Watch This Space Dec 2020 Podcast - How Did We Really Do in 2020?

2:12AM Nov 30, 2020

Speakers:

Jon Arnold

Chris Fine

Keywords:

work

people

home

office

pandemic

environment

technologies

technology

jon

business

space

chris

workplace

data

point

longer term

terms

employees

impact

enterprises

Welcome to watch this space, the podcast about future of work. Every month, we bring you insider perspectives on how digital transformation and emerging technologies and generational change are shaping the future of work. We are two analog guys finding the groove for all of this in today's digital world. i'm Jon Arnold. And these trends are my focus as an independent technology analyst in my company, J Arnold Associates.

And I'm Chris Fine. I'm a consultant and advisor specializing in workplace technology, IoT and security. My company is Integrative Technologies, LLC. Hi, Jon. Good to be back.

Okay, Thanks, Chris. And same here. And we are going into end of year. So this is our December 2020 edition of watch this space. And this actually will technically, Chris, close out season three. And I think if we keep adding listeners and building our following, we just might be ready for a Netflix series. Hmm.

I think so. I think so we're maybe maybe we start on some other network and work our way up to Netflix. But yes, absolutely.

All right. Well, I think we'll have to punch up our production a little bit on that front. And yes, I do need to get my piano over here so we can record some music. That is coming, folks, I promise you, hopefully for the next the next episode. So we started from coming from last month's podcast, Chris, we talked a lot about how companies are adapting to, the COVID situation, of course, mostly on takeaways from some of the industry conferences we've been seeing lately. And that trend is of course, continuing. So we have more to talk about. But I think we'll frame it today in terms of end of year. And then what to look forward to in 2021. So Chris, I'd like to think about as we kind of come to an end for 2020. How would you rate 2020 on a 10 point scale, in terms of the industry that we're in the collaboration, technology space, and then to rate on a 10 point scale, how you feel about the year 2020, in general, for how we've been coping?

Well, I think in terms of how helpful collaborative technology has been in a terrible situation. So assuming that the overall rating is pretty negative. There has been a bit of a bit of light in that in collaborative technologies like zoom, and other products have, I think, really helped people to cope with a bad situation, everything from education to office work. I hasten to add, as I always do that, that doesn't help everybody. It helps those who can work from home, and does not impact all the people who've really been badly impacted by the pandemic, in other businesses, but within the scope of how this can be effective, which is, I think, expanded from what you would have seen before the pandemic was people find so many new and different ways to use the tools. I think I think it's been positive for the impact of the industry. Does that make sense?

Mm hmm. Sure. Sure. So all right. Can you want to put a number to any of that? Not that I'll hold you to it?

Well, I would say eight for the business, and 10 for the degree of increased impact that the technologies have had on folks who are able to use them.

Yeah, yeah. And I'd be on the same kind of level with you for that, too. I, you know, I've for a while I've been saying this is the right technology for the right time, collaboration technologies, in particular, unified communications, team messaging, these kind of platforms have obviously, you know, hit their stride in this environment. It's almost like I've been saying a bit of a perfect storm for them. So it's been very good on those fronts. And obviously, people who have played the market and bet right on some of these companies have done very well.

But to your point, Chris, sure. It doesn't benefit everybody. It doesn't affect everybody in the same way. And I guess to think ahead for next year is the thing is to look at those areas where underserved or overlooked areas can benefit. So in particular, as we we've talked before, people who don't work in offices, people who have limited access to broadband technology to drive these applications need Help. At one of the events I saw a couple of weeks ago, they had the FCC Chairman on. And he talked about some of the their priorities for making funding programs. So broadband can be made more accessible to, you know, rural areas and underserved markets. And so they understand that as infrastructure goes, it's very, you know, very important to bring, bring this out to be in the digital economy, especially in, in this kind of pan pandemic environment. Politics aside, I mean, they've got the right idea for sure. And we'll just have to see what initiatives follow for next year.

What's the Jon, it's interesting, in my mind, being somewhat history oriented, to compare this to the social and political and economic arrangement that was done with telephones, especially in the US. So part of the reason or in fact, the predominant reason that AT&T was allowed to form, what became the Bell System monopoly, which is was very different from most things, here. And it was that they promised and were based on the idea of universal service. So in exchange, they were treated like a utility almost, in the sense that they their responsibility was to get telephone service to everybody. And they largely succeeded in doing that. It took a long time, and there was a lot of criticism about the pace of it.

But they were able to fulfill their charter for a long time. And service did become almost universal. But broadband service was born under very different economic conditions. And so I think the challenge, as the Chairman said, is really to try to find, you know, with a less monopolistic way to really make sure that there is universal service. And I think that's a challenge no matter what political view you might have about how to do it. It's challenging either way, but it's one of those social priorities. And when you asked, for example, how much impact on the collaborative technology as well, it's kind of revealed that in many, many cases, it's it's almost the same in terms of importance personally, as well as business that the telephone turned out to be, and that for that matter, cell phones, that that it really needs to be universal, the means to to be able to provide this kind of service. I don't know if you, if you agree, but that's kind of the way I see it. It's there's interesting parallels about the deployment of other technologies.

Well, sure, we've, we've definitely all benefited from having having these technologies. I also think, too, as we're going into 2021, if we're going to continue in this distributed environment, work wise, but also socially, you know, in terms of school, health care, all of these areas, and retail for that matter, too. If it's going to be more of a lockdown, then we want to be happy with, we're going to have to get used to it. The onus falls even further on these technologies to enable this kind of emerging way of life that we have to adapt to. But without that broadband piece to power at all, it can't happen.

So I think the stars, you know, will continue, I think lining up this way between political and business and, you know, social policy priorities, to say, hey, this, this is the only way we're going to be able to survive short of eliminating this pandemic all together. But as we know, you know, this won't be the last pandemic. So just like we found after 9-11, right, I hate to say it, but it forced us to rethink a lot of our first responder, public safety, operations and priorities, etc. I know we're getting a little off topic here. But it does point back to the need to have that infrastructure in place accessible to all, just like it is in workplace where everybody needs to have a way to do their jobs. And you can't make the technology accessible only for certain types of job functions or more roles in an organization.

I guess if the question is what do you learn from such a terrible crisis? And hopefully,

it knows a lot about how yeah, but but about the society how it responds, right?

Right, both immediately and in the long term. Right. So when we get into this discussion I think we're gonna have today. Certainly, I would make the point and it sounds like you're on this page to where it. Things are not going to snap back to really where they were, it's going to be a different mix. And so one of the key components of that mix is how broadly communications technology is enabled.

Okay, so let's think about how this translates into what we think 2021 holds in store. I think that's what people will want to be thinking about it this time of year, you have been looking at some recent research from Leesman. And we both talked about their ongoing research, and it's pretty extensive, pretty deep. But the data sets are really interesting, right? So you've got a few touch points, I think we can we can visit now for for what that picture might look like?

Well, Leesman, has been doing some interesting work. I'm a fan of their work, their research work, because they're not biased in terms of one way or another. They're very careful, they're not. They're basically paid for by the end customers, ie the enterprises who need the data, not sponsors and vendors. And they tend to be pretty even handed about how they survey. And so Leesman had operated under the thesis for a few years that they could build up a giant database of employee survey results that could be compared across geographies, and enterprises. So they were suitably anonymous enough so that the companies would mind if they were shared. But they were universal. And they could be cut in any way statistically.

So what Leesman started doing last year was to start applying what they call their indexing method, which is essentially a quality index that had been applied to the workplace applied to home to and they had, they've now had 145,000 respondents in their client base, in multiple geographies, to work at home, during the pandemic. And they had, I believe, nearly a million prior to that, who worked in the office. And there's an overlap of about 20 to 23,000 people, which is fascinating, because these are people who can rate their office at home versus their or their work at home versus their office. And one of the things that's interesting was it with, with some exceptions, the score that was given the overall quality score that was given to from the work at home respondents was higher than the than what the average was from the workplace, it wasn't a huge amount higher, but it was higher than the margin of error.

So they concluded along several axes, that it just it just was better, that people were fine working at home. So I'll just mention a couple of the factors that were interesting. So a big impact on the quality score was, what kind of environment you had to work in at home. So the home working environment still beat out the office, except if you didn't have a real location to work at home. So like, if you were had roommates, you didn't really have a room had a nonspecific area, like the dining table where you had to clear the dishes and put your laptop out. That was the only category that scored lower than the office, the rest of the of the settings, or the choices like dedicated work room, dedicated work area all scored higher quality for experience than the offices did. And was interesting. Also, the scores didn't really change much based on what kind of work that the correspondence did. Right? So whether it was one to five activities, all the way up to a huge number of different activities during the work day, the home in for these respondents still beat out the office. And that's, to me very interesting thing when you say,

Oh, yeah, you know, Chris, this, and, you know, the numbers we've been looking at here, show that you can make the case that work from home is better, if you have a certain, you know, set of criteria that work for you. And that's a great validation for that move. And as we've talked about on earlier episodes, you know, it kind of cuts both ways in terms of, we want your workforce to be staying indefinitely in this environment. So I think, you know, this data is real, it makes a good case for that. And for businesses, I suppose that are looking to cut down on their real estate footprint. You would point to data like this, I think if you're looking for validation from work, Or maybe on the fence about staying home to say that, hey, the data shows that, you know, it's generally a more satisfactory experience.

So it's like a lot of things, it's like when you get a new pair of glasses that you've had an adjustment to your, you know, lens strength, it takes a little while to get used to it, but then you get used to it, and you stay with it. And I think this data, Chris, points in that direction. But as we know, it doesn't apply equally to everyone. And businesses have their reasons for wanting people to come back as well. So I think this this research, you know, and we've talked about it before, is definitely worth to, you know, us following on a regular basis, because it really is a good barometer. I would agree, you know, for enterprise space, but also because it's so extensive, it really tells that story globally as well.

Well, Jon, I would hasten to say, I would not take this as gospel as they say, right? This is, this is merely a way of looking at it, and you would never make decisions where you it would be, it would be tough to make decisions on this, based on this without cutting it demographically, you know, cutting it geographically cutting it by distance to office, cutting it by seniority, you know, age, a lot of different, a lot of different criteria, that's not necessarily reflected here. You know, so you'd want to do that too. But one of the things they found, which is kind of pretty relevant to what we do, at least in their surveys, was that the home still still won the experience score, unless your your the level of collaboration was highly collaborative. If you were just if you were for an individual work score the highest.

So what do we think this means, so, I think that this work experience score that came out of this this research, the work experience score, is not saying necessarily that you want to stay home all the time, I think what it says is that, at least for this survey population who have tend to have sort of office kind of work, which as we know, is not the whole, it's not the whole world of work, that to the extent that they that they can or should or want to work at home, it is a good experience for them. And thus, they also feel it's later in study, that they're more productive, but they don't want to necessarily give up the office. So the challenge for the employers is, what kind of office do we make? And that's where I know, you have some thoughts. And I have some thoughts too about, you know, it's becoming clear that this this quarantine or this workplace shutdown is going to probably last well into 2021. And so given that corporate real estate and other management has a little time to think about what the office needs to be, they have a lot of criteria to think about, right?

Yes. And so to kind of flip this the other way about the case for going back into that workplace environment. You know, where I know, we have limited amount of time here to review this stuff. But I just want to point to some things I've seen in some recent events over the past couple of weeks that I've attended. And it's pretty clear that we talked when we talked about collaboration before that it's evolving on a few different levels. And AI is driving quite a bit of it. And an interesting thing I'm seeing now, and I think this will be a big part of what we're going to unfold next year, as you say, is now enterprises are going to have to make some decisions about investments, about how they're going to maintain space, and they're going to scale it back, etc.

Some very interesting use cases for AI in particular to to drive some of these decisions and cater to what's needed. So a big concern obviously, for employees is feeling safe, are they comfortable going back to an office environment, but putting aside the needs to be social and work with your teammates, etc. Is it a good place to be physically and you know, socially distance, etc. So what what I'm seeing here, in particular, a Cisco Canada event I attended, they talked about some of the new applications that they're putting into their, into their platforms, AI-driven mostly, a lot of video. But these are things that have to do with it's a bit like asset tracking, like in a hospital, where you have RFID and you know, tags and all the equipment.

Well, the same thing is going to start to unfold in the office using these platforms that have touchpoints throughout the environment. They can use AI in particular, just to detect, you know, the level of activity inside the building overall, which is what the landlords need to know. But for a business that's renting a space that may have a couple of floors, you can get real time data now tracking on, you know, how utilized every workspace is, how long employees are, you know, at their stations, how often are they in meeting rooms, are they distancing physically, all that kind of stuff. So you have lots of new forms of data that can help businesses, not just manage it, so that they know where their employees are and how they're interacting. But of course, if you have requirements, you think about impact on insurance, certainly for like lockdown, you know, specifications that you know, limiting the number of people who can gather in a particular place, when people should leave the building, how they should exit, they go down the stairs, if they take an elevator, you know, all that kind of stuff, how many can be allowed in the lunchroom, there's a million things like that, when you get into meeting spaces for collaboration, etc.

Lots of use cases here where AI really can help provide real time data, not just on the physical movements of people, but how they're using the tools themselves. Right, and as a way to maintain social distance. So you know, if they want people to be working on projects, you can only demonstrate here that people are working at a safe distance, because they can use these tools to collaborate online, both in the office and with peers in their home offices. So there's a lot to think about here that is kind of a new layer of business value, that will turn the office environment into almost like an intelligent workspace, much like what we have in smart home. Now, that office space becomes a smart space as well. So these are really good use cases for these technologies as they evolve. And I think we're gonna see more along this line in 2021. For sure.

I think it has I think there's two sides sides to it, though, there's a huge question about data and privacy. And what is the goal of the system? I mean, the technology is getting to the point, Jon, where you could, you could really ingest, you know, an almost infinite amount of data from, you know, an infinite amount of sources, and apply almost an infinite amount of computing power to derive AI conclusions from it. But the companies that I talk to, the management is very aware, when they get to the corporate real estate, the CIO, and the executive level, they're very aware that they need to be asking the right questions. And one of the themes that I hear a lot very specifically, is, we don't want to record more than we have to like, we don't want to drill down more than what definitely reveals to give us a return on that investment. So, you know, workplace utilization kind of writ large in on a broad basis has been a question for a long time.

And now it's become much more important because of the need to adjust the levels of space that you have and how they're used. But the general request that I hear is, we specifically at once we get past whatever health needs and safety needs, we have in the short run, we don't want to be necessarily tracking people walking around. We want to just find out if we have 25%, too much space. And we want to find out if we've architected or design space that people don't use, or they do really use. Does that make sense? In other words, they want to be very careful what questions that they ask.

Mm hmm. Right. And, of course, to anonymize the data as best they can. There's a huge price, as you say, privacy implications here. But they're going to need this as well for various forms of compliance. You know, if, if local governments specify gathering, they're going to need to demonstrate that because the issue of enforcement in a private environment is very difficult, but at least the technology gives them the tools. So I think this is going to give rise to a, you know, this role of like a corporate privacy officer, right, some kind of a new, and they have this already, of course in big organizations, but that role of a privacy officer, a kind of a Czar internally, is going to grow bigger for sure, I think. I think this is going to absolutely have to be part of the equation for this return to office trend to kind of take hold and give employees comfort, but also assurance. that the data is only going to be used for that and not to be kind of a big brother monitoring thing for everything that they do. And of course, that's going to vary from region to region. But I'm very certain that we're going to see a lot more of this next year just as a prerequisite to get people back into office. So I gotta, we got to wrap up now, Chris, so let's let's kind of distill that into a takeaway for each of us for what really should be the focus in 2021.

I - my focus on 2021 would be think about the longer term if you move out of crisis management mode. So I think that a lot of companies that can afford to do this are not going to be opening up much office space until the vaccine has come. And the danger is significantly below where it is right now. The risk, I should say, I think every every solution really needs to be thought of in terms of longer term, what's the strategic value of it? I also think that to our last point, data and privacy, and use of data is going to continue to grow as a theme.

Okay, I'm with you on that priority for privacy, for sure. And my add to that would be the reality that the the nature of work, and what we value from work, is going to have to evolve to reflect the times. So as you say, it's a longer term thing. But clearly, you hear a lot now about mental health, workplace stress, anxiety, work from home anxiety. A lot of those issues are getting, you know, they get in the way of productivity, of morale of retention, all these issues, and there's obviously a cost to that. But I think the step forward for 2021 is to find a way to balance that of the needs of the business for getting things done, but also the emotional and mental, you know, health and, you know, stability of the workers, because this is not a normal environment. And one thing that I think may tap into that is, if businesses can't get people to come back to the office full time, people don't really want to be home 100% of the time, I think there's going to be some middle ground evolving.

And we may have talked about this earlier, talking about We Work. I think that business model was probably too early. But we're in an environment now, where I think that space idea makes a lot of sense - it's kind of a neutral ground, where I think if employers want to help balance that stay at home thing, that they may, maybe they'll subsidize employees and say, Hey, for one or two days a week, you can go to one of these shared workspaces, just so you have a change of scene, more professional environment, and doing it in a way that is, you know, checks all the boxes for both parties. But I think that would be a welcome development for people who just don't want to be working in a shoe box apartment all the time.

I think that's definitely going to happen. That's a good point, Jon. I think, I think it's as we've said, it's going to be a continuum. But there's going to be far more flexibility. Again, you know, it's going to selectively affect people who can or can't do it. But I think within the space of those who can, there's the idea of commuting an hour to work five days a week with the traffic, and all the other stuff and not being able to have any work life balance. And all of that is going to move in a good direction.

Agreed, agreed. And then we'll see. I'm with you that we'll see more of that. And I think we just hit the tip of the iceberg of how things will evolve. Well, I think we're past our normal length here, Chris, but it is our end of year edition. So a little bonus time. I think no one's gonna mind if they're interested in this topic. But we will need to come to a close now. So with that, I will close this out. How's that?

That sounds that sounds good, Jon, thanks again. We're just going to wish all our listeners a very happy holiday and end of year season, and to a new year. And please stay safe. And we appreciate you very much for listening to us sending in comments or whatever. We appreciate hearing from you, and we really appreciate your listening to us.

All right, agreed, well said. So that brings us to the end of our time today. And we, as Chris said, want to thank you for listening, and we do hope you enjoy the podcast, and you'll continue with us, as we explore the future of work here on Watch This Space. If you don't know you can access all of our episodes at our website www dot watch this space dot tech, or wherever you subscribe to your podcast. And as always, if you like what you hear, please leave us a review or rating. We really value any and all feedback we get. So with that, I'm Jon Arnold.

I'm Chris Fine.

And we will be back next month and next year with another podcast. Thanks again for listening.