Ryan Anderson v2: Support Rich Interpersonal Interactions | Work 20XX Ep41

Ryan Anderson v2: Support Rich Interpersonal Interactions | Work 20XX Podcast with Jeff Frick Ep41 from Running Remote
English Transcript

© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media

Cold Open
I do like that we’re matching.
I do too. I do too.
Okay, so I will count us down,
and we will go
in three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from Austin. I'm not in the home studio. The Work 20XX is on the road. We're here with our friends at Running Remote in Austin. Because people that run all remote companies are actually really good at things that all business people should be good at, from communication, managing objectives a lot of good things. So whether you're remote, hybrid, all in the office or somewhere in between. There's a lot of great lessons that are coming out of this show that you might want to pay closer attention to. And I'm excited to have my next guest, one of the OGs, of remote work and distributed work. But it goes way before that because he's at MillerKnoll, and MillerKnoll and before that Herman Miller and Knoll separately have been involved in office design and design around ergonomics and people and homes and everything else for a long time so We're excited to welcome in not through the magic of the internet, but side by side wearing a matching shirt, I love it. He's Ryan Anderson, the VP Global Research and Planning at MillerKnoll Ryan, great to see you as always.

Ryan Anderson:
Hey my friend. It's so good to be here in person. Thank you for having me.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. And, you're the road warrior. I mean, you're like, everywhere all the time. I keep an eye on you on LinkedIn and the man is. The man is a traveling man.

Ryan Anderson:
Yes, we're a global team. We look at the research. Basically we're researching how physical environments can make work better. That’s home, that's office, that schools, hospitals and beyond and so when you research how physical environments affect people, you got to get out of here. Out of your house and go see these things and study them. So yeah, we're all over. We're a globally distributed team of 25 in 21 cities. So I've got folks all over.

Jeff Frick:
So you practice what you preach is what you're saying.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah. Exactly.

Jeff Frick:
So one of Brian Elliot's great lines that he uses all the time is distributed doesn't mean never together remote doesn't mean never together. And in fact, you know Chase Warrington at Doist they spend as much money on, on getting people together as a lot of company spend on real estate. So it's important to get together and space is a big piece of that. There was a really interesting thing I saw that in one of your things it said space created by thoughtful placement of furniture and relationships is what creates this magical thing. What is the role of space and how does it continue to evolve?

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, well, I mean, let's first acknowledge that there's all sorts of people, great thought leaders, really the best experts on a remote work are here physically in one location. So there's clearly value in being together and spending quality time face to face. I think what we need to do is ask the question, how do we achieve the best balance between yes, achieving more work life balance personally, but being part of a really good high performance, high achieving team and that requires time together. So we need to look at the role of physical spaces. It could be home workspace for doing certain types of individual work. It could be office design. And we need to kind of put aside our old like idea of what an office you know, was or should be and imagine it as something else. And then there's all these other places in between event spaces, flex spaces that can serve a big purpose. And then ultimately, we can basically create really good choices for people that have more choice over where they can work. So they're not just working with whatever kind of crappy conditions that might otherwise exist.

Jeff Frick:
So you made an interesting comment. You talked about, one of the impacts of people being more remote and isolated, are increased levels of burnout, increased feelings of social isolation loss of belonging. There's a lot of negative things if people are just isolated by themselves all the time. That's why solitary confinement is the really the worst thing that can happen to you in prison. You talked about the office, being the antidote to this negativity. What have you could share you know I think that's a different approach to what the office used to be. It used just to be the place you store the files and where the computers were. If you're trying to actually use it as a place to counter some of these negative things, that's a different it's a different objective.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah. It is, it's definitely a different perspective. And I don't suggest that old office design can necessarily be that antidote. So I think the culprit is probably too much screen time. We could place it on remote. But I think the issue is that most people are spending a huge percentage of their workday physically isolated from others, spending huge amounts of time interacting through screens. Which you're right, burnout, social isolation, loss of psychological safety. Like there's an imbalance occurring. So our physical spaces can be a solution to this. Although forcing someone to be at a particular desk for 40 hours a week isn't exactly the remedy towards having somebody who doesn't feel like they've got a high degree of psychological safety. So the goal basically is to design environments that first and foremost really support rich interpersonal interactions, like the kinds of things people love, where you see someone and maybe you give them a hug, or you just catch up and you begin to ask, like, what are you working on? What's going on with your parts of the company? And you stitch together an organizational network through in-person time and create that sense of connectedness that just doesn't typically happen when you're solely working through a digital platform.

Jeff Frick:
And are you seeing, you know, or I should say, how are you seeing kind of the proportion of different types of spaces say, within not only an individual office, but we're also seeing kind of this thing where shared services within a shared building, that that can be used by any of the tenants. How is that kind of shifting around?

Ryan Anderson:
It's the biggest change happening. And a lot of organizations haven't really gotten their head around it. So there's still a role for desks, don't get me wrong. And I think having a good place to do it in particular, focused, concentrated, asynchronous type work like I need two hours with a spreadsheet. You still have to do that, but you need to be able, if you're going into an office to then peel away from that and spend other parts of your day interacting with people in a way that's much more fluid. So one of the biggest things we see is people building internal event spaces, it's really tough to find a good third You know, third party event space, the acoustics, the ergonomic comfort, the food, the lighting is often just junk. And so we see organizations doing that within their facilities. We see spaces like cafes, project rooms, places where teams can go and make a big productive mess for days or weeks at a time. And so yeah, it's just like a different allocation if your view of the office is rows and rows of open desks, private offices and conference rooms, that was, as you point out, designed primarily in an era where offices were about supervising work and expressing status like that's not the vibe anymore. The vibe is like, what do you do to bring people together to be productive in ways together that they can't be doing while working apart? And we've had of course, thousands really of customers make improvements that are really meaningful. And that's kind of what we know about.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. It's interesting. Because the institutional offsite has always been there. We really need to get something important done. We're going to bring everybody together with intention. We have specific objectives. And we're going to go to a resort or a nice conference hotel that has all these hospitality services. So I love this kind of concept, where onsite now is the new offsite in terms of intention, in terms of variety of activities, in terms of really you just mentioned a bunch of these kind of hospitality, like types of amenities that really make that whole thing come together.

Ryan Anderson:
That's exactly what's happening. So like the idea of an offsite at a hotel or resort is great because the pools are awesome, the bar is awesome. And then you get in this room with crappy lighting and these fake bamboo looking chairs and everyone's like, crap, what are we going to be doing for the next, you know, three days? But, we've had organizations where maybe they've adopted a hybrid policy. They're seeing fewer people in the office on a given day, but they take some of that space and they turn it into an internal events workshop type space, like good ergonomic furnishings, good natural lights, good supportive technology and say to everyone like, you can book this for days, or in some cases, even weeks on end. It becomes a magnet for those that are working locally. It's cool to see who's coming into town, but also it's just, a clear alternative to the sort of work you can do from a spare bedroom.  Or, like I said, a hotel.

Jeff Frick:
So another topic that that furniture and office design deeply interacts with is technology. And last time we talked years ago, you know, we talked about how unfortunately, it ended up that your guy's job was really just to hide the cables that ran the power drops and then ran the Ethernet cable. And as you said, I think we put the chairs in at the end, you know, that’s where the people go.

Ryan Anderson:
And then the people in after that.

Jeff Frick:
Exactly. Technology's continuing to evolve, right? There's a lot of opportunity now inside of spaces to use them more effectively, more efficiently. There's all kinds of sensors and there's like this whole new era of technology outside of just connecting the laptop to the Ethernet. I wonder if you can speak to what are some of these cool things, and how are people using them to get more ROI on their investment in these nice spaces?

Ryan Anderson:
First we should just note that the technology used to be resident, it used to live in the space, and so the office design was often there to support I.T. networks in ways that maybe were more important than human networks. Our technology today is mobile. It's in our pockets, purse, and backpacks. And there isn't necessarily a single technology that brings people into an office anymore. So it starts with let's figure out how to support what people bring in. Let's do the really tough work of trying to figure out how people that are doing things like taking video calls and using products like Miro or Mural, can do so in a shared environment so that it's natural and not awkward, and you don't get the weird feedback from the mic’s and that sort of thing. But there's also this other side, which is the buildings themselves are getting more technologically advanced, where they're more aware of the use patterns. They can save energy, they can provide things to improve the overall experience. I think one, evident use of this is basically, what are known as user experience apps or tenant experience apps. Places like Australia have widely adopted this so that it's kind of an app for your work experience. You know, it's going to tell you what’s in the cafe it's going to tell you if there's a fitness class, it's going to maybe help you reserve a parking spot if you don't have one. These are simple conveniences just to make life a little better. But I will say that despite all that, I still think the primary goal of the office is allowing people to have face to face time where, yes, you might be using technology, or in some instances, it might even encourage you to put the technology away for 20 minutes. And that's something that most people are seeking. I don't want to sound like a Luddite, but we don't want to exist that way solely. But we don't necessarily want a space to ever be designed around the tech. It's always got to be designed around the interpersonal interaction around the people.

Jeff Frick:
So you've got a great perspective because as you said, you got a team of 25 spread out in 21 cities. You travel all around the world and, and you’ve expressed before that the geographic differences are real. So I wonder, you know, it's been five years since Covid. It's been, you know, like 2 or 3 since the vaccines and everyone's kind of started getting back to normalcy, whatever that means. What are some of the differences you see in different geos? In terms of where we are in terms of the evolution I don't want to say RTO, but the evolution of office and space,

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, Oh, it's so much more diversified and so much more interesting than the headlines make it out to me. We find that there's a few things that affect the use of offices and just the conceptualization of offices that are very difficult for people to understand. One is just the local culture. So as an example, you know, in Paris, you don't really eat lunch from your desk like you go and you eat lunch together. So it didn't take a lot of encouragement to get people to come and, and spend time together. We're in Austin. Austin actually had surprisingly good return to office rates compared to most cities, because a lot of organizations had adopted some degree of  flexible working pre-pandemic and so it wasn't like there was this big struggle or debate as much like people understood, there's just good times to be together. And I'll say, even down to like a city block, if you find neighborhoods that are more vibrant, there's more culture. You tend to find offices that are much more vibrant and active, and then you've got these places that are just traditional, like built for commerce, very little culture, sort of older environments where it's class B, class C, real estate. Those are the spaces that are struggling where you read about all the vacancy rates. But for my team specifically, we're really fortunate because we've got We're part of an organization that effectively supports working from home, but we've also got local offices or local dealer partners. I'm here with somebody from SKG our local dealer in Austin, so our team members always have the chance to go someplace and spend quality time with others, even though they're distributed all over For me, that's important. I don't want to deny anybody that opportunity.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. It's honey versus vinegar, right?  I mean, there's reasons there's certain things you just can't do at home or you don't want to do at home, where it's a much better opportunity to do it at the office.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, exactly. If it's a well-designed office.

Jeff Frick:
If it's well-designed. Okay, so your research, What are you working on? Any cool research things we should be keeping our eyes out for?

Ryan Anderson:
Oh man. Oh, man. So, I mean so much. This is what gets me going. We've got research going around what's happening with offices, schools, homes, hospitals. There's some really, interesting things that we've recently completed. A lot of it has to do with how the design of a space can actually impact relationships within an organization between managers, managers and employees. Even, the kind of connection that people have with the place itself, which is called place attachment. Like if you sit in the same chair at the dining room table each night, that's an example of place attachment. But we're taking it even farther. We've been doing research for more than a decade around inclusive design, looking at a wide variety of groups. It could be veterans, it could be, working parents. Recently we've been working with women in menopause and perimenopause, asking the question, how can these physical environments make your work experience better? And then if we get really down the path, I'm going, like, deep cut for you.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Ryan Anderson:
We've been diving into it, something called neuroaesthetics which is looking at basically how the esthetic things, the elements around us impact how we think, feel and the decisions that we make. We're doing this with a group at Johns Hopkins. And so this is probably down the path, but we'd like to be able to get to the point where we have a very clear understanding of how these environments affect our relationships, our sense of belonging, and even how we make decisions and how we feel.

Jeff Frick:
So it's a whole different level than just activity based, design.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, actually, in some ways, I think activity based work. So that's the idea that you're designing a space based on the type of activity that can happen there. It's useful. It's been around for 40 years. The challenge is and this is what we're talking about most of these activities, if it's using a device or it's having a meeting, can happen almost anywhere. And so it's a little bit tougher to use activity based, strategies to inform design. You got to get a little bit layered deeper. How does it affect the ways that we're interacting with each other? How does it affect the way I think about myself, my employer and my work? And even how does the space itself help me to make better decisions?  So that's kind of where things are going.

Jeff Frick said:
I love that. So I just want to let you know I have about, three monitors. I probably have about 15 or 20 kind of semi-permanent post-it notes. One of them, right on the top of my main monitor, says Inclusive Design.

Ryan Anderson:
Does it?

Jeff Frick:
I mean it is such a powerful concept. You design for the people with the biggest challenges and everybody benefits. It seems so drop dead simple.

Ryan Anderson:
It is. What you find is that if you start looking at different groups and what they need, you'll see patterns. So as an example, we mentioned there's a high degree of anxiety, social burnout or excuse me, burnout, social isolation. But there's also like a lot of other stuff going on in terms of what might cause someone to feel a very high degree of stress throughout the workday. So the addition, as an example of a wellbeing space in a discrete location that you communicate to everyone, hey, we know work is stressful. This is a place for you to kind of unwind. It can help somebody on the autism spectrum who's got sensory overload. It can help somebody who's experiencing, the brain fog of menopause. It can help a veteran who's dealing with PTSD. It can help somebody who's just having a really crappy day. And so the idea is, the more you work with different groups, you see these patterns, and you can solve for a much broader array of needs with an investment in one space Right than trying to do something separate for everyone. It's great that we have prayer rooms and nursing rooms, but what happens if we land on a room design that can help everyone? That's kind of the goal. There's an efficiency to it as well.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. It's interesting. I saw Kay Sargent from HOK speak recently, and she was talking about neurodivergent design She has a new book out. And what she said to a lot of times, like the neurodivergent people are maybe a canary in the coal mine in that the stuff that irritates them actually irritates everybody. But maybe everyone else isn't quite so sensitive. So in in taking care of that, that irritant, you're actually taking care of that irritant for everybody.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah. I'll give you an example. In September, I was in Melbourne at, the largest company in Australia. They've hired about 32 people with autism to join their cybersecurity team. They're excellent at seeing anomalies and patterns like pattern recognition is a real gift for them. But sensory control is really important. So they designed a wing of one of their floors that allows more control over the intensity of lighting, more control over acoustics, more control over visual privacy, and the biggest problem they had is keeping the people in the rest of the building from going and using it, because who doesn't want that? And so they ended up building drywall and putting on like security locks.  But the message for the whole, like the whole community there is you can do more. Maybe each person can’t adjust their levels of lighting. But if we're talking about these new work strategies, can you offer different spaces with different levels of acoustics or lighting? Yeah, you can. And so choice might be work from home or work from the office, but it might be work from six different, very distinctly different environments in the office. By doing that, you're only increasing the chance that somebody will be productive and accomplish more for the organization.

Jeff Frick:
It's funny, Kate Lister recently was talking about the old the old experiment where they just put the thermostat on the wall that wasn't necessarily connected anything in the office but people felt a lot better if they could at least go up and turn the dial a little bit.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah, it's called the Hawthorne effect. It's true.

Jeff Frick said:
Not to be discounted, though.

Ryan Anderson:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Well Ryan as you can tell Ryan has so much information. We don't have time here to get into it all, but check out his podcast ‘About Place’ podcast. Ryan Anderson said: He's been doing it for years. He has a lot of great guests and and the guy is smooth on the mic. You got to admit.

Ryan Anderson:
Thank you, my friend

Jeff Frick:
Ryan is great to see you.

Ryan Anderson:
I appreciate you.

Jeff Frick:
Alright, He’s Ryan.  I’m Jeff.  You're watching Work 20XX live from Austin at Running Remote. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. Catch you next time. Take care.

Cold Close:
You made that so easy
piece of cake.
piece of cake.

Ryan Anderson v2: Support Rich Interpersonal Interactions | Work 20XX Podcast with Jeff Frick Ep41 from Running Remote

English Transcript

© Copyright 2025 Menlo Creek Media