Transcript: The Future of Work - w/ Jeff Saunders

You have this aspect where you get high degrees of interdependence, where you start getting aspects of shared risk, shared reward coming into play and trying to find out in a highly interdependent relationship that I am so reliant on this partner that I can't do without him. So the organization's almost become married. And yes, they could come get divorced, but they'd be so painful if they did. So you see this spectrum of relationships emerging from the highly transactional to the highly interdependent. And when you get into those interdependent relationships, that's where the value generation is occurring.

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, episode number 38. Hello and welcome to Constructor, the best way to build it. This podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships within your project teams, help you understand how to lower risk and be under budget and on schedule in your projects, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. My talk today is with Jeff Saunders.

He is the Director at Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies. He talks with us about the work he does at the Institute and some of the major research he's done on the future thinking for work. We dig into megatrends, the future of outsourcing and co-sourcing as the independent co-sourcing model. Lastly, we talk about the eight challenges for the future and how to navigate through these challenges. There's so much value packed into this interview.

So without further ado, here is my interview with Jeff Saunders. Welcome to the Constructor podcast, Jeff. We're happy to have you on this morning and afternoon over there in Denmark. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to having great conversation.

Yes, me too. So first of all, we want to know who is Jeff Saunders? Yeah, you're currently the Director at Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, but let us know a little bit about your background. How did you even get there? I did future studies back in 2007 after I had moved to Denmark from living in the United States.

And I'd previously in the United States been working with a lot of issues related to a future of geopolitical and strategic issues. And then I've done a lot of work, foresight and future studies work in that regard. And then when I was in Denmark, you know, I through network and happenstance, I found that the Institute was looking for a profile similar to mine. And then, you know, one thing led to another and I ended up at the Institute and then worked my way up over the years into having the director position related to our strategy and innovation department.

Wonderful. You've been doing a lot of research while there. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing, particularly. Well, the Institute is a interdisciplinary organization that works with a variety of different organizations. So we have specialists that range from a wide variety of academic and professional backgrounds because there's a multi-perspective view for the future and an explorative view to the future that we bring to the work that we do.

And we work with a number of different types of organizations looking about what opportunities and challenges lie in the future and how they could best be prepared for a multiple or a number of range of futures. So we work with public organizations, government ministries, departments, municipalities and like. We work with private organizations. These could be Fortune 100 companies and above, or it could be smaller organizations as well. We work with non-governmental institutions, labor unions and employer associations.

So we're typically working with a broad range of different organizations about what is it that is affecting their contextual environment or their strategic environment and then asking the question or the questions related to who is best advantaged or positioned to take advantage of the opportunities or who is most threatened by these futures. And then we help them navigate what's their best strategic position to try to achieve. That's just so fascinating to me. I really love the approach of pretty much getting prepared for the future and navigating the best way to succeed as a business.

And you guys really have a broad gamut of different companies that you work with. So you really have an interesting perspective because you're learning from each company type and whether it's governmental or what have you, you definitely can come to each company with perspective from so many different points of view. So we're understanding from a different perspective what's challenging senior management. What are the challenges that employees are having in different organizations related to? Who are the customers?

How are different trends and influencing factors, drivers of change impacting consumer demands or citizen demands? What is it that we prepared for? What are the potential disruptions that could emerge? That's a very buzzy word right now, but what are the things that they need to be prepared and what different developments can mean in terms of our future competitive environment. These are all these things that we've tried to bring to bear and highlight for organizations around the world.

Yeah. So that gives you actually the opportunity to work with a number of organizations, particularly the ISS you've been working with for what, seven years? Yes, seven years. We've been working with ISS World Services. So they're based headquartered out of Copenhagen, Denmark or out of Surbo, which is just in north of Copenhagen.

And they're the world's largest facility management provider and integrated facility services provider in the world. They have something like 500,000 employees. 500,000 employees is amazing. But that in addition to the number of companies with the different perspectives that you're looking at the end user experience with them and how to provide better services and prepare for future, you have the perspective of working with ISS who also likely wants to know the same thing, the future of facility management and understanding ultimately what to expect a few years down the line.

Yeah. That was the basis for a series of white books where ISS and the Copenhagen Institute went together and started looking at what are the major drivers of change globally, what we call megatrends, that are shaping the facility management industry? How does that impact what their customers are needing to have service? What are their pains? What are the potential gains that they're looking to achieve?

How does it ultimately impact the end user? And so, you know, use these buildings and facilities that ISS services and other service. And so we started a journey back in 2009, 2010, looking at what were the major drivers affecting the facility management industry. That led to a beginning of analysis 2011 about what were the new ways of working that were emerging that were being driven by automation, greatest revolutions in digital technologies, globalization and the like. And how would that impact how organizations prepare their employees and use space in the future to support what their employees are doing?

How do they express their brands around it? And then ultimately what services are required from facility managers? And so this process over the years has looked at a variety of areas affecting the facility management corporate real estate space. So looking at how will organizations and people be working in the future? How will they be collaborating with partners to solve challenges?

And how could FM and corporate real estate providers work with others to deliver value for their customers? What is it that end users ultimately need to be supported? So you've had the last several years of focus on several decades of focus on activity based working. But now we see with that that's not enough just to look at the functional aspects, but also that people are looking for experience or looking to fill what we call the immaterial values, a sense of belongingness with an organization, a sense of social connectedness with the people that they're working with, and they want to have fun, be inspired.

And the workplaces are transitioning from a place where, hey, you can work in many places and many spaces after your individual choice and what you feel best supports you. So what is it that attracts people to the workspace? And what can the corporate real estate and facility managers, providers do to make the workplace something that's attractive for people to come? And that requires taking an entirely new perspective, which is focusing on the end user perspective. And for a very technical, normally very technical field of facility management with people with engineering backgrounds, how do they go in and start applying an end user perspective using insights from anthropology, ethnographics, data sciences, and the like to actually understand what is it that triggers end users in the spaces that they're using?

I love that it's really almost blurring the lines between facilities management and HR and IT and security and your food vendor services. You know, like, it's ultimately, it's just one of those things that keep coming up. It's about how do you approach space so that ultimately everyone has the happiest experience coming in? So I want to understand a little bit more about the megatrends that you described earlier. I understand from a presentation that you've done that there are 14 of them.

I mean, you don't have to hit on all of them, but just want to have a sense of what are megatrends and what do they look like for the future, I guess? The Institute has developed over the years. I mean, the Institute's been around since 1969. So over the 48 years that it's existed, we've developed a number of tools and methods within future studies. And one of them was megatrends.

And megatrends are aggregations of trends that we have a high degree of certainty will happen in the future and for a long period of time into the future. So there are elements of the future that we could be relatively certain or highly certain will occur. And they're things that are broad in scope and have significant impact on society. We like to say you can't hide from a megatrend. So there are things related to aspects of economic growth, aspects related to technological development.

If you're relatively sure that technological development, economic growth will continue, you can have a discussion about how much, how deep, and when different developments will occur. But by and large, these developments have been occurring for hundreds or even thousands of years, and we're very certain that they will continue to go along. There's other aspects, and they're relatively easy to measure. There's other aspects of megatrends, for example, something like individualization. Individualization we're highly certain it's occurring.

If you look at consumer preferences and things like that, everybody, people look for services and the desire to express themselves in increasingly granular and tailored ways. And so while that's harder to measure discreetly, you know, we're highly certain that that has an impact. It has an impact upon how organizations want their services from their providers. They want tailor-made services. But if you also look at consumers and end users, they want individualized services as well.

And if you look at issues related to commercialization and other aspects, you know, consumers have liquid expectations. So the services and experiences that get in one area get spread over into other areas. So these are some of these factors, and we have 14 megatrends that we work with that to bear on our different processes to talk about and help organizations understand what are they certain about what will happen in the future? What do they need to prepare for so that they understand what they're certain about and what they're uncertain about, and then focus on the ones that will have the most impact for their organization and try to develop solutions for dealing with those.

I wanted to list out the 14 megatrends so you know what they are. I'm also including the link in the show notes for you, so look out for them there. Commercialism, sustainability, polarization, democratization, acceleration, complexity, economic growth, technology development, immaterialism, network society, globalization, individualization, focus on health and demographic development. We'll get back to the interview. So tell us who you work with at the Copenhagen Institute.

I mean, it sounds like you work with integrated teams in order to develop sort of this future study explaining to them about megatrends. Tell us what that would look like. How would working with someone to identify those trends, what would that look like? Yeah, I mean, we have multiple disciplinary teams on our side that work together to bring these various perspectives. So we have economists, we have social scientists, we have people with backgrounds in anthropology and sociology.

We work with, depending on the subject area, people who have expertise in health and things like that. We bring these multiple insights together with this methodology, and then on the customer side we go into a co-creation process with them where it's, you know, within the organization and external subject matter experts where we kind of try to triangulate how these various inputs can come together and create a shared understanding what the future could be and how could it develop. So could you give us, I'm just trying to like wrap my head around what a specific, I don't know, user experience or customer experience that maybe has been enhanced due to the co-disciplinary approach right on your side and on their side coming together and saying, hey, this is how we're going to approach business now.

Moving forward to enhance ultimately the experiences, people who enter into our space and work with us ends up being. Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to do with the organizations are is that we're trying to say everybody goes with the implicit understanding of what they think the future will be. And some have an innate perspective on the future is incredibly optimistic and they see opportunity in the future. And then you have others that, you know, you tell them, talk to them about the future and they'll say it'll be more or less the same thing as today with a few extra gadgets and things like that.

And then you have so they can't imagine an alternative future. And then you have others who associate the future with loss, like things in the good old days were better. And so what these processes, you know, one aspect of these processes is to help teams within organizations to make explicit their implicit understandings of the future. So it helps them structure their thinking about the future. What do they see as opportunities?

What do they see as threats and why do they perceive them as threats? And then, you know, it's about so it's a tool for initiating dialogue internally and then also with stakeholders who go with clients and like. But it's also trying to help reduce complexity by trying to say, OK, what are the key trends that we think drivers that we think are going to be shaping a particular industry, a particular product or service or or consumer group and the like? And then we start kind of going through what are their implications?

How does it affect customer requirements? How does it affect the competitive environment? How does it affect the way organizations will be delivering services to either a business or a consumer in the future? And then from those, we try to understand what are the strategic implications of this? And then we try to guide organizations through a process which looks at those which have most impact on their business model or service model or the like so that we could sort the ones that have the least impact away from the analysis and focus on those that are most impactful.

And then once we have a focus on the ones that are most impactful, we can sort of have an understanding of what is it that they're highly certain of? And sometimes when you start talking about and what are they uncertain of? And sometimes when you're having that dialogue related to uncertainty, many organizations start putting into the category of how highly uncertain about this is because they have a feeling it's going to happen, but they kind of wish it wouldn't happen. So, you know, it could be the globalization of, you know, different types of media and media services and the like.

And they had that understanding, well, the market is already highly globalized, but they didn't see a direct peer competitor coming in. Well, the market has shifted. You have all this competition because it's a globalized market space, particularly within media. You have YouTube, you have Netflix and things like that. So you have competition.

So you can bled into your marketplace. You should be prepared for that. So that's some of that aspect of helping people kind of understand that. And then when you have a certainty of understanding about what are the key uncertainties, building scenarios for understanding how could those futures develop and then guiding them through a process of what we call systemic ideation and testing where they could take either their current ideas and test it up against these alternative futures or they could go into a process, say, oh, we see the consumers or our competitors could be behaving like this in this given scenario.

What does that mean for us and what solutions could we develop to bring to bear to the market? And then they can go about testing what is a robust strategy that works in multiple scenarios and what are more scenario specific concepts or business models and the like that maybe shouldn't be pursued because the risk associated with them is too high. So when we work, we talk oftentimes of a kind of a concept or a mindset which we build from resilience, which is the proactive adaption to change, which is foresight.

And future studies is about building a sophisticated and robust radar about what are the key trends and drivers and potential areas of disruption that can impact you. And how do you assess and monitor those on an ongoing basis? So, you know, where presidential threats can emerge and so you could plan and react to develop a sort of a shield process. But then you don't want to be purely defensive. You want to be proactive.

You want to be aggressive. You want to seize opportunities as they emerge. So how could you take up the sword and identify areas to seize and strike in the market? And so this is that kind of idea that we in concept that we want to build within the organization aspect of building a strong radar, understand what's going on in the market, building a capacity to seize advantage of emerging opportunities quickly and then having the capacity to ideally sense quickly when threats are emerging and having a plan in place to react to it.

And it's building that mindset within organizations is what ultimately, in my opinion, future studies is about. I liked the ideas of understanding what the key trends are to first pay attention to and then understanding from their perspective what the opportunities are in the future and the threats in the future. Doing that and then doing the systemic ideation, kind of giving them like the process to understand, assess, pretty much come up with that plan to, like you said, seize the opportunity or put a plan in place to to react to any potential risks if they arise.

So wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. You you definitely mentioned certainty. And that's one thing that I bring people onto the podcast. I'm always talking about how do we reduce the level of uncertainty that owners have? And although I come to a lot of the times from the perspective of executing a construction project, these are the things that owners are thinking about.

I mean, why are they even going to even invest in real estate, in their infrastructure, in in anything if it's not focused on their end user experience, if it's not focused on their customers, if they're not well prepared to react to the future? Right. So there's always this balance of things that are happening. And I think that it makes a lot of sense, the approach that the Institute is taking to ultimately prepare, prepare owners. I love I definitely love the approach.

Very cool. So I do want to get into the future of outsourcing study, particularly for FM services. Tell me who was involved in that study and we'll dig into some of the things that you found out about outsourcing in the future. Yeah, I had a we had a team at the Institute that were working on the future of outsourcing. And that was a collaboration again with ISS, with IFMA and Cornet Global.

So we had the research phase, which our team at the Institute was doing. So we were focusing on how are megatrends we had talked about, how are they impacting the notion of outsourcing and also the various trends. We were also doing a lot of work with the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals. They were also a participant in the surveys as well. And then we were also doing work with subject matter experts in the field related to outsourcing and collaboration, looking at what were their inputs, how do they see the future developing.

And it was from those perspectives that we brought together. What does it mean for the future of facility management? So, first of all, many different perspectives. I mean, corporate real estate, facilities management, I think there's an aspect where, again, the understanding is there is collaboration, there's integration taking place, not only just in the research and how they all all they all tap into each other ultimately, but in the results themselves. Tell me how the outsourcing model is developing based upon the study.

Yeah, well, what we found is there's a number of emerging approaches to outsourcing that are occurring in collaboration that's occurring within the marketplace. And ultimately, it's going in the direction of one aspect is cost. And that's when things become commoditized. Then it becomes a factor that cost is the key driver. But at the other end of the spectrum, you know, it's this question of this interdependent relationship.

And so you have outsourcing kind of developing and polarizing in a way. So at the one side on the highly transactional side, you see this emergence of crowdsourcing models. And that's a situation where you have what's the difference between one Uber driver and the other Uber driver. There's tons, you know, just to take that one example, which is commonly used or within a single source cleaning providers at the micro level. They have an example of a company in Denmark called Happy Helper.

BK, which is Amazon Home Services is another example where you have offer, you know, some labor and some service and people who require it. And these people are highly interchangeable. So it's a question of, yes, the reputation. But there's many people with five star ratings and it's a question of price. And, you know, you just kind of go with whoever nearby and handy can do it at the time you need it and click.

There you go. And that's a very transactional relationship. And the platform is the one that links to people who have a desire with the people who have the ability to offer something. And they're the ones that take a slice of the cake because they're providing the organization of that. And so, you know, outsourcing providers, you know, if they get caught in the transactional relationship with their clients, they easily end up being pushed down in that environment.

Then you have on the other side of the spectrum, more interdependent relationships that are emerging. So you start seeing kind of network solutions being put into. So you have networks of providers that are dealing with highly complex solutions and they want to provide. They need to have multiple providers to provide a solution to a customer or multiple customers. And it's those networks that go in competition with each other.

We're seeing that emerging. And then you have this aspect where you get high degrees of interdependence in what we call co-sourcing models. And this is related to vested sourcing from the University of Tennessee and Kate Vittesek. We start getting aspects of shared risk, share reward coming into play and trying to find out in a highly interdependent relationship that I am so reliant on this partner that I can't do without them. So the organization's almost become married and yes, they could come get divorced, but there'd be so painful if they did.

So you see this spectrum of relationships emerging from the highly transactional to the highly interdependent. And when you get into those interdependent relationships, that's where the value generation is occurring. And so as I, you know, the ideal relationship for an outsourcing provider, if you're not a platform provider, is ending up in those more interdependent relationships. I appreciate the parallelism to what I happen to have talked about on the podcast multiple times with lean construction practitioners or owners who are wanting to do construction in a more integrative way.

I mean, obviously there's the integrated project delivery model. They establish the integrated forms of agreement and it really does sound very similar to the core co-sourcing model, shared risk, shared reward model that you're describing. I haven't heard the lean approach, IPD approach as highly interdependent, but as you're describing it that way, I do also see the parallelism there. And once you establish that relationship, it is challenging to, like you say, un-marry because you get to a point where you understand so much about each other and the goals that the owner is hoping to execute for their end users.

For a construction project that usually ends, which is less often the case with facilities management services, I would like to ask the question now, what's the difference between traditional facilities management and what I'm understanding is now called service management? Could you talk to us a little bit about that? You know, that's a slightly different thing than the outsourcing models, but that transition between facilities management, I mean, this question of focus where, you know, facilities, you're talking about the buildings being managed and the services, it's that broader perspective looking about, you know, not only just the buildings themselves, but what about the occupants within the building and how they're doing and how they're ultimately experiencing that.

So you start getting into more areas of value creation. You can start talking about integrated facility services, integrated services, and you can start linking the various elements that come into play in creating a service experience. So you start talking about, you know, how do catering, how does cleaning, how does all these aspects come together to actually create a service management approach? So then you start getting into this approach about how do you design the services? How do you understand the user needs?

And then ultimately about how do you manage that service process to understand how well is it actually delivering on what was expected? And so you go from a design to management process that integrates between the two. So it's expanding the scope and the role and the type of requirements that facilities, providers, corporate real estate need to have. So ultimately they become sort of an orchestrator of different elements. And then it becomes a question about what are the elements they're better in control of.

So in the physical space, and if you talk about the workplace experience and service management of that, you have, what are the range of touch points that an organization has with its users? And typically most businesses, if we're talking in an office context, you have dynamic spaces that could be either digital or physical. And you have kind of fixed that they're always there, you know, like the building isn't a good example of a fixed space and a dynamic space could be a pop-up shop or something like that.

And you have that range of physical and digital. Now, facility management and corporate real estate, they can control the physical space and the dynamic and the fixed very, very well. But once it starts integrating into the digital space, then they have less ability to control. So that's a question in this process about trying to do the integrated user experience, how could they go about being the orchestrator when they're in control and then being a member of the band that hits the right notes at the right moment for their digital partners when they're in the other portion of the spectrum.

So that's an integrated, interesting challenge that's emerging in the future of work, new ways of working and service management. I know we kind of stepped away from the outsourcing question, but I am curious as to if the facilities management outsource group is in this co-sourcing model, they do, I do like the fact that they would have the opportunity to speak to the service management approach. I didn't want to get away from that because I saw the correlation. I just, I want to, I want to see what your perspective is on that.

Well, I mean, it's for that question because the co-sourcing approach is, is highly interdependent. So it's understanding not only client need, it's like, you know, what did their end users need? And that gets into that service management and the context with the manager in the future will have to reduce for that they're trying to manage. So ideally, if you talk about in the co-sourcing model, you could say, you know, company X, they, you know, the works, the workplace and the workplace strategy is highly important for them to deliver on what they need to do to fulfill their customers requirements.

They need their employees to be highly engaged and highly motivated. They need a partner that could help them manage that process and manage it better than anybody else for them. So that partner needs to understand, OK, what are the user requirements? So what are my customers' employees requirements? What are their work profiles?

So what type of archetypes around that? What are their user journeys? What settings are they engaging in the workplace? How does that relate to what the buyer is trying to achieve of that service? And then understanding, what is it that is regard and what is it in the technology regard?

In that co-sourcing approach, I mean, that is just that that aspect of building that ending among the variety among the partners that they're willing to open up more and more of the elements that are close to the core actually within their core to their partner because they are not able to deliver unless their provider is also able to help them do it. So it's that intimate relationship. Did Dean Kashiwagi before the interview, he specifically mentioned that when you hire experts, you can see into the future that have no confusion and it reduces your project.

So that's why you specifically want to to hire an expert. And so when and they are looking at their client and their end user of their ultimate clients, they the customers, whoever it may end up being, even if it's workplace, the people who are working in that space, it's that expertise that that you hope in your procurement process that they are experts and can deliver with that simplicity and vision kind of give you a sense of where my mindset is. I wanted to share with you guys where you can listen to my interview with Dr.

Dean Kashiwagi here so you can get some context of our discussion. You can find my interview with Dr. Dean at constructor. That's ConstructRR.com. Back to the interview.

Yes, they have insight into the future if they're the contours. But when dislocation shifts emerge, experts can give you an insight into the future. But if you have new areas of technological development, there's a there's risk associated with that as well. And that's just because, you know, alternative business models developed in other areas come in. So that's why in many industries you have the established players who the expertise in doing things get completely disrupted by newcomers that come into the market because they've seen a new way of doing it, going in new methods and approaches and technologies.

And they're able to seize market share rather rapidly. So you can make the argument within the FM space and the corporate real estate space, that we're delivering so many solutions for so many years. Why the hell do they get beat out by upstarts like WeWork? And all of a sudden you have an industry or a company that's expanded dramatically. But, you know, what about their valuation and is that inflated?

And we have all sorts of discussions around that. But they've been able to totally reframe the way people talk about the workplace, in the workplace, by developing a completely new approach. So, yes, experts are important and I won't deny that. But I also say there's also a downside with experts and, you know, cases like WeWork as an example of that. It's definitely comprehensive.

I want to ask you about challenges for the future. So with that particular response about, you know, experts and to any emerging approach or disruption, for I guess lack of a better word. But I do want to talk about some of the challenges that a provider who has been doing things, how can they be prepared for some of those challenges and pivot? The key aspects is been affecting providers, is this need for resilience and agility for organizations to have that need to be supported by facility managers and corporate real estate.

So you have some organizations that are in adaptive situations. You have some that are in kind of winner takes all markets where they could have a huge portion of the market and then someone else develops a better solution. You have that particularly in the tech industry. But in other industries, you know, do we win the major project that, you know, provided 20 people on our staff work? Will we win it?

Well, then that's great. We'll have work for 20 people. If not, maybe we want to have worked five people. And that need to scale up and scale down quickly is becoming more important as, you know, the accelerating pace of change, greater complexity in the market, more uncertainty. And so end users want to have owners, they want to look for service models where they may be willing to pay extra for the ability to flex up and down.

That's a difficult challenge. Hub operator that could offer that degree of scale because you're sourcing the space out on maybe an individual or a small team basis. If you're a multi-site owner, steps would say, hey, what's your pain? Your pain is as an end user core organization is that you don't want to be stuck with a lot of fixed costs if things go against you. You want to be able to scale up and scale down rapidly.

So there's examples in the market. In Denmark, where they have a company, which says you give us a month's notice. We can move you into one of our other sites at no charge where you can get a bigger space or a smaller space and we can actually help you manage that insecurity that could emerge. So that's some of those aspects that come into play. We did a white book.

It's on the new ways of working. Could you talk to us a little bit about that? You know, what we look at is when we talk about the future of work, you have, OK, how is work and work processes developing in the future? What are the future of the workforce? And so this is like demographic issues, aging, millennials, things like that.

What is the nature of the workplace and how is that developing both digitally and phasically? And so we started talking about, OK, how are work and work processes developing? And one of the aspects is, you know, notions of technological development and disruption and organizational agility. Many companies need resilience. They need to manage costs.

So they want to understand and shift as many of the fixed costs they have into variable costs because that gives them greater control. So you have this need for resilience and this need for agility. Technology is breaking down the barriers internally to organizations and externally to organizations. So those collaboration models that I was discussing before, ranging from crowdsourcing models to, I'm sorry, crowdsourcing models to co-sourcing models, even what we call mesh sourcing models, they enable that to be done easier. But it also is breaking the silos down within organizations.

And that's because it's easier to understand how people are using things to develop services for how people are interfacing with different, with each other and with the physical world around them and to share and monetize those resources. So there's a lot of changes going on around that, and it's enabling things like co-working, which helps an organization to leverage the community better. So an organization could say, hey, we have a ton of extra space because most offices, half of our desks are empty at any given time and we may have surplus capacity in our workplaces.

And why do we need to have a gym in our building that costs money and no one uses it anyways? Why can't we use the neighborhood gym, organize a discount related to that? And now all these things could be organized through an app. So leveraging the community, leveraging the neighborhood and breaking down this notion that everything has to be in-house at one site and that we have to own it all is being changed by this freedom from ownership notion and this idea that we can leverage the community and resources more efficiently and more effectively.

Facility managers have to understand in corporate real estate is, you know, to what degree do they want to be open to the community? How do they monetize the assets that they have? You know, you have apps like Liquid Space and things like that. They could offer the opportunity for their employees to work at different locations, to be inspired, that maybe have the better offices or project rooms or war rooms for doing their work than others have. So that's a key aspect.

There's this aspect around technological development. You can see that going around also in Europe, the United States, North America and Asia, where you have the automation of labor on. And so you're seeing that occur, particularly start talking about the cognitive and AI revolution, that these are going to impact how workers organize work processes and what and who are the future talents. So the expert of today can quite easily be disrupted and become, if you want to call the future average person. So that notion of talent.

So organizations need resilience, but individuals need resilience as well, because you could be disrupted by Watson, for example, or another AI system, robotic process, automation. All those aspects can come in and change the way you work. So how do you shift gears and prepare for the next future? Some people like working in a freelance market. And so you have the ones that do it very well and highly skilled and they take good wages and they're quite happy.

And then you have the ones that are called the precarious, the precariat class. And those are the ones that are forced into it out of need. So it leads to a polarization in the market. Now, individualization, increasing due to global teams and providing all that stuff. That's increasing the demands on the organization to provide more individualized services.

More expectation is with technology that, hey, you can understand me better. You could provide more granular services to me. So how do we manage that and make sure that we provide the services that we need? Now, all these changes and shifts that I've been talking about are focusing and changing. The fifth aspect is this focus on health and well-being in the workplace.

And what we could see is that, you know, we had this traditional cost of, hey, we have, you know, most of our spend, particularly talking to office environment with knowledge workers, 80, 85 percent is on our employees, the rest is on technology and the physical assets and things like that. It's the cost, particularly during the crisis, managing costs within the built space, also managing costs on the labor size. And it was all about cost cutting. But now, you know, with our society focusing on innovation, it's about what comes from employee engagement.

And if they're not healthy, then it's a problem doing it. So reviewing whatever type of service and all the job is to make sure all the boxes are filled and, oh, is it filled with the right things? Those jobs are being automated right now by artificial intelligence. And that person, if they had a bad day at the office or at home and, you know, they had got a call from the school that the kid was misbehaving or whatever and they're distracted, they could still kind of check the boxes and it didn't take much.

But if you have to be creative, innovative, you know, with experts from different fields, that requires a different degree of cognitive input. And that really requires that people have a good sense of wealth and well-being and actually provide good quality inputs and the like. But there's also the aspect when you focus on that is that you can create and drive absenteeism, higher turnover, and you could drive presenteeism, which is when a bad office design actually creates so much distractions that it makes people present, but not there because they're constantly distracted by other aspects and so they're being much less productive.

So that's that focus because you can actually turn the equation around the focus on actually investments on improving employee performance. I actually have an interview lined up with the author of Healthy Workplace. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Lee Stringer, but she definitely talked about health and well-being and the focus on providing that for people in a workplace because of all those reasons. Right. I mean, and we'll get into that in that interview.

But a lot of the things that you just mentioned, absolutely like absenteeism and the lack of creativity while at work. I mean, the production level can definitely go down if if those are not the the focuses. So I think that's that's super interesting. There's all that aspect of people wanting to have, you know, I talked about wanting to have, you know, again, with individualization, user choice and personalization. How is it that I want to work?

How is it I'm most productive in giving control to the user to choose the settings and spaces, you know, would like to work and invest supporting that. So that's that whole activity based working movement that's going on, which is always important. Somewhat goes hand in hand with the health and wellness, because if you can't give people the environment, the sustainable environment to be health, healthy and well within, sometimes the building itself is is not contributing to that. Right. The built environment is not doing that with sustainability.

And those behaviors around sustainability that can that can certainly contribute. We design workspace actually decidedly on the healthy place to be. Well, thanks for sharing that about the new ways of working to the interview, although it's been like super enjoyable to talk with you and enlightening as well. I do want to get from you. What's your recommendation to the listener, to the owner listener right now?

Or anybody who's even working in facilities management, which you're I mean, you study the future all the time. Is there anything that people, companies should be paying attention to right now? You know, we talk about the future of work, future workplace, future of the workforce. But, you know, it's about, you know, translating that into, you know, understanding what's the strategic ambition of the organization. And trying to say, OK, was it that our employees, you know, are working together?

How should they be working together? How are we supporting and fulfilling those functions? And what are the facilities and technologies that they need to have in order to do that? And so they start understanding the linkages between the the strategy, how they're working, their user journey during the day. And then they could start understanding what are the touch points by which they interface with digital workspace and the physical workspace.

They could actually do a lot to improve the well-being of their workforce, the productivity of their of their workers without a dramatic investment, either in fixed assets and understanding and using data and better processes around data to understand where is it that services are provided to support the work that actually needs to get done? And where are resources being misallocated to areas that may be nice to have, but doesn't really help anybody get their work done and maybe re-prioritizing that the areas that are neglected and being intentional about that and thinking about their fixed space in an intentional way.

And that's something that that needs to be done. There be any resources that you'd like to direct the listener to start going down that road of investigating what steps to take next as they research how how they should be working? I mean, yes, it is sort of this let's look at us as an organization and our culture and the end users and how people are working to make sure that we're getting all the feedback that we need as well. But is there is there any particular place where people should just, you know, go look at whether it's ISS or you know?

Oh, yeah, I mean, there's the white books that we produce with ISS. There's five of them. They're available online and, you know, the links could be provided. One place to find them is on betterworkplaces.com. They're also available on the Institute's websites.

There's also things done by the International Facility Management Association, Workplace Evolutionaries. But, you know, those are places and resources that people look at to gain inspiration to holistic approaches to the workplace. And how is it that they can go about understanding how their end users work? So are they office bound? Are they out of the office?

And what type of archetypes do they have? What are their touch points, interfaces and user journeys throughout the day? So taking that service design, service management approach to understanding their employees and then the importance of what's being offered versus the satisfaction and doing a resource prioritization around it. There's a lot that's out there. If someone wants to learn more about you and what you're doing particularly, how can they get in touch?

Via the Institute, which is www.cifs.dk. And, yeah, there's always open for an email or a call. As much as I did. I definitely enjoy talking about the future of work. So I hope you get some really cool nuggets out of this one.

Please email me at Brittany at Constructor.com. I want to know how this podcast has helped you, even if you haven't implemented it yet. If you just want to learn more, just go ahead and email me again. That's Brittany. B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at ConstructRR.com.

Next week, we'll be talking with Michael Bull, the host of America's Corporate Real Estate Show. We navigate through emerging trends as it relates to corporate real estate, like urban development, Internet of Things, driverless cars. And most importantly, we talk about training and development of employees. Tune in next week to listen to this interview. Don't forget to subscribe at Constructor.com to get email updates from me.

If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes and Stitcher. Please leave a review to show you support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.