Smart Spaces & Hybrid Work- A Tour of FM:Systems New HQ: Ep 16

Jennifer Heath 0:15

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Hybrid Hangout Podcast. I’m Jennifer Heath.

 

Brian Haines 0:21

And I’m Brian Haines.

 

Jennifer Heath 0:22

And we have a very special episode today. As you can tell, we are in the same location. Turns out, we’re both three dimensional, we didn’t know. So I’m here today in our new Raleigh office, it’s my first time to be here to visit. And I wanted Brian to talk a little bit about some of the decisions that went into choosing this space designing this space. But before we get into the office, you have also been doing some traveling, where have you been?

 

Brian Haines 0:50

A couple of our clients summits, we’re doing a sort of a summer series, a series of six events where we’re going to sites, the first one pretty exciting. A couple of weeks ago, we were in London in the UK, and just had an absolutely packed room really exciting. Talking a lot about the joint value proposition between the FM:Systems portfolio and the Johnson Controls Open Blue portfolio as we come together. Really exciting. It’s resonating amazingly well, we’re talking a lot about really cool stuff like smart buildings, autonomous buildings of the future, how our technology, our utilization technology, our sensors can help buildings, not just the people within them, but buildings themselves better understand how they’re being utilized. So it’s really exciting. The second one was just a couple of days ago, we were in New Jersey at one of our premier partners AMS. Once again, packed room, same experience, really loving the experience. We talked a lot about some of the things that we have coming down the pipeline, including a big Metasys, which is a building control systems, integration to our FMS:Workplace product that’s going to be coming a little bit later this year. Really resonating well, a lot of people really excited. So it’s been fun and packed rooms, really, really cool to see so many clients or partners, etc. We’ve had several of our hardware partners join us. In New Jersey we had Embrava there, we had AirThings really exciting to see them joining us in these conversations, as well as our clients implement many of these solutions to solve their most complex problems in their facilities.

 

Jennifer Heath 2:31

Awesome so I am looking forward to the summit in Milwaukee, which is at the Johnson Controls Innovation Center there. So I will be in attendance in July. And we have summits happening in Washington DC later this summer. And we’re doing a virtual summit as well. So folks out there listening, if you are interested in some more information on those clients summits, if you’re interested in attending, if there’s one in your area, you can go to our website to our events page and get the information there. And certainly the virtual summit is for everybody.

 

Brian Haines 3:04

You’re missing the most important one, we are going to have one here in this office later this year, which will be pretty exciting. Hopefully we have a lot of clients here, a lot of partners, a lot of our employees to really be here and be exciting to show off this space.

 

Jennifer Heath 3:17

Yeah, so that’s a perfect segue. One of the reasons that I am here this week is specifically because we do want to talk about and share our experience in designing this space moving into this space. Because we know everybody is really kind of rethinking their workplace right now. And it was really an exciting process for us to take some of the lessons we learned over the course of the pandemic, as we’ve evolved our work style and work model here at FM:Systems. And a lot of thought really went into this space. So talk a little bit about the actual area that we chose. It’s the Raleigh Iron Works facility, I don’t know what the right word is here but –

 

Brian Haines 4:00

It’s kind of a big urban renewal project here in Raleigh, which is pretty exciting. They’re taking a significant portion of this side of Raleigh, which was, you know, not really a great area, and they’re redeveloping it in a lot of ways to bring a lot of energy, a lot of people into the area. So it’s pretty exciting. And it’s expanding. We’re one of the first tenants in the Raleigh Iron Works from a corporate perspective, which is pretty exciting. Most of the retail is filled out on the lower levels. But this has been a really good journey for us.

 

Jennifer Heath 4:28

Yeah. And there’s apartments here as well. So it’s a true mixed use development.

 

Brian Haines 4:33

Yeah, I think some people refer to it as sort of a live, work, play kind of environment where our old office was sort of an island, if you will. It was near a mall. It was sort of a parking lot that wasn’t really- There were not really any sidewalks or anything that led anywhere. It was difficult to get to it was hard to bike there. And if you wanted food, you had to leave you had to basically get in your car and drive somewhere else, or if you wanted to do something else. So we decided to do something completely different. And we took our time. I can tell you we looked at a lot of real estate. Probably took us a couple of years as our lease was coming to an end at our old location, we decided to really focus this space to be something completely different, which is what we’ve ended up with. So it’s exciting.

 

Jennifer Heath 5:20

So tell me a little bit about the process of designing this space. It’s obviously, and we’re gonna do a little tour here in a little bit. So folks will get to see, but it’s a very industrial field, we’ve got lots of exposed pipes, an amazing steel roof, that is somewhat noisy, which is kind of interesting. It expands and contracts with the temperature. So that’s sort of its own unique characteristic here. It is charming. So tell me a little bit about some of the decisions that went into the layout.

 

Brian Haines 5:51

Sure. So we had in our eyes, in our mind, an idea of really, truly supporting a hybrid workplace. Our employees are dispersed quite a bit, we’ve got a lot here, sort of our center of gravity, where our headquarters is in Raleigh. But we also have a lot that come in for meetings and collaborative times. We really wanted to focus on building a collaborative space, if you will. So the number of workstations that we have in this office is one tenth the number of workstations that we had in our old office. We’re about 40% of the square footage that we had previously. But this space is a lot more flexible. There’s a lot more places to meet, larger conference rooms, smaller conference rooms, private spaces, like phone booths for private conversations, little huddle spaces that are really flexible, furniture that you can actually move easily to bring together and sort of ad hoc, walls that move. Really exciting hopefully will show that on the on the walkthrough. We also decided to use partners to help us envision and make this space a reality. JLL Project Services were our project manager, they were really our owner’s rep during the entire process. We worked with Little and Associates, an architecture firm, which is also one of our premier partners for implementing our software to do the design and worked very closely with us on really realizing this space. iSpace Environments, a furniture dealer, that resell some of our solutions helped us select the furniture that’s in the space. So we made it kind of a team project, if you will, people that we know and love. They’re our partners. And we brought them into this process. And it’s really turned out pretty amazing. The response has been kind of off the charts, it’s good.

 

Jennifer Heath 7:34

And we also have used, of course, a lot of our own technology here, talk a little bit about the sensors, the different ways that we’re using our own solutions to drive utilization and to really optimize our own space.

 

Brian Haines 7:47

Yeah, so we’re sort of using our technology and our partners’ technology in a lot of different ways for this to really be a showcase for that. We want to be able to bring clients in here and have this because of a Customer Briefing Center, we want them to be able to touch and feel and see the results of the sensors and the capabilities. Some of that still in play. I mean, we’re new in the office, and we’re still waiting to install our booking panels. But those will be in soon. We’ve got our live view on the wall, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes. We’ve got sensors everywhere that are measuring occupancy, work point sensors, overhead sensors, we’ve got indoor air quality sensors, I’m looking at an AirThings indoor air quality sensor on the wall right now. It’s kind of packed with technology, everything from the building control and access system. All of its here, all of its providing data. And we’re using this as a demonstration dataset, that we’re going to be showing off a lot of our capabilities. So it’s pretty fun.

 

Jennifer Heath 8:42

Fantastic. How is the response, what do employees think about it.

 

Brian Haines 8:46

I think they love it. It’s a really cool space. When you walked into our old space, you know, it was really designed, not that it was bad. it was just designed for a different era, you know, before the pandemic, lots of cubicles. There are no cubicles, not a single one, in this office, everything is movable, everything is flexible. All of the workstations are sit to stand, all the desks are sit to stand with a little motor, you just flip this little thing and they go up and down. The ability, nothing’s assigned. There’s no assigned space in the office. So it’s all entirely flexible. If you want to sit in a specific location doesn’t matter. There’s no sort of organizational hierarchy that says you know, the leaders get this and the individual contributors get that it’s nothing like that. It’s really an open, flexible environment. Really warm and welcoming, but also super cool. It feels like you could come here and just hang out, right. We’ve got a balcony with really cool flexible furniture. We’ve got couches, we’ve got the ability to be able to move anytime you want between any of the spaces, we’ve got booths, all of it tech enabled. Most of our rooms have Microsoft Teams devices so they’re Teams rooms, but also any of the booths, any of the areas have technology on the wall, you can instantly connect your laptop, sit down for a ad hoc quick meeting. We’ve even got some rooms that look a little bit more like a living room than a conference room, right? We call them sort of ad hoc meeting rooms. And you can just kind of come together, pull the chairs around. And they’re very cool chairs. They’re cool furniture really nice, very modern and sleek. It’s got a neat industrial feel to the whole facility. And it kind of fits incredibly well with Raleigh Iron Works itself, which is a historic iron mill that was located here in Raleigh. And so it kind of plays off of that a bit.

 

Jennifer Heath 10:40

Yeah, it really is a fantastic space. I’ve been here the last couple of days have gotten to collaborate with my team, which I am fully remote out of Nashville, Tennessee. So I’m always kind of on my own little island. And it has been so good to be able to be here and interact with folks and have these in person meetings. It’s been a really productive couple of days. What is your favorite thing in the office?

 

Brian Haines 11:02

I think my favorite thing is probably the way the break room is a central hub for everything. It’s not just off to the side. But it’s got what we call, you know, an informal conference room that has a sliding glass wall that opens into the break room, which means we can have company wide meetings and fit everyone comfortably. It’s got the technology, it also opens onto the outside deck, which really allows you to expand it even further. And you know, there’s a lot of amenities in the break room that make it feel more like a hangout space. The way the furniture is, we do have taps and things like that, which is pretty fun, which makes it easy to entertain, but also is just a really warm, welcoming feeling. And it’s the way it’s centralized. Everything kind of feeds in and off of it. It’s nice. That’s my favorite.

 

Jennifer Heath 11:57

Yeah, I think my favorite is probably the outdoor space. It’s really beautiful out there. Today. It’s a little on the warm side. We are in Raleigh, it’s a little humid. So we’re not out there too much today but in general, I know that’s going to be a really popular space. You want to show the folks at home?

 

Brian Haines 12:14

I would love it.

 

Jennifer Heath 12:15

All right. Let’s do a tour.

 

Brian Haines 12:16

Okay.

 

Brian Haines 12:17

All right, I’m really excited to show everyone our new office. I’m going to take you on a really quick tour, so follow me. The first thing that we’re going to get to once we come out or into the office, into the lobby is our main conference room, which is really fun.

 

Brian Haines 12:36

This is a much bigger meeting space that we had, even though our previous office was a lot bigger and it’s packed with technology. First of all, it’s a Teams room. We’ve got sensors everywhere that do the occupancy sensor. Over there’s the indoor air quality sensors on the wall. One of my favorite features is this right here, which when we’re doing a Teams meeting, we can hit this little purple button on the wall and this entire board you can, you’ll notice that there’s a camera out there. It becomes part of the Teams meeting and we can whiteboard and ideate and that becomes part of the team’s meeting itself. And when we’re done, we just hit the little purple button and that part of the meeting goes away. So pretty exciting. So that’s it for the main conference room. We’re just going to go out into the lobby.

 

Brian Haines 13:25

If you’re coming into the space itself and you’re here for a meeting or maybe you’re being interviewed by FM:Systems or Johnson Controls, whis is a very nice, relaxed space. As well as flexible workspace in here as well. We’ve got tables and chairs. Maybe I just want to come out and get really good access to light. Outdoors is really quite gorgeous. There’s a beautiful sort of outdoor space with lots of plants and stuff that we can use anytime we want. We also have a number of these in the office, which are basically booths that anyone can sit at any time. They have technology, they’ve got great speakers. We can just sit down, plug in, join a meeting, pretty exciting.

 

Brian Haines 14:05

Let me show you a little bit about the technology. When we first come in, we have a very large, I think this is an 85 inch Samsung panel here. This is what’s called live view. And as you can see we’re doing this during lunch time, so most of the spots aren’t lit up, but we’ve got a lot of people here today. You can see this is using our Workpoint technology and our overhead sensing technology. This is telling me that any place that’s red has got someone actively sitting there, and if it’s green, it’s available. So when you come in, it’s really easy to see what’s occupied, what’s been unoccupied for, you know, a certain period of time. Maybe someone sat down, maybe they got up to get some coffee and they’re going to go back and what’s available. So it really makes it convenient when coming in to find that.

 

Brian Haines 14:52

Now we’re just going to go ahead and we’re going to leave this area and we’re going to start going down the main hallway and there’s a number of different really interesting spaces. On the right we’ve got one of our small teams rooms. Once again, all Teams enabled. Really fun to be able to go in there and do a meeting very quickly. On the left we’ve got a whole series of phone booths and these phone booths, maybe we’ll look at this one cause it’s open here, are meant to have private conversations. They are sound isolated. They are very private and secure. So if you need to have a one-on-one conversation with someone, that’s really a great choice. And each one of those phone booths sort of has a different furniture set up so you can kind of pick your own, if you will. This is one of my favorite rooms. This is the what we call just sort of an ad hoc teams room or ad hoc meeting room. All of this furniture is meant to be really flexible and movable. Once again, we’ve got the indoor air quality sensors, the AirThings, we’ve got our occupancy sensors, we’ve got really cool technology. But this room I notice our marketing team uses all the time. I think it’s really super comfortable. They bring the whole team together and anyone who’s remote is up on the screen and they work together quite a bit. This is our IT closet. Not really anything exciting here.

 

Brian Haines 16:12

This is one of my favorite spaces. This is the ad hoc informal conference room. All of the furniture is movable. We’ll talk a little bit more about that when I get to the other side.

 

Brian Haines 16:25

One of the things that we really decided to focus on was really making this space be about Raleigh. For instance, this is a Raleigh map on the wall. Just kind of giving it a little bit of an interesting personal flair, which I think is quite fun. And then we’re going to go into this room. This is where all of our workstations are. Remember, I was saying we’ve got one tenth the number of workstations that we had because this space is really all about getting together in collaboration and much less about, you know, sitting in individual cubicles. Our philosophy is if you’re doing private heads down work, you can do that anywhere. You can probably do it from home. If you want to come in and work with your team members, this is a great place to do it. Once again, we’ve got a number of the booths over here on the left which are just considered to be extremely flexible and on the outside we’ve got a whole series of offices. All have access to a really great amount of light. All of the furniture in here, all of the desks are sit to stand, which was really important to us. In our old office we had a couple of sit to stand workstations and you had to reserve them. They were a pretty hot item. They got used quite a bit. Here, everything is sit to stand so that we don’t really have any of those issues.

 

Brian Haines 17:39

All right, so we’re going to go this way. I was talking about the informal conference room over here on the left. If we had a little bit more time, I’d slide open this glass wall, but this entire glass wall folds up, and this room becomes part of my favorite space. This is our break room. I really consider it to be more than a break room. It’s a room that really is warm. The furniture’s a lot of fun. You’ll notice that the fabrics and everything we picked were really designed to make this feel a little bit more like you’re in a cool, maybe home environment or a place that you just really want to come to. Even if you’re working after hours or whatever that may be. It’s just a really nice, warm space. A tremendous amount of flexibility. Our vision, and we’ve already had one really big meeting and in this space, we probably had 50 or 60 people comfortably in here when we first opened the office, which was really exciting because it never felt crowded. It felt really nice and warm. And that opens up right onto our patio, which is great. We never had a space like this and there’s a variety of different kinds of furniture out here. We’re still waiting on a few of our amenities, like our umbrellas. It’s a little bit warm out there today, so not a lot of people. But we also have, and I’ve seen a number of teams use this space over here, which is really kind of an outdoor seating area, really focused on couches and being a little bit less formal.

 

Brian Haines 19:15

So we’re really at the end of our tour, we showed the outdoor space, the flexibility. We absolutely love the space. We’ve been getting phenomenal feedback. Perhaps we’ll come and do a tour in about a year and sort of do a sort of like what’s working, what’s not working. This is really designed to be flexible and open and collaborative. We couldn’t be more delighted. We’re really happy. I’m glad I was able to take you on this tour today and thank you so much.