Worktech made its return to Singapore yesterday at Cisco Headquarters in Maple Tree Business City, Singapore.
Inavate is proud to have supported this year’s event as a media partner.
The event drew a diverse crowd, providing networking opportunities to over 150 professionals from a wide spectrum of industries including real estate, technology, interior design, and marketing.
Among the attendees were influential figures from renowned organisations, including names such as Airbnb, Chanel, BlackRock, and Cisco. These thought leaders delivered talks and panel discussions across a variety of ‘hot’ topics such as hybrid work styles, AI, inclusive workplace designs and sustainability in the corporate world.
The return of the office
The consensus at Worktech Singapore is that remote work in a post-pandemic age is not going as well as it should be, but office spaces have to be appealing enough to make the commute worth.
In the opening talk, Chris Anderson, leader of Cisco’s hybrid work business development unit, dived into this matter: “Being together in a room helps to facilitate workplace culture, but flexibility is important. At Cisco, we encourage people to work anywhere they need to be, but we are also investing heavily in making our offices an activity-based environment. We’re shutting down offices that do not serve a purpose.”
Similarly, Hardeep Matharu from Veldhoen + Company shared the importance of an activity-based working (ABW) approach in designing conducive environments. Such an approach looks at the different activities employees in varying job functions take part in at work, and hence building solutions around these activities.
In this vein, Primo Orpilla, a San Francisco-based interior designer, noted the need for a fundamental re-thinking of the purpose and efficacy of a workplace, and that begins with listening to different use cases from the customer’s and employee’s perspectives.
Human before tech
Amidst the discussions that unfolded during the conferences, a common theme echoed throughout - the need for workplaces to adopt a 'human-first' approach. This philosophy steered many of the dialogues towards human-centered designs and practices, ultimately aiming to empower the modern workforce.
Yvonne Koh, head of people and organisation, fragrance and beauty at Chanel, noted the importance of understanding each user’s persona to identify common work patterns before designing specific hybrid solutions. She also underscored the need for leaders and C-suite management members to go on the ground and hear from employees first, as well as proper change management when workplaces digitally transform their spaces.
Moreover, diversity and inclusion is a key driver of change as workplaces allocate more emphasis on mental health and employees’ wellbeing. Nayan Parekh from Gensler shared how involving neurodivergent individuals in the design process can create more inclusive outcomes while Orpilla expounded on the five pillars of inclusive designs: accessibility, universality, neurodiversity, wellness-focus and equitability.
Leveraging data to gain insights?
The convergence of IT and technology has also become a useful way in deciding whether existing spaces in offices are being under-utilised and how well solutions perform in reality.
Anderson shared that there is a need to understand how spaces are being used down to the minutest details. As a case in point, Cisco has harnessed intelligent room booking systems to capture precise data and metrics of occupancy distribution throughout the week – leading to Cisco’s strategic decision to downsize its office due to the lack of room usage.
Moreover, Caroline Burns from Workplace Revolution shared how AI has the improved potential to make sense of how humans can work better by streamlining the design process through sentiment analysis and automated data collection.
However, Vanessa Sulikowski from Cisco added a nuanced perspective as leveraging data through AI could inadvertently lead to ‘death by data’ – in other words, data overload. Therefore, ensuring a balance between objective metrics and qualitative data allows business to strengthen analytics and insights, while also ensuring that a ‘human-first’ approach can be adhered to.
The future of work
In the final panel discussion, talks on the future of work included the deployment of immersive technology into office spaces.
Parekh concluded that the world of AV in particular opens a realm of location-agnostic technological possibilities that could facilitate better working experiences for employees, such as holographic conferencing rooms, virtual desktops, AI-driven team spaces, virtual wellness and augmented retreats.