About Place

Host Ryan Anderson welcomes Phil Kirschner of global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. A self-proclaimed “accidental workplace strategist,” Phil fell into managing workplace strategy transformation efforts at Credit Suisse more than a decade ago and never looked back. As a result, his openness to supporting new ways of working fuels this fast-paced exploration of the need for executiv...

Kristin Leimgruber, Ph. D., joins us to kick off the season. Kristi is a behavioral researcher at BetterUp, the virtual coaching and mentorship platform whose science-based approach helps people thrive in the workplace. She and host Ryan Anderson link the rise in workplace burnout with the decline of our sense of social connection at work—an unintended consequence of remote work. It’s an important...

Host Ryan Anderson takes time to share some highlights from Season 1 and set the stage for Season 2 by answering the two most frequently asked questions he gets asked once people find out what he does for a living: What is the current state of return-to-office? And what does it mean for the future of the workplace? For more MillerKnoll insights, visit millerknoll.com/ideas-in-action .

For the final episode of Season 1 of Looking Forward, we welcome john a. powell, Director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. After a thoughtful discussion of belonging in general terms, john and host Ryan Anderson pivot to focus on what organizations can do to foster belonging in the workplace. From the impact that belonging has on employee retention...

Our guest this week on the podcast is Andreas Hoffbauer, Ph. D., a sociologist by trade and the founder and director of the organizational and behavioral design studio Atelier Kultur. In a heady conversation with host Ryan Anderson, he explains how our organizational networks have been weakened throughout the pandemic—and how prototyping spatial interventions can help strengthen them. For more Mil...

This week on the podcast, we offer a glimpse behind the scenes of our recently renovated Design Yard facility in West Michigan. Home to several teams that have embraced hybrid working, our transformed Design Yard provides choice and bolsters engagement. Matt Stares, Senior Vice President of Global Real Estate, Architecture and Development here at Herman Miller, and Gretta Peterson, our Senior Mana...

Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes, Founder/Lead Architect of AKKA Architects in Amsterdam, is the type of guest we could talk with for hours—but you’ll have to make do with 37 minutes on this week’s podcast. She joins host Ryan Anderson to discuss how organizations can design spaces in a more participative manner and create environments that are ready for the future of work—a future in which workplaces act...

Our guest this week is Steve Todd, AVP, Global Head of Workplace at Nasdaq, and creator of Open Sourced Workplace—a resource for real estate and workplace information. Steve joins host Ryan Anderson to share how he’s been able to move Nasdaq beyond a spreadsheet-driven understanding workplace ROI and toward a more user-centered approach—including some of the factors he’s identified that influence...

This week, Ryan welcomes Andrea Chegut, Ph. D., Director of the Real Estate Innovation Lab at MIT. A data scientist first and foremost, Andrea’s work involves listening to data and leveraging what she learns to help designers and business leaders align the built environment with the needs of people. In a fascinating conversation, she and Ryan cover the four biggest struggles corporate real estate...

This week, host Ryan Anderson welcomes one of the most experienced and insightful leaders in the workplace strategy space: Adrienne Rowe, Head of Workplace Strategy at Raytheon Technologies. Their conversation starts with the current state of workplace strategy as an evolving field of practice, and springboards into a range of topics, from activity-based working to the challenge of balancing flexi...

This week, Ryan tackles remote work with one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, Darren Murph. Darren is Head of Remote at GitLab, a DevOps platform that helps co-located, hybrid, and remote teams collaborate and build software. Darren shares lessons that GitLab has learned as a completely officeless company with more than 1,400 remote employees—including boundary-setting at the organiza...

For our inaugural episode, Ryan welcomes Brian Elliott, Executive Leader of Future Forum, a consortium launched by Slack to help companies rethink work in our digital-first world. Topics include managing distributed teams, the effect of the pandemic on employee expectations—including the ripple effect those changing expectations are having on HR policy—and avoiding "false flexibility." For more Mi...