the most powerful technology advances within buildings are those that are reaching out to the user and helping to facilitate better experiences within the building, right? So we can look at tech broadly. If we look at the technologies we use for our daily productivity, as I mentioned, they tend to favor being used individually.
There’s this old concept of the atomized individual, which suggests that the more that we use our tech, the more it kind of physically and emotionally disconnects us from others and so I don’t think that we should conceptualize offices as the ultimate place to take that video call, the ultimate place to work on a spreadsheet. Don’t get me wrong, it needs to do that well, but the office does need to be the ultimate place.
Video fatigue is real. I get very concerned about the 93% of the 10,000 people we surveyed a year ago that said they deeply need more schedule flexibility because over-scheduled video meetings is suffocating. So yeah, I would say those come to mind, but only to an extent.
DA: Cool as commercial real estate continues to evolve, and the related industries, what skills do you think are gonna become sought after as operators look to ensure that the industry remains vibrant and relevant? But what don’t they have now that they really ought to be thinking about in the future?
RA: Yeah, the top two for me would be, and they’re related. One is around user engagement as an example, one of the best things any organization can do before starting a facilities project is go interview members of their employee resource groups. Like if they’ve got working parents, people of color, veterans, like go engage with these people. Don’t just ask some VP of something. What do your people need? And then base an entire workplace design on that kind of speculation. So it gets back to what you were talking about earlier, David, with that customer type experience. We need people within commercial and corporate real estate that know how to talk with end users. The second part, and I said it, it might even be the same thing as change management. If I were resourcing like a corporate real estate team or if I were looking at a commercial real estate partner, I’m recognizing that every facilities project is a change management project and virtually every facilities project is in response to some sort of talent decision and so the days of saying, we’ll build it and they’ll love it and we’ll give them these four types of spaces and they’ll all use it is like, no, we have to bring people along a journey that says, you told us these were the experiences you deeply miss. Look, we’re changing the space to facilitate it. Now, who’s gonna get out there and begin using it and telling others about it? All of the strategists advisors on my team are ProSci change management certified. I’m not, but I can’t think of a single significant project we’ve done where whether somebody called it out or not, someone needs to understand change management.
DA: Right, that’s a great insight. Final question, if you were not doing what you’re doing right now, we already know that you’ve left and come back several times but if you weren’t doing it for whatever reason, what would you do instead?
RA: I would probably lead a think tank or a foundation that is focused on achieving change at a bigger scale. The other caveat I would say, and I know that most people will be listening to this audio wise, so they can’t see the number of tattoos on my arm of fish, but I always wanted to be a marine biologist or an ecologist or an oceanographer. I live right near Lake Michigan. It has been like an anchor for me throughout my years in Michigan and Chicago and so I would say at a practical level, I’d probably go do some nonprofit thing, but if I really set myself crazy, I’d be like in the middle of some body of water studying fish and being surrounded by just that beautiful ecosystem.
DA: That’s a great answer and I like the fact that you took it in both directions. Listen, Ryan, this was a phenomenal conversation, great to connect. I learned a lot. I know our listeners will benefit from listening as well. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for being so open and I’m looking forward to this being the first of many conversations that we have. I think there’s a lot of alignment. I think there’s a lot of common subjects that we’re both exploring and I’d love to continue the conversation as we move forward and I wish you all the best and again, thanks so much for joining me today.
RA: It’s a privilege. I’m appreciative of you and what you do and I’m very thankful to have spent some time with you today.
DA: Amazing. We’ll reconnect again soon. Thanks.
That’s a wrap on today’s episode of 10. I want to thank Ryan for joining me on the program. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review. It helps others find the show. Thanks for listening and until next time, I wish you all continued success in building community where you work and live.

The impact of tenant behavior on the built environment with Julie Whelan | SVP, Global Head of Occupier Thought Leadership | CBRE
Season 6 / Episode 1 / 43:03
In this episode, Julie joins David to dive into the people side of CRE and how tenant behavior is shaping the built environment. Julie combines her two passions—commercial real estate and understanding how people use and interact with spaces—to explore the evolving experience of the workplace.

TEN Season 5 Highlights
In season 5 of the Tenant Experience Network (TEN) podcast, host David Abrams has had 15 inspiring conversations with some exceptional leaders at the forefront of innovation and technology in commercial real estate. Have a listen to some of our favorite clips.

Unlocking CRE insights with Adam Jacobs | National Head of Research | Colliers
Season 5 / Episode 13 / 44:20
In this episode, Adam covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of data on occupancy levels, how CRE is responding to changes in the marketplace due to the pandemic, and the realities of demand and occupancy in urban vs. suburban locations.

AI, data, and the future of sustainable real estate with Gary Chance | CEO | Nantum AI
Season 5 / Episode 12 / 37:17
In this episode, Gary shares how his team is utilizing the latest technology and data to write better algorithms that save real estate tenants and owners more money, energy, and ultimately, to provide a better indoor experience overall. If you’re interested in AI and the impact it’s having on the built world, this episode is for you.

The impact of tenant behavior on the built environment with Julie Whelan | SVP, Global Head of Occupier Thought Leadership | CBRE
Season 6 / Episode 1 / 43:03
In this episode, Julie joins David to dive into the people side of CRE and how tenant behavior is shaping the built environment. Julie combines her two passions—commercial real estate and understanding how people use and interact with spaces—to explore the evolving experience of the workplace.

TEN Season 5 Highlights
In season 5 of the Tenant Experience Network (TEN) podcast, host David Abrams has had 15 inspiring conversations with some exceptional leaders at the forefront of innovation and technology in commercial real estate. Have a listen to some of our favorite clips.

Unlocking CRE insights with Adam Jacobs | National Head of Research | Colliers
Season 5 / Episode 13 / 44:20
In this episode, Adam covers a wide range of topics, including the impact of data on occupancy levels, how CRE is responding to changes in the marketplace due to the pandemic, and the realities of demand and occupancy in urban vs. suburban locations.

AI, data, and the future of sustainable real estate with Gary Chance | CEO | Nantum AI
Season 5 / Episode 12 / 37:17
In this episode, Gary shares how his team is utilizing the latest technology and data to write better algorithms that save real estate tenants and owners more money, energy, and ultimately, to provide a better indoor experience overall. If you’re interested in AI and the impact it’s having on the built world, this episode is for you.