Does your CX make you feel boxed in?
The phrase “return to work” sparks up a lot of emotions these days. We’ve all grown accustomed to pets on video calls, taking meetings in pajamas, and rogue child interruption. Giving that up to go back to the office can make us feel a bit conflicted. Especially if you have to return to a dreary, gray, dull, cubicle. When Robert Propst invented the Action Office back in the 1960s, he had no idea they’d devolve into corporate melancholy.
Today’s guest, Amy Yin, Founder and CEO of OfficeTogether, is battling the sadness of cubicles everyday. She and her team work tirelessly to make offices fun and engaging again. In today’s episode, you’ll learn how the office has evolved over the years, and how it’s impacted the way we interact with customers.
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“Companies are walking a very fine line right now between too much choice and flexibility and not enough camaraderie and fun.” - Amy Yin
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) The intersection of Dilbert and CX
* (5:30) What is OfficeTogether?
* (7:45) The nuances of going back to the office
* (10:10) Their Customer Experience
* (12:44) How to keep in touch with customers
* (14:53) What makes a great customer experience
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Narrator: Robert Propst (Proh-pst) stood before his creation and marveled.
“It’s beautiful,” he thought.
The vertical panel walls. The Herman Miller desk. Shelves of various heights and sizes. It was like Michaelangelo staring at a completed statue of David. Which is a fitting analogy considering Robert, a Denver-based designer, had a background in sculpting.
Except it was better than that: the statue of David could only be admired by generations. Robert’s Action Office would actually change generations. He was setting the office worker free. That is, until the world’s first open-plan office system accidentally turned into…the cubicle.
Now, what does the cubicle have to do with successful CX? At first glance, nothing. It’s monotonous. Soul-sucking. A symbol of the corporate rat race. Few would mistake it for great CX, let alone the highest levels of employee satisfaction. And it is the hell from whence all office jokes arise:
But Robert didn’t see it this way at all. Not in 1960, at least. Back then, he was the president of Herman Miller’s research division. He was charged with extending the line of products for the iconic furniture company. But Robert wasn’t an inventor of things, so much as he was a problem-solver of large-scale, human issues. “How does the world operate?” was the question he would constantly come back to. And at that time, the world of work was not operating well.
“Today’s office is a wasteland,” Robert concluded. “It saps vitality, blocks talent, frustrates accomplishment. It is the daily scene of unfulfilled intentions and failed effort.”
Enter: the Action Office. What Robert proposed was an entirely new kind of workspace; one that encouraged “human performers'' over cogs in the machine. Private workspaces replaced a grid network of desks. And workers were encouraged to move about and make the spaces their own. Perhaps most importantly, the Action Office was designed to be adaptable. Reconfigurable components meant that spaces could be easily shifted. That way, as the nature of work evolved, the Action Office was poised to evolve along with it. Anticipating changes meant that where we work and how we interact with our customers shouldn't be affected.
Robert, along with his partners George Nelson and Jack Kelley, debuted the first Action Office in 1964. When companies said it was too expensive and stylized, he debuted the stripped down and more affordable Action Office II in 1968. The design was widely praised, with the New York post declaring the old office was officially doomed.
But as we all know, Robert Propst’s statue of David - his magnum opus - became a Dilbert cartoon. Corporate America wasn’t ready for his genius.
So put away your TPS reports and loosen your tie, because today we’re learning from history’s “what if’s” and making the office a little more fun.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about setting up your organization for the future of work. How can we improve our CX in a hybrid work environment? In this episode, we’ll hear from Amy Yin, Founder and CEO of OfficeTogether, the software platform for hybrid office spaces. She’ll share with us some of their CX initiatives that all companies should consider, whether you’re in the office or not. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
Narrator: The story of the cubicle is, in some ways, a cautionary tale. Executives did not share Robert’s vision to free up employees and make them human performers. Instead, they saw the Action Office as a way to improve their bottom line. The obtuse walls shifted inwards to become, well…cube-like. And the blank canvas that was meant to inspire individualism just left people’s brains feeling, well…blank.
Robert lamented this in an interview just before his death in 2000: "The dark side of this is that not all organizations are intelligent and progressive. Lots are run by crass people who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes."
But Robert’s theory behind the Action Office still endures. Offices must be flexible and adaptable to change. And Amy Yin knows this well. Her company, OfficeTogether, is poised to meet the future of work with their software solutions. Here she is explaining what they do:
Amy: So office together is a software platform here to enable hybrid collaboration. A lot of companies have been tasked with office transformation.
And this is funny because companies were not meant to do real estate. They weren't thinking about the workplace yet. Every company in the world has had to rewrite the playbook about.
what it means to use an office, what it means to work, what working hours are all about.
We make it easy to do flexible work arrangements, hotel desks, and a transform your own office to be focused on employee choice as well as making it safe and fun for employees to come back in after a long break during the pandemic.
Narrator: But as companies worldwide begin returning to work, pandemic fears remain. With health checks, social distancing, and whatever variant comes next, Amy had to create a nimble software to address the hybrid office.
Amy: So we help them get out of their spreadsheets by creating some nice lik automated software that integrates with slack to make sure you can take that health check, stay safe, do the social distancing as well as make sure that the office was never overly full given that we knew that being close to folks could lead to spread of the COVID 19 variant.
So that was where office together started was really to make offices feel healthy, safe, and compliant. And, um, we've really evolved in the last year since then. We want to make offices feel. But we also want to make offices fun again. Um, you know, I think that the conversation of system shifted a lot from like, how can we buy enough PP and E and disinfectant and make sure people are like, uh, not going into conference rooms or talking too much to each other, to like, oh man, We've spent the last year, making sure offices feel sterile.
How do we make offices feel fun and inviting, and like a warm place to build friendships and relationships again. And that's going to be a really interesting challenge because, uh, it's totally, uh, it says yet another office transformation transforming from the sterile safe office to the flexible yet fun office.
And that's what we're here to support.
Narrator: Fun aside, there’s a lot of nuance that goes into returning to work. Amy shares some insight into some of the emotional complexities of re-opening the office.
Amy: at the grassroots level. It's I go to the office.
and no one else has. Or I show up to the office and none of my teammates are there and now I don't want to go anymore because I just commuted for an hour to be in an empty office and get on zoom.
The next level is as a manager, oh, I've never met some of my team or my team wants to come in. We don't know when there's going to be space for the team to come in and people do not want a permanent desk because they don't want to feel obligated to go into the office every day, which is where a hotel desks come in.
And then, um, at the admin level, I am managing health checks in spreadsheets. I'm always having to play bad cop or police. Cause I have to track down people coming into the office, making sure that they're keeping the office safe. Um, and it feels really manual and tedious. And then at the executive level, it's I go to the office and it feels empty.
There's no buzz. There's no vibe. Does anyone even work here? And So, you're seeing hearing problems at like the grassroots ad. Manager all the way up to the executive level. And there's a lot of it around like feeling. Is there a feeling of retention or belonging, collaboration happening and is my time well spent?
Narrator: It’s a problem many workers can relate to as some return to work. For that reason, it’s little surprise that their customers run the gamut from 25-30 person companies all the way up to 10,000+ employees.
Amy: our ideal customer, one of our customers actually they're called reorg. They're a financial services company based in New York, their tagline. I typically can reorg.
They have a fully flexible model. You never have to go to the office.
So I love that their tagline is you never have to be in the office, but we'd really like to see you. And that's the ethos of the company, right? They want to support employee choice, but they know that if you don't have critical mass in the office, if it doesn't feel like a fun, engaging place to be.
They also lose out on talent that way too, because there's a lot of people who want to go and see their coworkers develop a relationship and get that face time. And so companies are walking a very, very fine line right now between too much choice and flexibility and not enough camaraderie and fun.
Narrator: And the solutions they are providing have translated to some major cost and time savings for companies.
Amy: what some of our customers they've told us, we've saved them two and a half to five hours a week by moving from spreadsheets to an automated health.
Because now you can have people reserve their desk through software rather than having to send a slack message that desk has shows up and is reserved. And now that information is broadcast to the rest of the company. And then on the day of your reservation, you get that automated health check and it also serves as a reminder that?
you're going to be in the.
Um, the second point part is for employees. They really love it too, because now they don't feel bad about bothering the office admin. Like, Hey, can I have a desk? Is there a desk for me? It's all. Self-service. And they also get to stock their. Fellow peers to see, oh, when did I manage it? Going to be the office Friday.
Okay. I'm going into, And then at the executive level, they really love that there's data and visibility into what, how the office is being used.
Because a lot of our companies are finding less than 30% of their office is being used. And so we had some companies that, uh, actually ended up getting more space because they realized that every day they're hitting capacity with the number of people going into the. And then we have a hell of a lot of other companies on the other extreme, where they have capacity for like a hundred people and only 10 people are going in And so it helps executives rightsize the amount of money they're spending on real estate, which is oftentimes 20% of your operating budget. So even reducing that by 50% represents huge cost savings that can go into R and D that can go into salaries that can go into better perks and benefits for employees. Um, you
Narrator: Since as far back as 1968, when Robert tried to make the Action Office smaller and more adaptable, Amy has noticed the continued downsizing of workspaces.
Amy: I do feel like there's this really interesting trend in workplaces. So if the shift from like factory work to office work and how offices were just modeled after factories, um, and then how you went from offices, private offices. Two cubicles cubicles to open floor plans about open floor plans to hotel desks.
It's just like an every single stage, like less and less real estate per employee is dedicated because more and more knowledge and more and more resources are moved to the cloud.
Narrator: What Amy has recognized is that the future office is becoming less about the physical workspace and more about the digital workspace. She also recognizes the implications this has on customer interaction. There are more tools and initiatives now available.
Amy: The other thing about customer experience that I think about is, um, how do we make it easier to stay in touch with customers? So like, yes, we have, we've always had this principle of talk to customers. Sometimes it just felt like more work than other than others actually keeping in touch.
So two initiatives that we recently put on is we, um, started a customer advisory board where we are meeting on a monthly basis with dozens of our different, uh, admins and employees at our companies. And this gives us a chance to ask them for feedback, allow them to request features, and then react to our roadmap so that we know if we're going in the right direction.
If we're building things that are really, really solving a burning need for them, or just. And then the second thing we've been doing for awhile, which continues to be super successful is that we open up a slack connect channel or Microsoft teams channel with our customers that we have an immediately immediate easy way so that we can feel like they're, we're part of the same team.
We're all at the same company. They can message us and usually get responses in less than two minutes, which is a really fun experience as a customer.
Narrator: Creating a channel is a great way to stay connected with your customers. It’s personable, convenient, and makes everyone feel like they’re working on the same team. It’s a great first step to rehauling your CX.
Amy: for someone trying to rehaul CX.
I would highly recommend getting on slack connect. It might feel a little chaotic managing everyone, but being able to direct message and give that instant feeling similar to what Intercom did for websites.
Giving that to customer experience is so delightful versus sending someone, an email, having getting like an automated JIRA response. It feels very personal. And then number two, start a customer advisory board. It's a way to get your customers. Built-in it's brand loyalty and that way everyone at the company can easily talk to customers with little overhead. All right.
Narrator: Having a direct communication channel with your customers is the easiest way to figure out what they want. Which, as CX leaders, is our North Star.
Amy: What makes a great customer experience is when the company is really obsessed with what the customer wants. They have a tight feedback loop with the customer where the customer is driving the roadmap, figuring out what to build. Shouldn't be hard if you're talking to customers, because they'll just tell you what to build.
They'll tell you what their problems are and you can figure out what a solution is. And so a great customer experience?
for me, it looks like. Constantly talking to customers, here are the problems, repeat it back to them and then surprise and delight them a few weeks later because you've solved their problem in a very creative and unexpected way.
Narrator: So, what does the cubicle have to do with successful CX? Well, as Robert and Amy helped us see, it anticipates the changes to our work environments and the way we interact with customers.
Hybrid work is here to stay, which means we need to introduce communication channels into our CX. In the digital world, there’s no cubicle to show up to. Heck, maybe you’re taking customer calls from your bed some days. As the workplace has changed over the last century, the core tenets of how we interact with customers haven’t. When we open communication channels and prioritize their needs…well, the future of work is bright.
And how we work is as important as the work itself.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by Ben Oddo, and produced and edited by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com.