Post on 28-Jun-2020
teem.com / @teemforworkinfo@teem.com / 415.423.2373
Transforming Your Office into a Workplace of the Future
An evening with thought leaders
featuring
Before starting Teem, Shaun co-founded Neutron Interactive,
an internet marketing and online lead generation company
that is a two-time Inc. 500 award winner.
Teem is a cloud-based platform that makes it easy for your
employees to meet and book conference rooms, to efficiently
manage workspaces and meeting resources, and to measure
and analyze your company’s meeting and collaboration
behavior.
With thousands of innovative, busy organizations using Teem,
companies are better able to manage and optimize their
places and technology to help their number one resource—
their people.
On Thursday, Januay 26th 2017, from the State Room in
downtown Boston Massachusetts. Teem, GE Current, and
iOffice held an open panel discussing the workplace of the
future. They covered over what initiatives their companies
were doing to pioneer this transformation, what things to
consider when building out your workspace, and how data is
being utilized and how it impacts the employees.
Shaun RitchieCo-founder and CEO, Teem
Author and Workplace Technology Advocate, Elizabeth
Dukes is the Co-Founder and CMO of iOFFICE, the leading
Integrated Workplace Management Software (IWMS) software
serving the Digital Workplace. Elizabeth champions iOFFICE’s
mission to use technology to empower the workforce and the
Smart Workspaces that serve them.
With more than two decades in the field, Elizabeth and Don
Traweek co-founded iOFFICE after working of Pitney Bowes
Management Services, a service company that provided
outsourced workplace management solutions to the Fortune
1000. iOFFICE serves more than 2.4M users worldwide. Co-
author of Wide Open Workspace, and a sought-after speaker
at IFMA Worldwide, CoreNet, Future Office, Tradeline Space
Strategies and Realcomm/CoreTech. She received her
Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing from the University of Texas,
Austin.
As CDO, John orchestrates an enterprise-wide transformation
by leveraging digital capabilities to build intelligent
environments.
Current by GE is a first-of-its-kind energy company, where
world-class hardware technology meets unprecedented
software technology. Combining GE’s LED, Solar, Energy
Storage and Electric Vehicle capabilities with our Predix
platform, Current delivers a 21st-century energy ecosystem
to customers—making energy sustainable, resilient and
reliable, creating a new world of possibilities for intelligent
environments and helping reduce, produce, shift and
optimize to transform businesses and lives.
John Gordon Chief Digital Officer, Current (GE)
Elizabeth DukesEVP & Chief Marketing Officer, iOFFICE
There is a massive chasm in today’s workplace environment
for technology that optimizes the ever-changing,
continuously moving workforce. For many businesses, the
cost of their people, their workspace and office technology
are three of their largest expenses so, to minimize wasted
time and money, companies are searching for solutions that
can seamlessly integrate with what they have to optimize
their workspace and tech to get the highest productivity
from their employees.
Every year, General Electric (GE) assembles a global
community of developers, industry luminaries, and
technology thought leaders, as well as some of GE’s partners
and top customers, to explore the digital transformation
of industry, leading-edge technological trends and the
companies spearheading those trends, the state of the
Industrial Internet, and what this means for your business.
And in 2016, the focus of GE’s premier event—aptly named
Minds + Machines—was on software, innovation and the
most powerful digital industrial outcomes.
Bursting at the seams with world-class technology
companies, it was a relative newcomer, Teem, that was
selected by GE for its Partner Innovation Award—a reflection
of Teem’s advancement in integrating with Current and GE’s
Predix to provide enhanced meeting room management
solutions by increasing workspace efficiency.
Building on the partnership momentum fostered at Minds
+ Machines, John Gordon, GE Current’s CDO, and Shaun
Ritchie, Teem’s CEO, were joined by Elizabeth Dukes, EVP
and CMO of iOFFICE, for an informal night of Q&A and
drinks, but what transpired was an eye-opening look into
what partnerships like these can offer and where these kind
of technologies are taking the workplace of the future.
Your office is more than just desks, conference rooms,
employees or even your ping pong and foosball tables. It’s
the sum of all its moving parts. Thanks to the globalization
of all things, the proliferation of employees and emerging
technologies, how to optimize the workplace—it’s people,
places and tech—key conversations and development are
happening all around. There’s no hiding from it.
It’s this shift that is driven by both the movement of the
workforce and by the overwhelming need to cut waste of
any form—a shift that is formed out of necessity, but noticed
from the top to the bottom of the office pyramid. It’s one of
the most important changes happening in business today,
and it’s a powerful force that your organization can harness.
Industry leaders like TripAdvisor, Dropbox, GoPro, and Yelp
are getting the most out of their employees by implementing
tools and technology that help get the most of out their
workspace and associated tech. In this section, we’ll walk
you through the lessons that brand strategists, social media
leaders, and communications experts are learning along the
way.
Within this context, your people—in-office and remote
employees alike— are your most valuable assets, and, on
average, they attend 252 meetings every year in formal
conference rooms. That’s 214 hours spent in meetings—
and business leaders spend even more time than that. We
have to do everything we can to make the Workplace of
the Future as conducive as possible to making that time as
productive as possible.
Now for the thoughts of the Experts—
Elizabeth Dukes:
“Things have changed a lot in the past 15 years as it relates
to technology; it’s rapidly advancing as it relates to the
workspace and that experience that customers are trying to
deliver. So we turned the tables on ourselves and said, How
are we going to continue to add value and really help our
customers to transition into that workplace of the future?
“We can’t continue to add or offer value to our customers
without taking advantage of innovative technology partners.
There’s so much great technology out there that we don’t
have the bandwidth or the expertise to develop, that’s why
we’ve reached out and joined forces with folks like Teem
and Current by GE. Teem has been vastly more depth in
providing support for people and understanding employee
engagement in the workplace and we want to be able to
extend that to our customers. Current has data that we can
take to not only create workspaces that are more in tune
with the worker but support the operational side of the
workspace, giving us information and more deeper insights,
so that we can be more intelligent in how we perform in the
workspace to make it more productive for our workers and
customers. iOFFICE’ SaaS based IWMS is the perfect platform
to effortlessly connect these great tech partners to provide
a wholistic solution to further enhance the workspace and
employee experience.”
John Gordon:
“So one of the most pervasive things that’s industrial (even
though we don’t always think of it that way) is buildings. If you
think about most buildings, they’re fairly antiquated. We don’t
pull information out of them and we don’t use that potential
data to run whatever makes a building better.
But what if you could use that for a space (like a building),
whether it’s a retailer, a warehouse, a manufacturing site, a
power plant, or maybe even in an office space? What if you
could start to bring information into that? So we’ve built a
group called ‘Current’ that was designed to take all of what
GE does in the industrial world, like how we collect data,
make it secure and make it available and say, How could
you bring it into these spaces so that people can make all of
these spaces do their purposes better?
“That moved us into the space about workplaces. We said,
We’re using this technology. Why can’t I today even find a
conference room that’s open in our buildings that we have
tons of all over the place even though it’s around? You should
be able to get this information.”
Solving the Problem
Our group said, “I think we can solve every retail problem,
every hospital problem, and every office problem. Basically
we think we can solve them all. [But] when I joined the team,
I said, “You know what? That’s a terrible idea.” It’s a great
concept. I really like their concept of saying, “I think all spaces
could be run a lot better. Let’s move this forward,” but we’ve
got to stop thinking that we know how to make all the spaces
run better. So we found great partners who are experts. If
you take Elizabeth’s background from what she did from the
very beginning on outsourcing facilities and moving to this
path, nobody has that kind of experience; what Shaun and
Joe have been doing of how they help people use the space
better—these guys are experts in what they do.”
“We consider buildings and spaces probably the most
pervasive industrial asset in the world, and we’re on a mission
to try to help make them intelligent both by giving the data to
all of you — so you can use it to make your own spaces better
— and with your own teams, but also so you can partner with
folks like my colleagues up here who have great insight and
great solutions that you could derive that for.”
Q1:What is your company doing around ‘Workplace of the Future’ initiatives and what is your role in this kind of workplace transformation?
Shaun Ritchie:
“We started our company about three years ago and the real
problem that we had was meeting space, conference room,
calendaring and all these kinds of things that we probably
all experience on a day to day basis. It turns out that a lot of
other people have the same issues around trying to figure
out how to get the right people into the right places at the
right times using the right technology.”
“So we initially created an app [to show the status of the
room]. Then we said, “What else can we do? Can we listen
to our customers? What other kinds of data are in our offices
or in our workplaces?” Similar to how many of us wear Fitbits
and try Quantified Self, we’re looking at how we can quantify
a workplace and the data around that.”
The Solution
If we can provide the tools to be able to utilize and leverage
workspaces; primarily meeting rooms, office spaces, even
desks, office/desk hoteling and things like that, can we create
a great experience for the user but also take that information,
that data, analyze it and then apply that to different models
across many businesses and say, “Here is how your space
is being utilized. Here is how your people’s time is being
utilized, and really how the technology is being utilized.”
If we can create those magical experiences on the user side
and then we can create the data, analytics and the information
behind that for the Facilities, folks at IT and even HR (similar
to Elizabeth’s — we both believe in this very similar vision),
we can drive not only the intelligence, but also automate
many pieces of it.”
“For example, ghost meetings are meetings that are on the
calendar but never actually happen. You look in the calendar
and everything is booked, but then you walk around and
there’s always meeting rooms that are open. We take care of
that. We cancel those meetings if no one checks in. We can
do that through a display outside of your conference room,
through a beacon or a sensor, tools and technology that we
can integrate with. It’s intelligence and it’s integration.
“The world is very open with all the API-driven environments.
We’re able to partner well together because we’re all open
environments and then we can create (again) integration,
automation, and intelligence, that we believe is going to be a
winning recipe to create great workplaces and experiences.”
SR: “What is this space? Where is it going? What are the technologies that are
going to be available? How can I bring these technologies into my workplace
to create this amazing experience and optimize experience?
Right now, and even over the last year, this market is rapidly maturing with
the introduction of IoT in the commercial spaces, in our offices, everything’s
moving to the cloud and to lot of different kinds of open integrated
technologies. As those start to converge, we’re going to start to see real
massive shifts toward workplace optimization and this kind of market being
created.”
ED: “I’ve thought of 3 examples...
“1 – McKesson is very interested, as they build out these
spaces, in creating a seamless and effortless workplace
experience and how technology affects the user. We have
teamed up with Teem in this particular situation so that we
can make a more graceful visitor experience of having them
log in (very easy to do). That information is automatically fed
into our back-end system so we can update where visitors
are and notify the hosts within the space. So we’re making
that more graceful.
“2– Operations have to make their workspace hum so
that workers are happy and don’t notice that the lights are
flickering or the AC is off. We are working with Under Armour
in a couple of different scenarios. They already have some
iBeacons deployed but we’re leveraging iBeacon technology
to facilitate more information and better response time to
their service technicians. They’re using our service request
tool to manage all the facilities services requests. So instead
of just waiting for that on demand request and dispatching
accordingly, we’re getting that data about where the people
are deployed across the workspace in real-time so that they
can more efficiently respond to those workers.
“3 – A big part of this workplace experience is providing
amenities: ping pong tables, Cornhole, Wii, gaming areas
and all that kind of stuff. They’re looking around and they’re
questioning whether these spaces and amenities are not
sure if they’re necessarily being used. So that’s another great
thing to use sensor technology—capture if these amenities
spaces are being used. Is it really valuable or do I need to
turn it into work pods, standing desks, lounge areas… How
can I best use that space?”
Q2:What kind of things should we be considering as we build out our workplace?
Q3:Give us an example of how [your company] is combining and incorporating technology with how people use it and how is that actually truly impacting the employees.
JG: “I’ve got people all over the planet and one of my
engineering teams is in Melbourne, Australia; one in California;
one here, and one in Montreal. I want all my people who
have all the expertise to get together whenever they need
to, wherever they need to, and just get it done.
“This is really hard to do because when I hear that a great
partner needs something from us I want to be really responsive
because they are great. That requires us to go now, but you
can’t do that if you’re worried about what’s booked at that
time, whether stuff is blocked, thinking about whether you
need telepresence screens—only in the big conference
rooms—whether or not you can get the guys from Montreal
and Melbourne. We have one big conference room with a
telepresence screen but there’s one person using the room
and they book it. I don’t know if that happens for you guys but
it happens for us incessantly (at least it used to).
“There are conference rooms everywhere, but if I want to go
grab one, I don’t know whether they are open or not. Now I
can look in my phone and see on any floor at any time what’s
really open this second. When I go and say, Dave, we’re going
to talk about this with Jeff and get the Montreal guys on the
phone now. Let’s go to the sixth floor, [this room] is open, as
soon as we walk in, it turns red. That’s real-time.
“So the path was to just understand how people are using
these spaces so we can think smarter about it. I like the space
being smarter but I like my team being faster, which they can
be if they have the data quicker. If my team is faster we’ll
figure out how to move, how to help customers do better,
how to help partners be better.
“So that’s the kind of stuff that I always think about; how we’ll
make the teams move faster, Joe. Our role is to get the data,
collect it and provide the information so that other people
here can help make those types of decisions.”
SR: “On any company’s P+L, first is typically people, that’s
the biggest expense; second is usually real estate; third is
usually the technology—to summarize it. If we can affect and
make meaningful impact in any one, or all, of those different
categories on a P+L, then we’re going to win. If we can make
these three things work seamlessly together, we’ve all won.”
Q4:Can you talk a little bit about GE Current’s role with this data, how it actually is being used, presented, and impacting employees in their workspace?
SR: “Late last year or mid last year and we said, We’ve got all
this interesting data around all of these different companies.
We can anonymize it, aggregate it altogether and see
what the differences are. We can see the typical length of
meetings, typical size of attendees, when and where people
are actually meeting and stuff, and then we are going to map
that back on the global index.
“What we’ve been able to see is actually a pretty fascinating
data, not just about general meeting length but about
meeting size, how many people and when they are actually
meeting. If we can take that information and then leverage it
to help drive that back to the individual company or location
in your company, then we can say, here’s actually how your
company operate. So it’s been a fascinating experiment to
see as we’ve rolled up this workplace productivity index.”
JG: “With the types of sensors that we have, we try to look
at a place to pick up a lot of different information. One of
the things that works really well for that is things like people
counters. People counters are like the simplest, little, dumb
camera that you could ever get but all it sends back is a
number. It’s five… it’s three… It looks and sees the people.
And maybe once in awhile you get 10 people in there, but
90% of the time it’s two, or one of our guys is either playing
Cornhole.”
SR: “We take that data, marry it with the calendar data and
then we can see that there were five people scheduled for
the room but there were only three people that actually
showed up. Maybe there’s not much utilization.
But was there a video conference link attached to that room
as well. There were five people invited to the meeting and
only three people were in office, but because we can also
marry the data to a video conference system. Pulling that
data we can see that, no, actually there were five people
combining these different kinds of technologies. I think
that’s really where we’re trying to answer the question: how
to make the business decision of, If I have an eight-person
room and only four people are in the room at any given time,
why do I have an eight-person room? You’ve got to make
macro decisions based on all the micro data pieces that we
can integrate together.”
Q6:Can you talk a little bit about GE Current’s role with this data, how it actually is being used, presented and impacting employees in their workspace?
Q5:Tell us a little about the Workplace Productivity Index - how it’s being used and how it’s actually impacting the way that companies are moving forward into these workplaces of the future.
SR: “You’re seeing it here being played out but there’s not
going to be one silver bullet to answer that specific question.
There are multiple toolsets. Long gone are the days where
Cisco just owns the whole thing, SAP or whatever. It’s going to
be multiple solutions that integrate well together. That’s really
how you are going to be able to solve the answer, marrying
some of the things we each do. Some cultures are going to
say, “No offices, no desks, nothing.” Consulting companies
are notorious for this,—you work for four days a week in a
field somewhere, when you come in you don’t have a desk
or anything. But there are a lot of hybrids where 80% of our
people are going to have an assigned desk. The other 20%
that we know are traveling (or whatever), so we’re not going
to assign these folks desks.” It’s kind of a culture thing.”
As organizations look to the future, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the challenges of transitioning to the modern
workplace. However, that evolution can be approached and measured in new and exciting ways, as the evening’s conversation
clearly highlighted. The rise of more intelligent technology and systems has already begun guiding progressive businesses
in this transition. Companies such as GE, iOffice, and Teem have partnered together to bring integration, intelligence, and
automation together, allowing your organization to create more efficient and fluid workspaces that result in happier and more
productive employees. To learn more about these products can help you with building your workplace of the future go to:
teem.com/futureBOS
Building a Stack of Disparate Tech that Plays Well Together
About TeemTeem’s cloud-based platform makes meeting easier for thousands of companies around the world, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, GE, and National Instruments. Successful businesses use Teem to optimize their workspaces, save millions and help employees work more efficiently.
Check out all the details at teem.com/futureBOSor call us at +1.415.423.2373, or email sales@teem.com