Designing a Better Workplace: The Role of the Workplace Experience Officer in Modern Organizations

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts with a digital workspace inner workings.

Are you being otherwise? Pretty good?

Heather Bicknell 0:32
Not too much going on getting ready for some vacation coming up. So looking forward to that. How about yourself?

Ryan Purvis 0:40
Yes, very good. Very good. Lots of interesting things are happening. So that work that I was doing, that we're keeping top secret is coming closer and closer to being released. So I'm quite excited about that. I've just got one or two little last things to happen before we can start talking about it. But I've been showing some people and getting some feedback. And yeah, it's looking. It's looking good. Very excited. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I obviously show you separately, some stage. But yeah, it's it's all going to it's that feeling you get yours before you only go on a roller coaster. And you get up and you're going up and you're going up. And then as you come over the thing you just know, you're about to launch. And go and you get that that feeling in your stomach. It like that kind of feeling at the moment almost every day, which is, which is great. I love it. I can see why people get addicted to starting things. Yeah. Cool. So so the one thing I thought we could chat about is I sent you an article on LinkedIn, about the chief employee experience officer or something like that, or chief workspace Experience Officer, I think. And I thought that was a really cool, new C suite role, which which I'm available for it if anyone wants to hire someone. But you know, and I think it's so relevant because of what's what's happening all the time. And if you look at obviously, we talk a lot about what COVID did to change how people work. But also with with this plethora of options to how you work and and what helps you do your work and all that stuff. I mean, look at the look at how AI has exploded, you need almost this this additional functional view to help employees leverage this stuff. So I think it's it's the workplace, but it's also the RSA work ethic or the work mechanism that needs to be factored in, which is a completely different, as I've said, perspective to what people currently do. If that makes sense.

Heather Bicknell 2:50
It does. And I think you started seeing experience roles within the last five ish years really start to take hold and more positions are being made around things like employee experience, workplace this experience. And I think one of the interesting things is that the sort of functional divide, these roles could be in HR, they could be it rolls, you know, this could be a natural move for someone, I you know, VP of it as CIO move into this chief workplace experience role. But I think you're right, with all of the changes that have happened to the workplace, as we know, rapidly within the last three years, sort of necessitate someone whose main thing is, how do we shape that experience?

Ryan Purvis 3:44
Yeah, and my kind of analogy, and this is kind of embarrassing. So in South Africa with loadshedding, and the government's completely incompetent. This solution was to bring in the Minister of electricity, who's really a glorified project manager. And it's, and it's really a waste of money. To be fair, but the reason why I thought it was quite funny is that that's kind of what this role is, in some respects, you're you're bringing it across, you have to bring everyone together across very different things. So you have to understand all you have it's, it's, it's understanding all the business lines, it's, it's having a technology piece of it, it's a there's a security piece to it as well, to really have to be all rounded in this role, but But the crux of it is you really need to understand the people that work in the business and what they need to do in the business. So you got to be people centric, and I think that's where, why that's why I think it's different to having like a CIO or CTO or CEO or CIO, taking on this, this capability. I think it's almost like the business person that moves into the technology world or a very business centric technology person that moves out into this role,

Heather Bicknell 4:55
if that makes sense. I completely agree. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 4:58
And you're right. Is this me? neat is that there are many head of EU exes and head of workspace. But often those are just monikers for a an engineering person or a service person. And I think there's that need for a new kind of executive. So I'm very excited to see how this goes. And maybe in a couple years time, we will look back and see how many how many roles have been hired for this? Or how many companies have appointed someone for this role? Because he said, is the C suite keeps getting bigger and bigger? Which is the other thing? Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing? I don't know. It seems to be getting more and more.

Heather Bicknell 5:37
Yeah, keep adding roles, but what do you think your way?

Ryan Purvis 5:40
Well, I think the reality is, there's just so much stuff to do. And for various reasons, I mean, in some respects, the amount of complexity is draw is driven by regulations and policies and, and maturing of various things. And that requires an overhead in order to handle it. So you have that, that that pushes it. And then also because of the way the world is globalised, and and made things complicated, because you now meet the jet, you're dealing with multi gender, multi geo located businesses, you're offering services globally. I mean, you know, the Internet to logic has driven a lot of this stuff, because you can just transact with somebody in another country. It's almost the legacy of those countries that has created the complexity. I'll give you, I'll give you a very simple example. I've got a friend who just moved from, from South Africa, to Plymouth here in the UK. And he was asked me all sorts of questions. And I said, Well, when you get here, you need to sign up for the curve card. And he said, Well, what's the curve, quadruple the curve card is an aggregation card. So it's a it's a MasterCard, debit card. But you can put any card behind that except for an Amex. So what happens is I give my wife the curve card, and she goes and does whatever she needs to go and do. And then the transactions, I just put them in the right buckets. So it goes to the right card for the right thing. So if the business expense goes to business, if it's a personal experience goes to the personal credit card, and here we have various cars that have different mortgages and things we're trying to get for that reason. And that curve card is huge for me, and one of the huge benefits for because we travel a lot is the currency exchanges is really good. So and because I'm, you know, between South Africa and the UK, I have both my UK cards and myself and cards behind the curve card. So I can go to any place pay for anything, and make sure it goes to the right bank account, using rules. Now, that kind of service or technology exists here in the UK, but doesn't exist anywhere else. So it's a foreign concept when you talk to other people, but what they've done is completely reduced the complexity of financial transactions for me when I travel, you know, and it's and it's a small cost in, you know, cost me 100 pounds a year, I think for membership, whatever it is. But I get all the benefit. Because often the problem you have when you go into a transaction in a place is oh, we don't take Amex. But you're like, I really want to use my Amex because I get more miles, or you did the transaction, but your car that you had unlimited money in it, because you've you know, you left the one that you normally whatever, you know, those sort of situations, you just use this card, you can just move it around, and it's all done. Plus, I only carry one card, I don't carry seven credit cards with me or whatever it is, you know, for all the stuff we do and debit cards, and then if I draw cash, the cash is still drawn out of the curve card, but it goes out of the right bank account for cash. So I'm not going to charge your credit card fee, if it will cash on your credit card. So those sorts of things. So now if you if I go back to before I had the credit card, if I wanted to do something in South Africa, and I didn't have money in South Africa, I'd have to transfer money from the UK to South Africa would have to arrive which would take however many days. And then I would be able to draw it out in South Africa on my seven cards because it's cheaper that way than using my British card in a South African ATM. But now I just use the code card, I don't even care. Because it's it just it's made that seamless. Now that in sort of tying this back to my analogy around the complexity of business, for me to open bank accounts in multiple locations, it's often very difficult because of all the rigmarole look at the compliance all the rest of it. I mean, I had to do some certification of stuff. And that's why you need all these roles, because there's so much legacy complication. And I think this is where you know, crypto that is, as unlike Bitcoin made, it makes a lot of sense. You take away all that complexity, because you have a trusted platform that's distributed and all that all the things people know, are there. And it's an interesting thing, because if you look at the reason why you have all these C suites, it's really to coordinate the people in those functions together to make the business go in in the most effective and efficient way. And that's really the point. So you could have as many C suite people as you like, you know, obviously to level of management, but for the CEO to manage But in essence, I've managing towers of people to make sure that they can make things get into harmony, which is the long way I get to do what I was trying to get to

Heather Bicknell 10:10
know that makes sense that I don't even I think the analogy was for the C suite. But I think it also works for the workplace experience officer in terms of, you know, what you're describing in that frictionless card experience, which does sound quite nice. I made the mistake recently of booking, I'm going on an international trip, and they booked from the hotels with a credit card that gets that doesn't international penalty for charging and set up by you know, other one that wouldn't have done it. It's just a silly thing and remembering which card does what. But yeah, it does make me think of the all the friction points in the employee experience and the workplace experience of you know, when you are using a physical workplace as well. And that workplace experience officers role could be a lot of it, removing those friction points, so that employees don't get frustrated, their productivity is not impeded. They're not disengaging with the business, because all of these things aren't building up in the background. Because no one's really looking after them from a holistic standpoint. So,

Ryan Purvis 11:18
yeah. And that's, that's 100%. And I think the the, the interesting piece for me is, would you would you now have a chief AI officer? Or would you have a chief, would you keep it as a chief workplace workspace officer, because, you know, as much as AI, if you go back to what it was, for most of us before, a lot of new services started arriving was very much a case of what were you building into a solution to solve a problem? Was it a machine learning thing? Was it a computer vision thing, natural language processing, whatever it was, but now you have a situation where you're not unless you're going to build all these services, these services are available. So who's going to help the business person or the business as a whole, including different functions to decide on which services they're allowed to use and not use? And how do you incorporate them into the business and you got to get coordinate all the things you got to do the security guys, the tech guys, the the risk guys, whatever it is, you've got in your business, that that has to all work together, because if one of those people owns it, then it's always going to be a bias. Whereas if you're just the person trying to make the business people work the most efficiently, then you kind of obviously be independent, because you're not, but you your focus is on the business being the best, where's the risk, ours would be obviously more about managing the risk. And the tech guys be more about managing the tech debt, and, you know, stability and all those things. So as I say, it's that sort of glorified project management role in some respects. But it is about stakeholder management and driving things in the right direction.

Heather Bicknell 12:50
That's super interesting thought in terms of who within the business is going to help shepherd sort of the next phase of AI in because I think you're right, if it's sort of one of those groups, whether it's legal, or IP or security, or even, you know, other centres of the business who are pushing it forward, there's always going to be bias towards whatever is most important to them. But I think it will need someone who has the overarching view, to figure out what, how it's going to work for their own business, and how to take advantage of the productivity benefits without incurring the risk. I wonder how much of it seems like a things that a CEO could take on? Right, like, in some ways, the CEO could be a workplace experience officer at some organisations? And in some cases, it could be a separate?

Ryan Purvis 13:47
Well, yeah, look, I think that every business is gonna have the, every lead is gonna have the way they want to handle it. You know, and most CEOs are typically, you know, aware of what they need to be aware of. But in the same token, they're not going to be driven by be too internally focused, if their job is to be more externally focused. So if you're, if you're trying to grow the business, you know, you're gonna be doing this, that sort of stuff. But if you are betting that twice, I think you need to have a person that focuses on this for the operational delivery side, and, and you probably argue more than a COO Yeah, we look at this. But often, the CFO is already involved in so many things. And that's why you've had this sort of multitude of different sea level. You know, look at our CIO was on the board for a long time now seeing CIOs on the board, or CTO on the board. And typically a CTO would be on board because it's a software company. But now you have in them more often. And the seaso the security officer is tending to be belong under the seat, the CIO, but that's also not entirely correct, because security is a it's not just a technology thing. It's actually more people think. So you see that come up and you're getting the chief people officer and in all the As things are, as you say, we're carrying more and more sea levels. And I just think it's because of the complexity of things. And I think having the this, this chief workspace officer might be more of a horizontal role, as opposed to a vertical one where they cut across everything, you know, whereas people is vertical technologies, vertical security is maybe more vertical, or more horizontal, maybe depending how you look at it. I don't know, that's the thing that think they think that's interesting. It'll come down to what kind of CEO you have, and what kind of structure he or she wants to operate that in to handle how it manifests. And that's why we sort of wait a couple years and see what it looks like.

Heather Bicknell 15:39
Yeah, yeah. I do wonder, a year or two years, whenever we see the Microsoft copilot, or Google's Bart equivelant, really be widely available and take off in the workplace weather, you know, who owns creating the rules around that and also helping you do you think that will be a CIOs role? And most organisations, should that be more of a workplace experience officers? Like part of their purview?

Ryan Purvis 16:11
Um, let's Yeah, I actually don't know. I mean, in in prior to COVID, I think the CIO was much much more technology focused, which I mean, obviously makes sense. But but the sort of disconnection for me was the I in in CIOs, information, not technology. So you typically aren't, you know, and unfortunately, the CTO role has been bastardised in the market, because what they're really doing is trying to hire senior developers. And they're calling them CTOs to get given them a fancy title. But but it's actually a developer role. So it's kind of it's kind of taken away the the sort of value of the CTO role and in some cases, but yeah, that's just one of those things. The thing that for the spec to the sort of AI and CIO, doing there was a very nice picture that I saw was put a time with Iowa's information, integrator, influencer, it was all bunch of like seven or eight different different explanations for what the IMU is, and that was kind of the thing is a good CIO was actually doing a lot more than just technology, they were connecting the business, they were understanding the business, they were mapping business goals, to where the technology strategy has got very much more strategic role than, than say the CTO will be, which will be much more technical hands on what I saw during COVID. And now is that the CIO and HR became a lot closer and facilities became a lot closer. So So you sometimes have facilities sitting under the CIO, and the CIO. But because of the amount of technology involved in the, in the buildings, you know, you think about conference rooms, and all that. Building smart, smart buildings, smart devices, in the aircon, heating, all that kind of stuff. Because that IoT stuff has become so prevalent, the CIO is now getting as the as the head of the technology function is getting everything. And because the people are so reliant on all the technology, from phones, to tablets, to, to the actual devices, etc, it will also become a, you know, a related thing. And then they will cases with, you know, the, the HR people will be put on the CIO. And that also comes down to leadership thing, if you don't have the right leaders at the top of HR or people, then you might have to put it under an exec. That makes sense. But what I'm trying to get to that role has evolved dramatically in the last three years, the CTO has as well, in ensay, mostly in bad ways, because of the way it's in these roles are positioned. But what I'm seeing in the market is upsetting to a lot of people about this is a move also to more fractional executives. So instead of going and hiring a full time CTO or a full time CIO, full time CFO, you're getting a one day, a week, one day a month, exec and you're getting and you're hiring the team, the operational team behind that person. Now, in that case, this and I think Zoltan actually positioned himself like this as the chief remote officer, I think or something like that, where you come in, and you come in on a part time basis, to guide the business to deal with working better using technology. And you may not need to be there all the time. And you're really co opting a cohort of resources from the other areas to say, move the users from physical devices to virtual devices, which is a common use case is to get involved in or do some business process reengineering and bringing new technology so you know running a new CRM, yeah, which would be a project or programme run by technology for the business. But now you've actually got someone who's coming in and saying, Well, let's look at how the business operates. Is this the right way for your business to operate? Let's not even worry about the technology, let's like if we had to reverse engineer the whole thing, how would we do it and take that, that approach, and run it as a programme for X number of months or years. And then at the end of that move on, and the business goes back to what they're doing, and then the people that were doing those other roles, you know, there's in the functions carry on, but they've got this dedicated exec looking at, you know, changing the business, with the with the understanding of all the technology available, and, you know, leveraging AI and all that kind of stuff and making it fit. So that's one one perspective.

Heather Bicknell 20:45
It's very interesting. However, it makes me think of, sort of our you were talking about in terms of roles, being a project manager, in some respects, you know, things, I guess needs, ebbing and waiting around big change transformation efforts and the need for someone to sort of fall on that. But they're not happening, or maybe different ones are happening that require, you know, slightly different skill sets and the ability to bring different groups together, which is where maybe some of the fractional pieces make more sense.

Ryan Purvis 21:19
Well, if you look at the underlying benefit, and I'll probably close on this underlying benefit of all these AI services that have come out, the benefit that I see is I have more time to spend talking to people, because I can generate content, now chat GPT, I can generate nice presentations and all that using beautiful AI. And there's various, I've got an auto, auto AI taking notes in meetings. So I don't have to. So when I talk to somebody, I'm completely engaged and doing stuff. And when I'm generating content, or whatever I'm using, I mean, I was building my website for this new product. The other night Chat GPT did most of the work for me. And all I had to do was fine tune it. And if I didn't, if there was like a night with work, if I didn't have, they would have taken me a few nights with work. And that's that's where I think and this is how the thing about understanding how to bring these things in like, like, we haven't even talked about training or educating the end user. So now you've got all this stuff coming in? How do you get them up to speed I mean, you're here in the Quinn episode, we're talking about with muscle Bay, that sort of all people that don't even know how to use their phones. Now you're trying to explain to them that you've got this AI called Chet GDP that you can talk to. And it'll come back to you with content that you can use. And you could write a book in like a week, just by AI gave me an emails every day that write a book in a week. And it's, it's completely possible because often, the biggest part about writing the book is not, it's not the idea. It's getting the page right with all the material on the page in a way that's readable and make sense to what you had envisioned. And that takes all the time. And now if you've got something that could spit that out for you, based on on a few bullet points, you've just taken what a four year thing into maybe a month, a week, a week, it might be too quick, but, you know, a month of of workers is much better. So I think it's the benefits are there is obviously risks is a few people talking about pausing or slowing down the AI stuff. I think that's not going to happen. But I think there's a level of of coaching and educating and putting in some guide rails, which is a very overused phrase. But it's the right thing, you know, put things in the right in the right sort of boundaries.

Heather Bicknell 23:36
Yeah, maybe we can dig more into that. Next time. That

Ryan Purvis 23:42
door is cool. Well, that's a good one.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DWW podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on our website https://www.digitalworkspace.works/. Please also visit our website https://www.digitalworkspace.works/ and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.