-- Intro --
Chris Moriarty
Hello and welcome to Workplace Geeks, the podcast that is on a quest to nose out, size up and kick about the world's most exciting and innovative workplace research with the amazing brains behind it. I'm Chris Moriarty
Ian Ellison
And I'm Ian Ellison
Chris Moriarty
And we are your hosts on this intrepid workplace voyage of discoverable delights. Who the hell wrote that while I wasn't looking? Alright that anyway, right? So, look, thank you all for your lovely feedback and shares on social of Jo Yarker’s amazing interview. It's been hugely popular, we found across lots of different pockets of the workplace landscape, which is great to hear. And thank you for those that have engaged with our recent article on workplace experience frameworks that was published in workplace insight. Now if you haven't had a chance to look at that and would like to then you can pop on to our LinkedIn account, you just need to search for Workplace Geeks and you will find a note pointing you in the right direction. So, onto today's episode, Ian, let our lovely listeners in on who we're speaking to this week.
Ian Ellison
So, this week, folks, we're talking with Professor Alexi Marmot. Now I've known Alexi for a while and I've always found her incredibly humble and helpful. But when you sort of dig into it, Alexi has got one of those CVs where when you really look at it, you realise what a quietly accomplished and influential workplace heavyweight she is, without so it seems the need to shout it from the rooftops. So current roles include Professor Emeritus of facility and Environment Management in the Bartlett, which is a University College London's faculty of the built environment and very, very famous faculty there as well.
She's also the professor of architectural science at University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design, and planning. And she's also the board chair of AMA, which is Alexi Marmot associates the business that she founded in 1990. So that's kind of the stuff that she does. She's also wrote a bunch of different books over her career. So, in 1995, she wrote understanding offices with her longtime collaborator and friend, Joanna Ely, in 2000. She wrote office space planning, also with Joanna and she contributed to the IFMA Foundation's work on the move volumes one and two, and also edited volume three, which Chris I think you're going to talk about in a quick moment. So that's kind of like a list of things that she's achieved. But before all of this, she also spent the latter half of the 80s at a certain seminal workplace practice that we may also have already mentioned on this podcast before Chris D, E. G, W.
And the similarities with Frank Duffy don't kind of end there she studied her PhD at Berkeley, California, like Frank Duffy and her early career in housing wasn't by the sound of it, unlike Frank Duffy and also Franklin Becker from the States. So as one quick aside, before we get into our discussion with her, I do think we sort of need to devote some Workplace Geeks resource to almost working out the family tree of the physical workplace here, because I've got a hunch that most if not all, of the UK branch certainly will track back in one way or another to DEGW in the 1980s. But that's, that's a hobby horse of ours. And I'm sure we'll get to it at some point. Back to you, Chris.
Chris Moriarty
So, we anchored the conversation around Alexis contribution to work on the move three. So as Ian said, that's the third in a series of publications by the IFMA Foundation, which looks at and considers the key issues facing the facilities management industry. Now, for those that don't know the IFMA Foundation is a charitable arm of the International Facility Management Association, which is based out of Houston but has chapters all over the world. It works for the public good in support of facility management, higher education.
It helps students’ study in facility management and related field conducts critical research for the profession and aims to increase awareness of facility management and making it a career of choices. So, if you want to find out more about them, you can head to foundation.efma.org. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. But enough of that on to our chat with Alexi.
-- Interview --
Chris Moriarty
So, Alexi, welcome to the Workplace Geeks podcast. It's brilliant to have you here I known you for a while now. So, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show. For those who haven't heard of your work. Just give us a little bit of background on the work you've done in the past the work that you do today.
Alexi Marmot
So, I have a strange background in this field. In a way. I was originally trained as an architect in Australia, in Sydney. And then I ended up going to do postgraduate work in California, both in architecture and in city and regional planning, as it was urban planning in effect. And so that's already two countries and sort of two areas of work but both in the built environment. And then I came to the UK thinking oh, you know a couple of years before I go back to Australia, but the lure of being here has been so strong that here I still am. So, in that context, I've always been deeply interested in the built environment, but also the built environment as a social artifact?
What is it about the way we run our societies and live our lives, that make us create buildings in the way we do cities in the way we do interiors of buildings in the way we do. And over the course of my career, which has spanned both practice and academia, and a mixture of the two, overlapping, and so on, I've had the privilege of working on those sorts of questions in three main building types, initially housing, particularly housing for the underprivileged, then workplace, which is absolutely riveting and fascinating, and I remain riveted by it. But then moving also to add a different sort of workplace, the educational workplace. So those are the three sort of foci. But workplaces are very much a core to what I love thinking about.
Chris Moriarty
It's really interesting, because you speak in there about workplaces, social artifacts, which I guess a lot of people can sometimes forget about, because they just see it as a kind of functional device in an organisation. And you will, I guess, by the cornet, social artifacts, you're kind of looking at it with a wider lens. And that definitely came through when we read the chapter that we're going to talk about briefly today. So, before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about the book that we're going to talk about, which was the work on the move number three. So, it's part of a series and it's published by the IFMA foundation. So, tell us a little bit about the book. And your chapter, particularly in that book
Alexi Marmot
When the pandemic got going. The International Facility Management Association, foundation of which I'm a trustee, decided that we really needed to start thinking about the post pandemic workplace and putting out some guidance to people on this. And interestingly, that was after we already published a pandemic guide. Very quickly, very, very much in the first few weeks of the pandemic, the aim was to really look ahead and to use what was clearly going to be a real break point in what we'd been doing till now, to really say, so what should be different? What might be different? What could be different?
Or do we just go back to normal, it was also to get people thinking, but also to bring in income to support people that the foundation supports, who are trying to really become facility managers. And I guess that really speaks to the importance again, of people and buildings as a social construct, with people running them who are very much part of whether or not a workplace is good, bad or indifferent.
Chris Moriarty
When I was looking at the introduction to it, I noticed that I went down the list of contributors, and I recognise the number of names and it's from all sorts of different angles. It's coming out, isn't it in terms of looking at this future of work? Now your chapter? Well, one of your chapt because you did too, didn't you? You look to sort of work megatrends. But you also looked at health and well-being at work now. What was it about the health and well-being at work that really kind of motivated you to write that chapter? What was it about that topic that made you want to make that your contribution to this, this piece of work?
Alexi Marmot
So, I think there's two key elements to that. One is actually thinking about the whole area of planetary health, the climate, the climate emergency, the fact that the planet is overheating, and so on. So, it looks both at that level of changes that the building sector all together is very, very conscious of, because we're such a big contributor to it. And secondly, there's also been an increasing focus on individual health, mental health and well-being in particular, physical health, obviously, because of the pandemic.
So, putting all of those two together was really the main challenge of the chapter on health and well-being at work that I wrote, some of the issues of sustainability were also taken up brilliantly by other authors in another chapter. So, I didn't spend too much time on that issue. But it very much forms the background, to the ways in which I think about the role of the workplace and how we again conceive of it as a place that uses lots of resources, and a place that demands lots of transport resources as well in traveling between home and work. And so, the whole area of change post pandemic becomes really fascinating. With that issue of the balance between working in a workplace and work or the workplace becoming also the living place.
Ian Ellison
It makes me think about Jack Millis from episode four of the podcast who spoke so incredibly fondly of you. I guess what I'm kind of reflecting on and let's see if there's a question that falls out of this. It feels like You've always spotted the big systemic interrelationship between the built environment and the health of the world, and the health of the people who use the built environment.
You can see it from the sort of micro to the macro. And not just you see it in different ways, but you spot the interlinkages. Now, if I just picked back up on the fact that you kind of what I thought you were doing, there was almost declaring the pandemic as an opportunity to do different and you said not go back to normal as almost an implication there that normal need to be better? Am I hearing that right? Is the agenda for you almost a real significant change agenda for the built environment? And for what workplace can be for the planet?
Alexi Marmot
Yes, and no, we all have to be modest about the possibilities of change, and whether or not a few voices can make change happen. But it was absolutely clear that the whole world changed overnight, almost because of the pandemic. And for that to only be a negative change would be just crazy. Just crazy. And particularly for people like Jack Nicklaus and others who've been thinking about the whole issue of you know, what, historically, mankind has not lived in a different place to the one in which we worked, you know, we are sort of evolved, whether it's hunter gatherers, or later settled farmers, we've evolved to be in place to understand the local.
And then we went through this era where we moved into vast cities where that was not possible anymore. And we invented amazing things like the motorcar and aero planes and all of that, you know, fantastic things. I mean, I'm not in any way anti change in anti-technology overall. But I am there to say, let's think about our evolved selves, let's think about what the planet can stand. And the planet is yelling back at us at the moment saying, I'm not sure I can stand this much longer. Also, that the virus itself may have been caused by climate change. We know zoonotic disease transferring, because perhaps the bats were coming closer to civilisation and infecting people as a result. I mean, I'm, I don't know how solid the evidence for that is.
But it's issues like that, that we, you know, it's that moment of saying, everything's up for grabs, everyone has to reconsider. And this really is still going to be something that we talk about for a long, long time. The issue of potentially working at distance has been around for about 50 years, Jack Nicklaus was, you know, one of the people talking about telecommuting, and one of the first clients that I had when I set up my company was IBM who had just invented the laptop and we're trying to work out how they themselves as a company should work as well as how they should then use that to promote the idea of working not in an office and so you know, this is a it's a long tail that's made a lot of change pre pandemic it's got a lot further to go still
Chris Moriarty
Alexi when you at the start about that kind of that description there of what you just sorry, I just saw Alexa. Not Alexi, Alexa. I said Alexa, my Alexa fired up. Alexa off, right. Okay, she's the microphones off now. I don't know why I didn't see that coming as it do you do you have that issue? Wherever you go. Let's see where people talk people talk to you and people smart devices start firing up.
Alexi Marmot
It has been known to happen. I mean, I take I take some delight in the fact that the reason that we both share a name, I mean, my, my proper name is Alexandra. And that actually means helper of mankind. So, the Alexa bit is the helper bit. And that's why Alexa is called Alexa is that right? Yeah. So that's the name
Chris Moriarty
So good at my next dinner party, I think organise the dinner party just to say that. Anyway, Alexi. So, at the start of that description there of your response to Ian's reflection, it kind of reminded me of this, this paragraph in in your book. Now I'm not going to say in what section is because that'll give the game away. But you talk about time saved by not commuting, better interactions with family members be more connected to neighbours and local community and sort of elaborate on some of those things that I think people talked about in the pandemic has been benefits but not looking at them as a whole system just looking at was individual things that they noticed.
But you you've slapped a label on to this called playfulness, which jumped out at me and Ian which is, you know, it felt to me the way I described it to me and when I read it, it felt to me without wanting to take this to transcend too highly a kind of a spiritual way of looking at workplace, you know, and the connectedness to the world around you and your role within it, and how work and place and all that stuff kind of fuses together. So, I've I kind of I interpreted that right, you know, how do you see that whole thing? And playfulness is that? Have we got the kind of gist of it?
Alexi Marmot
Yes, I think so. I'm not sure that I would call it spiritual and such, I think it's possibly more driven by more, if you like, scientific insights, that I've learned from other people about the idea of firstly, mindfulness, where there's more and more evidence about the importance of giving time to be mindful of people around you and of self, and what are the distractions in daily life that make it often very impossible or difficult to do so but that, again, is sort of led by a lot of thoughtful people who've been researching and investigating those ideas, again, on the issue of our evolved biology. Again, there's lots of people who do write about that as an explanation of human behavior.
So, I think it's been interesting that there's very little of that discussion about the world of the built environment. So, this was my first little realisation of that lack of connection there about other things I was interested in, and sort of an attempt to maybe make a label that could then be developed, perhaps in the future by others to dwell on that a little more. And I guess the issue within the workplace to connect it back to the workplace is that there's an increasing demand for things like a somehow the concept of a workplace gym, for body fitness has started to evolve into a place for mindfulness, a place where you could go to be quiet, to meditate, to think, to get over those awful words that somebody just said to you, and your frustrations and blah, blah, blah. So, at a very practical level, I think it's already starting to creep into the workplace debate
Ian Ellison
Your use in the past of kind of clever little ways of phrasing things or capturing ideas so that we stick with people, the one that really stands out to me, is Alexi’s law. So, it is playfulness, kind of another kind of way to just to try and plant a seed in people's minds that they can think about this more powerfully and think about this more holistically.
Alexi Marmot
Yes I think it is. I mean, language matters. Language matters hugely to what we understand about anything. And if we don't have a word for the idea of somehow being routed in place, in big cities, in the 21st century, then it's going to be harder to try and get there. So yes, if, if others would pick up the term and fly with that I would be really delighted.
Ian Ellison
What a generous, generous offer, it gets me thinking about that Scandinavian word, I hope I'm doing this justice. And I know it's pronounced Hoogly. Certainly not how it's spelt. But there isn't a direct translation in our languages there. And it is that sense of it's not just cozy, it's not just comfortable. It's not just warm and comfy.
It's also a social feeling of being surrounded by good friends that perhaps you haven't been seen for a while. And when we started to chat about what placement this might mean. And Chris kind of went off in a bit of a spiritual direction, it's that idea of if we can give something there are only so many words in the English language. But if we can find a way to plant a seed, that can lead so many more powerful things, if we get people thinking differently.
Alexi Marmot
Yeah, I think it would be lovely to actually get a group of people to really focus on where we could take that as an idea. Does it have legs to really be developed further? I think it does. And it's not just about the work impact that the full life impact.
Ian Ellison
So, the first chapter that you contributed to, rather than edited were the ones around the sort of the global workplace megatrends if you like, and within that, you know, this very strong feeling that, you know, global health and well-being was something that we needed to think about. And you've already articulated that in our conversation. And then when you got specifically into your chapter, about health and well-being, you begin with this notion of I think you use the World Health Organisation's definition of health as a basic human right in the it contains physical health, mental health, and also social health.
And then you go on to explore all sorts of different things from the macro to the micro. So just for listeners, could we just sort of capture how would you summarise maybe the key takeaways from that chapter or maybe the things that you were really trying to achieve with it?
Alexi Marmot
Firstly, I was very conscious of the fact that when I wrote this, we were still in the pandemic, and we probably will, we still aren't completely free of it. So, speculating about the post pandemic period is already a little bit bold. And I think from the position right now, I think what I see is some panic from some parts of the real estate world, saying, oh, my God, maybe people never will come back to the office, or maybe they won't come back in as big numbers, and maybe corporates really will take much, much less space. And then and then we're still in that phase where we don't quite know. So any speculation that I make is, is really just that, and may not be as evidence based as I would like, the real things that I think are important is this idea that health is the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, as you were alluding to, and that is it really a fundamental human right.
And if so, anyone who creates buildings or looks after buildings, or says to people, you really must commute five days a week, or six days a week, in some countries, or minimum or three days a week, in some organisations, they sort of really need to be conscious of all of the aspects of both the individual health, the family health of the worker, the workers, family, if they, assuming they all have one somewhere, the city's health. And you know, again, going back to the planetary health issue, a lot of what I have been thinking about these last few years has been based on the evidence that keeps coming through that our built environment is one of the key aspects that has created some of the climate change issues about which were concerned, the creation stage, the operational stage, amounts to heading up towards half of the carbon emissions.
And then if we add to that, the transport emissions, which is fundamentally usually about journeys between buildings, then it's, you know, it's about two thirds of the problem, two thirds of the problem, if you take into account all of those factors, so the planetary health side with each passing year makes me more determined that we really ought to be conscious of this. And that really means that we have to think each time, you know, do we need this building? What building do we need? How big should it be? And what should it have within it, that actually makes people feel good and justifies its existence? The way that I've tried to answer these issues over time has been through what I call evidence based consultative design. So, the evidence base is both trying to understand the science and the facts and so on. But it's also then gathering evidence from users, you know, what really matters to them in whatever it is that in the case of workplaces? What, what is it that would help them in their work?
And what do they love about their workplace? And what do they despise, what really gets to them. And usually, their answers come out as a mixture of things to do with the physical workplace, and very much more of a sort of social work place as well, the people with whom they work, the conditions of work, the pay and other stuff. But because I come from the built environment side, I try and just extract most of the things that have to do with the built environment, and then how we can change that. So, one of the things that I talk about is the issue of the sitting down culture. And yes, all three of us are sitting down now. And what has happened, of course, is that mankind evolved to be physically active on two legs, took a very long time to lay invented chairs, anthropologists have actually found over 50 ways in which the body is at rest in different cultures, the sort of societies in which most of us live in the West has about two positions.
Ian Ellison
Wow, so all of the squatting and the different ways to sort of position yourself we they just don't exist in our culture in our society. And we have created all of the furniture which then propagates that if that's the right word or promotes that that stasis.
Alexi Marmot
Yeah. And you know, I myself try and practice standing up, I do lots of interviews, conference calls, etc. Standing up and do have a standing high desk as well. But in the end, you know, I also sit on a chair a lot of the time and we've done brilliant things to design very ergonomic chairs and to work out you know, how do you actually keep that backup right and do all of the other good things for the body? Through the ergonomic design of chairs. So that's one very obvious thing. And I've done research on that in the year’s pre-pandemic. But one of the things that people have talked about, that the pandemic introduced into their lives was actually a lot more time to exercise, because they weren't sitting stuck in traffic.
And we all know that lots of people found walking, found walking, and getting to know local people better as one of the, again, pandemic benefits. And now it's not that one can't do that it worked. But we don't. We don't very much, although again, you know, things like standing meetings. And walking meetings, again, is something that can be promoted, as well as standing high desks and the positives to that are now very well founded in medical knowledge and are creeping into the world of most workplaces’ designers. So, it's now not so unusual to be talking about these things. But we really mustn't forget that. And again, it does come down to, again, our evolved, our evolved bodies and what we were doing.
Ian Ellison
So, in the last episode of Dr. Jo Yarker, they were evaluating a case study, which was designed to essentially active principles. And, and I remember during I distinctly remember, because I felt like I was just being educated very, very directly, Jo, explained to me at the end, that it's, it's not necessarily just the sitting in the standing, it's the transitions, it's the body in motion. And it clearly there's a direct role that we can play in that as workplace professionals, whilst you were talking there, Alexi, it kind of got me thinking about your dual roles, you alluded to the fact that, you know, you have an educational hat, very long served educational, kind of role in and around our area.
You also alluded to the fact that you know, you've been consulting in architecture and workplace decided for a number of years, with a educational hat on, it's very easy to sort of stand there in an impassioned way and talk about what the opportunities that we can do with the built environment for society and for organisations and for people, when you're faced with a client who wants you to deliver a certain thing that they've already got in mind, and you kind of almost have to turn to them and go, there could be a better way to think about this. And it's probably not the answer that you want to hear right now. But Shall we really push the envelope? Do you find yourself encouraging clients to just be better about what they do, and maybe not worry so much about the traditional things that they have in mind for their workplaces
Alexi Marmot
That’s always been a way in which my practice has worked. By actually saying that the practice was doing evidence based consultative design, I guess we probably attracted clients who were interested in that as a mode. So, they were already open to it, if you like, and we both shared existing evidence and gathered new evidence for them to make their decisions. And a lot of that was about rather tricky things at the time, about, I mean, I was very much involved in the whole issue of not owning a desk at work. And back in the day, that was hugely controversial, you know, the one thing that people had was that sense of ownership and place.
And so, to actually say, Look, you know, there's a lot of reasons for thinking that maybe that's not appropriate, because maybe working in your own little group, and always sitting down in the same way, etc, was neither good for the team nor for the body and for the whole organisation. So, and we, you know, we got feed lots of feedback on that, it but it still made very uncomfortable, uncomfortable decisions for a lot of organisations. But without sort of trying to pull together the evidence, you wouldn't want to do that anyway, because you might be suggesting something that was really inappropriate and could fail.
Chris Moriarty
Alexi as someone who's, you know, in the intro, that you describe your career and you know, the different countries that you worked in, and then different sort of focus that you've had over the years. And as you know, as an IFMA, foundation trustee as well, you'll be conscious of some of the work that they're doing. And this series of books and all this sort of work that's done to describe and to assess and to tentatively predict where the workplace is going, how would you sum it up, you know, from your experience, where workplaces where, where they've come to and potentially where they're going because so much is made at them? There's miles and miles of words written about the workplace, but what would you say is a kind of a kind of a simplified, and I know it's a is a very complex thing to simplify, but a kind of simplified assessment of where we've been and where we're going.
Alexi Marmot
Okay, so let's first of all, define the workplace that we're at dressing as mostly the office workplace. Okay, so not talking about the many other places in which people work, some of which have their own huge strength and hazards. In my career when I started out, most office workplaces were defined by the social hierarchy within the organisation, and very, very clear that there were people who mattered and people who didn't matter. And so the top of the hierarchy, obviously, were the bosses and the bosses were always in the top of the building with the best views with big enclosed offices, and they sometimes had their own cafeteria, no wouldn't be called cafeteria, sorry, they own their own dining suite with different food, then other people who would go to a cafeteria in the basement, there weren't any social amenities and offices were not seen as places of sociability, and team building in the same way that they are now addressed.
So yes, of course, a good manager would manage a good team, and have occasional team meetings, they were usually rather rare. There would be probably one social meeting a year, which was the Christmas party for the organisation. And so, lots of things have changed in those decades in which I've been thinking about workplace. Today, we much more talk about the workplace as a setting for sociability, number one, for being coached and helped and supported by colleagues. Most large workplaces expect to have a place in which you exercise a place in which you can store a bicycle or any other newer forms of wealth. But the I guess, there's the whole thing about stuff like electric charging, but keeping up with new technologies of transport, if you like, as well as new attitudes towards transport, food choices, very much informed by more understanding of, of good and healthy eating than ever before, and much, much less obvious articulation of the social hierarchy.
Not that it isn't there within most organisations, but there's been much more of a sense that them up there are really with us, too. And then increasing, well, let me say, more steps into a realisation that physical health as in this setting, standing issue and movement issue is important. So again, workplaces with open staircases that say, please use me, don't go into a lift, please exercise your body, walk up some stairs, you'll burn calories, that way that's good for you, those things are now becoming the norm. And each of them has been on a long and slow trajectory that, you know, that I've witnessed, I'm not sure what the ones are to follow. But I do know that it will have less of the thou must come into a building, every day of the week, thou shalt sit at a place that says clearly what your salary is, and how much power in this organisation you have. And you will be able to eat things that you want, and that are healthy for you. And so on.
Chris Moriarty
What you just described there, I think kind of touches on to the ideas in the chapter that again, caught our eye when we were going through, which is workplace worth the journey. So, you're sort of describing there, this, this pool into these environments, rather than this demand to go into these environments, which is perhaps more aligned with that very early image of the workplace, you described with, you know, the sort of director dining suites and so on.
And also the another term that kind of jumped out was well working. And I guess the two things kind of interlink in that, you know, these places should be environments that encourage lots of healthy behaviours and situations, both physical and mental. So, do you see that as the kind of next evolutionary step then for workplace? Because I think it'd be fair to say that, yes, whilst we're seeing that, in the very large organisations, and I guess the flagship projects, there are, there's a kind of long tail of organisations that won't be there yet. But hopefully, ultimately, that'll rattle down. So, do you see that as kind of the next kind of norm that we want to create amongst organisations in our workplaces?
Alexi Marmot
Well, I very much hope so. I think the issue of workplaces worth the journey is both about the planetary health has to do with transport, and the individual health as well of the worker and the organisation. And as long as the organisation really asks people to come to a place because something great is going to happen because they're there. You know, in a world where work can be done anywhere, then, yes, of course one wants that one wants really good things to happen in the workplace when people do that. see each other talk together been together and work better as a result as for the well working thing.
Yes, I mean, that in again is sort of part of the part of the same set of ideas, that that should then also incorporate things like the good social relations, the good food, the, you know, also workplaces that have the places where you can physically exercise, some of them have places where young children can go to nursery, and so on. So that integration of life and well-being into well working would be terrific if these issues have become more widely spread than they are now.
Ian Ellison
All of those ideas of those concepts. Alexi, it makes me think about the current remit for physical environment professionals, operational facility managers in particular. Certainly from, I think it would be safe to say from an IFMA perspective, facility managers are quite closely linked to the built and to the physical, and a lot of your concepts talk about the need to stretch beyond that. So, is that about stretching the remit of this particular profession? Or is it about allegiances or alliances? Is it about thinking rethinking the whole thing dramatically differently? Am I leading the witness by trying to put you in a political box and get you to comment on it?
What do you think about because, you know, Chris, and I would very definitely talk about workplace being this overlap between the people using the technology and the tools wherever they're working in service of organisational need. And we would say that that stretches beyond the purely physical and the purely facility. But there are different ways to kind of look at that and organise it and arrange it. So, my follow up is almost with all of those aspirations about playfulness and well working and places that you really desire to be at, rather than you're told to be at, how do we almost power up facility and workspace and the physical to make that happen?
Alexi Marmot
Difficult question Ian you know, the, as we all know, the way in which workplaces are invented, designed, built, operated, used by different organisations involves lots of different characters in lots of different roles. And facility managers, I think are one of the sort of ignored groups usually. And yet, they're the ones who are often dumped with the product that others have designed without really thinking about them. I also think that in a funny way, facility managers who often are unseen, because they're the cleaners who come in in the middle of the night and just make things healthy, safe, for all or they're the caterers who again, you don't see the cooking is done somewhere else. And you know, stuff brought to cite it, again, depends on the scale and type of building and so on, they play an enormously important role.
And a lot of buildings, of course, have security of their front entrance. And a lot of that security is a person and the quality of what happens at that front door, when you first come into a workplace building really measures the difference between somebody who says Hi, or welcome or whatever. And I'm really sorry that you've got to have your bag examined, versus somebody who just stands there looking Surly and has a gun in their pocket. I mean, you know, this, this is really important. In that sense of well, working, feeling good about going to a workplace feeling, I'm so glad I made that two-hour journey and the traffic on a crowded train or whatever it might be. So, it's complicated coming together, and lots of different people. In the end, for most people, it's their immediate team and their boss that matters most. But the rest of that context should not be underestimated.
Chris Moriarty
When I looked at opening chapter, there was a line in it that talks about the growing importance of the facility manager in a way of looking at the pandemic. And there's situations where fire finding ourselves in and saying, you know, this is a opportunity to look at how workplaces can evolve can be improved, can be viewed through a different lens and be imagined differently. And there is a role for the facility manager within that. And as someone who spent the best part of five or six years in that world, that's an idea that I should imagine, has been talked about this sort of growing role and importance, I should imagine in each one of the chapters of this IFMA series, you know, from 2011 2016 2022.
So, I guess my follow up on Ian's and this whole conversation is yes, I think there's A growing understanding of the workplace can evolve and all the rest of it. But in terms of the role of a Facility Manager, and generally of the different characters and actors that are involved in creating this vision that we can all share, how optimistic are you? That it can happen? And I know that's a very loaded question. But just generally, your sense of how different this scenario is to maybe scenarios we've had in the past.
Alexi Marmot
Okay, well, it is a challenging question. The book was written for a facility management audience. So of course, it needed and wanted to stress the role of facility management industry. As an industry, it actually is massive, absolutely massive, because it requires so many staff to do things like cleaning, and catering in particular, and security. Those are the key ones, most designers, urban planners, and so on, wouldn't know what I meant. And still don't. So, we still have a knowledge integration gap to close. And we do know that so many, I mean, on how we know all the problems, if something new is built, there's always massive problems on handover, when the team who operate the building need to understand how it was designed, and how all this equipment functions in order to operate it well.
And until those gaps are closed, and until we have better communication and understanding, then we do have a challenge. You know, we know lots of buildings that are operated, using way more energy than they need, because it was never explained to the people who take over the operation, how it really should be designed, or the systems are too complicated to understand. Now on the other hand, we also have a lot more introduction of more feedback on how buildings are operating, how equipment is operating. And we have better AI, we have robotics. So, you know, things like vacuum cleaners, I mean, you know, now increasingly no longer need somebody doing it.
So, you know, a lot of changes are afoot that might allow a better integration, but I'm not counting on it happening tomorrow. In a sense, I think all of the authors writing the book are optimists and looking towards a world in which people taking decisions about our built environment, people doing the designs, people putting in all of the engineering stuff, key groups there, and designing that stuff. Really do also think about what does this mean in practice on a day when people come to the building, when the temperature does this, that and the other. We just need to close that gap again, to make a more efficient, more effective and a more enjoyable world.
-- Reflection section --
Chris Moriarty
Hello, James, welcome back to the podcast because we know that last week you were whittling in Dumfries and Galloway and we were joined by Esme. Did you? Did you enjoy your whistling? Course?
James Pinder
I did.
Chris Moriarty
What did you whittle?
James Pinder
Wood I will say I did listen to a bit of the podcast. I know Chris, you were talking about chisels and stuff. So, I think you were getting mixed up with carving. Right. Right. And you know, often they are used interchangeably, but they are different, I guess.
Chris Moriarty
Okay, I suppose that's the kind of the orientation, but they do at the start of your whistling balls. Because I guess it's a common mistake that people like me can make.
James Pinder
Oh, yeah, it's Yeah, exactly. And you'd be pleased to now booked on to a blacksmithing course in September. So that should be good.
Chris Moriarty
Is that you advising us in advance that you're not going to join us for a Pinder Ponder. You've had you've had a better offer? Well, look, I'm glad you're here. Now. You've had a chance to listen to us talking with Alexi, what were your three main takeaways that you took from our interview?
James Pinder
Not Alexa. Don't mention that word.
Chris Moriarty
Do not mention that word. Because all our devices are going to fire
James Pinder
Up. Yes, it reinforced the thing that we shouldn't have called our children, Siri and Google.
Chris Moriarty
Other smart devices are available?
James Pinder
Yeah. If you want to sponsor this podcast, then. So yeah, the three points that I picked up really interesting discussion. And the first point that stood out to me was Lexi's discussion around her buildings and why they are the way they are. And you know, what are the forces that shape and influence them?
And I guess, getting into social construction and the fact that buildings are social artefacts, I think, you know, she used that phrase during the interview. And what I think is really interesting about that is we kind of take it for granted. We take for granted that our built environment and our buildings are the way they are If we don't often question why that's the case and whether it could be different, or whether our buildings could be different, because those forces that shape them also, I guess, entrenched and so intrinsic, we just don't question them. We just, you know, take them for, for what they are.
Chris Moriarty
I found that interesting. But I had to kind of retrospectively work out why I found it interesting. And the way I kind of listened to you there and listening, thinking back to the chat with Alexi, I guess what we're saying is, for a generation of people entering the working environment, you're presented with the office or whatever it might be, and you go, well, that's that, then that's what they are. Whereas there's this kind of tapestry of history about certain decisions, or certain cultures or certain times that did it in a certain way. And some of it sticks.
Some of it doesn't quite stick and the stuff that does stick. We don't often question I guess for me, the obvious example that springs to mind is when you see someone at a conference, say a workplace conference that will make the association about the similarity between an office with rows of desks and a factory with rows of production lines. And it's kind of that suggestion that well, actually, these were designed because they were an iteration of what we knew other work looked like, and we kind of did a admin version of it, something like that. Right?
James Pinder
Yeah. We're trying to try to explore and understand what are the what are the things that shaped buildings? Why are they the way they are? Because ultimately, that understanding those things as well, a kind of key to understanding how we change things. You know, one of the things I'll sort of flag later, or one of the points that I wanted to make later was around systems and understanding why our buildings are the way they are is sort of almost the first step in improving them and changing them
Ian Ellison
Its interesting, it takes me back to speaking about workplace conferences, Chris, and the sorts of things that get used repeatedly. You know, one of the ways to get people to recognise how closely buildings are linked to people's decisions and how interlinked they are. We tell the story about, you know, the parliament and Winston Churchill and the decision to rebuild the Houses of Parliament when it was bombed after the Blitz and that clap that, that famous phrase, we shape our buildings, and thereafter there, shapers and the decision to rebuild it in the image of what it was because it that was what they valued in terms of parliamentary debate and stuff like that, and the building was set up to facilitate that it could have been something different the building could have shaped an entirely different social interaction in the Houses of Parliament, which would have changed everything for years to come.
But they chose not to. After that conversation with Alexi, I dug out some lecture handouts from when Alexi guested at Sheffield, Hallam University, almost a decade ago. And one of the things that she cited during that lecture was a book by somebody called port about Imperial London. And in the mid 19th century, you saw evidence of exactly the same workplace challenges that we see today, you know, talking about kind of industrial copying of spaces, you know, administrative offices, with people, you know, preoccupied with cost reduction, with unhealthy conditions, making work ineffective, with people grumbling about open plan, with hierarchy shot through because the senior staff had solo offices, space standards being in there. So more important people getting more space, and communication problems between departments. It's kind of like, you know, 150 plus years later, similar traits all the way through. And that's because of the way we act and the way we design offices we stuff doesn't change, so stuff doesn't change.
Chris Moriarty
But is it possible to break that cycle? Because surely the people let's take the Houses of Parliament for an example. And I think it's a really cool example, because I guess what you're saying is that there was an opportunity to rethink the design of it, after the war, they chose not to, because they wanted to instill some of the values that they thought were important to Parliament. But today in political discourse, you can see the net effect of that, you know, is the fact that they face each other so directly and opposing? Is that good for discourse? At the moment, who knows, you know, you look at the Scottish assembly or some of the more modern parliamentary buildings, and they're designed differently, they're more rounded, everyone's got kind of equal input.
So, I guess what you're saying is that there is a there is a kind of a set of values of culture that exists.
There's decisions made based on those cultures and values. They then literally, in this example, cemented into society, and that continues to then shaped behaviours moving forward. But I guess my question is, is there a way of, I guess I've given some examples but our way of snapping out of that, and rethinking it because even you're rethinking will be influenced by what's gone before about your experiences negative or positive? So, in a way are we just? Are we flagging something that is just the way it is? And will continue to be? Or is there a way of kind of breaking the cycle?
Ian Ellison
Well, welcome to the world of social construction. That's the point. And once you recognise that that is at work, you really see how challenging it is to change stuff. What's really interesting is there is not a necessarily a will to change the Houses of Parliament. But for years and years and years, there is a huge need to dramatically refurbish and repair the Houses of Parliament. And James has a wonderful Guardian long read and Guardian long listen about this, in the nobody is prepared to bite the bullet to do it, whether doing it through a full D count, or by doing it as a partial D count, the cost to the taxpayer is astronomical.
So politically, it's an untenable discussion. But the point is, the longer that this thing gets left, the more not just unfit for purpose, the more dangerous the Houses of Parliament becomes, they're literally on patrol all of the time. People looking for fires in the Houses of Parliament, it is that dangerous. So not just changing spaces, but even the upkeep of spaces is problematic when it comes to the social construction wrapped around all of the decision making with respect to them.
Chris Moriarty
They are doing that now though, aren't they? They are restoring it
James Pinder
They are but I think it's I think it was in the news just a couple of days ago is turning into a money pit
Chris Moriarty
I did see a Twitter video of someone showing that it was quite funny, because it says I've been leaked the video of the leak in the Houses of Parliament that stop everything because it was just rain coming right down into the middle of the building. So, I'm sure the contractors on that had a bit of an eye roll when they're trying to do all this sort of stuff. And this thing's falling apart around them. So yes, so that's the social construction. But James, what was the what was your second point that you thought was interesting?
James Pinder
Let me just make sure I've covered everything on the first one. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, it was an interesting part, the discussion, which was talking about the number of risk positions in Western culture versus other cultures. And, you know, the fact we spend a lot of our time sitting, but you know, that self is sort of maybe an example of where we've designed a built environment that subsequently shapes how we behave. And there are consequences of that aren't there?
Chris Moriarty
You I found amazing about that idea. And it's one of those examples where someone says something and carried on talking and there's a part of your brain whirring away, trying to unpack something is when she said that the, she said about, you know, Western culture in society, we've kind of got these two, maybe three positions, whereas separately, anthropologists have looked elsewhere, where there's 50, and I'm sat there going, what, how do you get to 50 different resting positions, I mean, surely, some of those are just like, I'm gonna have my arm here, I'm gonna move it a foot this way. And that's, that's now number 47. Your main unlike there is only, I mean, except there is more than three. But there is not 50, there can't be 50 different ways that you can rest.
James Pinder
Chris, your challenge between now and the next Pinder Ponder is to try and see how many, how many can achieve
Chris Moriarty
I will find 10 Resting positions in my house. And I will put them on our LinkedIn page. And we can see if anyone else has got any variations of it, because surely some of them become ridiculous.
Ian Ellison
I think there might be an element of cultural naivety in there as well. And what I mean by that is so that so in a society in a culture where snow matters, there are many, many words for different types of snow, there are in our culture, because we only see snow for five seconds every other year or something like that, but it’s not though. Yeah, but it's not when you're an Eskimo, right? Because it's got all sorts of implications. So perhaps there's a link through there.
Chris Moriarty
Anyway right. Number two, James was the second thing you thought interesting.
James Pinder
Yeah. And this is, I guess this is a point we've touched upon previously in previous episodes, but what Alexi called Evidence Based consultative design, and, you know, she talked after that, about, you know, the fact that when you ask people about their workplace, as you know, there are things they despise the things they love, and some of those are workspace related, and lots of them aren't. And its sort of trying to unpack that and understand that actually speaking to people and finding out how they perceive their workplace is really important. It's clearly really important to Alexa in completely understand why. And also, this, I guess, the point that links to that is I think this came slightly later in the podcast. But, you know, there's question about how opened our clients to have in their minds change through evidence and the fact that some clients are more open to that and more open to what Alexi called Evidence Based consultative design, so they I'll more happy to trust that process, regardless of where that might take them.
Chris Moriarty
I kind of got from her answer on that, that, in effect, what she's saying is, we position ourselves as that. So, people that that approach us have already self-selected in the way their selves, segmented, say, you're talking our language, let's do this. But there's a lot of organisations that I guess they're a step behind on that kind of journey, because I was talking to a small business the other day who are thinking about workplace change. And you know, we're just sort of chewing the fat. And I was sort of talking about data collection, and you know, what they're planning? And they said, Oh, you know, we do want to do that. We do want to know how well we're supporting people in their workplace experience, but the moment the priority is looking at sales performance and tracking sales performance, and I said, do you not think the two might be related, and there was this kind of mental block.
And then that got us into a conversation about, you know, hybrid working, and some people want it, but some people can't have it. And they're worried about the sales team working from home because the sales numbers go down. And, you know, so therefore, they pull them in. And there's, there's lots of stuff entangling in there. But I guess my point being, they couldn't see past what they already think they know. And they weren't open to the idea that actually workplace experience. And by that, you know, the broad church that we talked about on this podcast, workplace experience might have a determining factor here, not something that sits separate to it. The you know, the two things aren't separate. But I guess what I'm saying is that I would need evidence to really hammer that home, but I almost need them to be open to the evidence to allow me to gather it, you know, there's a kind of a kind of a catch 22 situation that goes on.
James Pinder
Yeah, I mean, there's a guess that also links to how decisions are made in organisations. And you know, Ian and I've talked about this, when we were teaching, you know, different organisations have different decision-making footprints and footprints or fingerprints, fingerprints, or maybe footprints.
Chris Moriarty
I'm glad that you're paying attention in these sessions.
James Pinder
So yeah, different, different approaches to decision making. And maybe that more consultative approach just isn't compatible to the way decisions are made in some organisations. And actually, in some organisations, you might go through the process of doing those sorts of consultations, I can think of a client we worked with, who kind of went through that, but it still didn't really fit with their decision-making culture. And it's therefore difficult for something like that to shape what the final decision is
Ian Ellison
Do you know from a slightly different perspective, that whole thing of evidence for organisations, and almost how many organisations need to pay for external validation of something which, broadly speaking, we know already, you know, I mean, so again, back to Alexi's lecture handouts from 2013 that I've dug out of my draw, you know, sort of grand statements and she one thing that I really, really like about Alexis her ability just to make killer points so succinctly, you know, our buildings are overlooked, overheated or over cooled, under controlled, underutilised and by the way, underutilised bid is Alexi slaw, the more space you give, the less it's likely to get used, that I think we alluded to a Lexi's law briefly in the in the discussion, but we never defined it.
And Workspaces are empty, almost half of the working day, pre-pandemic, before we even got into hybrid. And we know those things for a fact, we mentioned this with Dan pulling in Episode Seven on stage, we know these things, we've always known these things, the evidence is there for free. And yet organisations feel compelled to pay part of our industry to show them that that's the case within their organisation, to sort of give them the gravitas to do something about it
Chris Moriarty
And not necessarily do anything about it.
Ian Ellison
Well it depends where it goes, doesn't it? But yeah, absolutely all of that stuff. And then you know, when you take an Alexi kind of broad-brush global megatrends, lens, a you start joining the dots, which I think James might get to your third point here, that kind of bit around, all of this has a huge bearing on the climate emergency. So, whilst we are reluctant to do anything from within our own organisational situation, because it's too hard is too much change the magnified that up, multiply that up with everybody that's not really doing anything in particular. And you have so much wasted space using so much wasted energy. It's, it's untenable, right?
Chris Moriarty
So, what was your third point that you wanted to highlight?
James Pinder
I thought it was kind of implicit in a lot of what Alexi talked about, and that sort of systems thinking if she didn't use the phrase, and she, you know, I'm not sure if she'd described herself as sort of a systems thinker, but I think the way she talked a lot in her interview, it was very systemic, you know, think looking at things as system. And it's something Ian and I are really sort of interested in and passionate about, and I guess we like to think that we view things through a systems perspective.
Yeah, a lot of the conversation was about systems and systems are interesting because they are often difficult to change. And you know, some of the things that were talked about in the interview were about the difficulty in changing the way things are. And those take taken for granted things that we talked about the start of this conversation. But also, systems can be changed in some time, small, small things can have a big impact on system. So yeah, I just thought that was wasn't sort of addressed explicitly, but it was sort of implicit in a lot of what Alexi talked about.
Chris Moriarty
So, Ian putting you on the spot now, for the average listener, describes succinctly what systems thinking is.
Ian Ellison
So, systems thinking, is the way different forces kind of act on each other in a kind of cause and effect way. But what you get to do with systems thinking is you get to spot all of the different forces, and you sort of map them and you understand also not just what's happening in the moment, but what might happen over time. So, it's a school of thought, I think they're starting to unfold James in the sort of 1950s and 1960s. And there's a few key academics that are really associated with it.
The really interesting thing is we believe passionately, that you can get to grips with what's going on in a complex way, by using systems thinking. But the problem is that often it feels really pessimistic, and it kind of evolves lots of bad news. So, it's not easy to understand, quite often you get a message that it's not readily solvable, if you like, without really thinking and affecting things in lots of different ways. And so, people find it really hard to deal with it. So as much as it's really important, it's also really hard to use, I think
James Pinder
What's it Yeah, some of the early thinkers in systems dynamics or systems thinking were environmentalists, because they could say that we're in a system. So, like a good book that is probably as good at sort of accessible book is systems thinking by Donella Meadows, which is, sort of goes through the fundamentals. But yeah, a lot of the early thinking around systems, or applications of systems thinking was around environmental issues, which is get interesting given where we are now, but obviously, it has also been applied in management and organisations
Chris Moriarty
I guess, to your point in about that kinda, it feels a bit kind of negative is and I put myself in this camp, because I'm, I'm one that likes cracking on with ideas, and really hate someone reminding me about all the reasons it might not work. But I guess that's what you're talking about here is we can't change anything in isolation, it goes back to the previous two points we've just made, we can't simply go we have measured this, and we know that we can do that, and it will do this.
But then someone will say, Well, you know, but you know, finances? Are you really getting pressed on budgets at the moment, and therefore they're scrutinising everything? And that's going to slow down your decision making, which is going to impact how quickly you can. So, there's like, it's just all the stuff that exists in what feels like independence and isolation, but actually are somehow in some way to like kind of tentacle that into each other so that they are operating as a system as opposed to standalone modules.
James Pinder
Best example, most recent example, or sorry, the book, by the way, is thinking in systems, not systems thinking, just in case you're interested. But yeah, let's look at the most recent example, then what happened in the pandemic, when an entrenched system of how people tended to work in offices was suddenly disrupted, from due to external factors. But then once restrictions started, being loosened, those forces that were there beforehand, started exerting an influence on how people might be working going forward, you know, whether it's political pressure to come back into offices, or in city centres, all of those sorts of things. It's almost a perfect example of a system that play a complex system, multifaceted system.
But actually, if you look at it through a systems lens, you can start seeing those forces at play. And some of those forces maybe benign, and some of them may be less so and you know, there are different interests at play as well there, aren't they? And the same can be said about, you know, that original question we talked about at the start is conversation, why are built into the way we are? Well, there's an entire industry, which is a system at play, which delivers buildings in a certain way, in certain places. And that is hard to change that it can be hard to change that
Chris Moriarty
Well. Yeah, I guess if you look at the facility services industry, they've got a business model that's been shaped for decades, that's been kind of uprooted and challenged. Do they go with it? Or do they try and maintain profits because their shareholders expect profits? And that's another system over there? Which influence is this? So, I guess what you're saying is that something will happen and the impact of that something will rattle through the system. Sometimes it starts something in a module spinning on its own kind of volition, but we'll have some sort of influence later on down the line, which is why in this example, we didn't just ping back to how we were, because things changed in different parts of the system. But now a kind of bounce in some of those forces that you're talking about Ian back into the centre
Ian Ellison
Kind of a nice way to think about it is what systems thinking tries to do is recognise that the world is messy. And there are lots of forces at play all at the same time. And if you try and pick one or two things out of that, and say, this is what's going on, and we can isolate it, actually, particularly over time, other things then come to bear. And that's what you really start to see, you know, a shaking hand with people again, are you wearing a facemask? Because Old habits die hard, and there are all sorts of things which govern what's going on? We've talked in a previous episode about the frustration with why nothing changes after conferences.
Chris Moriarty
We talked to me about it we talked to Esme last week, amazing Pinder Ponder the best one yet, the best it was I think it was the best Pinder Ponder we've had yet.
Ian Ellison
So, the point is, we will talk with Esme about, you know, kind of the frustration with you get really, you go to a conference, you get really inspired by a particular speaker, and then you go home, and nothing changes. Well, partly, the reason that nothing changes is because your inbox is bloody full left, you've been to the conference. But the other reason that nothing changes is it's really easy to stand at the pulpit and preach a particular thing. But most of the time, that particular thing doesn't recognise all the other forces, which may well push against it now or in future. And it's really, really easy to be all about optimism and agency, it's really, really hard to grapple with what's really going on. And that's where Systems Thinking is super powerful, but also super pessimistic. And that's the thing, right? And that's why it's sort of sometimes false and hard ears
James Pinder
So, we’ve got footprints and hard ears
Ian Ellison
Yep deaf ears, hard ears, whatever
Chris Moriarty
So, James, that is that is the third of your three points. So, have you got any, any plans for the rest of the day? Have you got anything exciting lined up?
James Pinder
I'm not sure yet.
-- Outro --
Chris Moriarty
Okay, well, that sounds exciting. I'll speak to you next time. If you if you join us. If not, you might have another craft course that you want to go. So that's all we have time for today. If you are interested in the publication from the IFMA foundation, it is available as an eBook for $25 or a hard copy is available for $50. And remember, you can still get your 20% discount with Sam Konitz uncertainty experts’ course by using the code geeks. But that's all for now. Speak to you soon.
