Katy Redmond is Senior Director of Integrated Portfolio Services at JLL and Dusty Duistermars is Senior Vice President of Digital Advisory at JLL. In February 2020, Mike Petrusky hosted a live webinar broadcast called “Workplace Data Improves Employee Experience & CRE Performance” featuring an interactive conversation about what has changed in the marketplace since both guests had last appeared on the “Workplace Innovator Podcast”. During this webinar, Katy and Dusty discussed how they help clients maximize their workspace and drive employee engagement and productivity while reducing costs with utilization technology alongside JLL’s industry-leading workplace strategy and expertise. Plus, Dusty took “podcast karaoke” to the next level with a live musical performance unlike anything you’ve ever heard before on this show!
Connect with Katy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katy-redmond-045a302/
Connect with Dusty on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustycre/
Download the FULL webinar recording: https://www.iofficecorp.com/webinar-download-workplace-data-with-jll
Learn more about JLL’s Workplace Solutions: https://www.us.jll.com/en/transform-with-technology/build/utilization-intelligence
Discover free resources and explore past interviews at: https://www.workplaceinnovator.com/
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikepetrusky/
Share your thoughts with Mike via email: podcast@iOFFICECORP.com
Read the full transcript:
Mike Petrusky (00:00):
Hey guys, it’s Mike. As you know, it’s been in the news for weeks, but at the time this podcast is being published, the global coronavirus crisis is disrupting our world in some very tangible ways. All of my conference plans for the next several months have either been postponed or canceled. And since gathering with workplace leaders like you is what I love to do the most, I am really disappointed by this turn of events. But I also certainly understand the reasons for these decisions. So I am trying to think of new ways that I can continue to connect with you all, even if we can’t do it in person for awhile. That’s why, on March 18th, I will begin broadcasting a weekly interactive live stream every Wednesday at noon Eastern time. And I want you to be a part of it.
I just recently shared on social media, a blog post from my favorite author and marketing guru, Seth Godin. And in the context of the fact that many of us may be required to work from home in the coming weeks, Seth said this. Quote,” Even as we retreat from physical interaction, there’s a huge opportunity to actually connect, to learn and to understand.” And I absolutely agree. Please join me and my new iOFFICE colleague, Madison, as we chat about the state of our workplace experiences each week, we keep each other up to date on things going on, what we’re learning, what we’re reading. And we’ll talk about how we can continue to encourage and inspire each other during these challenging times to be workplace innovators. Please connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at podcast@workplaceinnovator.com for more details about the live stream. Would love to have you there with us and I hope to see you soon. Thanks.
Dusty Duistermars (01:48):
So if Katy and I are going down the hall, looking for a room, if that’s connected with the sensors and it’s bringing up these rooms, we can actually find a space.
Katy Redmond (01:56):
Find a good way to take that data, aggregate it and put it forward in a way that the rest of your organization can digest.
Mike Petrusky (02:04):
This is the Workplace Innovator Podcast, where we talk with corporate real estate and facility management leaders about the industry trends and technologies impacting your organization. This show is powered by iOFFICE, the leading employee experience focused IWMS software that delivers real time data and mobile tools to help you intelligently manage your digital workplace. Hey everyone and welcome to episode 99 of the Workplace Innovator Podcast. My name is Mike and I am really excited to share with you today an audio edit of an amazing live webinar I recently conducted with my friends from JLL, Katy Redmond and Dusty Duistermars.
The presentation was titled Workplace Data Improves Employee Experience and CRE Performance. And we talked about how to maximize your workspace and drive employee engagement with space utilization technology. The original live broadcast lasted for over an hour and it was jam packed with awesome insights and information. So I think you should check out the full recording when time permits because it’s good stuff, but you’ll also get to see our smiling faces on webcams, which was really fun. This was the first webinar where we added video and everyone told me how much they enjoyed it. So I think you’ll enjoy it too. We’re going to do it from now on that way.
But in the meantime, consider this podcast episode as a bit of a teaser trailer to give you just a taste of what that conversation was all about. These are actually just highlights of the first half of the webinar. So again, look for a link in the show notes to download the full broadcast recording, and be sure to listen all the way to the end of this podcast episode for an amazing musical performance unlike anything you’ve heard before on this show. It’s a real special treat folks and you’re going to love it. So here we go.
Welcome to this live broadcast, the Workplace Innovator webinar podcast series, whatever you want to call it. I am your host, Mike Petrusky. I’m so thrilled you’re here. Thanks for tuning in and checking us out on live webcams this time around. And I’m excited to introduce my guests today, who are going to help me talk about workplace data and employee experience and corporate real estate and making the most of our space. These are two returning guests. You could say this is a big family reunion from the Workplace Innovator nation. So let me introduce first, the amazing Katy Redmond. Welcome to the show, Katy.
Katy Redmond (04:44):
Thank you Mike. Glad to be here.
Mike Petrusky (04:46):
And it’s great to have you back. Do you remember your episode number?
Katy Redmond (04:49):
26.
Mike Petrusky (04:50):
Yes, that is exactly right. I always pick on my guests. In fact, that’s really… When I’m looking at your picture, I don’t think Katy, I think, hey, there’s number 26. And even going way back, longer than that in the early, early days of the Workplace Innovator Podcast, Dusty Duistermars. And of course that name if you see it on the screen, you may have said, how do I pronounce that? Duistermars. And I learned very quickly hosting it’s Duistermars. So Dusty, welcome to the show.
Dusty Duistermars (05:18):
Roll the dice, stir the pot, go to Mars. Katy, you remember.
Katy Redmond (05:23):
I’ll never forget it now.
Mike Petrusky (05:25):
Good details, but that’s very helpful. What have you been up to lately, Dusty? Give us the update for Michigan.
Dusty Duistermars (05:32):
Sure. No. Yeah. I’ve just been trying to make the workplace great again, one office at a time, if you will. But no, JLL has a very large technology division. I am part of the digital advisory team and we are… These cross trained resources tied to certain regions of our corporate solutions, so I serve in the East region. And we just really help with the increasingly complex ecosystem, anything from smart buildings to IWMS, point solutions, room booking platforms, whatever the client has pain points in. And I think the biggest thing that I’m seeing right now is just a general shift in occupancy. Not only did cell phones and laptops really, really open a whole new possibility of working, but helping folks navigate through that shift. Do they need to go to a more agile working model, whether that’s a structured desk hoteling type situation, or do they want to do kind of a neighborhood setting or is one-to-one still really right for them? And so there’s not one answer for everybody. So that’s really what I do every day, help folks figure that out.
Mike Petrusky (06:45):
Awesome. Well, we’re going to talk all about many of those things you just mentioned. And Katy, I know you have a new role at JLL as well. What are you doing these days?
Katy Redmond (06:53):
Yes, I do. So I’m in January, I joined integrated portfolio services, IPS is the acronym at JLL. I came over from digital solutions, Dusty and I worked together for awhile. It’s exciting because I was able to bring experience with digital advisory into these broader real estate questions, real estate challenges. So the IPS model at JLL is based on this idea that clients of all sizes. So portfolios, emerging growth companies, there really is a range benefit from having a disciplined real estate strategy. So it’s IPS model, it’s scalable, it’s flexible. And we do that reach back into all of the services that an organization might tap into. So as we get into this conversation on data driven decisions and why data matters, this is really important to talk about at that strategic planning level. And I’m excited to go on with this conversation.
Mike Petrusky (07:47):
As am I. Well, this is awesome. I’m so excited to have you and be able to see you. Hey, listen, it’s not your grandfather’s webinar and not your grandfather’s corporate real estate broadcast. It’s going to be a little bit of fun. But hopefully informative as well as entertaining. We do enjoy getting to know the personal side of my guests and I encourage you to go back and listen to podcast episode 26 or episode five. You’ll get the real, in depth, behind the scenes with both Dusty and Katy. But today I wanted to focus on maybe offering some inspiration for our audience. In fact, that’s something I do on the show a lot. I’ll ask my guests to come up with an inspirational or motivational quote that they like. So Katy, why don’t you go first?
Katy Redmond (08:30):
All right, I’ve got a good one.” There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.” That’s our Roger Staubach quote. I think about it a lot. And I think it’s one worth keeping.
Mike Petrusky (08:42):
All right. What does that mean to you?
Katy Redmond (08:43):
When you’re thinking about everything you can do to give 150%, 200%, just do a little bit extra, that really separates an average delivery to something that’s really extraordinary. So I look that, that gap between what everyone can do in that extra mile. It’s a real inspirational quote.
Mike Petrusky (09:01):
That marginal 1%, or whatever it is, that very small little, extra effort really takes us to another level. And I know that JLL, you both are all part of this. This is the motto of JLL, right Dusty?
Dusty Duistermars (09:13):
Correct. Yep. And so for my quote, if you will, I like to echo what’s really kind of embedded in who we are, which is to achieve ambitions. And that’s both on a personal level, with that heavily, obviously on the client side. I’ve achieved a lot of aspirations, not only in the day to day work that I do, but I feel like my clients have really… I’ve learned so much from them. And everybody’s trying to kind of push this new occupancy model, this new workplace, this drive for heightened employee experience. And it’s an exciting time to be doing what we’re doing, I guess. And so this achieving ambitions is something that I feel that we absolutely live out every day.
Mike Petrusky (09:57):
I love it. I love it. Well, let’s get into the content today and the conversational delivery here. It’s going to be a little different, again, not a typical webinar presentation folks. We’re going to have more of an interactive conversation. We’ve got two incredible experienced experts from our industry with us. And I look forward to hearing their updates since the last time I talked to them, a year and a half, two years ago on the show. And at the time I know Katy, you said the top trends were around mobility and utilization, which we’re talking about today. And of course the internet of things. And I’m sure Dusty, will talk a little bit about all these things as well. So who wants to take this first? How far have we come since the last time we spoke two years ago? And then where do we head from here? I think this is a great open question. So Dusty, why don’t you give us your vision of what’s happened in the last two years since we last chatted?
Dusty Duistermars (10:42):
Yeah, no, I think this shift in occupancy is happening, but I kind of like to double click on some of the why’s and the sense of what’s driving the employee experience. Dialogue is the desire to keep the people that you have and to attract the best talent in the market. We’re slowly creeping into an age of 20-30, where some predict that rather than having a hundred applicants for every job opening, it’s going to be the reverse. There could be one truly qualified candidate for every hundred open jobs that we have. And that creates a tremendous problem for a lot of the businesses out there. And so to be able to leverage the workplace in a way that you are attracting the best people, to go back to the three 3,300, think about how email absolutely changed the game.
Email today still saves me so many conference calls, right? I hate to do those long ones, but if I can get the right information to the right group of people that saves hours and hours of time. And I don’t think, the IOT, we don’t have a silver bullet in terms of something that impactful. But I think collectively we are looking at things like that visitor check in experiences is awful, where we’re in huge lines in multi tenant office buildings. How can we improve that? How can we improve just trying to find a truly available conference room, right? The stats say we waste about 30 minutes per week, just looking for a truly vacant room, right? Even though that there’s nobody in there, the sign says that there’s people. 40% of meetings are actually ghost meetings, which is crazy. And so we’re trying to be able to solve some of those types of issues. Cafeteria wait lines, that’s not as big of one, but there’s ways we can use technology to kind of get better at this stuff.
Mike Petrusky (12:36):
Sure. And Katy, what do you think about that as far as the research that you’ve been using, when talking to clients about… Dusty mentioned 40% ghost reservations. Any other statistics you can throw at us and other thoughts on this?
Katy Redmond (12:50):
Yeah. Well, we’ll start with one. So even though we’re seeing broader adoption of utilization strategies since we last spoke, since we have the podcast in 2018, broader adoption of things like sensor technology, more of a comfort level in spaces, but still the utilization rates overall, there’s a lot of gap to gain there. So one surprise is you would think with a little more technology applied in these spaces that we’d have an immediate change in utilization rates. I think we’re seeing that over time. So we sometimes see stats when we’re initially talking with clients, where they’re like 40-50% occupied. In a space that these days, what we’re really targeting, right Dusty? We really want to see someone at 60% or greater in utilization and try and help them get there.
So that’s one surprise since we last talked. I think a lot of us were optimistic on how fast corporate real estate could close that gap in utilization. That was one surprise. But the other big thing, and when we talk about numbers and stats, is this idea of data driven decision making. So it’s using metrics across an organization. So instead of this concept of, well, I think, or I think my [inaudible 00:13:58] space is being used this way, or I think this about my real estate portfolio, that we’re able to use data. We’re seeing a lot more organizations comfortable with those data conversations. So those are a couple of things that have changed since we last did this podcast.
Mike Petrusky (14:12):
Yeah. Let’s talk more about metrics. I know that people online would probably want to see some of that data and we can point them to some of the reports that JLL has published. Some of the information that iOFFICE has put together over the last couple of years. I know just two years ago, we had launched our iOFFICE Hummingbird app, which is that idea of bringing a tool, a mobile tool… Remember mobility being the key, one of the keys into the hands of occupants, whether it’s an employee or a visitor and allowing them to interact with the space and just be more consumer friendly in the way you open that data up to a user on the employee side.
And I know that we’ve made a lot of changes to that app over the last couple years, it’s kind of constantly being updated and evolving and new features, new functionality. Being able to schedule food deliveries and get an Uber and so forth and coordinate with your meeting schedule and so forth. Have we come a long way in the past years? Dusty, you have thoughts on the actual tools that are available today versus a couple years ago?
Dusty Duistermars (15:11):
For sure. You know, since we’re all using our phones anyway, right? I think mobile internet usage actually surpassed desktop three years ago or so. So we’re all on our phones for variety of reasons. And one trend that has been happening is we have a different app maybe to book a conference room, we have a different HR app, we have a different app that the landlord’s given us at the building level. Like we just have a folder, if you will, of different apps. And so the consolidation of some of those into one platform that really interacts with the building, we have made a lot of progress in that space and how that interacts with the different IOT ecosystem, if you will, right? The fact that a new breed or a module, if you will, of some of this stuff, it is kind of this desk availability piece, which is great. I can book the app. Or I can book my desk or that space on my mobile app. But it’s how can that outlook plug and improve that experience, right?
So you can see the room, you can see what amenities are in the room, you can add some food to the meeting or whatever. And through connecting with a larger ecosystem. So if I’ve got ceiling based sensors in the conference room, when there actually is no shows, the sensors detecting that the light never goes on, or there’s no people in the room. So it can free up that reservation, because they say about 30% of meetings are actually impromptu. So if Katy and I are going down the hall, looking for a room, if it’s connected with the sensors and it’s freeing up these rooms, we can actually find a space.
Mike Petrusky (16:56):
Yeah. And Katy, the data that we’re capturing, and Dusty alluded to it, the IOT sensors out there deployed in many, many spaces, tens of thousands of them. The operations team, our audience today, the corporate real estate leaders, the workplace leaders, the FM practitioners who have access to all this data on the operations side of the coin. So you’ve got the employee interacting and the interface going on here, whether with an app or a kiosk, or even other ways of interacting through Outlook and so forth. But then you’ve got all this data being gathered by the internet of things and the sensors. And then you talked about data driven decisions. Tell us how these metrics help my workplace leaders listening today. How does that help them make decisions?
Katy Redmond (17:37):
Yeah, well, let’s start… I mean, foundationally data-driven decisions, you have to understand why you’re collecting this information. So it’s not just data for data’s sake, but starting with this strategy to say, here is a challenge or here’s a desired outcome, and then work backwards in how you collect that information. So when we talk about data and we talk about metrics, it’s, first of all, it really has to have a purpose. Because all of us could be overwhelmed by the amount of information that’s available to us. So that first data strategy. And then second, is once you know what you’re measuring and where the data sources are coming from, that you have a good plan in place to aggregate that data.
So there’s lots of tools. I know that you have a dashboard function. I mean, this is something we talk about all the time. Whether it’s coming from a consultant service provider, it’s coming from a tool like yours or at our Cornet Tech symposium that you attended, Mike. We actually had an end user speak to us from a pharmaceutical company in Maryland, and they did their own home grown data analytics using Tableau. And it’s fantastic.
So I think those are the two big takeaways is number one, make sure you have a data strategy and you know what information you’re gathering and why. And then the second takeaway is find a good way to take that data, aggregate it and put it forward in a way that the rest of your organization can digest, especially the C suite. So if you’re doing reporting and you have information that builds a business case, and you’re putting that forward to individuals that are outside of real estate, that the data’s presented in a way that could be understood by anyone regardless of their real estate expertise.
Mike Petrusky (19:13):
Awesome. Hey, here we are folks about halfway through, it’s going by way too fast. But I wanted to take the opportunity to have a little fun, get to know a little bit more about my guests. Again, music is a huge part of the Workplace Innovator Podcast. In fact, we do something called podcast karaoke on the show, where it’s usually me, but often my guest will join in and we sing. But today folks, for a special treat, we were talking about what to do and this band came to mind. Do you remember the Bare Naked Ladies from the nineties, right? They had a few hits (singing). And then you had (singing).
Dusty Duistermars (19:54):
Dollars? I don’t recall it being, if I had a million dollars. I know a version, if I had a million square feet.
Mike Petrusky (20:04):
Really? Oh, this is interesting. What do you mean by that?
Dusty Duistermars (20:07):
I mean, I guess if I had a guitar around here or something but… What is this doing here?
Mike Petrusky (20:15):
What? You have a guitar.
Dusty Duistermars (20:17):
What in the world.
Mike Petrusky (20:17):
Breaking the new ground here. It’s Workplace Innovator Live, folks featuring an original song by Dusty Duistermars.
Dusty Duistermars (20:24):
How this goes here. (singing).
Mike Petrusky (21:29):
I had it all together. Yeah. Rock and roll. Dusty Duistermars. Next level. That was Epic. Thanks man. Thanks for doing that.
Dusty Duistermars (21:39):
You bet.
Mike Petrusky (21:39):
All right. We are out of time, folks. This has been great. Katy, can’t thank you enough for being a part of the show again today. Thank you.
Katy Redmond (21:47):
Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Thank you, Dusty.
Dusty Duistermars (21:51):
Yes. Thank you, Katy.
Mike Petrusky (21:51):
This has been great. Katy, Dusty, thank you so much. And thank you for listening and watching today. Share it with a friend, let us know how we can help you further, what topics you’re interested in hearing about, and we’ll do our best as we continue to encourage and inspire each other to be a workplace innovator. Peace out.
You’ve been listening to the Workplace Innovator Podcast. I hope you found this discussion beneficial as we work together to build partnerships that lead to innovative workplace solutions. For more information about how iOFFICE can help you create an employee centric workspace by delivering digital technology that enhances the employee experience, visit iofficecorp.com.