-- INTRO --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome to Workplace Geeks, the podcast on a mission to celebrate the very best workplace knowledge and research. I'm Chris Moriarty.
Ian Ellison
And I'm Ian Ellison.
Chris Moriarty
Think of us as your curious co-conspirators, questioning the defaults, dismantling the norms, and exploring bold new ways of working. Join us as we step beyond the nine to five and imagine a future where work works differently and better for everyone.
And we're back series four fortnightly, and here we are recording in a booth in the heart of the NEC at the workplace event, and we've already got a stellar lineup of guests. Ian, do you want to tell the listeners who you've already got lined up for us?
Ian Ellison
We've got Kay Sargent from HOK talking about her brand new book, designing Neuro Inclusive Workplaces.
We've got Ryan Anderson from MillerKnoll on relationship-based working. We've got poet Matt Harvey with our very first Workplace Geeks, poetry takeover, and Mark Catchlove on Herman Miller, Robert Propst, and the unintentional invention of the modern office cubicle. We've got more conference specials on the way later in the year.
Chris Moriarty
And we haven't been idle whilst we've been, uh, on the off season have we in Why don't you tell 'em about a brand new format for our podcast?
Ian Ellison
Well, we've just done our very first Workplace Geeks investigation into biophilic design, where we ask the question is biophilic design, just good design? Or something we need to intentionally spotlight because of its unique importance.
And to answer that, we went to the first ever biophilic design conference. We explored the Barbican in London and talked to all sorts of fascinating folk to answer it. So that one should be in your pod feed right below this one. If you haven't noticed it already, have a listen. Tell us what you think. We've got another one planned for later this year about the age of experience, but we'd love you to tell us what or where else needs the Workplace Geeks Investigation treatment.
You can even commission us to do one if you think we can help illuminate something important to you. But enough of that,
Chris Moriarty
let's focus on the show today. It's the first episode of series four with some heavy hitters. Ian, introduce today's guests.
Ian Ellison
We have got Emeritus professor, Jeremy Myerson, co-founder and chairman of Worktech Academy and Philip Ross, founder and CEO of Ungroup, and they join us to discuss their fourth co-authored book, unworking, the Reinvention of the Modern Office, published in 2022.
So for anyone interested in learning from the past to look forwards and think about future opportunities and challenges for work and workplace, honestly, this is a really, really good read. And we had fun with this one, didn't we, Chris?
Chris Moriarty
We did. And it was a great opportunity to bring back friend of the podcast, Kasia Maynard, who's head of research and editorial at Worktech Academy for the reflection section.
So we'll speak to Kasia afterwards. But for now, let's catch up with Philip and Jeremy.
-- INTERVIEW --
Chris Moriarty
Welcome to Workplace Geeks, Philip, Philip Ross. We'll get an introduction from you in a moment. Welcome back, Jeremy Myerson. You're only one away from getting the Hatrick ball at the minute, so welcome back to the podcast.
For those who haven't heard of you guys or see your work, perhaps Philip, you can start us off with just a, a brief introduction about who you are, what you do, and where people might have come across some of your work. Over the years,
Philip Ross
Jeremy and I have worked together for many years. We'll come back to that.
I founded the business 30 years ago. Back in 1994. I wrote something called the Cordless Office Report, which back then kind of challenged something called Orbit, which had recently come out from a firm called DEGW, and I kind of said, Hmm, what they're saying is complete rubbish. And we predicted the idea of technology that was cableless, that was portable.
And the rest is history. So that's how it started. And my first business was cordless consultants that said exists roll forwards 30 years. I've now got a number of brands people might have heard of, Worktech, which we think is the largest global community for the workplace. It's an event and conference that happens in 46 cities around the globe.
And alongside it is our academy that Jeremy can talk about. I've got then, uh, two consulting businesses. One is Unwork, which is a future of work advisory firm looking at the future through three lenses, people place and technology working globally and helping to shape some seminal projects. And it's still cordless, which is a technology advisory business for the workplace.
Lovely stuff.
Chris Moriarty
And Jeremy, for those who haven't heard your amazing episode very early on in the workplace, geeks, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jeremy Myerson
So great to be back. I am an academic researcher, writer, journalist. Uh, editor, some of your listeners may remember. I was the founder editor of Design Week in the late 1980s, just coming up to its 40th birthday next year.
I went to the Royal College of Art, both as a student and as a lecturer, and I was later asked to run something called the Helen Hamlin Center for Design. And we were a large research group within the RCA. Probably the largest in the history of the RCA and certainly the longest running. And one of our themes was the future of work.
And this really brought me into the orbit of Philip. And together we started the work tech conference. Philip organized it. I chaired the first one in London at the British Library in 2003. And in 2016, Philip and I set up something called the work tech Academy, which is the knowledge engine that sits behind the events and the advisory work.
So I've been looking at. Work and workplace and how it's changed as a researcher, as a writer. It's been a very, very interesting journey and never more interesting than right now.
Ian Ellison
Oh, that's nice. You teed that up. Lovely. Right. Okay, well that was all true. And uh, also quite formal because I heard on the grapevine that also you sort of crossed paths for musical reasons.
Jeremy Saxophonist, Philip Drummer. What's the backstory then Boys give us the, the slightly less formal side of it.
Philip Ross
Oh, Barry tells it very well. Jeremy, you, you, you, you take over the story about how you first met.
Jeremy Myerson
I was living in a mansion block in West Kensington and I was very friendly with a bunch of guys on the Financial Times and they had a rock band and they were looking for a drummer.
And as you do when you live in a mansion block, you hear your neighbors and uh, I told my friends on the Financial Times. There's a guy upstairs who keeps time very well when he's practicing. And so we marched upstairs, banged on the door, and a family member came to the door and I said, oh, we'd like to speak to the drummer, and just started apologizing immediately and saying, look, I'll tell him to stop, but we said, no, no, no, no.
Don't tell him to stop. We need him for a gig. Do you know what? Some
Chris Moriarty
astonishing about that story, right? Just imagine, Philip, you had an electric drum kit, right? None of this, what we're talking about now would even exist, would it? We wouldn't be sat here right now talking about this 'cause you'd have just been sat there beaten away happily on your own with your headphones on, completely oblivious
Ian Ellison
and the knock would never have happened.
I love that. That's that's absolutely glorious, isn't it? And what a case for being in the right space at the right time together for a chance encounter in an industry that talks about water cooler moments, eh? Funny that right? We are here to discuss your fourth co-authored book. The first three were sort of very design-led coffee table editions, which I have cherished on my workplace e bookcase for a long, long time.
And this is a completely different type of book. So before we actually get to Unworking, talk to us about your creative process, about how you collaborate and how you co-author. How does it feel, what do you do? How do you go about it?
Philip Ross
We kind of felt that there were very few publications that really kind of inspired both the creative world, but also leadership, you know, non-creative people to think about the future of the workplace in a kind of rounded way.
A lot of technical books, Jeremy, weren't there A lot of, a lot of kind of air conditioning metrics and face planning kind of approaches, but nothing that would inspire a, a leader. And at the time that there were the early examples of creative workplaces. So our first book was the Creative Office. And I think that kind of really pulled us together from our different perspectives, but really together, we kind of formed this really interesting way of working.
I think Jeremy, you, you talk a bit about technology, almost skepticism, I'm a determinist. We brought very opposing forces together, but we also found a lot of evidence globally. And I think that book, the Creative Office, which ended up going into I think about 11 different languages, which was remarkable in the end.
It really hit a nerve because our philosophy, our hypothesis was that a creative workplace was no longer just the domain of a creative industry. Everyone needed creative workplaces as the knowledge worker emerged. But that's how the genesis was.
Jeremy Myerson
Yeah, we were coming from two very different backgrounds.
My background, I'd studied at the RCAI was very much in with the design and architectural community. We saw a lot of office projects from the formal perspective of architectural and spatial design. Philip was coming from a completely different angle from the angle of technology and systems and a lot of what made offices great were actually invisible to the naked eye.
So this was an interesting dialectic between two very different, uh, writers. And as Philip said, he was the technological determinist. Technology is there so we must use it. Whereas I was a lot more. And remain a lot more skeptical. So there's a kind of creative tension between us and I suppose our creative process was really about not co-writing, but actually sharing drafts with each other and, and taking the lead in one area.
And then the other would review and critique that. And over time, and. For books, you get to understand the style of the other person. And we were able to, without the usual angst and protecting your own ideas, we were able to share them.
Ian Ellison
Yeah. That sort of relationship where you might have differing views, but you also have that balanced with trust, you get to a point where it almost feels egoless because the output, the product is the most important thing.
And you might have written a bit, but somebody else is now helping you improve it. But that needs trust and you have to get beyond your ego for that to be able to happen. And I sort of really sense that in the way that you've talk about it.
Philip Ross
I agree. I don't think we, we either of us have egos. We're not doing this I think for self and grand, but it's, it's much more about a passion to really kind of create something that pushed forward the debate.
I think that was the rationale behind us. I mean, both speakers, we both travel. I think we're both privileged because almost every single case study we've personally been to, we're not writing it asage. We, we've walked around the buildings, we've talked to the client, we've talked to the architect. We understand why they've achieved what they've achieved and are trying to celebrate their journey.
I'm an economist to kind of balance Jeremy's academic background. So you know, the idea of forecasting is, is very much in my DNA and I think we look for trends that help us predict the future, and I think we work very well to try and achieve that because our books are there too. Stimulate and inspire, but also to predict a
Ian Ellison
future I, I am fascinated because Jeremy, you come from a world where DEGW, Frank Duffy and John Worthington don't exactly rule, but their ideas and their messages.
Some would say it's hard to sort of surpass them because they got their first, and they talked about a lot of things, which people still talk about now. And yet, Philip, you've just said the cordless office disagreed strongly with Orbit, which was one of their foundational publications. So is that almost like an industry representation of the tension that you two represent?
Jeremy Myerson
That's a very interesting way of looking at it. I mean, I work very closely with Frank Duffy and John Worthington, and I'm a huge admirer. They invited me to edit a book designed for Change, all about DGW, which was a multi-author book. Which I was respond, I was the ringmaster, which was an interesting experience.
So I know their ideas extremely well, but the game moves on all the time. And a lot of what Frank's said, and his models have been amazingly durable. But the game moves on. And in terms of our books, they move on as well, because I think our first three books, you know, the creative office was saying that large companies should start behaving like small companies when it comes to the workplace.
They needed to be more creative, more agile, um, more flexible. Um, then we did the 21st century office saying this is what the 20th century was about. This is what the 21st century might be about. And then we did a book called Space to Work, which came out in 2006, which was about knowledge workers. We identified a very specific group.
And it was about different types of approaches for knowledge workers. But in a sense, all three of those books belonged to the pre-internet age. The days when architects were buying very large, expensive, full color volumes to sit on their shelves, to take down to photocopy, and put in presentations to clients.
And now that whole market for kind of big, heavily illustrated books, they have disappeared. And if you want to sell a book, it's all about the argument. It's all about the discussion. So for our fourth book, we completely changed t and it took us a while to come up with the title. The approach and find the right publisher in order to do what we might call a thesis book or a manifesto book, lots of words rather less pictures, a book that's making an argument about the future as opposed to using case studies as a way to talk about the future.
Chris Moriarty
And that's a lovely way to sort of get into it. So just talk us a little bit about where the book came from. It'd be great to hear the origin story, but also how you had to tweak and adjust some of that approach that you'd sort of refined over the first three books into this one.
Philip Ross
Well, I think, I think to build on Jeremy's perspective around this idea of a manifesto, we wrote this at the end of Covid and, and it was interesting because we didn't know quite how to phrase some of the ideas.
You know, would Covid reemerge, was it over? And we are talking about what's next. So it was a very interesting mode of operandi because you had to try and. We have a narrative in a very uncertain climate. Offices were emerging again. But there was this huge debate about hybrid, a return to office and remember all the distancing, the per specs, and all the craziness that happened at the end of uh, era.
So I think the manifesto was to really also help people think about what was next. This, this remarkable experiment of locking people away and in effect home working on steroids and remote working for the first time when we were told for many years by all sorts of organizations, that it was impossible meant that everybody, you know, every single board, every single partnership group was now thinking about the future of work.
And this book was written to try and help them navigate that. So that was the purpose of it. When we thought about the positioning, my consultancy companies called On Work, I named it that because I wanted to challenge people. When I look at the workplace, most of what I see is iteration. I walk around many, many buildings all over the globe, and I don't see much innovation.
You know, you, you see iterations, small improvements, a bit of marginal gain here and there, and I think our philosophy was to say, look, COVID was an inflection. We have to do something very different to reimagine the future of work. So Unworking built on the brand of Unwork, which is about unbundling and unraveling our assumptions.
So the thinking was getting people to kind of stop and step back and almost take a blank sheet of paper and start again as opposed to tweak and iterate, which a lot of people were trying to do. That was the philosophy for me and, and, and, and where the name came from. We, as you could see, used Tom Wolf's fabulous treaties to begin to explore that, and, and it's become really interesting.
What I think is important is this is not a UK or even a Northern Hemisphere centric. This really is global and our search was global. We touched in Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, bun Aires, Sao Paulo, you name it.
Jeremy Myerson
One of the most interesting things was that it's both a history and a manifesto for the future. And the reason for that is we were talking to a publisher called Reaction and a very, very interesting publisher, and they have a design history series.
The history of the kitchen, the history of the bathroom. And they approached me and they said, well, would you do a history of the office? And I said, well, I'm not very interested in the past. I think it's important to inform the future, but I'm much more interested in writing about what could be happening.
But this went on for years. They approached us in about 2017, I think it was, and we tried a number of ways to frame the book, and we were struggling, to be honest. We came up with several synopsis, and then the pandemic struck us, Philip said, and that provided our rationale. That was the decisive. Moment where we could pivot forward and pivot back.
So the book begins with a history and we start on Fifth Avenue with a workers' parade, Easter Sunday, framed by the tall office buildings, the high watermarks of time and motion and scientific management and taylorism. And so we thought, let's do a hundred year history from the mid 1920s to the mid 2020s.
We talk about efficiency, we talk about taylorism, we then talk about the post-war reaction in Europe to scientific management, the community based office, the social democratic office. We then go into the networked era with a new millennium, and then we have covid, and then we talk about what's gonna happen in the future.
And that's the. The bulk of the book, and it ends with a manifesto for this concept called unworking. So it was really external events, which created the driving framework for the book rather than any calculation on our part. Suddenly in about 2020, we had a publisher raring to go and a pivot from which we could kind of move material around.
Chris Moriarty
I sort of read it as kind of almost critically evaluating what we're doing rather than just slightly improving on what we did before. I always think there's a kind of an old adage about the worst thing you could do with digital innovation is to make something that is analog digital. You've got to actually rethink how you do the thing in the first place.
'cause now you've got a different tool. And I could get why there was a sense of optimism about this might be the thing we needed to go forwards. Now we will almost certainly come back to whether or not two years down the line has it manifested answers on a postcard. But just to go back a little bit to the history, there was a few things that I thought were really interesting.
I kind of felt, as I was reading it, there was two ideas and they, they are completely counter to each other. First off, this idea that progress has been really, really slow, right? So I think there was a Drucker quote, which is about looking at knowledge work and productivity is like, it hasn't changed in a hundred years.
And then I'm sitting there going, wow, but like the technology development are massive and you are telling me that we've had no productivity gains off the back of that. Like that's scandalous, right? So I'm sitting there going, how frustrating. And as much as we would probably all. I'd be very kind of downbeat about taylorism as an idea how enduring it's been.
And you can still see the echoes of in modern workplaces. But it also, I forget in what context you used it. There was this sort of thought experiment that you talked about where you almost get someone that's at the Victorian desk to look up and see the modern workplace evolve around them and and develop.
It's only when you see it in that context you realize how much change there was.
Jeremy Myerson
I think, you know, everything's changing and nothing's changing much. To summarize, you did it much better than me, Jeremy. So basically, Peter Drucker, you know, wanted a revolution in productivity for knowledge work as he defined the term knowledge work.
And what's going on here is simply that factory production techniques revolutionized manual labor 'cause it was simpler. The productivity of the manual laborer in the modern factory setting went up 50 fold, and there wasn't the corresponding leap in the modern office setting because we don't know enough about how cognitive work plays out and what is really a catalyst for better performance.
We're still discussing it. Our friends at DGW wrote a big report about it and came up with a model, and it's still the holy grail of workplace design and planning. But what the book tried to do was to isolate a number of themes that might contribute to. Performance at an individual team and an organizational level.
So one of those is not just thinking about what people do at work, but how they feel about it. What is their experience? And the book has a chapter on experience. The book talks about the process of designing, moving away from designers as taste makers, to actually gathering data and evidence and understanding patterns of utilization and designing on that basis and understanding human need better.
So inclusive design and neuro inclusive design. So all of this gets covered, and I suppose what Philip and I were trying to do was to guide the reader towards a much more. Sentient workplace that responded to the needs of the individual, the team, and the organization in a way that would enable them to do their best work.
On the understanding that it hasn't been possible in the past because we've been dealing with templates which have seen the office as a technical artifact, whereas it's as much a cultural and a social artifact as it is a technical one.
Ian Ellison
When I look at books like this, the university lecturer in me is almost, is almost thinking, is this a good resource for people to learn from?
Could this be like a course text almost? It's part education and it's part provocation. It speaks to the past in that classic, it's a George. Santiana in 1905 in a book called The Life of Reason said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There's this lovely thing in your book between looking back and learning, but learning with critique and turning to the likes of, as you said, Philip Tom Wolfe's the great relearning article from 1987 saying, what have we done?
How can we learn from it? How can we repackage all of this so that we don't fall into the same traps again? But then almost taking the pandemic as essentially, it wasn't just an event horizon for the book, it was an event horizon for the future of work, and using that to stretch forward into the art of the possible.
That's for me, is what this book is about. It takes you back to take you forwards in a really quite lovely storytelling, articulate, well evidenced kind of way.
Philip Ross
I think that's exactly right. You learn from history and I think as Jeremy's alluded to, things have a habit of repeating themselves. I love the idea that actually Taylor studied time and motion, the idea of clocking in.
And here we are, you know, over a hundred years later, people in our studying return to office, by studying clocking in it, it hasn't changed, right? It's a different way of clocking in, but it's still there. And what they realize is people don't clock out today, so they're trying to correct for that so they, they can really get the time and motion measures right.
But, but look, I think while you can learn from history, and I don't forget people are on different journeys. I think what we found is that, you know, some companies we have worked with are on very advanced journeys. They've been innovating around their workplaces for 20 years. Others have just started or are just starting.
And I think e each has a different touch point. Um. What we want to understand is how, from my perspective, does digital really enable? There's obviously the disruption. We talk a lot about disruption, but it's the enablers that are the really exciting areas for change. And I think the understanding that we see in the book is about some of the areas of differentiation, whether it's demographics, understanding generations, understanding people's particular attributes, aligning it to the work they're trying to do, so it doesn't become this kind of one size fits all uniform box that most workplaces are.
But we celebrate diversity, whether it's borrowing the attributes of the city to the workplace because that's where we have created spaces for living. We seem to forget that in many workplaces, which seem to be a factory, whether that's talking around. The idea of, I guess, great design. Often I walk into offices and the t almost feel like they haven't been designed.
I know that's a nonsense, but you know, when you look at the space we choose to live in, to drink, in, to eat, in, to stay in, they're often beautiful, exciting, vibrant. What's happened to the office? Why haven't we been able to embrace great design? So I think there's a lot of different areas we touch on. And what we try to do is borrow on all sorts of influences from Quaker origins and, and, and different ways of organizing and including paternalism, right the way through to the impact of data and ai and where that takes us.
Chris Moriarty
I guess, you know, if you're putting down a manifesto, what you are kind of doing is not maybe challenging people to do a thing, to come along with you, to adopt a mindset, to make a shift change. Ultimately, there's a kind of, so what moment it goes, right, here's history. Here's all the different levers that you've talked about and the opportunities I've read through this book.
What am I signing up for? What am I gonna be doing next? What should I do when I put this book down? How did you kind of turn this into your kinda provocation, your manifesto?
Jeremy Myerson
What we set out to do was not really come up with a formula or a framework that people should follow. It was much more opening a conversation and having a discourse.
So we have a whole section of the book called What Comes Next, and obviously we look at space. Technology and designing their obvious chapters that are gonna be changed by what's happening in terms of where offices are located, what technologies they're using, how we design them, and so on. But then we added other chapters, like experience, organization, what happens to the organization in this new era, and then the relationship with the city.
So we had a chapter on urbanism, and then everyone's talking about diversity, but what does that really mean? And then everyone's talking about hybrid. Well, hybridity has been around for a long time. It's a very well known concept in science. And then demography the different generations and how they're going to influence and what they're gonna need in the workplace.
So it wasn't a. Kind of framework, a guidance system that that would take the reader through to a kind of bright new world of the future workplace. But it was really a series of journeys down particular subjects that would then form a mosaic, what it would be like. And then the final section of the book, which we call reinvention, we then put forward some very simple ideas, some very simple concepts for what the future workplace could be like.
And of course, in the time since we've written the book, things have moved very fast and things have shifted again. If we were to rewrite the book now, we've probably do things differently. But you know, it came out in 2022. It was a moment in time, but we were setting up the art of the possible.
Ian Ellison
I'm delighted that you timestamped it there, Jeremy, and said if we were writing it now, we might think about it differently because I think that's something to really, really dig into.
Let me frame where we go next with a couple of quotes, and these are quotes from your book, some things that stood out to me as I was reading it. So taking stock of where we are now when we're talking about the third part, reinvention, you've got two chapters there, repurposing and unworking, and these are all quotes from that end of the book.
So a one size fits all office is completely obsolete now. And then you say a little bit further on in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, are we finally casting off the offices of Factory legacy of the 1920s and making the reinvention of the workplace tangible. And as much as you say that you sort of laid out some simple ideas and you weren't providing necessarily a recipe for people to follow because that's hard to do when you're looking to the future.
You do make some quite interesting points, like people should be given a stipend and annual budget for provisioning work. And then you talk about how advanced it like AI predicting and steering people's preferences and some guidelines around how that might work with an organization. That is a very bold statement for an organization that is used to knowing where it's workforce is and telling 'em what they're able to do.
So I think there's some really quite bold stuff in there.
Philip Ross
Look, we ended up with 10 new directions as part of a thesis for Unworking, and I think when you reflect on them, they still hold true. The first one was the social workplace, and I think when you look at Generation X and Gen Alpha and Gen Zed, you know that the new generations into the workplace, their social capital is in a really bad place.
They have been isolated. They don't have the right social skills anyway, and the office always played a big part in terms of building your social network and your human capital. So they've really suffered, and I think that's a key area. The idea of anything from learning by osmosis to serendipity and all the other benefits of physical co-location are still not there for many who come in maybe two days a week.
And it's still very hybrid and ad hoc, and they're working from bedrooms and kitchen tables. We identified the healthy workplace and I think health and wellbeing is a major factor. We're well aware of the huge impact globally around. Sedentary work leading to obesity, leading to conditions like diabetes and other healthcare issues.
Huge issues with a non-productive population, people who are long-term sick, who are out of work so that the workplace has a big world around wellbeing. The sentient workplace was number three in terms of directions. The idea of how people feel and measuring that for the first time I think is really interesting.
The idea of an experience led workplace talks to that, but also talks to the idea that we are. Intentionally or purposefully shaping an experience. And I think the purposeful workplace touched on the idea of belonging as well, which began as and is continuing to be a trend. We talked the idea of the elastic workplace.
People didn't know what they wanted, how much space they will need. That borrows on the idea of flex and cowork, how you can adapt. And we're still seeing interesting examples coming through of really elastic workplaces. We then looked at personalization at scale, and again, we are hearing from leaders how can we personalize?
And a lot of that's coming out of apps and adaptability. We looked at the idea of contextualizing, um, the workplace. What are people really doing? What activities are they there to do, and is it different? There's a very kind of superficial view that you collaborate in the office and you focus out elsewhere, but that's a bit too binary.
What are the real. Processes and activities that we can model with the workplace. We looked at digital, of course, the idea of workplace with a digital DNA, that's everything from smart buildings and the huge emergence of the data lake and digital twin. And then we looked at the idea of the consumerized workplace, which I think again is fascinating.
Providing choice, almost the star rating that we give to an Uber driver or an Airbnb. Let's also give that to the workplace and lots of ideas there. And finally, 10th trend was the shared workplace. What is ownership of space and where does that go? So we had 10 directions, and I think they all still hold really true for the big debate.
Jeremy Myerson
What frustrates Philip and I is that a lot of the debates, since the books come out, when we talk about the future of work, people are obsessing on where people work. Do you work at home? Do you work in the office? Is there a third space when we should be thinking about how people work? Once you think about how, rather than where the, where begins to fall to a secondary level, it's the how that's really important.
And this is where, you know, giving people a stipend to provision work rather than a desk in an office becomes more true. I, I just was looking at some research from Nick Bloom at Stanford, who's really the foremost scholar in the hybrid era, and he was part of a team which looked at the distance.
American workers are from their employers and it's incredible. They've radically extended the distance that employees have from their companies, and that's because they feel in the age of remote work, they don't have to lift on top of the office. That's interesting. And that genie is outta the bottle.
It's never gonna be put back in, which is why the directions that Philip talked about. They hold very, very true today because these things are playing out more and more now. The genie's out the bottle, the hybrid genie, you're not gonna stuff it back in. Yes, some companies are strong arming people back into the office, but all the research says that office mandates lower satisfaction.
And at the individual level of productivity satisfaction is the key measure.
Ian Ellison
One of the things that I see with the 10 directions, and I think one of the things that work tech and work tech academy, you seem to do it quite often and I think it's a very nice way of doing things, is you tend to create models which create different perspectives but also.
Show that these aren't binary discussions. So Jeremy, I was invited onto one of your webinars earlier this year and you were broadcasting almost an update to this thinking, I guess a sort of reflection from six different perspectives on how organizations have responded to the pandemic. And you talk about two of them in depth.
In this book you talk about resolute returners versus choice champions, but you sort of extended that in some of your subsequent work to space savers and tech investors and data drivers and wellbeing watches. And they're catchy names, but the point is they are six different overlapping perspectives that you can major in as a workplace for professional that you can minor in depending on your clients, depending upon how you feel about things.
And once you've got a framework like that, you can start to say, well. That's why Goldman Sachs perform like that and make those choices and have that narrative. And that's why Slack and Spotify do this and have chosen that narrative. And they're not necessarily wrong. The question is, are they contextually right?
And I think what you've got here is your 10 directions. They set the reader up with choices around priorities and important for what to think about from their perspective.
Philip Ross
What interests me is that a C is not a uniform entity. So you have to kind of segment and segmentation is often very, very kind of basic.
People talk about personas or or job roles. But actually if you look at really interesting segmentation, a bank will have investment professionals, they'll have tech professionals, and they work in very different ways and probably have very different workplace requirements. It's also driven by compliance and legislation.
A trader has to be in the office five days a week. That is driven by a compliance requirement. And alongside that, people who support that role will also need to be in five days a week. So I think the landscape is very difficult, very complex, and I think often we try and simplify it or the press simplifies it to a number of days in the office.
I think the other perspective of this is offices are a very difficult asset to sweat, but environmentally using an asset for three days out of seven. Equally not particularly sustainable. So there does need to be, I think, a reset. We talk to developers quite a lot, and you still battle to get any innovation because the way the investment market is set up, you could really imagine not just a mixed use development, but a true integrated use development.
And what we tried to infuse in the book is some lateral thinking. So for example, many large organizations will have an auditorium, a huge, vast, beautiful space with fantastic technology, beautiful armchairs or seats for two, 300 people. Why can't that become a cinema after 6:00 PM. If it was designed correctly, the security was done correctly.
Chris Moriarty
There's probably a few FM sweating at the idea of the general public coming into this FM needs to off its game. I know, Hey, look, I'm not here to defend them. I'm just making their voice heard.
Philip Ross
You know, you look at commercial kitchens in offices, millions of pounds spent in commercial kitchens, again, by 3:00 PM they're all shut down.
Why can't they be in a basement and 24 7 used after the office workers go for Deliveroo and Uber Eats as a ghost kitchen. So those kind of, if we reimagine work with a lens of sustainability, I think we could do a lot more and, and, and push innovation.
Chris Moriarty
Do you know what, and actually brings me onto the kind of where I want to finish the discussion because Jeremy, you talked about this being a timestamped kind of publication.
There was a lot of talk about hopeful uses for these big spaces. I think I was definitely in your camp. As everybody was trying to make sense of what was happening off the back of the pandemic. I genuinely, genuinely thought, this is it. It's kind of like the convergence of great technology and a kind of review of what work was because it was suddenly the shackles were off and we could think a bit more freer about it.
I recently put a post up on LinkedIn where I kind of had a very glib view of what Canary Wharf was gonna become. I kind of sat there and goes, yeah, this place is cooked, they're never gonna recover. And I was there a couple of weeks ago and it was mobbed and the train getting there was mobbed and the train getting home was mobbed.
And I'm sitting there looking at headline after headline after headline, and I didn't know when this started. I dunno what point organizations did press releases about their work policies, but it's a thing now. It gets into the news Corporation X has issued mandate that does this, that does that. And I sat there, I go back and I go, do you know what it was that moment?
Amazon came out and said five days a week, I sat there going, oh no. There's gonna be a load of other ones now that are either emboldened by it or think, well, we're not gonna do five days, so we won't look so bad when we say four. So with all of that landscape, since this book came out, do you look at that with disappointment, pragmatism?
How do you kind of reflect on that? Did we miss the opportunity or do you still hold hope that we can unlearn what we've always
Jeremy Myerson
known? I think we remain optimistic, but it depends whether you see the COVID-19 pandemic as a total disruption to work or an acceleration of trends, which were preexisting and it's probably a combination of the two.
I think the technology, to go back to our typologies, the technology has not been as faultless and as seamless and as great as we'd hoped. And when we wrote the book, everyone was into virtual reality, augmented reality, and ai. You know, a regret as authors is that we didn't play up AI enough in the book.
We mentioned it, we discussed it, it's underlying a lot of processes, but we didn't foreground it. And as soon as the book was published, you know, chat GT came out and the whole thing kicked off. But it's true that the technology has not been as perfect as many people had hoped. I think on the space and placemaking side, I think a lot of architects and designers have gone back to the tried and trusted, they've not been sufficiently experimental.
And on the people side, you know, the C-Suite have whipped the HR departments. Back into a much more conventional, let's get everybody back to work. And of our typologies, the resolute returners have been the strongest group. They have been battling away, not giving an inch of ground. They've been unyielding.
They've been very determined often for quite good reasons to do with building culture and collaboration. The choice champions have wilted a bit under the pressure and you've got companies which were work anywhere champions in the early days of Covid. They have retrenched gone to a much more kind of in the office.
Yes, you can have some flexibility, but we want you in the office some of the time. At the other end of the spectrum, there are companies have gone fully remote, A lot of people have avoided the quagmire middle ground of hybrid where nobody knows what's happening. So these typologies we discussed. Some of them have remained steady and some of them have bent in the wind.
Chris Moriarty
Philip, any final reflections before we finish up? Well,
Philip Ross
look, I think with Jeremy, I think AI has now got a huge part to play in disruption and shaping the future of work. You know, we're seeing the idea of AI dynamically planning day by day buildings and how people sit together, which is really fascinating.
Almost reshaping both the organization and the way people work within it. They will also be part of the landscape of data generation. So we are gonna move towards the data analytics of the workplace in a huge way and teams of data scientists coming into the profession. But I think your reflection on Canary Wharf, we kind of see that actually that's probably a healthy realization.
Some cities were hollowed out. San Francisco's. CBD is still very, very grim and depressing. New York is still struggling with vast s swats of empty office space that's being seen as obsolete. And alongside it, everything suffers from the delis to the bars, to the dry cleaners, to the tax revenues and the transport revenues.
So the cities are struggling without the net worth individuals coming into offices and spending. So I think there's a balance to be played to, to counter the, the debate. Um, and I think that the resolute returners are probably doing so for good reasons. You can measure some of the declines around network strength, around innovation pipelines around client, um, development and profitability.
It, it lasted for a while because there was a hangover. But then there are some declines and you know, some of the quotes from leadership that Homeworking is an aberration. And some of the other kind of fairly strong words that I used actually talks to the idea of what is the corporation for? The theory of the firm is about the idea of agglomeration to optimize both the cost and interaction.
And I think therefore, getting back to first principles and redefining the office based around the future shape of organizations, the workflow and the outcomes required, I think is the real secret for what's next.
Chris Moriarty
Well, a lovely way to finish. So thank you so much, gentlemen, for joining us. If people are like curious about this stuff, where would you be pointing them to?
Jeremy Myerson
I won't be, be any surprise to your listeners if I point you in the direction of Work Tech Academy,
Ian Ellison
the exclusive members club for the highest quality of workplace professional knowledge.
Jeremy Myerson
Yes. But with a free to view from end perspective, just to warm you all up, we are running a multimedia platform around the future of work and you can get knowledge on our work tech events, but also we are tracking the big research reports and surveys of the day
Philip Ross
Work Tech Melbourne is happening today.
It's a remarkable community. You, you are, you're all passionate. We're passionate, but we see passion globally and, and it's very infectious. So we are trying hard to build that, to cross fertilize ideas. We want work tech to be a really stimulating forum, celebrate people who've innovated and have really pioneered and pushed the boundaries.
So definitely recommend going to a local work day.
-- REFLECTION SECTION --
Chris Moriarty
Right, Kasia? Yeah. Welcome to the booth. We're still here at the workplace event. We don't do many reflection sections live, do we? We don't do much live in the same space, but here we are. We have just listened to Philip and Jeremy talk about their book on work. Now this will be a piece of work you are very familiar with, you know, being part of the Worktech family.
But tell us a little bit about your kind of reflections on the book generally, but also like some of the bits that we kind of talked about in the chat and what kind of jumped out at you.
Kasia Maynard
Thank you. It is so fun to be your faces. I have to do that.
Chris Moriarty
Your face literally changed. You went into show mode. Yeah, you did.
You went right into show mode. It
Ian Ellison
was like jazz hands. It was like something happens way,
Chris Moriarty
it can't keep this. Of course it does. It all stays in. We don't do any edit when when
Ian Ellison
people laugh, other people laugh. So now people are laughing there. Listen, it's so hard to edit
Chris Moriarty
out there. It'll be so hard to edit out.
Alright. Okay, go on. And
Kasia Maynard
so jazz
Chris Moriarty
hands,
Kasia Maynard
thanks for having, it's nice to be here in person and see you both the, the book itself. My general reflections on it, well, you just touched on it in the discussion with Philip and Jeremy, was the idea of looking back to look forward. And that was a clear theme in the book as Jeremy discussed, and we moved from Efficiency Community Network and then what's next?
And that is the kind of the key part of the book. Where have we come from to get to where we are going? Some of the things I thought were particularly interesting in the chat, and this happened a little bit later on, was Jeremy talking about technology not being what we thought it was gonna be at this point.
And so very quickly
Ian Ellison
we
Kasia Maynard
thought it was gonna be virtual
Ian Ellison
and augmented
Kasia Maynard
and it's pivoted completely in an AI direction. A hundred percent. And I think that goes to show, I read something the other day that was saying technology. Is a catalyst. It's not the cure. So every time we come up and say the metaverse is the cure, that's gonna be the future.
This is what's gonna make remote working great. It wasn't, it was a catalyst to get to where we are now, which is AI and some level of efficiency to remote working. The conversation is changing all the time. So I think you made the point in the discussion about knowledge work moving so slowly and tech moving so fast.
And I thought, you know, that's a really interesting point because it's true knowledge work is still at a point where we're measuring presence and we are measuring things that we've been measuring since taylorism since the 1920s. Yet technology is so, so beyond that. So why haven't we thought of a different way to measure productivity other than you being in the office?
Yeah. And the measure of productivity has changed from okay, output of how many things you make to how many documents you put out. You know what we've measured change, but ultimately it's. Still the same, we're still measuring output
Chris Moriarty
over. Is that kind of almost like technology has advanced so much, but actually our output hasn't you, you that expect the technology to be pushing performance?
Kasia Maynard
Yeah,
Chris Moriarty
and actually I think it was Drucker was saying like, guys, our GDP whatever way economically you wanna measure kind of performance is totally stagnant. It hasn't developed in the last a hundred years, whereas in the a hundred years prior to that it, it exploded, it ballooned and we've just not had it.
But what you are talking about there gets me thinking and you know, we're recording a certain event today where there's panels and there's been like, two things I've kind of taken today is we're still predicting the future, despite us also reflecting on how bad we have been at predicting the future. I was talking earlier on about sci-fi movies, like being the themes.
Everyone was talking about Minority Report. We're all gonna be like, minority Report we ain't, and then it was, we're all gonna be like Ready Player one. We're not. We're so bad at predicting what will actually happen. I guess what the book. Does, and Jeremy really made that point, didn't he? That it's not about looking backwards, it's learning from what's been before.
And one learning you can take from it is things don't change that much. So why are we predicting that they're going to radically change in the future? Well, there's no evidence of it, right?
Ian Ellison
It's interesting because that all of this, looking back to look forward, it's sort of talks to that, I said it in the show that George Satana quote about those who don't understand the past are doomed to repeat it.
Here we go. Those who don't, you always do it with quotes. I dunno
Chris Moriarty
why you do it to yourself.
Ian Ellison
Just paraphrase it. Those who don't understand who history are doomed to repeat it. And there's another quote, and I will paraphrase this one. We think stuff's gonna progress really rapidly in the short term, but actually, and it never feels like it does, but you'd be amazed how much ground we cover in the long term.
Chris Moriarty
You don't see the change until you've dipped out and dipped back in and you go, wow, guys, you don't realize when you're in it. Right?
Kasia Maynard
But the marginal gains thing is really interesting 'cause I've had a thought on this. Um. Because I was reading the Atomic Habits book. I don't know if you've come across that bit.
Yeah. Very clever guy. But he was talking about marginal games in terms of making habits. So he referenced the British cycling team. Yeah. And he was saying they're a very subpar team for a long time. In fact, bike manufacturers were embarrassed to sell their bikes 'cause they were doing so badly. And then they got taken over by another head coach who thought, I'm not gonna radically change what's going on here.
I'm gonna change loads and loads of little things to the point where they brought their own pillows with them on tour so they had better night's sleep. They painted the inside of the van white so they could see specks of dust. So people didn't get ill. He said, every day I wanna improve this by 1%. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think when we talk about workplace transformation now and where we are going, it's, it's not about let's reimagine everything. 'cause the word reimagines when used so much in workplace transformation, we are reimagining the world of work. That insinuates to me that it's an overnight. Change and it's not, it's loads of, if we can just improve the workplace at 1% every time we try, we're ultimately gonna end up in a much better place.
But I think every time something big happens, we try and reinvent the wheel and we get a little bit lost
Ian Ellison
doing it. So it's evolution, not revolution to use a bit of classic change management course speak and then every so often, back to your original thing, something like OpenAI and the whole dropping of a completely different system on the world that shakes everything up and then it settles down in Vols again.
Kasia Maynard
Exactly. You know, the Metaverse was a huge thing in 2020. Accenture were doing their onboarding on the Metaverse and a lot of other companies were investing heavily. I think PWC invested quite heavily in it as well. And it didn't materialize into anything 'cause it wasn't the same kind of human connection.
And now, yeah, AI is basically personalizing our workplace. This is doing more for us than the metaverse could have ever done. And it's very different. This is a bit of a segue into something else, but Philip mentioned the social capital of Gen Z and I thought he said something really interesting because he was like, they're not building social capital.
Their social skills are not good. Yeah. It was quite a strong statement. Yeah. I think I agree with it though a little bit. I see. I disagree a little bit because all Gen Z now like fine, their in person skills might have changed, but that's in relation to our lived experiences of people who are slightly older who have been in the workplace.
Their social capital is actually probably so much bigger than ours. Digitally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're, they're on things like social media shifted and, and it shifted and, and I think you can argue that those connections are superficial, but actually a lot of Gen Z are making connections. They're making business through digital means.
We do it through LinkedIn. They're doing it through Instagram maybe, but they have built these whole communities that they feel very close to, that they feel like they're their friends. Digitally online. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we ask them to come back to the office for social capital, I think we are doing it more for the millennials and the Gen X.
We're doing it from our own mountain top. Are we bringing them in because we want to improve their social capital or are we doing it because we don't know how to get to that? That is
Chris Moriarty
stellar
Kasia Maynard
reflection
Chris Moriarty
section material there. So you, the thing that got me now, I wanted to ask them about this during it, but we've run outta time and it's linked to your bit about technology and stuff.
I found it really interesting the kind of almost side by side relationship that technology and work have with each other and how that has influenced workplaces. And I think whilst I was reading, I saw the name Keith Alexander, the N If Prize come up. Right. And I remember when I was at the institute when we were changing the name and we were looking at kind of history of FM and all rest that I kind of got a bit obsessed with it.
A lot of research about the history of fm, where it came from, why it was called that. I think it was a real purple patch in the nineties. For facilities, academia and Keith Alexander and F were right at the center of that. Yeah, there was. There was, yeah. Some amazing stuff came out. It was
Ian Ellison
almost like a golden decade.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah. Of like progressive thinking, challenging thinking.
Ian Ellison
But it was also, it was the true pioneering, I mean, long, long time ago, I think FM world celebrated the, the 20 pioneers of fm and it was Keith Alexander. It was Frank Duffy. It was Iran Price, it was Bernard Williams who's just died the, the original facilities economist.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And And those names, they were breaking ground.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah.
Ian Ellison
In a way that you kind of wonder who's doing it these days.
Chris Moriarty
But equally, I thought, isn't it interesting? Because the kind of thread in that research that I found, which was kind of facility management, really came about when office computers came in and it was about having to manage the facility where these computers were.
It wasn't like a workplace. And oh, and the technology's come into it. The, the actual job title was more about it facility management. Ah. But what it got me into thinking was we think that technology's pushing, but actually workplaces, I think they're a lag. They're trying to keep upward technology for ai.
It's like, we're gonna change work. And you're like, whoa. And then the workplace, we're gonna figure out what to do after you've changed work and we're gonna catch up with you. Always imagining it the other way around. It's, it's technology first. Technology will change work. Work will change workplaces. And do we just have to accept that?
Ian Ellison
Oh, that is another quite
Chris Moriarty
profound. This has been a good episode for me, if I'm honest.
Ian Ellison
You are very much in a Philip Ross kind of mold, aren't you? Because he was the one that, you know, I would put technology determinist, technological determinist. Yeah. I thought that is shade
Chris Moriarty
talk there, Jeremy. Yeah,
Kasia Maynard
I would say I am more in Jeremy's camp.
I'm not a fan of. If the tech's there use it, that's not my mantra. I'm like, let's leverage it where we can. That makes sense. But if it's just there, for example, why would I use AI to find out where my teams are if my team is small and I can message 'em on WhatsApp saying, you are coming in today. Yeah.
That is, I understand it for bigger teams, but I under, if there's an easier way to do it, I don't see why that's a
Chris Moriarty
tipping point. Almost like tipping, it gets to a point with the value it, it is almost like a scale thing, like a, A problem might have a certain scale to it that technology lends itself to.
But in the meantime, don't just do it for little bits. Don't
Kasia Maynard
overcomplicate something that works through technology. Because I think to your point, yeah, I do think the workplace is constantly sort of chasing technology. What's technology doing next? How can we adapt? But then also socially, we are behind technology as well.
We'll use it in our daily life. Like we'll play around with ChatGPT separately in our daily life. We'll use Uber we'll, all of these apps that. That we frequently use without even thinking about where our data goes really. And then in the workplace we switch into a different mindset. So I don't think in our personal lives, I think technology and life is kind of going symbiotically, but workplace, I just think people have a different mindset because I think it comes back to trust again.
And
Ian Ellison
you use the trust word. I have been reflecting. Since this episode, but also here we are at the NEC at the workplace event and some of the sort of topics that have come up in conversation. Why do organizations, why do workplaces lag? Well, they lag because they can, because there's a power dynamic.
Mm-hmm. So you say trust, I say power. There's always a power dynamic. If you can tell somebody what to do or withhold something, if they don't do it in a soft or a hard way, as in I'm gonna give you a mandate to get back to the office. Or if you don't like it, there's the door, whatever. What it actually does is that sort of stifles the need to do anything progressive because you've got them, as Matt Harvey would say, the late thirties.
Chris Moriarty
Yeah. Coming to an episode near you. So me and K have set a very high bar there for reflections.
Ian Ellison
What was your takeaway? Uh, well. I sort of talked about this a little bit during the episode, but a good measure for me from a sort of teacher educate a lecturer type perspective is would this resource be a really useful learning tool for people to grow and think more progressively about this stuff?
And do you know what? That would absolutely be a book on my cortex for the workplace leadership diploma for undergraduate or postgraduate stuff. It's a really, really lovely grounding. More specifically, there was this tiny little line, I think quite early in the book. Am I even being the introduction? You know that I love a good system, you know, like I like to think in a systemic way.
You like systems and. I found myself reflecting on the fact that they're basically talking about the corporate real estate ecosystem. They don't call it that because they do it in such lovely language. They say Own, plan, build, design, manage supply, invest, occupy. They are all the different interests within this ecosystem that is corporate real estate.
And I think that we identify the forces, and I hear them over and over again, but I just think that was incredibly eloquently done. What I don't see us doing is talking about, which forces, back to my comment about power. Mm. Which forces are the ones that make things change? Because we can sit here being all futurists saying the world is gonna be X, Y, and Z, but if the power is with the pension funds from the investors.
And nobody seems to talk like that. You know, when Anthony Slumbers was talking during the pandemic about the death of the office, here is the inflection point. There is no going back. I'm like says whose pension? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's, Philip said on the episode that New York is in trouble.
San Francisco is in trouble from a real estate perspective. So maybe I've got a quite a sheltered myopic view, but I don't see the world changing the great deal.
Chris Moriarty
Mm-hmm. It reminded me when all that stuff was coming out, it was like the death of the city, that death of the office in the city and I looked, I forget where I was.
Must have just been when you were starting to creep back out again. I remember looking across the London skyline and seeing cranes everywhere and I'm like, well no one's told that. Yeah, that's true. That's true. They stop knocking them up.
Kasia Maynard
We've just done a, um, our latest sort of quarterly trend report was on eight global cities across the world and we looked at places like New York, London, Melbourne Bra Airs.
Tokyo, Singapore and Dubai. Have there been worked tech events at all of those cities by any chance? There have? There have. It was interesting 'cause because we categorized them as innovative cities, evolving cities and adaptive cities. And the adaptive cities are the ones that are overcoming some challenges at the moment.
And in that bucket was New York, Melbourne and Breena Airs because they have to overcome some serious challenges. New York's dealing with high vacancy rates and as a result they're putting a lot of emphasis on office to rezi conversions. And that was actually a big focus at ZA as well. The North American team was focusing on how can we make credible office to resi conversions.
And they were saying actually the worst office buildings made the best houses. That's because of the low ceilings and you know, and they've got a housing crisis, so they're adapting to that. Need and change. Melbourne again has the highest vacancy rates of anywhere in Australia, around 20%. And they're basically saying, okay, well the CBD is kind of dead the way it is is dead.
Yeah, okay. So we need to start thinking adaptively. They're looking at flexible workplaces and they're trying to think just differently to combat that and actually attract people back to the office. And then Buenos airs are doing some interesting things because their governments and private sector are collaborating in some initiatives that the government's giving incentives to the private sector to say, if you develop some of these under underutilized assets, we'll give you incentives, we'll give you tax breaks and things like that.
So they are in trouble, but they're
Ian Ellison
innovating. But your point, and the thing that I was pondering, it sort of speaks to the same thing, which is these are systems. Where the different elements exert different forces on each other, depending upon what's going on. But the point about systems, and this is why people don't really like them, they're complicated and they sort of exist and operate and change over time, but they are notoriously robust.
They are really hard to change. So trying to reinvent one's area is trying to invent Melbourne, trying to reinvent New York. These are hard things to do. And maybe this talks to the bugbear of people who stand on conference lecterns doing the workplace evangelism bit. We should do this and we should do that maybe.
But that's not how the world works because it works on systems, not bloody magic wands. Yeah.
Chris Moriarty
But what you're talking about there kind of makes me think of a lot of stuff that I do outside of the world of workplace. Some of those power sources of power. Have got to go. What's the bigger picture here? What do we ultimately want and how can I grease the wheels slightly it goes right.
Actually we're gonna offer some incentives. 'cause what we all want is a busy business district and what we all want is occupied offices. And even saying the death of the office is hybrid work. That return to office. And remember one of the things that came out was, yeah, no, but your train season ticket's still a week's thing, right?
There should be some flexibility in that, but they're not gonna do that 'cause they don't wanna lose revenue on that. And you're like, well these cogs, they present as been all neatly integrated. But actually there's sparks flying everywhere 'cause they crunch. And you know, even in that model you talked about there, they're all big wheels, small wheels, different turnover of wheels.
Some are 10 year cycles, some are four month cycles. Yeah. The gearing. The gearing is all over the place. Ian, the gearing is all over the place. Well look, that was some top reflection, but you've set a really significant bar series for, but we are, we're expecting big things from our reflection section.
Guests maybe. It is 'cause we're in a booth. It's quite, it's quite a logistical nightmare, uh, going forward. But yeah, there must be something said. So thanks for joining us.
Kasia Maynard
Thank you so much for having me. It's been so much fun, so much fun to be in person and this
Chris Moriarty
time, which sincere feeling. Uh, lovely stuff.
Thank you very much.
-- OUTRO --
Chris Moriarty
So there we go. Series four up and running. Now remember, you can continue the conversation on LinkedIn. Just search for Workplace Geeks. You can also use the hashtag Workplace Geeks. And if you want to get in touch, you can email us on hello@workplacegeeks.org. Visit workplace geeks.org to see past episodes and to sign up to the newsletter.
Speak to you soon.
