Transcript
Tony Buffum: Yeah, I like that. I mean, certainly we wanna we wanna enable as much of that human-to-human work, but we have to make it really intuitive. I like the example of even if you're a guest, you should be able to navigate what you need to do. And it's not quite there, but we've seen the progress, like you said, since the pandemic. This has changed dramatically. The investment in collaboration technology and software spiked, you know, during and and after the pandemic, and we've carried that with us.
Tony Buffum: In the remote work that blew up and now as it moves back into the office, still there's a much more of an affinity. I I remember early days starting with Stanley back in 2008 and and being on conference calls but not being in the office, and people just forget you're on the call. Like, like just talking, like you need to unmute the line, please. Like you're test sending people text messages, guys. Help me out. I'm I'm still out here.
Cause it was unusual a lot of the time for that to be the case. Now it's it's pretty automatic. Like we've become a lot more accustomed to it. And what I think is a short period of time for you know that type of technology adoption. And I like that I I've read that you said of going into the office, we need to earn the commute. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that and what should people be able to accomplish that makes it worth.
a longer commute than I currently have, which is two minutes to my bedroom. Not even I'm sorry, two seconds to my bedroom.
Bob Cicero: I think for us it was a notion of we as an organization did not want to mandate folks to to come back to the office after the after the pandemic. And we still don't. we look at this notion of the space and place that you go to, the workplace, should be so incredible from removing friction, should be delightful, should be a fantastic environmental experience, right? Should just be really about the experience where you you want to go there.
It's not, hey, I don't have to be in, you know, two days a week, three days a week, et cetera, but I but I want to go there. That was really a mindset shift for us, right? And we needed to really rethink the notion of just not designing technology in and thinking about table shape and all the other elements around digital equity, et cetera, but how do we think about environmental factors, right? How do we think through the notion of of you know, noise, lighting,
you know, shading, things should just work automatically, right? And as we've gone forward, right, our latest London location, we took a really heavy view at neurodiversity. And so when we think about the neurodiverse population, right, 20% of the world, depending on the literature that you read, is neurodiverse. And so how do you then think about that through texture and sound and giving quiet reset spots for folks that come throughout their from say
A subway ride or a train ride or you're sitting in traffic for an hour, you're stressed. How do you give them a place to reset? Right. So if you walked into our London office as an example, it is a room, you open the door, it is super quiet in there. There is no technology. It gives you just an opportunity to really reset. And that's what we're really thinking about, to give all the pieces of the of the tool set, if you would, to bring the to make sure we earn the commute for people that want to be there. And so far it's working.
Right. People want to be in these new spaces. And more importantly is that these new spaces will adapt over time because I think, you know, you mentioned this notion of software. It's going to rapidly iterate. And so what we have today is not going to be what we have from six months from now, what we have for a year from now. It is going to be software that's just going to continually iterate and make it better as we move forward.
