About Place

Our guest this week is on a mission to convince organizations everywhere to take the double disruption of COVID plus inflation as an opportunity to change for the better. Debbie Lovich is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group. She brings her sharp wit and analytical mind to this conversation about the need for leaders to model flexibility, how our reasons for being in the office today have increased demand for shared space, and what the future of work looks like for the 70 percent of the global workforce in manufacturing, retail, and other industries where employees can’t work from home. You’ll find Debbie’s article on that topic here. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Season 2 rolls on with a visit from Samantha Fisher, Head of Dynamic Work at Okta, an identity and access management company that’s actually expanding its number of offices even though it does not require its 5,000-plus employees to come into the office. In an insightful conversation with host Ryan Anderson, Sam breaks down the implications of enforcing a standard eight-hour workday and shares how a dynamic work schedule and environment encourages productivity, equity, and empowerment. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Host Ryan Anderson welcomes Phil Kirschner of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. A self-proclaimed “accidental workplace strategist,” Phil fell into managing workplace strategy transformation efforts at Credit Suisse more than a decade ago and never looked back. As a result, his openness to supporting new ways of working fuels this fast-paced exploration of the need for executive-level change management, for widening our perception of what “hybrid” means, for using AI to identify moments that matter in the physical workplace, and more. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Kristin Leimgruber, Ph.D., joins us to kick off the season. Kristi is a behavioral researcher at BetterUp, the virtual coaching and mentorship platform whose science-based approach helps people thrive in the workplace. She and host Ryan Anderson link the rise in workplace burnout with the decline of our sense of social connection at work—an unintended consequence of remote work. It’s an important and timely conversation—and ultimately, an optimistic one, as Kristi and Ryan explore strategies for identifying burnout and strengthening social connections across organizations. Read the Connection Crisis Insight report from BetterUp here. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Host Ryan Anderson takes time to share some highlights from Season 1 and set the stage for Season 2 by answering the two most frequently asked questions he gets asked once people find out what he does for a living: What is the current state of return-to-office? And what does it mean for the future of the workplace? For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

For the final episode of Season 1 of Looking Forward, we welcome john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. After a thoughtful discussion of belonging in general terms, john and host Ryan Anderson pivot to focus on what organizations can do to foster belonging in the workplace. From the impact that belonging has on employee retention to the long-term effects more flexible work arrangements will (or won’t) have on workplace culture, it’s a fascinating exploration of this fundamental human need. And we hope you’re already looking forward to Season 2, which will launch in 2022. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Our guest this week on the podcast is Andreas Hoffbauer, Ph.D., a sociologist by trade and the founder and director of the organizational and behavioral design studio Atelier Kultur. In a heady conversation with host Ryan Anderson, he explains how our organizational networks have been weakened throughout the pandemic—and how prototyping spatial interventions can help strengthen them. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

This week on the podcast, we offer a glimpse behind the scenes of our recently renovated Design Yard facility in West Michigan. Home to several teams that have embraced hybrid working, our transformed Design Yard provides choice and bolsters engagement. Matt Stares, Senior Vice President of Global Real Estate, Architecture and Development here at Herman Miller, and Gretta Peterson, our Senior Manager of Global Workplace Strategy and Development, join Ryan Anderson for this enlightening conversation. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes, Founder/Lead Architect of AKKA Architects in Amsterdam, is the type of guest we could talk with for hours—but you’ll have to make do with 37 minutes on this week’s podcast. She joins host Ryan Anderson to discuss how organizations can design spaces in a more participative manner and create environments that are ready for the future of work—a future in which workplaces actually support the diverse needs of the people who use them. Their conversation is a master class in people-centered design for a post-pandemic world. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Our guest this week is Steve Todd, AVP, Global Head of Workplace at Nasdaq, and creator of Open Sourced Workplace—a resource for real estate and workplace information. Steve joins host Ryan Anderson to share how he’s been able to move Nasdaq beyond a spreadsheet-driven understanding workplace ROI and toward a more user-centered approach—including some of the factors he’s identified that influence productivity. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.