About Place

Welcome to Season 3! To kick off this season, your host—and our VP of Global Research and Insights—Ryan Anderson offers his thoughts on the state of the workplace today. Get his take on the variables affecting the future of work around the world, how the workplace can better support flexibility (hint: it’s not just through hybrid policies), and why organizations need to do more to address employee wellbeing. We hope you’re looking forward to going even deeper into these themes throughout the season.  For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

We’ve come to the end of another season, but there’s still time to look back in our season wrap-up. Host Ryan Anderson puts a bow on Season 2 by sharing new data that challenges listeners to shift their focus from returning to the office, and toward a reimagining of the office for this new era of work. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.  

As our Digital Marketing Strategy Lead at MillerKnoll, Chris Coleman has been helping Ryan Anderson answer questions from customers wondering whether they should start hosting meetings or other work functions in the metaverse. These questions get asked so often that Ryan invited Chris to join him on the podcast to share a digestible explainer of all things metaverse—or, as Chris prefers to refer to it, Web3. If you’ve ever found yourself lost in conversations about blockchains, NFTs, virtual reality, and the like, Chris breaks it all down and explains what it means to the future of business and our lives. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

This week, we welcome Corinne Murray, founder of Agate Studio. As a leading workplace strategist, Corinne helps organizations think differently about how they approach the creation, management, and evolution of their places of work. In an enlightening conversation, Ryan and Corinne explore the nuanced world of the future of work, touching on several approaches employers can use to evaluate both the built and social work environments to improve employee experience. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Disruption has been the theme of Ronen Journo’s 28-year career, so his perspective on this period of rampant experimentation in corporate real estate is particularly prescient. Ronen is Senior Managing Director and European Head of Management Services & Operations at Hines, a privately owned real estate investment, development, and management firm. In this episode, he and Ryan discuss how the pandemic provided an accelerant for challenges that had been on a slow burn for decades, and the need for corporate real estate professionals to focus on the experiences of the people who use the built environment in order to fully realize its value. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Inclusive design is a topic not nearly enough people are talking about. This week’s guests are working to fix that. Jolene De Jong is an Applied Insights + Design Specialist at MillerKnoll and Joseph White is the company’s Director of Design Strategy. They recently collaborated on a white paper for the peer-reviewed CRE Journal. In it—and in this episode—they unpack the need for architects and designers to move beyond accommodation of unique needs and toward a more widespread adoption of the notion that spaces that follow inclusive design principles simply work better for everyone. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

Host Ryan Anderson could not wait to share this episode with you. Our guest, Cali Williams Yost, has spent her career helping organizations reimagine not just where, but also how and when their people work to improve performance and well-being. With a mix of infectious enthusiasm and the truth-bomb directness of someone who has been advocating for these shifts for 27 years, Cali makes a strong business case for embracing flexible work and remaking the office into an intentional enabler of a more flexible operating model. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

On this week’s episode, we chat with Craig Robinson, Chief Growth Officer at flexible workplace provider, Industrious. With more than 20 years of experience in the commercial real estate business, Craig helps organizations to be more innovative in their approach to real estate by expanding their concept of "workplace" and providing greater employee choice while managing costs and risk. Join host Ryan Anderson and Craig as they discuss ways to support optionality, flexibility, and environments that promote belonging and purpose. For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action.

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

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