PANEL DISCUSSION ON CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Panel: Steelcase, Trek, Lindsay, Stone & Briggs
About the Speaker
Rick Mohr
Advanced Solutions Team
Steelcase North America
Appointed to his current position in October 2012, Rick is responsible for engaging strategically with large organizations in North America around issues specific to people, space, technology, and brand.
He’s based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He joined Steelcase in 1979, working in a variety of positions, including manufacturing, design, and dealer services, contract, marketing, and sales.
Panel discussion with Trek and Lindsay, Stone & Briggs
Deb Alton:
Thank you everybody for being here today. I want to just take a moment & introduce to you our panelists. Rick Mohr, to your right, is with the Advanced Solutions Team, Steelcase North America. He’s a Workplace Consultant with the Advanced Solutions Team for Steelcase, global leader in the office furniture industry, providing products, services & insights into ways people work, including products for architecture, furniture and technology. Appointed to his current position in October 2012, Rick is responsible for engaging strategically with large organizations in North America around issues specific to people, space, technology, and brand. He’s based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He joined Steelcase in 1979, working in a variety of positions, including manufacturing, design, and dealer services, contract, marketing, and sales.
Next on your right is Phil Ouellette. Phil is currently president & COO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs. He joined the agency as CFO in 2000, became a partner in 2005, and has been in his current role since 2011. His background is mostly in finance and operations, having worked at Honeywell for six years in four different business units, as well as other companies in hospitality, manufacturing, government, contracting, specialty retail, and professional services. Phil has a BA in history and Masters in finance.
To Phil’s right is Julie Herfel. She is an executive producer with 31 years of experience in managing projects and creating integrated content for an ever-expanding media landscape. Julie considers herself a happy client maker and is passionate about creating work that makes everyone look good. Julie is also on the board of directors for Olbrich Gardens and is thrilled to be working on the development and marketing for the gardens. She’s proud to have been a part of the team that created their office space. She says, “Our office space helps us be more of who LSB as a group is. A group of special people who are always searching and collaborating to create communications and solving our clients’ business problems artfully.”
Next is Mark Joslyn, vice president of HR, IT, and facilities at Trek since 2004. He lives in Middleton, Wisconsin with his wife and three children. He has a BA from Denison University and an MBA from Northwestern Kellogg and has the entire history of the project we’ll be talking about in his head, so he brings a great deal of information and great history about Trek to you all today.
And finally, Margaux Stutz. Margaux is project manager of human resources who oversees a variety of programs, including the Mansion Hill Inn, a boutique hotel in Madison owned by Trek, the corporate travel program, and facilities projects. She just celebrated five years with Trek.
I just wanted to take a minute and talk about why they’re here today. Each of them had different business drivers, but had a similar approach to change. One is they embraced it. And they understood that by transforming their furnishings and environment, they could facilitate change required for the business and/or catch up to change that was already in place. These two projects were watershed moments for us in terms of the fact that it challenged us, as we were at the time, to apply our furniture as a tool to leverage their business needs. And the overlaying theme here today is that space matters, in this case as it relates to change. So we appreciate our forward-thinking guests for being here today, and sharing their stories. Just to let you know, as far as Trek, it was really for us learning about how to be flexible, and we have some other players in the room who can attest to that, from the project team. They pushed us to really help them find solutions to their need for flexibility. With Lindsay, Stone & Briggs it was real estate and its impact on the organization to maximize and really do more with less, and ask the question, what do you really need? Both of these organizations and their entire project team, which consisted of architects, developers, real estate professionals, and contractors, challenged us to dig deeper into the right solution. We learned a great deal, and we thought this was worth talking about and sharing with you all today. So I encourage you to ask questions. We have topics we want to cover, and Vickie is going to be our facilitator. She’s our Director of Talent Development, so she’s got a list of topics, but if we want to take a detour, we certainly can, to whatever you’d like to get into. So with that, I’ll let Vickie take it away.
Vickie Wenzel:
Thanks, Debbie. That’s true, I like to take side trips, so Debbie might hook us, so feel free. I met with Rick from Steelcase today and I encouraged him, if the topic is interesting, let’s just go there. We don’t need to stay on script. So last night, to prepare, of course, I went online to see what I could see about change management and I found three things I wanted to share with you. First of all, change management has been around for half a century. I found that an interesting kind of geek note. Secondly, there are 83,000 books on change management on Amazon, which is kind of a freaky statistic. And lastly, sixty to seventy percent of change initiatives fail. So what that said to me is that there’s a lot of change and there’s a lot of things that aren’t working. And so as Debbie said, can furniture matter? Can space matter? That’s why we’re here today, to talk to some folks who had some very good experiences and can share those with us. So let’s lead it off. Rick, can you tell us about some business trends that have facilitated change happening throughout the built environment? Three to five business trends that are making change happen.
Rick Mohr:
A little background – I have 36 years with Steelcase, 16 jobs with Steelcase, so I’m a baby boomer but I’ve had a Gen Y career. I just didn’t have to leave Steelcase to get it; I got a new job every couple of years. I work with clients somewhere in North America almost every day, and I would say that over that past two years, and these topics do change a bit, real estate compression has been hot and continues to be a real pressure. Thinking back to 2009 and 2010, Cisco and Ford got rid of eleven million square feet. Just those two companies. So what were the other forty-eight of the top fifty in North America doing? Some were growing. Google is an account of mine, and they hire over one hundred people every week. So you look at their interiors and it doesn’t look like there’s a standard? There is a standard. They couldn’t survive without governance. Facebook hires seventy-five people a week. So space compression and the enlightenment that happens around space compression is that it starts out as kind of an alternative workplace strategy, and when you get enlightened it becomes the best place strategy. And those would be my terms, not theirs necessarily, but it’s a really interesting moment when they realize that space actually can be better, but different.
Next topic that’s really hot right now is the tension between collaboration and privacy. Five years ago it was all about collaboration – there’s nowhere for us to meet, our collaboration spaces all look the same, it’s a conference room for twelve to fifteen people and three to five are meeting in it all day long, and technology in every room is different and there’s no place to meet. The momentum is swinging back now. And so what’s the opposite of collaboration? That’s privacy. We meet with people all day long, so when do I get my work done? And where?
A third one is Boomers retiring and Gen Y and Gen Z are coming. We’re not even looking at [Gen Z] yet; they only make up about 5-6% of the workforce by 2020. But they’re different than [Gen] Y. Not like a Y to a Boomer, but they’re a little different so we need to understand that. So talent management – companies talk about succession planning – I think it’s talent management. Succession [planning] is a piece of a broader puzzle.
I would say globalization and outsourcing is probably another big market. A lot of companies aren’t global or don’t think they’re global, when the reality is they probably are competing with somebody that is, so how do you deal with that?
I think probably the fifth one is technology and how that continues to drive for us to be able to work in a variety of ways that we just didn’t even imagine a couple of years ago. And that’s really fascinating to me.
Vickie Wenzel:
From a Steelcase perspective, can you talk about some key issues of product design and things you’re building in to mesh with those trends?
Rick:
Yes and no. I’ll give you a research project, we’re working with MIT media labs on things that think right now. We’re doing an assessment of our entire manufacturing enterprise. I don’t know how this will manifest itself; I just know the headline, that by 2020 it is our aspiration that everything we make will have technology built into it somehow. I don’t know what that means yet.
Phil Ouellette:
Kind of along the lines of the Internet of Things?
Rick:
I think IoT is a part of it, yes. When you embed technology in something, the intelligence has to be in such a way that it’s not, in my opinion at this point, battery. Do you want to replace 10,000 batteries a year in your furniture inventory? I don’t think so. So there has to be another way to wand that data on there for that connection to be a reality and I’m not sure what that is. That’s why we’re talking to MIT.
Vickie:
Let’s start with Lindsay, Stone & Briggs. I hope you can do a couple of things with this first question. One is, we’ve got some photos of your new-ish space. Could you just kind of paint a picture of what your existing space had been? So the audience knows what you transitioned from before you moved.
Julie Herfel:
We were on two floors, which we didn’t like at all. That’s one of the reasons we moved. And we all pretty much had private offices. And we had one conference room, that we could all pretty much fit into. We had a small kitchen on each floor that you could not eat in, so everybody was eating lunch at their desk, which is a problem right there. And we had a saying that said, “Get off your Herman”, because we all had Herman Miller Aeron chairs, because nobody was coming out of their office to talk to each other. I think that can sum it up.
Vickie:
Thanks Julie!
Julie:
We were having fun – it was a creative space for its day. We had sparkly, twinkly lights in the hallway, and certain people had bigger offices because of their “status”. That’s a problem for me. So yeah, that’s what it was like.
Phil:
Just to provide a little more context, it was an 1888 building, so it’s a flatiron structure that used to be a bank. My office was the interior of the vault, so trying to get wireless connections in there was virtually impossible (not that we had wireless back then). But it was, you know, all the offices were on the outside with the exterior windows. The interior was dark for the most part.
Julie:
It was very dark. We had double-hung windows in the offices.
Phil:
And the fact that we were on two floors serviced by a really slow-moving elevator or a fire escape that was key locked, meant we had two separate cultures going on, which sounds kind of crazy for a company of forty people, but it was the reality. There was a third floor and fourth floor culture.
Julie:
Well, the creative department was on one floor and most of the account people were on the other floor. So that’s a problem.
Phil:
And there’s a natural tension between those two groups anyway.
Julie:
How’s that going to help? Probably not!
Vickie:
So, Rick mentioned real estate compression, and LSB saved a phenomenal amount of real estate moving to the US Bank building. Can you talk about, was that a goal that you started out with? Was it a driver? Was it something that came about as you began to look at your needed change?
Phil:
Well, I think it was. I was probably more of the mindset that I think a lot of people go into it with: what’s my cost per square foot? Having a finance background and being a numbers person, that’s the first place I go, how do I save cost. And I think it was really working with you and working with our broker Brian; they both kind of changed my concept and all our concepts of using real estate as a way to make money as opposed to seeing it as a cost line item to save money. And that for me was a big 180 click-through. From the point in time that I accepted that, it just changed my entire outlook and how I view it, which is let’s create space that’s going to make us money, make our work better, get more clients, make us famous, have happier employees, be a recruiting tool as opposed to try to keep people uplifted all the time because it was a dark, dank, isolated sort of environment. For me that was the big shift, was just thinking about using real estate as a way to make money as opposed to just a cost.
Julie:
I just want to say, Phil is using words like dark and dank. People weren’t that unhappy there. They didn’t know it was that way until they went to the new space. In fact, they didn’t want to go to the new space. At all. It was like, “Are you kidding me Julie? This is not going to work.” So we had to do a lot of convincing, but once they got there, it was like the curtain went up and they were applauding, like “oh my god, you were right”.
Vickie:
Did you buy in early, Julie, on the whole idea of downsizing square footage though?
Julie:
Yeah, we had so many corners where there was paper and things that should have been in storage. Stuff that should’ve been gotten rid of a long time ago. It’s just baggage that you don’t need to carry. And that was a whole ‘nother thing, saying to everyone, you’re going to have one file cabinet. That’s it! You’ve got to get rid of all the stuff. I mean, it’s a digital age. We’re going to have a network, everything is going to be stored, you’re working on two screens, there are all these tools you’re going to have that you don’t have to have paper. Between Marsha Lindsay, who is the founder & CEO of our company, was about a paperless society a long, long time ago, before this even happened. When we did a prior renovation, she wanted it to have all open space, but our employees kind of revolted against it. So we already were attuned to the concept in a big way. In fact, we had talked about hoteling and Chiat/Day way back when; you came into the office, and you had your computer and you didn’t know where you were going to sit. So we were talking about those concepts long before this. This time we knew we were going to do it and we weren’t going to listen to anybody. We knew it was the right thing, so there was a core group of us who had bought in and we were going to make this happen.
Vickie:
Rick, anything else to add on space utilization?
Rick:
Yeah, I think what’s really intriguing when you make a shift like this is you’re starting to use, when you think in terms of efficiency versus effectiveness, the metrics change because the metrics on the traditional real estate side of the equation are pretty obvious, the cost. That’s why there’s so much focus, and rightfully so, on that, because at some point you’ve got to still write a check. The other side is a bit of a holy grail, which is if you can measure those softer issues in an effective way about engagement, retention, talent management, light. Those are all measureable too, but they end up being viewed as softer or a little bit more subjective. And you know what? You have to get your arms around that too, because I know a number of companies I’m working with right now where they will not recruit on site because that young man or woman if they see the place will not work there.
Vickie:
Well that’s a great segue over to Trek. Because I want to talk to Mark and Margaux about recruitment and retention. So Trek’s known as a very creative company, so you have some unique, specific requirements when you’re recruiting people. Can you talk, Mark, a little bit, before we talk about how you recruit, about what your environment was like at the time that you made a big shift with Oliver and put that first addition on, and paint a picture for the audience?
Mark Joslyn:
How many people have been to Waterloo, Wisconsin? A few have. So that’s the first part of the answer to this equation. Waterloo was chosen because the founders of Trek in 1976 had two criteria. One lived in Milwaukee, one lived in Madison, so they said they wanted it to be between the two, and it had to be dirt cheap. So Trek started in a former carpet warehouse in 1976 with five employees. And then they bought some farmland around 1981 and built the first phase of what we live in today. So that theme of dirt cheap continued right on through the 80s. Really, you have to imagine, it’s an 80s office building, very little natural light, low suspended ceilings, fluorescent lights, really high cubicles. It was awful. It was a sea of gray.
Rick:
Did you need a miner’s helmet?
Mark:
It was really remarkable. We don’t have any before pictures.
Deb:
They were too bad to show.
Mark:
I think the easy way to tie these together is that we realized that we had a great opportunity in 2004 to double our space and really bring in all the latest and greatest ideas at that time. So we spent a lot of time benchmarking with other brands that we admired. We were very lucky to find Bud [from Oliver Construction]. So our education began with that partnership – we chose a construction company that brought their own architect and thankfully we worked together with those benchmarks and we created a new vision. So we had the luxury in 2004 of adding at that time about 65,000 square feet. It allowed us to literally build the new, move everybody into the new half, go back and gut the old building, and try to make it look and feel like what we just built. To every way possible, that was our goal and we had to work around a compilation of about ten additions to the original building. I think there are about twelve rooflines there. But we were able to achieve that. So we literally had that luxury of doubling and therefore really being able to do it right and cast a new standard. Through that process, we met the Steelcase team; we actually went to Steelcase and learned what was in the market at the time, but also what was being thought about. And probably the coolest part of that was that we actually got to visit the industrial design department at Steelcase and we brought our industrial design department. So there are lots of other things we can probably talk about, but the backstory here is that today we have a thirty-six acre campus in the middle of nowhere and we had to build and bring onsite a lot of employee amenities that you probably can walk next door to. You don’t hopefully maybe in your business need a coffee shop and a café and all that. We did. We had to have that because we are out away from the urban core. So to be competitive and to be able to grow at the rate we have, we’ve really needed to invest in not just the cool place to work, but a lot of the amenities that we had to bring in ourselves because they weren’t in the neighborhood.
Vickie:
What was recruitment like before that? Did you have issues?
Mark:
Oh, for sure. The backstory with Trek is that we employ about 1100 people in the state of Wisconsin. Most of those people are in Jefferson County and most of those people increasingly are professional people: they’re designers, they’re product experts. So again, by definition, a lot of those people have come from the coasts or Colorado. Those are our main recruiting beds – California, Colorado, or the east coast. So it’s very difficult to convince people to come to Wisconsin at all, but then also we just sort of hit that Waterloo is just a suburb of Madison, and so all the accolades of great place for Madison have really helped us a lot. But yes, it was very difficult to recruit talent to come to us and this strategy is a good word. Our investments here were very much to change that game so we had an amazing story to tell.
Vickie:
Margaux, anything to add?
Margaux:
I visited Under Armour in Baltimore earlier this year to benchmark their facility, and their facilities manager there spoke of similar problems that most people from New York or LA don’t want to go to Baltimore, it has kind of a bad reputation right now. And they have invested so much in their campus, it’s actually incredible if any of you are out there. They’re also a Steelcase partner. One of the biggest things he said was that we definitely use this as a recruiting and retention tool. You can’t visit this campus and not want to work for Under Armour. And I certainly felt that way after visiting them and have brought that concept – we’re already doing that – people are so impressed when they come. But what more can we be doing?
Vickie:
Let’s move back to LSB for a minute. So your business is brand, you create and refresh brands. So, could you talk a little bit about how important it was for the space to speak to your brand? How it does, if it does, and how you refresh it.
Julie:
Well, I think if a company has been around long enough, you need to refresh your brand yourself – the Lindsay, Stone & Briggs brand. That’s hard to do if you don’t move. There were a whole bunch of reasons to move, but our Creative Director, Bill Winchester [said] if we want a new day, moving is a big sign that it’s a new day. So that just really helped to reenergize the staff to be an agency for the modern times, where we’re facilitating the conversations of consumers for our clients. We need to feel like we’re doing that at our office, so when we moved in it felt like it was the new LSB for the modern age, for the new things that we need to do for our clients. As you all know, everything is changing every day and sometimes you have to make a big change to feel that. So I think it really helped our brand internally and externally. We had a lot of conversations of what we wanted our space to feel like, what our brand was like, and we kept bringing up when you walk in we want it to feel like MoMA. Like you just walk in and it’s like “ahhh”. Like this just feels fresh and clean and modern. Not cluttered, because [for] what we do you have to unclutter your mind, and realize it’s a new day with fresh ideas, and if your space is cluttered and cramped and not open…I just think it inspires you to be more like that and that’s what our brand is. So I think it really, really helped all of us have a new self-image of ourselves.
Phil:
And I’d say an important concept we learned from you guys, because you helped us facilitate some of these conversations, is just moving from this concept of “me” space to “we” space. So when we talk about facilitating these conversations among our client consumers…we wanted to do that ourselves…really create a space where there’s more open collaborative environments to do that as opposed to everybody being huddled away in their offices. That had practical implications too for real estate compression. It just made it easier reduce our space 32%, and four years later we still feel like we have all this room and we never feel cramped. We always felt cramped at the old place.
Julie:
A lot of good ideas come around the water cooler, right? Well, we didn’t have any water cooler gathering place and in our old offices we couldn’t even eat in our own kitchen. So you walk in now and the first thing you see is a large café space. We also can see Madison. We have floor to ceiling windows, we can see the capital, we can see Lake Monona, we can see downtown, and Madison is ours. It’s right there. But you also want to walk in and feel like everyone’s constantly interacting and hanging out…those are the times when ideas pop out. It’s not when it’s a forced meeting. It’s not that we – we have meetings, believe me. But I think the magic happens when you have spaces where people can just hang out and that’s when it happens. We also have wall spaces that are magnetic and that you can write on and we have so many processes now, we’re coming up with new ones all the time. There’s just a lot of stuff that’s put out everywhere and everybody can see it. Even if I’m not working on that client, I can see what’s going on, I can hear what’s going on, I can contribute, so that’s really great. I think also for our culture, instead of being in our own offices, we do have project teams and we don’t really sit next to project teams, but what we did was mix up different departments and different ages so that younger people are sitting next to older people and people in creative are sitting next to people in media to really have that cross-fertilization that we really believe in. So these are all things that we’re about, what our brand is about, which is our space has really helped facilitate.
Phil:
And just another point. We have, I don’t know if you’d call it a four or five generation workforce, but our ages range from 20-73. And they’re all sitting mixed up.
Audience question:
Do you have any private offices in your space?
Phil:
No. There are conference rooms, so there’s private meeting space, but no individual has their own office. That was a conscious decision.
Julie:
We have spaces that you can reserve, and then we have spaces that you can just go into that you cannot reserve. So we understand that there needs to be privacy also. The collaboration is key for us, but we also believe that sometimes we need to do heads down work. And so what we do is give people permission that you don’t have to work at the office. You can just stay home today and get something done, that’s fine. That’s the culture, that’s how our brand is. If you’re meeting all your clients’ needs, if you’re meeting all your internal team’s needs, I don’t need to see you here every day. Now, it’s important to be in, but we just trust people. And if they can’t handle it then they’re probably not going to stick around, because that’s really a part of our culture, to get your job done. We’re all grownups on the same team trying to do great work for our clients.
Phil:
But given that trust, I think you find most people like to be in the office. The trust is there and the accountability is there, yet people want to be back in the office, which I think speaks well to the space.
Julie:
Magical things happen and you’re going to miss out when you’re not there. When you’re all in an open space, magical things happen. It’s fun! If you like who you’re working with, and you feel free, I’ve read a lot of things where people don’t have the conversations and they don’t say things out loud, but we are people who say things out loud.
Phil:
Maybe you shouldn’t say that.
Julie:
No, it’s nothing bad, it’s just fun. If you’re not having fun, what’s the point? It is hard work and you have to have fun sometimes.
Vickie:
On that culture theme, let’s talk a little to Trek about that. One of the things they pushed us to do is to think about furniture differently, and they were our first client a long, long time ago that wanted to untether the furniture. So the furniture all moved – I know that’s old now, but it was new at the time. No one did it; we didn’t even know how to plan that way. And they let their employees move their furniture around however they wanted right from the get-go, which we’d never heard of at least here before. So, you gave your employees a lot of permission to do whatever they needed to do and my question is, did the furniture help you with that cultural issue or was it a culture that you already had and you wanted the furniture to follow that format?
Mark:
I think it freaked us out a little bit. So imagine you’re building low cube-land, seated privacy, and we used that 120 in a number of places. So the first thing that all of our millennials did is they didn’t like having their back to anyone, so they spun all those things around. Well, that’s great except that it takes up two times the amount of square feet that you’ve allotted to those people. All hallways get crowded and cord management’s a nightmare. So in the beginning it was great, but it was a little bit chaotic and somewhat unexpected. I’ll never forget your reaction [looking at Vickie & Deb] and the Steelcase reaction the first time they came to see their new furniture installed. It didn’t resemble anything like the pictures.
Rick:
Guess we’re not doing a case study here!
Vickie:
We took this [photo] before move-in.
Mark:
But what I would say is that it was very important to go untethered, so wherever we have had that opportunity, we’ve gone with Post & Beam, we’ve built spaces with as few walls as possible, and that allows for reconfiguration without having to hire a third party to come in with special wrenches and move the cubes. We wanted that flexibility and I think it’s served us really, really well. When we first did a lot of these neighborhoods, they were what you would expect: finance department, the IT department, the HR department. Now they’re all cross-functional, so you go into a room and it’s the mountain bike room and there are people from all different disciplines working together in that room and they’ve essentially designed their space. So untethered is really great, and when wireless caught up with it, then we didn’t have the problems with the cord management and sort of being unsightly. So I’d say to the extent you can do that, absolutely give people that latitude. Something as silly as being left-handed or right-handed, completely, if you give people that option, they will adapt their space and personalize it. So I think that turned out to be the absolute right answer and it gave us just a ton of flexibility.
Vickie:
And when you did another project, which was the mezzanine, can you talk about how you gave entire teams the flexibility to own space together?
Mark:
You bet. One of the great learning points for me. Bud from the beginning was the advocate of open spaces and trying to not tether, so that really served us well. We thought ahead about ways to bring power and data into the spaces, either in the floor, which we trenched in anticipation of the future. We have rooms where the power is all the way around the room. So I think we, from the start, wanted that flexibility, which was great. But then I think what was really the learning for me was we started allowing the teams to essentially design their own space [where] we were reclaiming a former warehouse or distribution space and converting it into people space. We were putting in windows, we were trying to replicate the look and feel. Well, we asked the teams what they needed, and we found right away that collaborative teams want to sit in a cluster in the middle and they want all the walls for their workspace and to showcase things. So that’s when we really went heavy into the Post & Beam, whiteboards everywhere, things magnetic. We wouldn’t have figured that out except for asking those teams how they essentially wanted to work. And we have so many designers in our business, they all came from studios and campuses and that’s what they very much wanted. So in effect the end result was lower cost per square foot by allowing them to come up with it than we probably would’ve dragged up on our own. So I think that combination of the flexibility, but really giving the team the neighborhood and saying this is your neighborhood.
Phil:
It’s interesting what you said about that. You’re suggesting that left to your own device, you would have over-engineered it, but in turning it over to them, you met their needs and probably for a lower cost.
Mark:
No question. The best example I can give to that, and we talked about this, is we were pioneers, I think, with some of the furniture systems that we were choosing. We have storage problems like everyone. We have samples of everything, and nobody wants to get rid of it. People coming to visit think it’s really cool, like a history exhibit, but it’s not. So we try to adapt existing storage solutions to our needs. We took these file cabinets and we custom made the drawers and inserts so you could put frames in them, thinking that people would put stuff away at night. No way. That concept to college kids… So we actually spent some money unnecessarily trying to kind of make it more corporate, and we realized if we give them a wall, they’ll figure out a way to hang all their stuff so it’s readily available and accessible. And what may appear as clutter to us is actually their work in process. So I think that we would over-engineer.
Margaux:
Sometimes it feels like the Wild West at Trek, but if at the end of the day all those groups are really happy in their space and they’ve had a say in it, and I don’t think it’s the best idea ever or it’s something Mark or I or someone else would never have thought of, but they’re happy, what more can you want? And that’s what Atmosphere especially has done so much to help us with is figuring out how to help our people with their sometimes curious work requests that end up being good.
Phil:
Do you put limits on them? Like you can’t do that because it’s something that may be too big, too expensive to be done.
Margaux:
Yeah, we try to never build walls. That’s one of our big rules – we try not to build walls. But the great thing about Post & Beam is that it ends up functioning as a wall at times or a whiteboard or a hanging solution, so although I’m not telling people that they can go and spend a ton of money, if we need to spend a little bit to make a space better for them, we can usually find a good way to do that. We also have a big store in our warehouse of pieces and parts and we can often bring those back in because we have made some changes over the years in regard to our furniture systems.
Rick:
Real quick insight into what I’ve heard from these two. And I don’t know either one of you other than now; we just met. But with the stories you’re telling, one thing that comes to mind is that you were both brave enough as organizations to ask a really simple question that’s a hard answer. The simple question is, are you going to give space to people based on who they are or what they do? That’s a really hard, that’s a bridge you cross that’s very difficult to cross because now you’re moving away from what has been the established culture, space maybe as entitlement. There are a whole bunch of things in play here that are really hard to get through. And the other thing you talk about is allowing teams to figure it out. That goes to experiential learning. There’s a fair amount of research behind that that we’ve done a lot of work on. There are these three big buckets of, research is at the base of it, but it’s really understanding kind of what to do. So there’s three different types of knowledge people either have or don’t have: explicit, tacit, and latent. So explicit knowledge is, I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to give me an answer. Tacit knowledge is, you know how you work, but then we observe you and you actually don’t work that way. People like to think they know how they work, but they actually don’t, so we do observation work, which is what design professionals are so good at, to really get at those kind of tacit knowledge things that are really important. And again, the third one is the holy grail of research, which is the whole notion of latent knowledge. Which is, you kind of don’t know until you go through it. So your people didn’t know until they did it. It’s kind of like I was saying earlier, so Vickie has set a really good example of that. So Phil, I’ve decided I want to drive a car, so just tell me how to drive a car and I’ve got it. Or tell me how to ride a bike. Just tell me. Until you go through the experience, it doesn’t connect. And so, to put this in the world of space, in my opinion, explicit space in our world might be a mock-up and latent space might be a pilot. One, you’ve made the decision and you’re getting people to vote on what they think of the decision you’ve already made. The other one is, we’re going to build it, let people live in it, work in it, and we’re going to determine whether or not it actually works or not before we write a bigger check.
Mark:
I would just build that pilot concept for sure. If you want to get a sense for really creative uses of square feet, definitely come and take a tour. We’re growing so fast we have not kept up with enough real estate. So we have people in half the amount of square footage than the space we probably would have envisioned for them even a couple of years ago, and I would say they’ve never been happier because they are working together on the best use of that space. Like you, we’ve really tried to avoid private offices. We didn’t want the hierarchy, but we kind of compromised and said, well, some individuals or some groups really need that privacy, but we’re going to put it at the back of the building, not up against the windows in the prime real estate. We’re going to move them to the interior, and then the other requirement is that, my experience in all business is that the people who have the nicest offices are the people who travel the most. So what we did was we put technology in all the offices, so they are essentially conference rooms. I’m gone a lot, a lot of us are gone. When we’re not there, anyone can use those spaces for meetings and they all have wall screens. So I think we’ve tried to multitask or use things for a different purpose. The other thing is if you want to get a sense for what maybe some of the trends are, our employees regularly bring their own stuff in to test drive it. How many of you have stand-up desks at your offices? That’s here to stay – “sitting is the new smoking”. Our employees were out on the front end of that. We have now a very high percent, I would say, that are in permanent stand-up. They don’t adjust it, they just set it once and they’re committed to that now. So I think there are definitely things that we’re learning about through our partnerships, but I’d say most of the ideas come from the employees spotting something and bringing that idea in and wanting to try it out in their neighborhood.
Margaux:
Yeah, absolutely.
Vickie:
I have a follow-up question. Maybe for Margaux, but for everybody. And that’s, the old way of doing things is, we set up standards and then we publish them and then we manage to the standards. And you’ve all talked about how it’s a little more fluid than that. What are the yin and yang aspects of not having standards or having them “sort of”?
Margaux:
In my mind, the idea of having standards is a nice thing. It would be very clean like these pictures. But the truth is that our employees really like feeling like their space is a home for them and doing whatever they need to make themselves feel like that’s their space where they can be creative and get stuff done. So when I started in this role, the question was, can we let people do this? And it really did come down to, why not? If it works for them and it’s not expensive for us and we can make it work and they’re happy, then that is the positive. It’s not as clean as it could be, but people feel ownership of the space and that’s important to us.
Rick:
I was part of a dialogue out west, something like this, about a year ago. One of the senior VPs of a very large company said the challenge with standards is, and this is that yin and yang, that it allows you this governance of this management. And with a rapidly growing company that’s a really good thing, but the company that’s kind of crested in their growth, that’s a really bad thing. And he said, you know we have more mature companies than we have starters that are growing like a weed, so this is a bigger problem with the mature company than with the starters, because standards is really real estate on autopilot.
Mark:
We have the same problem, technology. So half our employees are Mac, half are PC. So depending on their job, everybody needs something. We’ve struggled with that across all of it, but I do think that the best ideas have been where people have been allowed to experiment or where we’ve brought in some samples of things. We did that early on with chairs, with other things, where we let people literally test drive and get feedback. We insisted on certain standards, particularly the visual, all the chairs are black. We try to impose a few things to give it some sense, but overall I think the best has come from people trying. Margaux mentioned we have a storage room with some extra stuff. Well it’s mostly the things that we tried – we gave everybody a kit. The first days they said you get one of those mobile pods, and you get a little what we call refrigerators, the personal thing, and you get these three. That’s the stuff that ends up being excess because we bought one for everyone, and if we would’ve been smarter, now I think we tend to just focus on the basics: get them settled and then figure out what they really need for their job.
Vickie:
The refrigerator is a tower.
Margaux:
I have people come to me every week and say, we were in this design, we’re in this space right now, it’s very standard, just cubes in a row. And we think we could actually work better if we had a pod of four here, and three here. We have problem-solvers at Trek and so they’ll actually sketch this out on a piece of paper and I’ll say, “I never would’ve thought of that. I don’t know how your group functions.” It happens even now, even ten years after we created this space. Although all the tables are the same color and the finishes are the same color, that’s really the only standard we have anymore.
Deb:
I have a question. That just reminded me. I know when you did the renovations, you did a lot of the creative groups, but then the accounting and marketing and some of the other ones that maybe were in more standards, did they also, if I’m remembering right, did they see kind of what was going on over there and think boy, that’s kind of nice, maybe we should try it? In a group that you wouldn’t say is a non-traditional or wouldn’t go to a non-traditional setting. Did that happen?
Mark:
I would say it has. I think one thing we’ve been experimenting with is we’ve actually created these cross-functional groups, so instead of a finance person occasionally visiting the team they support, they sit with that team now. There’s actually a lot more cross-functional collaboration that’s there. But even the real traditional groups, I think, have leaned more now toward Post & Beam because of all the flexibility it affords. And I really see, again, the best decisions are thinking of things as a studio or as a neighborhood or as a floor of the building, because then you don’t know, in two years, one group might be growing at twice the rate, so they move out, and we’re just moving neighborhoods all the time. I think that flexibility of very few walls and really thinking about how the group works will determine just the basics – do you want to sit against the wall? Like in HR, people sit against the wall and there’s a common middle space, but it’s exactly the opposite in the design center where they want to cluster in the middle and have the walls. Those basics were our learnings.
Vickie:
So we talked a little bit about collaboration. Let’s go back to LSB for a minute. You talked about how your business is collaboration and it’s fun, but can you talk a little bit about how it’s changed since you’ve moved? Is there a different work product? Is there a different process? And also, you were one of our first clients that bought media:scape, which is a table with pucks that attach six laptops. So by hitting the puck, you have control of the presentation, versus I’m in charge of the presentation. So can you talk about collaboration and also technology and collaboration?
Julie:
I think we could probably use another media:scape. I think we could us more individual rooms. We do have the open space, but we could use some more private spaces, because sometimes you do have phone calls that just, you know, and two people are concepting and they just need to be in a room together. So there are always more things that you want. Because most of our walls are floor to ceiling windows and Urban Land won’t let us put anything on those windows, we don’t have enough wall space to do exactly what you’re talking about, because we do have new processes where we’re putting a lot of information out on the wall and we just don’t have enough walls. And in fact right now our largest conference room wall is glass and looks out on the capitol and it’s full of stuff. People are writing on it, they’re posting things on it. There are some people who look at it and say, “But Julie, look at all that clutter” – but that’s our work. Clutter is our work and it needs to all go up there. So there are new processes that we have that we need more walls. There have been people like, well we could put a wall in the middle of the space, but I don’t want to do that because I want everybody to see the light and to see the views and because we were so…everybody has the same. I just don’t think that would be the right way to go.
Phil:
I think maybe to answer one aspect of your question, which is about work product. When Julie was originally talking about [how] moving to a new place really changed our self-image and our creative director really believed in that. I guess two things, one from a numbers standpoint and the other from an industry qualitative aspect. The number and the quality of awards we’ve won in our industry: substantially more. I think of the Clios, those were outward recognitions of the quality of our work. Awards are a big thing in the ad business, so the number and the quality of the awards has gone up tremendously in the past four years. But I’d say another metric, and this gets back to my opening comment about real estate as a way to make money as opposed to just a cost; in the four years we’ve been there, our revenue has on average per year of 37% over the previous four years. We’ve reduced space 32% and our revenue per square foot has gone up over 100%, so if you think about real estate as being productive, it’s showing up in the quality of work, it’s showing up on the bottom line.
Vickie:
And that’s the only difference you made.
Phil:
Well, it was the one I had hoped for and held promise, but you don’t really know until you kind of take a leap of faith that that could be realized. And it has been in those two entries, the awards and the revenue per square foot.
Julie:
I think something else that we’ve done that maybe [isn’t] exactly due to space, but we use a lot of freelancers and that’s a big trend. There’s so many different things that we need to do as an agency for our clients, there’s no way we can have all that expertise in the house, in the office, so we have to have a Rolodex (that’s an old term), but contacts of people that can do all different kinds of things and bringing them in when we need them. I think since we’ve moved, it might not exactly have something to do with the space, but that’s been a big change. And I think that has something to do with space, when you think of just how you run your business and not everybody needs to be in your office. Now, there’s a big thing about permalance right now too. They might not work with you in your office. We’re in Madison. There’s a lot of great talent in Minneapolis, in Chicago, and on the coasts, and maybe they don’t want to move here, but we certainly want to work with them. So I think that’s been something we’ve been doing more and more of.
Phil:
And technology’s going to play a bigger part for us, I think, as we think about the next evolution of how do we take advantage of sophisticated video conferencing technology.
Julie:
We need that really bad.
Phil:
And that’s the kind of stuff we’re looking at right now to really make the space feel even bigger and bigger in the sense that we’re working virtually with so many different people across the country. We just need to bring them into the office in a richer way in video conferencing.
Vickie:
I remember your creative staff used to go to the coffee shop to work on projects before you moved. Did that stop or do they still?
Phil:
I think that’s still part of it, but they do work in the cafeteria much more often, they might work in a private space by themselves just because they want some quiet thinking time, they might work at home, they work as teams at somebody’s house, they’ll go wherever. I think technology’s played a big part of that; the sophistication of wireless technology, and just the fact that we’ve equipped everybody to work remotely has made that a lot easier for us.
Julie:
I think if we were going to do an expansion right now, I’d think twice about it. I think there were some concepts we talked about that we weren’t ready to do four years ago. We have benching and everybody has their own space, but I don’t even know if that’s next time. I would say I’m not even sure we need to do that, because half the time people aren’t at their desk. Think about it. They’re just not.
Phil:
That was the reason we talked ourselves out of offices was the study that you guys put together that people aren’t at their desks 70% of the time and they’ve got 200 square feet of space that’s just sitting there that could be given up to make room for collaboration space.
Rick:
I work with a couple of consulting firms and if you’re a consultant, if you’re a partner at the consulting firm, and you consult in different lines of the business, in every one of those lines you have an office. And no wonder they’re out of space. You’re hitting on something really interesting to think about, which is this whole notion of innovation. One of our research projects shows that people will not share what they’re thinking about until they get to know a person. There’s actually a four-step process. And you can’t know a person until you’re face-to-face, video is a question that we’re researching right now. The second step is, let’s say I know you, trust occurs. Once trust occurs, the third step is I’ll share what I’m thinking about and vice versa. Now I have a safe environment to share because there’s trust and I know you. And then once that idea gets shared, then we’ll take a risk with it. That’s the germ of the innovation kind of moment is take a risk with that idea that we started to kind of tease apart and maybe brought in some other people to work on. Right now, the evidence would say you have to do that face to face, but we’re experimenting really hard as a company about this video connectivity to get to a level of trust with somebody that I may never meet just because of distance. We were saying earlier, there’s 194 countries in the world and Steelcase is in 156. We’ve got a pretty good footprint and there’s plenty of people I’m working on projects [with] in China and Singapore right now and I know I’ll probably never meet those people. But I have to develop some level of trust, otherwise you can’t get the work done.
Mark:
I’m just curious, how many of you at your companies have a dedicated video conferencing room just for video conferencing? Do people have that? So we did that, and what we’re finding is that nobody uses it because now everybody has a laptop and they all have a camera and they all use Skype. I think that very much video needs to be used, but I’m seeing a shift away from the dedicated rooms towards wherever, whatever you want to use.
Rick:
Is the lack of use of the bigger room because also they can’t figure out how to use it?
Julie:
Some people are intimidated by technology.
Audience member:
That’s been a big thing for us, that the room needs to be plug and play, that it’s ready for you even if you come in with your laptop and half a dozen people can gather around.
Vickie:
Let’s talk about wellness for a minute with Trek. So I can remember taking a different client through Trek not so long ago and they said, this just reminds me of a gym or something. And I said, “Well, Susan, you’re in the music business and your place sounds like a music business.” It’s their culture. And so, you are in the wellness business, people ride their bikes to work, they bring their bikes into their offices, into their open plan and park them right in the hallway. Can you talk a little bit about how you use the facility to reinforce your culture of wellness?
Mark:
It’s quite normal for someone to have a bike at their desk or in their workspace, so I think we learned early on that we had to factor that in when we thought about hallways and storage in neighborhoods, because that’s just how people are operating. We also have a dedicated room that’s how many square feet?
Margaux:
A thousand.
Mark:
A thousand square feet that’s just a bike storage room. Just racks and racks and racks of bikes. So I think we do have an unusual challenge in that. And you know that you can’t just have one bike. There’s a bike for every purpose, so a lot of people keep several at work and that’s just our culture. So I do think that’s very much reinforced. But back to the isolation comment, we can see the capitol too. [laughter] In Waterloo, we knew we had to offer fitness solutions on-site, not just cycling but also all other forms, so we have made probably a disproportionate commitment in terms of square feet to a dedicated fitness center, classrooms for fit classes, that type of thing. So that is a common response when people visit that it’s very much in our DNA, but we’ve also committed a lot of real estate to that.
Vickie:
Talk about how you price your food in your cafeteria. I think this is just interesting.
Mark:
It’s really interesting unless you like all the stuff that, in the news they said yesterday, we can’t have anymore. There’s probably two parts to that story, the first is back to just isolation, so we made an agreement several years ago that we were going to have world-class food service on-site. We tried outsourcing it, we tried a warming kitchen, we tried all that, and we finally just hired all the people and bought all the equipment. We have a chef and a dietician and we just did it ourselves. But part of the magic of that is that there is a pretty significant Twinkie tax, so we do offer a lot of options, but the healthiest options are the least expensive and in fact are heavily subsidized. So we’re providing it, but we’re also encouraging it.
Vickie:
That’s great. Didn’t you stop the coffee bar or something at one point? Do I remember that right?
Mark:
No, we have in-house coffee as well and it’s all free and we could never stop that.
Vickie:
Never mind. I was thinking of something else.
Mark:
A lot of what you’re hearing here is that you have to kind of embrace what is the culture that you are in fact trying to create. And so, a lot of what we’re describing, if you came and visited, you’d say well, that would never work for us. Dress code, environment, we were talking about privacy before. More and more, I see people with the big Beats headphones, and that’s their way of tuning out and getting stuff done and you know you leave them alone. So we’re seeing trends emerge that very much fit our culture, but I think what you’re describing is certainly what we’ve struck on as being unique and what I think is very easy to attract and retain.
Vickie:
Well, I have a series of questions to talk about tools that you use to help change happen, but before we do that, I thought we’d just pause and talk about what do you think is next in your facility with furniture and with what you’re going to do? What would you see as something that would work even better? Julie started to touch on that and Rick’s got some ideas of what Steelcase is working on, so anybody want to offer up what your vision would be of what you’d like or what you see coming?
Margaux:
So we are really at capacity with our current space and are really looking at the future right now. And as part of that, we’ve created a bit of a wish list: if we had more space, what would we put in it? Some of the pieces that I have kind of fought for is this idea of more small private meeting spaces that are either reservable or not reservable, but maybe they’re heads-down space where one person just goes to get something done or maybe it’s a couple people meeting. The open, collaborative environment is great, but we recognize now that there are times when people just need to go and get something done. I like this idea of – I don’t know how familiar you all are with this idea of the third place? Howard Schultz talks about Starbucks wanting to be that place between work and home, and so I kind of steal that idea even though I know we are work. Can we create some zones in our building that are a more casual place? I think college campuses do that really well, where you just touch down for a little bit, you meet, or maybe you run into someone or maybe there just happens to be a screen right there, but it’s not as formal as a meeting space.
Phil:
Do you guys have like a nap space? I have a friend that works at a high-tech in San Francisco and they have that, but a lot of people don’t use it just because they feel a little self-conscious about it.
Julie:
I think the CEO would have to take a nap and then everybody else would be like, oh, I guess it’s okay.
Margaux:
Yeah, that’s probably a good point.
Julie:
I guess I can take a nap!
Margaux:
You know, I would probably use it. I have napped in my car at times, Mark. But just so I can get more stuff done in the day! So those are the biggest things. How do we create more collaborative space, private space, and think about things differently than we have in the past?
Audience question:
You mentioned the third space. Have you had employee requests that have voiced the need without having the label on it?
Margaux:
Yeah, I would say mostly it’s this, we have an atrium right now with a couple big meeting tables and they get used all the time. And we have a café, it’s lovely, it’s great, and it has great food, but it isn’t the warmest environment. When you think of it, it’s not exactly like a Starbucks. So creating that kind of space, and the fact that all of these employees are trying to carve out little meeting spaces in their space because there’s not another space for that to happen. We also find we have this big atrium in the middle of the building, and there’s kind of a joke that people don’t want to cross it all the time, so what can we do to make sure that Finance and IT, who are on one side, are crossing the atrium to meet with Creative and Marketing and all the other functions there are on the other side of the building?
Vickie:
What about you, Mark? What do you see as the future?
Mark:
I would see indoor/outdoor. All the coolest companies we’ve gone and visited, Nike, Oakley, Under Armour, all these iconic brands, it’s very much about using the outdoors. And so, we have this work hard/play hard culture and people every day are outdoors at some point, but that’s not for work. It’s to go ride their bikes or hit the mountain bike trails. I think we need in our future designs ways that we can…just a simple…our café is right in the middle of the building, which is very efficient, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was along an outside wall and we could open the garage doors like Café Hollander? We don’t do enough of that, and frankly, just a building where you could open the windows. We have facilities in 29 countries, and everywhere except the United States, there’s no closed-circuit HVAC. If you’re hot, you open the window, if you’re cold, you close it. And I think that’s unfortunate. It seems like in the US we’ve gone a little too far towards interior-only. So I’d like to see that. Those trends that I mentioned – stand-up. A very high percentage of people are already committed to stand-up desks. They’re definitely here to stay.
Julie:
I would agree. We need more stand-up desks. People are kind of fighting over them, and I know that you guys have the desk where you can actually be on the treadmill. So I think having more things like that would be really great. And we mentioned more private space. It seems like, oh, it’s all open and that is all so important, but people do need a little room to go to once in a while. If I really wanted to be brave and do something new, I don’t know if I would have everything be benches. We have an open studio, but it’s all benches and I wish it could be a little more freeform. I hear about your spaces [at Trek], and I’m yearning for that.
Phil:
I think some of the discussion with staff, to the extent that they’ve voiced it, has been can we move some things around. I think that after a while people want to see change, they want to change it up, and it’s a little hard when you have fixed benching and power’s all corded through the floor.
Julie:
It’s all for the existing furniture, so we can’t just move around. It’s not an easy thing to do, so I think I’d want to go to more what you guys are doing. But I think you also have to have a little more space to be able to do that, and you guys are out in Waterloo where it’s cheap. So I think there’s a big advantage to that, right? You can have a place where everyone can put their bikes. A lot of people ride their bikes to LSB; in fact, we have somebody that owned a lot of bikes and had to get a special locker and in our old space, people were able to put them in, we had more space, so there were bikes in the hallways, but we don’t have the space for that. So, we do have to have some protocols because we just don’t have the space. So, a little more freedom for some of that. But we did get a Ping-Pong table recently.
Phil:
The obligatory Ping-Pong table.
Vickie:
How about you, Phil? What would the future look like?
Phil:
Well, I think some of the things Julie said, I think accommodating more flexibility to the space would be nice. You know, go back and think about that. I think incorporating more technology, not necessarily having a big monolithic video room that would be a white elephant, but maybe having some more flexible video technology so people can just pop up and meet and have multiple cameras so people can feel like they’re meeting as a group as opposed to one on one on a single laptop screen. And then things that Julie talked about already, we need more display space, just maxing out the existing wall space that we have so more can go up and become more visible.
Vickie:
And Rick, if you are talking for Steelcase, which you are, can you tell us what you think will be next?
Rick:
I want to talk for myself.
Vickie:
Well alright then.
Rick:
The number one need set of the Boomers, who are still calling most of the shots, was security and a subset of that was entitlement. That was why the standards kind of developed like the military or a pyramid. The guy or gal got the big office. I think the number one need set of this next generation, Gen Y and Gen Z, who’s right behind them – I think I mentioned this earlier, but they make up about 5% of the workforce, maybe 6% of the workforce in five years, and we’re not even studying them yet. 1996 birthdate. We’ve got to start studying them because they’re different than Y, not significantly. Their number one need set is choice and control. They may not get it because the Boomers are still calling the shots, so this is part of the recruitment challenge of somebody that might be cube-heavy. “Hey, congratulations, we want to hire you. We’re in a great city and here’s where you’re going to sit.” And they go, that’s not going to happen. Or they don’t stay long. It’s the two year and under kind of phenomenon with that age group. It’s that they’re in for the experience. I think the office of the future, and I don’t think it’ll happen in my work lifetime, but we’re starting to see it. How many of you know what our work café is all about? What our work café looks like? I know some of you have seen it, taken a look at it on Steelcase.com and drilled into it. I think the office of the future for some companies will be manifested that way, where you’ll just show up, come to work, and show up and work the way you need to that day. And if you need to be in the project room, you’ll be in the project room. If you need to be at the bench, you’ll be at the bench. If you need to be in a little place with a door, you’ll be in a little place with a door. And you’ll move in a nomadic way that allows you to work in this kind of fluid way. And I think that if your space can manifest itself that way, that is the third place. That becomes literally the greatest manifestation of it. It won’t be for every company. Some companies will never get there, but I think some companies will, and I think that’ll be a pretty exciting thing to look at. One more thing about innovation and project work. A real quick story. We did a research project about collaboration. There are three different types of collaboration: informative, generative, and evaluative. Generative is really the magic place where you actually get into a room and you generate stuff, new stuff happens. Those teams need to own the room. I think it’s one of the challenges a lot of companies have is they’ve got these collaborative spaces, but sometimes a lot of stuff they’re working on, they need – because the stuff has to stay up.
Julie:
Well that’s what’s happening with us right now. It needs to stay up and there are a lot of groups who need stuff to stay up and that’s why we need more wall space. It’s a thing. And they’re like, I’ll own wherever I can, so get out of my way.
Rick:
So we wanted to – once we did the research on the different types – we went to do a research project to get some insights and real facts on it. We did a research project we’re not going to publish, but I’ll tell you the story. It was with a large university and we took four marketing classes, or courses, that had a prescribed ten-week curriculum. Half the time was in class, or not half, but some of the time was in class, and another part of your work had to be in a laboratory. It was a marketing course. So they had to schedule that with their teammates, to do their work. But the laboratories, you kind of expect you go in and at a certain time you got booted out. The wrinkle is, we took one of those four classes and we gave them their own dedicated project room to see what happens. Two significant findings: number one, the outcome of all four classes was identical. So no change whatsoever in outcome, and when we went back and said why, it was because it was a prescribed course. There was an end, there was a result that was looked for, even though there’s variation by each course or group. But by and large, it was, you get an A or you don’t. But on the output, the one group that had a dedicated project room was done with the ten-week course in five weeks.
Vickie:
Wow.
Rick:
Pretty good productivity increase. So I know that can correlate or relate back to the business world, so I’m just saying that organizations that have or do project work have to decide the critical nature and importance of that project work, so that you make hard decisions about that group working on that new whatever [using] the open space for a period of time, whatever length of time it is. Other stuff will have to stay fluid.
Vickie:
Interesting. We’ve got about five more minutes. I want to allow any questions from the team if you have any.
Audience member:
So, first of all, again, thanks for being here, doing this. You guys are all obviously busy, companies are growing, it’s a great thing. But to actually stop and reflect on this stuff, I think is important. It’s important for me to hear, I think it’s important for a lot of these folks to hear too, because we work with a lot of clients, I work with a lot of clients, that actually don’t question who and what in those typical worlds. You guys have clearly done that. It was really interesting to hear the discussion about what’s next. What I’m really most focused on with you guys as I sit here and listen to you, is I start to understand how you got to who and what, and why you questioned those things. But having that space that you guys both have, large facilities, multiple amenities, not necessarily dedicated to work. And you guys [LSB] have those amenities that are outside the workspace, so it’s kind of a tradeoff in the real estate transaction. So at the end of the day, there might be some equality there. But who and what, from my perspective, is important to question, particularly as it starts to relate to your culture. You guys talked about that. And what I always try to get is, how is your culture really, how do you get to what your culture is? I always, I’m always kind of thinking about what’s the cause. What’s Trek’s cause? What gets Trek out of bed every morning? What gets you guys [LSB] out of bed every morning? I’ve been to your space [LSB], haven’t been to your space [Trek]. And so I kind of wonder that, and I wonder, not what they are – I think those are really important questions – but I wonder, did that influence the work that you guys did as a group? Because what you guys have done [Trek], and what you guys have done [LSB], it takes teams, right? So that’s the question – did who you guys are, what’s the cause, what’s your “why” – did that affect that process?
Phil:
I think it greatly facilitates it. I don’t know if it’s, in and of itself, an outward manifestation of our “why”, but it allows us to do that. Our passion is for brands and making brands matter and we love what we do, we love the creative process, and we needed an environment that recognized how the creative process worked. So when you talk about the research you guys just did and the fact that this ten-week course got done in five weeks, anecdotally that feels viscerally real. There is something about the intensity of the creative process and when it comes together, it generates white-hot, kind of backs off a little bit, gets a chance to breathe, and then people come back at it. And we needed space that allowed us to do that. The old space didn’t do that. Is this space perfect? No, I think we realize there’s still some pieces missing, but again, if I come back and I look at the quality of work as it’s recognized out in the marketplace by third parties who judge it and by clients who pay us, both measures are up. So it feels like it’s working, it’s reinforcing the culture that we wanted to get more toward, and embed more deeply in our work product. So, it’s a process of continual discovery, but I think there’s enough there that we’ve kind of felt like there’s some traction. I think it’s made us more open to just continually questioning more and new ways of doing things and not just accept that well, we’re here, and it’s better than what it was, so we should coast. Because talent won’t let us do it and it is a war for talent, especially in our business, as it is in any creative, knowledge businesses, it’s a war for talent. So we all have to create environments and cultures that are going to attract and retain the right kinds of people. And some are just going to be fleeting and passing through, but while they’re there we want to make them as productive for us as we can. I think that’s never going to end because we can never get enough good people that fit into the stew we’ve been cooking.
Julie:
I almost feel like what we have now is just like the beginning. I think the kind of talent that we want in our culture, if we had the old space, we wouldn’t be getting the talent that we do now. Like Phil said, I think we have to think about what is next when we can. I think people expect a lot more with space than they used to. People would start jobs like, well, that’s what it is. It’s not like that anymore. It’s just not. People’s space and environments are so important to them. Just think of Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook and everybody is out there, going, look at me, look at my space, look at what I’m doing, look at what I’ve created. And they’re bringing that to work. It’s in the culture and we have to be a part of it.
Vickie:
Well said.
Rick:
Behavior over time equals culture. Everybody in this room needs to be comfortable asking the question, do they believe that space impacts behavior? And the answer is it does. The challenge companies sometimes have when they use space in the stew, is that it becomes the strategy, and it’s not the strategy. It’s a tool in your toolbox, in which you have a broader strategy and that’s one of the pieces. One of the mistakes I see companies make is they use space as being this incredible change management driver and you go, nooo. It’ll help, especially if you do it right, if you have your homework, and you have the users involved. The single biggest mistake I see repeated over and over and over again is companies that are changing, as they drive for a space change of some type, and they don’t involve the users at all. So moving becomes a jack in the box moment – “Where did this come from? I didn’t sign up for this. What were we thinking?” Rather than have them have day one be celebration – “I was involved in this, and I had a voice.” They’re invested.
Phil:
It sounds like you guys [Trek] have done that.
Mark:
For sure. I would just chime in maybe a couple of things that will get to your question. We’re all about the “why”. We’re an employment brand, we’re a brand brand, and we understand the power of that. So everything we’re doing these days is telling that story so it will resonate with consumers, but also with people that would at least come and look at Waterloo, Wisconsin. If we can convince people to get on a plane and visit us, they stay at the Mansion Hill Inn, they come out to Waterloo. We’ll land people if we can get them to agree to come see. There’s some that don’t get that far, but I think we’ve come a long way. So it’s very much, for us, it’s about that “why”. To the point where I think people that come and visit get it. We don’t have to point things out, they sort of get a sense. But here’s something I would suggest to everybody, two are tools. So, Great Place to Work – do you at your companies do the Great Place to Work survey? Do any of you guys do that? The top 100?
So, even if you have no intention of pursuing that for your company or for your brand, look at the list of questions. They’re online, you can look at Fortune magazine or Great Place to Work. So many of the questions are about the space that you’re a part of. So, if you don’t think there’s a correlation, all the data suggests the companies who win that are outperforming their peers by many multiples. So pay attention to those questions because they’re very much about the space. Another tool is Pinterest. Margaux created a Pinterest board, so when our people are out benchmarking and visiting companies all over the place, they come back with cool ideas that they think would work in our culture. And they’re posting those increasingly to this.
So we’re very well informed when we have new space in the future, we already have a really good idea of what’s working, but also what we could bring in from outside. And it’s authentic to our culture because the ideas are coming from our own people. The last thing I would say about that “why” and maybe the authenticity, something that hit me after we did our first big project in 2004. We got done and it was gorgeous, it was all these pictures before we moved in. It was a really gorgeous space, and I’ll never forget, a designer came up to me and said, “This is the most amazing transformation, this is just the coolest thing ever, but where’s the airplane wing?” And I’m like, “What? What are you talking about?” And he goes, “Well, you know, I’m a designer and I feel like instead of a conference table, there should be an airplane wing.” And I thought, he’s right. We spent a lot of money on the conference table, but it wasn’t as authentic probably to the designers as if we would’ve said we’ll give them more input. And from that day forward, every move we made after that, we went overboard to get more input to make sure we had that kind of authenticity. So it’s still Steelcase, 90%, but the other 10% is the “why”, very much to the heart of your question. That was a long answer.
Vickie:
I want to be on time and on budget. And thank all of you for being here, and particularly to thank our great clients for sharing with us. We’re fortunate to have you, we’re fortunate to be working right alongside you as you push the envelope. It’s a delight and an honor and we thank you for that as well as your time today.
About the Facilitator
Vickie Wenzel
Director, Talent Development
Atmosphere Commercial Interiors
I have been characterized as the Connector in ‘The Tipping Point’ book, a talent that has defined my career. Fortunately, I chose an industry that embraces creativity, change and connections.
I believe I make a contribution when a connection is made. For instance, I love to help clients discover how their facility really does relate to their business objectives. It is almost magical when they “get it” and see new ways to leverage their business as well as their workplace.
I work for a progressive place that allows me to embrace my love of change, and morph into new roles. Today, that means I facilitate the connection of best practices and really great colleagues. Considering that I took post-college GREs and taught evening design courses at UW long ago, you could say that my life goals connected.
Connect with me if I can help you with business development, sales, marketing, facility planning, office furniture, corporate education and training, or Predictive Index.