We seem to be moving so much towards booking things - booking tables, booking rooms, and that's not natural. Why can't we use things?
Rebecca Kent
The office is no longer about connecting people, but about connecting those who are in the office, to those who are not in the office. Connecting groups to groups, not just individuals to individuals.
I’m Rebecca Kent, host of JLL’s Perspectives podcast.
And those were not my words, but those of John Corbett, workplace and real estate strategist at the networking and technology organisation Cisco.
Many office workers will associate Cisco with the video conferencing software WebEx, which allowed many of us to connect with our colleagues during COVID lockdowns.
In this episode, I speak to John, along with Sonya Alexander, a workplace strategist at JLL, about how this kind of technology is being used to connect us all as we all settle into hybrid working.
Rebecca Kent
John, 2020 was enlightening for many of us in terms of the capacity of technology to keep us all so connected while we were anchored in homes during lockdowns. What learnings are you, Cisco, and all of us, taking back to our offices or hybrid workplaces now?
John Corbett
Working from home we’ve learned that the way we've worked in a software-only environment has been very easy to just adjust our requirements to software on demand. We can just get things done, we can communicate very easily. And suddenly the office is looking quite difficult and quite hard. I'll give you one example, which is, if I want to hold a meeting with 10 people when I'm working from home, all I need to do is set up a meeting and send out a meeting URL like anybody can I suppose. Imagine having a meeting with 10 people at the office and suddenly the office becomes a very complicated place.
So, in our world, as we start to think about our ways of working, we put a lot of thought into how we get the workplace to become a contributor to our workflow, rather than an impediment to our workflow.
A lot of companies, a lot of folks in the industry are starting to learn what technology is all about. And they’re asking bigger questions about how that technology can start to play a role. They are starting to realise as we return to the office, how do we create stickiness between how we work at home and how we accelerate that within the work environment, rather than slowing it down within the workplace.
Some software-only type solutions that are available are almost competing with a workplace. What's happening is it's becoming easier to work somewhere else. But our focus is we want to give you that experience regardless. We don't want to slow that down.
But we need to right-size and bring the workplace up to speed with how you've now learned to work. How do we repurpose these new learnings that people have enjoyed whilst working in the pandemic?
How do we reintroduce those within the workplace and take advantage of existing things? We're not talking about Jetsons technology. We all use telephones, laptops, some form of video, telepresence and Wi-Fi.
Once you connect all those things together, it becomes a very powerful environment that we're learning more and more about every day as it continues to scale.
Rebecca Kent
So, as you were doing this in Cisco’s workplaces, presumably, you had to also give some thought to where the office is positioned within the scheme of a ‘workplace’. Pre-COVID it was unmistakably bang in the centre. Where is it now?
John Corbett
That's a great question. Where we have a bad habit as humans are we tend to over exaggerate things, we move into an either/or scenario. And that was relevant during the pandemic,
We're very focused on what I would like to describe as the ‘and’, which is to position the office ahead of both working from home and the customary way we worked before the pandemic to make the workplace more meaningful.
I'll give an example. If you're working on your laptop and you've got several software applications open, you can jump in and out of those programs as you need to respond to your workflow.
And it's not the destination, it's not the Oracle, the SAP, the Microsoft Excel, or the Word. It's not that.
It's how easy it was to transition from one program to the other. That's the user experience. That's where the gold is.
So, if you start to think about that, and you start to think about the office and how you transition it's almost impossible. Everything is a siloed solution. You would meet in a meeting room and suddenly meeting rooms are a very complicated place. You're going to book it, find it, set yourself up, plug things in and so forth.
I would say to somebody when you start a meeting at home using your laptop, how do you do it? Well, I just push the little green button on Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Cisco WebEx, whatever you wish to use, and the meeting starts. And then I would say, when you have a meeting at the office, how you do that? And then we'll take you through those motions. And then you realise, wow, there's a lot of work involved in meeting in the office.
What we do here (at Cisco) is I'll just walk into a meeting room, push the start button as you would on your laptop to start your call and the room knows me because the endpoints are smart, it's integrated with technology. I don't have to do much it just works. And what we have started to find is that we are starting to see behaviours change, people start to use things when they want to, rather than having to book resources to use them. The way I like to explain it is we are synchronizing workflow with workspace.
You think about how you meet somebody dynamically. You can just call them up on a phone if you wish to or just meet with them on your laptop. When you're in the office, people don't conduct a call at their desk, they might if there's no alternative, but it’s not great, they prefer to use a room. So, what does that mean? Are you going to book the room and jump through all those motions?
The by-product of that is that people now start to schedule conversations, which isn't real. It's not how we do it as humans, we just connect with people.
