Exploring Connection, Comfort, and Community in Workspaces
Ryan Anderson, VP of Global Research and Insights at MillerKnoll, joined us on The Future of Work® Podcast to unpack how we can create better workspaces that prioritize community, comfort, and connection. From rethinking office design to understanding global team dynamics, this episode explored what it takes to create environments that truly support people at work.
Mixed-Use Cities: A Solution for Loneliness and Sustainability?
We started by imagining a bold idea: what if cities like New York prioritized mixed-use buildings, blending residential and commercial spaces? Ryan shared how this concept could revitalize urban life, reduce isolation, and repurpose underused office spaces.
“Social isolation is an epidemic,” Ryan noted, emphasizing that rethinking space isn’t just practical—it’s essential for human connection.
Key Takeaway: Reimagining offices into living spaces or shared environments, like student housing or co-living for seniors, can create healthier, more connected communities.
The Power of Place: Designing for Relationships
Ryan introduced the idea of “relationship-based work” and how the physical workplace plays a role in building strong and weak social ties.
“People want quality relationships and a sense of belonging at work,” he explained.
From cafes to flexible meeting spaces, Ryan highlighted how design can encourage collaboration across teams, creating moments of spontaneous connection.
Key Takeaway: Offices should balance spaces for focus, collaboration, and community to meet diverse employee needs.
Rethinking Workspaces for Local Nomads
We explored the rise of the “local nomad”—employees who split their time between home, coworking spaces, and offices. Ryan stressed the importance of ergonomic support across all these environments.
“Comfort is the absence of awareness,” he quoted, emphasizing how small design choices impact well-being and productivity.
Key Takeaway: Employers need to invest in both physical and emotional comfort, ensuring employees thrive wherever they work.
Bridging Cultures in Distributed Teams
Ryan’s insights into managing global teams revealed the importance of understanding cultural nuances. With employees spanning continents, MillerKnoll focuses on creating localized designs that reflect the needs of diverse communities.
“You can’t impose one geography’s thinking on another,” he said, urging organizations to adopt a participatory design approach.
Key Takeaway: A tailored, inclusive strategy builds stronger teams and supports cross-cultural collaboration.
The Role of AI and Technology in Workspaces
While AI and automation promise to streamline work, Ryan cautioned against overhyping technologies like AR/VR. Instead, he sees tools like AI editors and smart building systems making everyday tasks easier.
“AI reduces the rote parts of work, letting people focus on what matters most,” Ryan shared.
Key Takeaway: Technology should enhance—not replace—human connection and creativity.
Looking Ahead: Trends to Watch
As we closed, Ryan forecasted three major trends shaping the next five years:
- Balancing Flexibility and In-Person Time: Employees seek autonomy over their schedules while valuing meaningful in-person interactions.
- Building Belonging: Creating environments where employees feel valued and connected is a top priority.
- Investing in Teams: Managers and team dynamics play a critical role in employee satisfaction and retention.
Final Reflection
This episode reminded us that the heart of any workplace is its people. By designing for community, comfort, and connection, organizations can build spaces that not only support work but enrich lives.
So, how can we create workspaces that foster genuine human connection? That’s the challenge—and the opportunity—before us.
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What follows is the transcript of the full episode.
Frank Cottle [00:00:00]: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast. I’m your host, Frank Cottle and today we’re going full throttle into 2025 with Ryan Anderson, Vice president of global research and insights at Miller Knoll. Together we’ll explore how workplaces are evolving by blending technology, design and community to create environments that equally support belonging and productivity. Ryan shares his unique perspective on how organizations can navigate distributed, hybrid and globally connected. But here’s the question. In a time when technology keeps us more connected yet increasingly isolated, how do we ensure the future of work brings us closer together? Let’s find out. Ryan, welcome to the Future of Work. Really excited to have you back again, my friend and God, nobody knows more about what’s going on than Miller Knoll. You guys, amazing studies. You see architecture of every sort. You see the way space is used, probably better than anybody I know in the world. So I’m going to ask you a question, I’m going to ask you a question as we start. And it’s kind of goofy, kind of goofy, but there’s been a lot of property sold in Manhattan and London lately, office buildings and an awful lot of conversion to residential. So what if this, what if the cities, what if New York, I know this is crazy, but what if New York said there are no new building permits are going to be issued, aside from mixed use, aside from a mix of residential and commercial together, how would that change the future of work? How would that change the way we work in 15 minute cities and all the concepts that if someone had the courage to do that.
Ryan Anderson [00:01:54]: Yeah, great question and thank you for having me. It’s great to see you, my friend. There’s several things that come to my mind, but I think it could have immediately positive effects on the health of cities, particularly if those requirements for mixed use ensured that something other than luxury, extremely expensive condos were the housing solution. I mean, I think of all of the ways that people used to live in cities. You know, people used to live in hotels. That was like a normal way of living. There were other sorts of housing arrangements. I’m thinking in this moment of Diane Lynn’s book Brave New Home. There are ideas floating around as an example of how you can take a more traditional office design with private offices around the perimeter of let’s say a class B or C building and turn it into student housing or co living for the elderly, where each of those office become basically private rooms with shared amenities in the open. And those shared amenities might not be a copy center or a training room. They might be a kitchenette Or a place to play board games. So.
Frank Cottle [00:03:07 ]: Excuse me for interrupting, but wasn’t that part of the concept of WeWorks, We Live Co living structure?
Ryan Anderson [00:03:16]: Yeah. So I was at WeWork for a while and yes, one of the concepts was we live in kind of a, an emphasis on what co living could be. I don’t think it’s a well understood concept, but I do think that co living in all of its forms, this could be retirement communities, college dormitories, et cetera, offer unique living opportunities and helps to address something that is affecting our lives and our work, which is just the high degree of social isolation and loneliness that exists across the world. But in particularly in the west, our Surgeon General here in the US has declared an epidemic of social isolation and loneliness. So there’s a practical side to what you’re describing. It’ll rejuvenate cities. It’ll certainly help with the use of offices and other workplaces. But there’s also a positive potential social dynamic if we were to head down this path. And certainly there is an environmental sustainability one too. It’s not like we don’t have enough buildings. The challenge is we have buildings that people don’t want and other people, well.
Frank Cottle [00:04:17 ]: They don’t get to use them 8 hours a day or 10 hours a day.
Ryan Anderson [00:04:20]: Yep, exactly.
Frank Cottle [00:04:21 ]: And that, that’s, that’s the problem. It, it’s. Maybe this is a horrible example, but it’s a lot like church properties that are used on Sundays as a utilization of the asset and real estate. It should be used 247 spiritually. It probably should, considering the state of the world. But different types of properties have different efficiencies. And office buildings for their stated purpose are pretty good. They’re a good place to work, they’re very efficient, but only for a very limited amount of time during the day, a third of the day. And that means that you have a wasting asset. The other two thirds.
Ryan Anderson [00:05:05 ]: Yeah, we’ve seen some really good examples though, of people breaking that mold. I’m thinking as an example, there’s a building that not a lot of people know about that I consider to be one of the most interesting progressive workplaces on the planet. Called the Ledger in Bentonville, Arkansas, which you could describe as a flex space.
Frank Cottle [00:05:22 ]: Yeah, I haven’t been there. Yeah, I was last year. I was there last year.
Ryan Anderson [00:05:26 ]: Isn’t it fascinating?
Frank Cottle [00:05:28 ]: Amazing fine art museum in Bentonville.
Ryan Anderson [00:05:30 ]: It’s part art museum, it’s part event space. It’s co working. It’s. There’s not necessarily a residential component of it. But as an example of a space that was co designed with the community in mind, I mean, you can even reserve time to go take pictures for Instagram there. It’s that cool of space. And as you know, because Bentonville is the mountain biking capital of the US it’s also a bikeable building with switchbacks on the exterior to allow you to, to go right from the trails into the building. So all of this sort of experimentation around how do you get better use, multifunctional use, more flexible use, but also just a greater investment and kind of permission from the community, I think that’s really powerful. We have very public and very private places, but there’s a spectrum within them of privileged environments that I think more people want to be able to access.
Frank Cottle [00:06:21 ]: Well, you know, the co working industry, I’ll use that term, has been stressing the concept of communities since its development, since its initial development. Prior to that it was business centers and things of that nature, which also had a sense of community. But co working has really made that an element of. It’s one of the key purposes of the facility itself is that function or can you extend that function into a work, live environment? I mean, work, live cities had communal ovens even 200 years ago, even 100 years ago, communal ovens, communal water. A whole variety of places where everybody went to do certain things, things within the community. I know my wife and I used to windsurf down in Mexico a lot. And we stayed in a little village on the East Cape of Baja. Sailing was amazing. But it was about a 45 minute mountain bike ride to the next nearest village where the telephone was okay. And that one telephone operator, it was amazing. An old, old, old mitel switch with runoff batteries. I mean, it was just an amazing thing. There would be a line of people going in there to use the different booths and the operator would place calls. So this sounds really rustic, right? I think, I swear marriages were arranged there, families got together there, holidays were planned there. Everybody did everything about the phone. They all went to that one common place for that. As soon as mobiles came into the area, all the villages fragmented. They all fragmented. They all became isolated. And so in the extreme, that’s what you’re talking about, that has happened. We’ve all fragmented overall.
Ryan Anderson [00:08:28 ]: Yeah. With technology as the primary enabler of this concept of an atomized individual. If you look at the user interfaces of most of our software and the availability of all of these hardware devices, they promote, maybe inadvertently, but us doing most of the key activities we want to do by Ourselves physically removed from others, whether that’s watching movies streaming as opposed to being in a theater, or whether it’s taking video calls individually versus being in a room. And so I don’t ever want to appear to be a Luddite, but we have to recognize that the natural force of technology is to cause a degree of physical separation and to be optimized for individual use cases. So whereas that community building and that kind of communal experience you described in the past was a necessity, today it’s a design challenge. Like, we actually have to figure out what it looks like to enable people to really thrive in different community moments, because it doesn’t happen organically with the way that our behaviors are evolving.
Frank Cottle [00:09:32 ]: No, I completely agree with that. How does that relate to relationship based work or things like place, attachment and by the way, technology? I was driving back from Dallas yesterday and I had an argument with Siri on directions and she won. You know, we had a full discussion about the route.
Ryan Anderson [00:09:55 ]: Yeah, I get that. And I don’t go anywhere without waves. Don’t get me wrong, these tools are incredibly helpful from an efficiency standpoint. But as it pertains to this concept of relationship based work, or planning for relationship based work, that’s a framework that we’ve been talking about lately. It’s a new construct, but it’s just drawing on really good design principles. And it acknowledges that in particular, when it comes to workplace, people are voicing a strong need to spend more quality time together to balance the use of technology with interpersonal experiences and interactions that are very difficult to achieve on video or on chat, etc. And so when we look at the copious amounts of research that either we’ve done or our thought partners have done, we consistently see terms like community, camaraderie, you know, in person, meetings, collaboration, as the reasons that people cite for being together. But when you peel it back a little farther, it’s just they want to have quality relationships and exist within a broader community at work, because that’s what companies and organizations are. They’re, they’re social networks. And you don’t want everybody operating like freelancers. You want people to come together with some sort of shared sense of purpose. And so we can draw upon a variety of frameworks from the world of social sciences to help explain why certain types of workplace design are so much more appealing, so much more enticing to different people. And place attachments, one of them. I mean, there’s a few that come to mind. I’ll chat about place attachment just for a second. But I’m also thinking about psychological safety, the existence of strong and weak ties, bridging social capital. Like there’s all these frameworks that if you take them and apply them specifically to workplaces, can lead you to really rich design solutions that maybe you wouldn’t come to if we take a more traditional approach to workplace design around activities or tasks or the sort of things.
Frank Cottle [00:11:56 ]: I got to jump in for a second on relationship based work and everything you said about the quality of relationships. Absolutely agree, but I’m going to use two phrases. Familiarity breeds contempt and absence makes the heart grow fonder. So I’m going to use those two phrases and say relationships. And this deals with return to office versus hybrid versus remote versus all these different work styles that we’re embracing right now. How do you balance out my two goofy phrases with return to office versus remote hybrid? Where is the this blend where you can have the quality relation? The best conversations I have are with friends that I haven’t seen for a while. Then we really dig into stuff together. The least interesting things I have are with people that I see all day long, every day. And we might get together on a sidecar or on a thing, but we don’t discuss interesting stuff in the office. We discuss side of the office, interesting stuff. How do you balance that in the work environment and the design environment which you were talking about?
Ryan Anderson [00:13:27 ]: Yeah, I think it’s with an intent to support both. So I mentioned the term strong and weak ties. That’s a sociological framework from a guy named Granovetter. And basically the idea is that those people that you see every day, those closest relationships, are strong ties. That’s our support structure for getting through the work week and just through life in general. All of our extended relationships, the people that we haven’t seen for a while, the people that we might not actually know that well but recognize us, those weak ties, as sociologists call them, are actually our foundation for feeling secure and a sense of belonging in a sense, sense of community. And so you can design a workplace that, yes, allows you to interact with the people closest to you on a daily basis to be able to get stuff done. But that is specifically designed to help you connect with people that you would have no reason to be on a zoom call with. It could be members of different teams, it could be leaders in the organization that you don’t report to, but by interacting with them, you find a much greater sense of security and understanding of what’s going on at your place of work. When we get down to like really specific Allwork.Space. It could be everything from team neighborhoods to cafes to internal event Allwork.Space. There’s still a need for areas to focus and concentrate. But the overriding theme here would be give people enough choice. Like not an overwhelming amount of choice, but enough choice so that if they’re fortunate to be on a more flexible work plan, that on a given day they can make those transitions between, I need two hours to concentrate on this spreadsheet and then I’d really love to go be around a bunch of people I haven’t seen for a while to. I really need to find, you know, my closest coworker to work through something. The challenge has come when we see much more prescriptive, either prescriptive space designs or prescriptive policies that say, be here on this day, do this. Here’s, you know, that that’s an old school view of how work gets done.
Frank Cottle [00:15:22 ]: The problem starts with a policy. The solution comes from the design and the community.
Ryan Anderson [00:15:27 ]: Yeah. And, you know, policy at an enterprise level, like, you can see meaningful change in how people work. At a team level, like a good team leader can say, hey, we’re going to shift the way we do things. We’re going to spend more quality time, we’re going to use a different set of tools. But at an enterprise level, like trying to get hundreds or thousands of people to do something differently is almost impossible. And what happens is it becomes a free for all. Which I think actually is the condition that most organizations that have adopted a hybrid policy are facing right now. It’s that there’s very little coordination. Everybody’s trying to do their own thing. There’s no sense of predictability that if you come into a workplace that you’re going to see anybody you’re hoping to see, and you don’t want to go there just to sit on screens all day long because you can do that more effectively in an environment that you control at home. And so some degree of coordination is really, really important. But yeah, ideally people feel like the workplace is where they can get quality interactions with team members that would be very difficult to have on video and interactions with people that they just don’t have any reason to be in touch with digitally.
Frank Cottle [00:16:30 ]: Well, you know, it’s funny, we’re going through some change right now in the workplace brought on by technology, changes in society, pandemic. And I will make a statement, people may disagree with me, that every revolution in, throughout history has started with people seeking freedom and autonomy. And I can’t think of one that hasn’t. They wanted freedom from something or change from something or autonomy from something. And in the workplace, which is really we’re talking about now, it can become very US centric very quickly. You know, we’re using Manhattan as an example and you know, different examples and stuff. But it’s really, the workplace is a global issue today. We hire across borders as a company all the time and that means we hire into and out of other cultures and different cultures have different ways of dealing with loneliness, of dealing with prescriptive policies, all of these things. How do you blend that together for companies that cross borders? How do I manage that effectively? This is going to become a really loaded question. It’s going to become a train, a freight train.
Ryan Anderson [00:17:59 ]: No, it’s a really good question because.
Frank Cottle [00:18:02 ]: Everything you’ve been talking about so far says, yeah, it sounds like a Microsoft campus. Oh yeah, I said Cisco would be worried about that. Oh, you know, maybe JP Morgan’s thinking that 80% of the people in the United States work for small businesses. How do you apply these things to those companies? Not just to the people building the ideally designed campus that’s going to have relationship based work and a strong sense of place attachment. Yeah, you know, there’s the challenge. This is a universal human challenge, not just a Fortune 500 challenge.
Ryan Anderson [00:18:44 ]: No, I agree. And it’s not just a business challenge. I mean, I would, I would extend it into the realm of nonprofits and schools and health care facilities. So I’m very fortunate to have a team of about 30 that’s all over the world. We have many team members in Europe, we’ve got a team member in Bangalore. And I think actually a lot of the principles do transcend not just large enterprises with these big campuses and in some cases it’s a little bit easier. So I’ll give you an example if it were a smaller group of employees in a location that values that social connectivity. So just like, well, let’s take India as an example. I don’t know that there’s going to be quite the struggle of a really large distributed organization trying to set up an office in Atlanta. But I’ll come back to the term I just used is probably a really good place to start for all the headlines around hybrid, remote, etc. Just recognizing that most organizations, small or large, are becoming more distributed, like they’re just spreading out. And it could be that everybody’s in an office, but they’re now in six offices instead of one office. It’s rare to find organizations that train their team leaders to effectively manage a distributed team. Part of that Process is understanding the cultural nuances of where your team members are and what they might be facing on days when they’re at home or in the office. When it comes to the design of workplace, each of those Allwork.Space in different parts of the world needs to be well tailored for the expectations and needs of the group that are in that location. And that’s also a chance for other team members from around the world to experience the culture and life in the office in those distinct locations. My team’s been. We travel a lot. We’ve been in well over 100 markets this last year. I just got done with a series of site visits in Australia, but my. One of my team members, Mark, just got back from a week and a half touring sites across India. And we love to talk about these differences. It’s not an era where we can impose thinking from one geography on another. And we always have to be really careful. And I say this in a somewhat guarded way. When we work with organizational leaders that might be writing the check for a new facility in the back of our mind, we have to recognize that they may or may not know anything about how their team members work in different parts of the business or different locations. And so where this is heading is a more localized and more participative approach to designing these sort of Allwork.Space to make sure that it actually works for the people who use them on a given day.
Frank Cottle [00:21:30 ]: I think that that’s critically important. And the. We had another company, was a network company of members all over the world. And we used to say back in the 90s, early 90s, that our differences were. Was our strength, that what we learned in Japan as a business concept, once we figured out how to translate it, translate it, let’s say, and reapply it to the entire group became breakthrough. And then learn something in India, or we would learn something in Germany. And we had to translate it and make sure it crossed the borders effectively, so to speak. But we’ve always felt, and I still do today, that those differences of what you. What you learn and how you learn are critical. And we used to time things too, with what we call a pebble in a pond. Okay, So a pond has a certain shape and you drop a pebble somewhere in it. Well, the wave pattern that comes out, you know, it might hit a cliff on one side that’s very close. And it might have to go all the way across the pond past the ducks to the shallow water and has a different pattern there. But you always have an idea that drops somewhere and then it distributes itself. And those differences that you’re talking about in cultures really become a strength. That is how we grow and how we learn. Think of how we learned language, think of how we learned mathematics, think of how we learned, you know, everything. It’s really through cross cultural exchange and trade. That was the way we learned as a, as a race going back through history. And I don’t think it’s any different today. We just cross borders faster and we use different vehicles, we use technology instead of camels and horses and, you know, but we’re still exchanging and that is a huge element. And it kind of takes you to, I guess, within an organization, how do you create a social obligation between the team members so that they’re obligated to each other and that becomes their strength, is their moral code, if you will, to support one another?
Ryan Anderson [00:24:00 ]: Yeah.
Frank Cottle [00:24:02 ]: In a diversified world, in a distributed organization, how do you do that?
Ryan Anderson [00:24:07 ]: I mean, I think it goes back to what we had briefly touched on before, which is you have to kind of assess whether or not the way work is organized is creating a sense that everyone’s a freelancer doing their own thing, or they’re actually part of some sort of cohesive team or community that’s trying to achieve together. We had Tim Arens back, who’s the head of workplace innovation at the Lego Group, as one of our guests on our podcast about place this season, talking about how they approached hybrid. And this is a distinctly, I think, Scandinavian approach, but they called it best of both. And instead of having any sort of communication around what the leaders think employees should do or where they think they should be, or concerns about productivity, they framed it as, there’s a balance here. More location flexibility gives you more options for work, life balance. But all of the employees do have an obligation to each other, a social responsibility to each other. You need to be present for your team members, you need to build into your team members. You need to help new people to gain a broader network and understand how things are done. You need to be able to reach out to other teams to make sure you’re all working effectively. And that requires, in many cases, being together in meaningful ways. And so I don’t think that that approach only works in places like Denmark. I think it’s reframing the conversation to put more trust and responsibility in employees. And if I look at office design and workplace design in particular, the roots of offices didn’t exactly speak employee trust. They were basically Allwork.Space to supervise work and express the status of leaders.
Frank Cottle [00:25:51 ]: Wardens with, with billy clubs in some cases.
Ryan Anderson [00:25:56 ]: I’ve been in Allwork.Space that have still felt like that. And so this idea that you were talking about with the pond, you know, suggests that someone in leadership is actually viewing either how they organize work or how they organize workspace as a journey where you can learn from it and iterate on it and cross pollinate ideas from one place to another. Which why wouldn’t organizations do that? They invest so, so much in corporate real estate. It’s usually, you know, number two or number three in terms of investments that they’re making, but they just view it as a necessary evil working with old assumptions. But this approach that says the Allwork.Space that we give you just like the technology tools we give you are tools for you to achieve together and let’s figure out what it looks like for you to really use them effectively, that’s the better conversation.
Frank Cottle [00:26:43 ]: Well, when you say that and translate that a little bit, hybrid. I’m going to work remotely from home. I’m going to work from a third workplace, hopefully a co working or a business center. And then I’m going to work from the corporate office. I am a local nomad. I’m not a digital nomad. I don’t have my laptop and my guitar and I’m not living in Bali doing gig work. I’m not a slow mad that moves from Barcelona one season and then Berlin the next season and then maybe, you know, Mexico City the next season. I’m a low man. I’m a local nomad. And I think we all are that. We are all travelers today. None of us are permanent anymore. We are all travelers. The only permanence is that we’ve got technology attached to us somehow overall. But when in that environment and from your business in particular, you have a unique insight on this being in the furnishings business, how do we support the health and well being ergonomically across that local nomad structure so that we’re protecting the health and well being of our employees the same way we would hope that people are doing within a permanent office.
Ryan Anderson [00:28:05 ]: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m broaden your question even a little bit and then I’m gonna get specifics. So as you know, Miller Knowles, a collective of about 16 brands and that includes Herman, Miller and Knoll, but also manufacturers that, that specifically are designing for residences. And we cover a lot of different types of space. Like my, my team research is not just offices but homes, schools, hospitals and beyond. And it gives us a chance to learn and cross pollinate what we see in some environments to others. And there’s actually quite a bit of interesting cross pollinization happening. You mentioned co working and its focus on community. That would be one of many examples. It starts for us with trying to understand comfort. So I’ll get to ergonomics as a more specific facet of that in a minute.
Frank Cottle [00:28:59 ]: I’m really talking about health and well being as it relates to ergonomics. Well, responsibility of an employer. If they’re going to say, yeah, work.
Ryan Anderson [00:29:07 ]: From home, yeah, I’m going to go there, I promise.
Frank Cottle [00:29:08 ]: From home as protected as work from the office.
Ryan Anderson [00:29:11 ]: Yeah. Well, again, if we understand that comfort is not just physical, but it’s also social and there’s cognitive, mental comfort, etc. There’s reasons why we gravitate towards certain places. Like maybe I’d like to do email from a coffee shop for an hour, or maybe I’d like to go sit on my living room floor and try to deal with a spreadsheet. And it often has less to do with physical comfort because those places are often not providing good ergonomics and they can produce all sorts of negative physical ergonomics, but they provide a degree of emotional comfort in other ways that we have to understand and we have to make sure that workplaces do a better job of supporting that. I do think we’re in a situation right now where physical ergonomics is being neglected and, or, and, and employers are not paying near enough attention to it. We’ve had about 34,000 people use Herman Miller’s Work from Home tool. Right around 60% say they’re experiencing physical discomfort throughout the workday. The majority of the things they cite are shoulder, neck, back pain associated with kind of just sitting in crappy chairs or chairs that don’t support them for doing computer based work. And so I think yes, employers can provide offices that don’t just provide good ergonomics at a desk, but think through all the other places like a cafe or a project room where somebody might choose to do work, the really progressive ones will also try to make sure that they’re ergonomically supported at home. If you look at Aeron chairs as an example, I mean, we sell a whole lot of them either to consumers or to organizations for people to use. Not just in the office, but home.
Frank Cottle [00:30:47 ]: Yeah, my wife has an air on chair and her office upstairs.
Ryan Anderson [00:30:51 ]: Tell her thank you, we appreciate the business.
Frank Cottle [00:30:53 ]: I’m sitting in a 1988 eclipse.
Ryan Anderson [00:30:56 ]: I know it’s still a great chair.
Frank Cottle [00:30:58 ]: I’ve never been able to wear it out. So I don’t want to pitch your product.
Ryan Anderson [00:31:02 ]: Oh, please do.
Frank Cottle [00:31:04 ]: No, we’re going too far there. But the ergonomics of work have a lot to do with the comfort, productivity, and the exhaustion rate, or lack thereof. Comfortable for people. And that has a lot to do with productivity. So it is important that we understand how that pushes out to the thing. Yeah. So. So finish with that and then I. I want to take it down. Another question.
Ryan Anderson [00:31:31 ]: Well, I’ll just add on. The roots of ergonomics were around basically finding ways in manufacturing and other environments to accomplish tasks more quickly. It wasn’t really about comfort as much as it was eliminating barriers to productivity. But when. Well, and I don’t want to do a product pitch either, but there was a guy named Bill Stumpf who created the first ergonomic chair, Ergon for her Miller, in the 70s. And he liked to quote this philosopher named William Gass, who said comfort is the absence of awareness. Meaning, like if you have that little tag on your shirt and it’s bothering you, you can’t focus on anything else. But if, if it doesn’t exist, you experience comfort and you don’t know it. That’s kind of what we’re trying to achieve in a good workplace design, whether that’s home or office or beyond. Can people just feel free to get what they’re trying to do done, to relate with people in a really natural way? Or is there something about the environment? Could be a light bulb, could be some ambient noise, could be something about the way you’re sitting or the desk that’s just interfering with what that experience could be. The goal is to eliminate those, those types of interference.
Frank Cottle [00:32:37 ]: Well, jump to the next type of environment. Overall, where are we going to see more about augmented reality, holographic technologies, et cetera, Technologies that are going to continue to evolve, that will change the way we immerse ourselves in the workplace. You know, go there a little.
Ryan Anderson [00:33:02 ]: Sure.
Frank Cottle [00:33:03 ]: Because I. I think that. Well, we’re talking about the future of work. Yeah. Talk about the future of work. We have to consider this and how it all ties to artificial intelligence, which I actually think. Art. I’m probably goofy. I think artificial intelligence is not artificial at all. I consider it to be an entirely new species or different species, at least, because we’ve had computers around for a long time, just advanced computers. So how is design shift? How’s the future? We’re going to embrace these new technologies.
Ryan Anderson [00:33:39 ]: Sure. And in the way of background, I’ve spent a little over half my career at the intersection of tech and place. And I also have worked within tech previously. I was VP of Digital Innovation at HER Miller before I got back into research. And so I’ll give you my perspective, but I’ll acknowledge that I think a lot of what’s being written about and talked about out there is wildly speculative, and there’s a lot of hype. So here’s what I see. Technologies like AR and VR are not new. They’re 40 or 50 years old. And there’s been a lot of thought, just as there has been about working in sim environments or working in the metaverse, about what it looks like to try to operate in a fully immersive digital environment. I have yet to see any evidence that people are seeking that. And if anything, those technologies for me have become a bit more niche. So we use AR to help people see product in Allwork.Space that are, you know, where the product isn’t really there. We’ve used VR for years to try to help people navigate Allwork.Space that we’re proposing, but generally they. They greatly prefer to see it on a 2D screen. We’ve looked into holography and the future of. Of holographs. I know you’ve been active there. I don’t. I’m not suggesting that any of this stuff isn’t possible, but I don’t personally think it’s poised to make a significant change in how we’re working anytime soon. When it comes to AI, it’s a little bit different story. And I’ll get like, super tactical AI offers people the ability to reduce some of the rote, less desirable parts of their workday. I have the privilege of writing for Forbes Online each month, and I’ll gladly share that. An LLM is my editor. Like, if I write something, I’ll ask it to clean up my grammar. And I’m very thankful for that little bit of coaching. So in an ideal.
Frank Cottle [00:35:36 ]: I’ve seen some of your writing. I agree.
Ryan Anderson [00:35:38 ]: Thank you. It’s doing its job. So I think there are some changes in work when it comes to actual buildings. There’s some fascinating advances in how the buildings are getting smarter and how we can use data to plan and manage the buildings better over time. But maybe one of the things that I find most intriguing, this is like, just at a really tactical level, is I do see voice interface. For all the talk in the past about gestural interface, I see voice interface as something that’s only going to get more common. I’ve talked with our former Chief Digital Officer who is now in another role within Miller, Noel, Ben Groom about this. It’s probably realistic that we’ll be talking to our devices, not just through our devices. Even more than the example you shared of talking with Siri, that has some implications to our physical working environments, et cetera. But I still think there’s going to be a balance that for all of the opportunities to work in very technologically progressive ways, there will always be this need to counterbalance the, the effect of these things and make sure that we provide really, really good experiences for people together in the times when they want them. And so we’re just seeking that balance.
Frank Cottle [00:36:51 ]: Well, you know, it’s funny, we’ve all experienced, I guess I’ll say technology, the sort of technology that we’re talking about. When you talk about talking to the technology and having it interact as opposed to typing it or doing something else that’s been around for decades. We’ve all been stuck. You and I were talking about travel a little bit earlier in the United Airlines or American Airlines voicemail from hell loop that we can’t get stuff done. And I think that’s disappearing. We our own company, we’re bringing in artificial intelligence receptionists to manage incoming calls in our call center. And they can do a level one or two, they can’t do a level three or four. But the up to a certain level, they’re faster, they’re more consistent, they actually give the customer a better experience. But you do have to be able to get out or escalate something to someone that can say, now what do you really need here? And deal with it. And I think you’re right. We will be speaking using our voice and our total brain, not just our how do I get the grammar right brain in all of this?
Ryan Anderson [00:38:21 ]: Yeah, in more interactive, relational ways. And so we do need to think about those dynamics. But I think of one of the first pilots that we did within her Miller around using bots. I think this was around 2016 or 17. One of my colleagues, Mark, basically proposed that we use a couple of bots to begin paying our bills in more efficient ways. As it turns out, there were two people within the organization at that time who spent about 40% of their day literally taking pieces of paper and like circling things and inputting them. And the company ran a pilot to be able to use AI to do this more effectively. It created some concerns early on around like, hey, what if, what if the bot adds a zero? And it wasn’t difficult to make the case that if somebody adds a zero, it’s more likely going to be the person, not the bot. But what I loved most about that pilot is there was an agreement with the head of the department before we started that if this was successful, those employees were able to repurpose that 40% for more meaningful work that required more of a human touch. It wasn’t trying to eliminate somebody’s job into the employee.
Frank Cottle [00:39:31 ]: Yeah, it’s more interesting for the employee.
Ryan Anderson [00:39:33 ]: More interesting. So that’s, that’s the upside of this. If we can do it right, we, we take out that human struggle, we reduce those sort of demands in the same way that we’ve seen automation in our manufacturing Allwork.Space, reducing the work that people can’t stand to do, the sort of work that they love. Like that’s, that’s an optimistic take, but if we do that, then these work environments should only become richer and more interesting.
Frank Cottle [00:39:56 ]: Well, I think if you’re being inventive, you always have to be optimistic. Honestly, you never want to invent something on the bad side, you always want to invent it on the good side. Give me two or three big trends that you see in the future of work over the next. Just only go to the next five years. If we go out 30 years, it’s like, who knows? But the next five years, what do you see as the big trends that are going to impact us the most?
Ryan Anderson [00:40:23 ]: Well, as it pertains to work or specifically our physical workplace.
Frank Cottle [00:40:28 ]: Well, tie it all together, however you like.
Ryan Anderson [00:40:30 ]: Sure. I do think that we’re in a bit of a pendulum shift where the last few years we’ve seen such an explosive use of technology and in particular technologies to enable us to work in more distributed and remote ways, that people are seeking a little bit of a counterbalance. I’ll give you one really specific example. We, we were co founders of an initiative called Future forum that for two years surveyed 10,000 people every quarter. We consistently found that people wanted location flexibility. I think 81% said they did. But a larger percentage, 93%, wanted more schedule flexibility. They wanted more control over their calendar. I frequently heard people complain about the sheer amount of their time spent on meetings. And I’ve been encouraged to see individuals and organizations getting quite purposeful about trying to eliminate this condition where people feel victim to their calendars. And so for me, that’s symptomatic of a larger and positive thing that’s happening, which is people are seeking a bit more of a balance between those distributed experiences, those technology enabled experiences, and richer in person experiences. I think organizations are going to continue to try to figure out what it looks like to knit together a degree of belonging. You know, here in the US there’s been some political backlash against DEIB initiatives, but I do see so many organizations seeking to try to create conditions where people feel like they belong. That organizational hierarchy and other things that might cause someone to feel like they’re on the edge doesn’t get in the way as much because the economics are pretty straightforward. We only have so much labor, and that’s not just a US thing. There’s a global labor shortage, and so organizations are trying to find a way of promoting belonging. What’s it?
Frank Cottle [00:42:22 ]: Yeah, it’s actually. It’s actually shrinking as a percentage of the population. Yeah, globally.
Ryan Anderson [00:42:28 ]: Exactly. So I think again, I get to see some of these examples of organizations trying to focus more. More on this balance of good time together in person with really great technology experiences as something that is part of the workday, but not exclusively. I mentioned it before, but distributed teams aren’t going anywhere. I mean, the world is only going to continue to get more distributed, and so organizations are going to have to spend more and more time training leaders. And it’s one thing to talk about upskilling, and I wish we saw better examples of what upskilling really is. But I think as we’ve all experienced in our lives, most of our work life relates so directly with the abilities and temperament of our managers that organizations are spending thankfully, more and more time looking at the effects of managers on team dynamics. I’m thinking about my friend Debbie Lovich at BCG and their work on enjoyment. They’ve done a bunch of great research indicating that title and money might get you in the door, but what determines whether or not you’re going to stay is the degree to which you actually enjoy your work. And that’s so critically dependent upon your manager and your team dynamics that when I think about future of work and I think about workplace, teams are the nucleus for me. And organizations have to invest in teams and team leadership in order to balance all of this crazy complexity that we might get into in the course of a conversation like this.
Frank Cottle [00:43:59 ]: Well, you know, I want to stress that the social obligation element, and maybe this is a good or a bad thing to say, but I forget the older football coach that made this response to a question, you know, what do you see today versus when went into the 80s or the 90s. And he said, well, today I see people that are focused on privileges and entitlement and self. Self, he said, and before we were focused on loyalty and obligation and things of that neighborhood, much more purposeful. I think in our distributed work environment. And you brought this up originally, we do have to look at our moral obligation to our teams, not just to ourselves. We cannot be freelancers and be a part of anything except, you know, the proverbial lone wolf. And you know, that never ends well. We as a society, we as a species have always done best by working together and, and by coming together and using our communal strength. And I think that’s, I hope that’s where all of these changes end up as we, as we create solutions.
Ryan Anderson [00:45:24 ]: I think so. And I think we should also acknowledge that. And I don’t, I don’t believe that the popularized generational frameworks are very useful in this sense. But if you do look across age and demographics, there is a growing desire for a lot of people to work for an organization whose intent, even within the context of the business world is good, that they’re trying to do something good in the world, that they have some degree of purpose or mission. And that’s tough when you work for a 300 person adhesives company. And so sometimes it’s about being good to the earth, but a lot of times it’s about being good to the employees. And this desire among employees to work for an organization that takes the health of their community seriously isn’t for me just like some sort of theoretical, aspirational thing. It ties directly to whether or not organizations are able to retain good employees that are so critical to their productivity. And so all of this conversation about relationships, about team dynamics, about people finding a degree of emotional connection with the places they work, if it’s all in the service of an organization saying we’re taking care of our employees so that those employees can achieve more together and outperform the market, I think that’s where success lies. And those organizations that continue to operate out of a sense of mistrust or convey to their employees that it isn’t like they’re not really on equal footing to the organization’s stockholders or customers are missing the mark. Like, employees are the critical foundation for all this and their well being and their sense of community is what’s going to ultimately drive results.
Frank Cottle [00:47:09 ]: No, I could not agree with you more. I absolutely agree with that. Hey Ryan, thank you so much for your time today. It’s really appreciated. You’ve been a wonderful guest and provided a tremendous insight and I want to wish you exciting and new future of work in 2025 as we start the year off off and we’ll look forward to the next time.
Ryan Anderson [00:47:30 ]: This was a great way to start the year. And as always, I appreciate joining you, my friend.
Frank Cottle [00:47:34 ]: Thank you. If it’s impacting the future of work, it’s in the Future of work podcast by allwork Space.