What The F* is Happening to The Office?

Work Design
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What the F* is Happening to the Office? The workplace is being reinvented—and we're talking to the people leading the charge. From architects to real estate strategists, tech innovators to culture experts, this podcast dives into the seismic shifts reshaping where and how we work. If you’re building, designing, managing, or just trying to make sense of the new office landscape, this is your front-row seat to the ideas, experiments, and people redefining the future of work.

  1. 5d ago

    Work Doesn’t Just Happen in the Office - and the Office Has to Be OK With That | Becca Landwehr.

    Work happens on the Metro, at the kitchen table after the kids are in bed, and on a Teams call squeezed between a doctor’s appointment and school pickup. The office was built for nine-to-five at an assigned desk, and most of us don’t work that way anymore. As my guest Becca Landwehr puts it, the office has to be okay with that.Becca Landwehr is a strategic planner and workplace strategist, trained in both communication and interior design, and she’s worked on both the design firm and owner side. What I appreciated most is how pragmatic she is. She isn’t anti-office, but she’s not pretending virtual work is going away either. Her first question about any space is simple: does it actually work for the people using it?We talk about a company with assigned desks nobody uses, plus return-to-office mandates, why core hours and anchor days beat “thou shalt come in,” what to measure beyond badge swipes, and the simple exercise she’d hand any leader facing a lease decision this year.Subscribe for new episodes with the experts shaping the future of work.Leave a comment! Where does most of your work happen these days, and does your office offer the flexibility for it?Subscribe to Work Design for more on the trends shaping where and how we work.https://workdesign.beehiiv.com/Connect with Becca Landwehr on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccalandwehr/

    Work Doesn’t Just Happen in the Office - and the Office Has to Be OK With That | Becca Landwehr.

  2. Oct 1

    The Workplace Supply Chain: The Hidden Business Behind Every Office | with Beth Goff McMillian

    Everyone's fighting about where people work. Almost nobody's asking the question that actually matters: why would anyone want to come in at all?In this episode of What the F* is Happening to the Office?, Bob Fox sits down with Beth Goff-McMillan, CEO of SKG, one of the largest woman-owned businesses in Texas, and founder of FOLIO, to go past the return-to-office debate and into the business that actually supplies the modern workplace.Beth will tell you a five-day mandate can't fix collaboration, engagement, or culture if the workplace itself never evolved. Getting people back, she argues, isn't a real estate problem, it's a human problem. We dig into how COVID and hybrid work rewired her entire industry: why office furniture became a commodity, why the buying process went transactional, how the floor plate flipped from 80% desks to 60% shared space. We also get into the workplace supply chain, the 50-point audit she ran on 450 manufacturers, how AI is adding jobs instead of cutting them, and the metrics she uses to tell you whether an office is working now that square-footage-per-person is dead.

    The Workplace Supply Chain: The Hidden Business Behind Every Office | with Beth Goff McMillian

  3. Sep 21

    Engagement Does Not Drive Revenue - So What Does? | Dr. Yasmeen J. Coning

    Happy employees don't necessarily produce better business results. In this episode of What the F* is Happening to the Office?, Bob Fox talks with Dr. Yasmeem Coning, founder of Ember, about why engagement, the metric most companies lean on, may be too sentiment-driven to actually predict revenue, retention, or performance. The real driver, she argues, is something deeper: collective organizational identification, or how strongly people connect their work to their own self-concept.Yasmeem breaks down the science behind identification, how it differs from engagement, and how Ember's Workplace Identification Score (WIS) is helping leaders design offices, operating models, and hybrid work patterns around actual human behavior instead of guesswork. As Yasmeem puts it: "Workforce is the new workplace."If you're rethinking how culture, strategy, and space planning connect to business outcomes, this conversation will change how you measure success.In this episode:- Why employee happiness and engagement don't reliably translate into better business outcomes- How collective organizational identification connects work to self-conceptEngagement as sentiment vs. identification as a stable behavioral signal- How strategy, culture, and identification work together as a stackEmber's six core factors: Core Identity, Connected Leadership, Collective Drive, Aligned, Ambition, Future Affinity, Market Gravity- The Workplace Identification Score (WIS) and how it informs workplace design- How workplace data shapes collaboration areas, innovation spaces, and office consolidation- Why identity-based measurement can support diversity by recognizing the whole person- The first question every headquarters planning team should ask

    Engagement Does Not Drive Revenue - So What Does? | Dr. Yasmeen J. Coning

  4. Sep 8

    The Science Behind Thermostat Wars | Nicola Gerrett, Ph.D.

    Every office has that one person who's freezing while everyone else is fine. In this episode, Bob Fox talks with Dr. Nicola Garrett, Ph. D. a thermophysiologist at Gentherm and one of roughly 300 people in the world who study this for a living. Nicola's background is in human performance, soldiers in extreme environments, elite athletes, drivers, and she's now bringing that science into the office. They dig into why office HVAC systems were built around a narrow, outdated user profile; why body size, age, sex, etc. make one "optimal" room temperature essentially a myth; and the difference between behavioral thermoregulation (throwing on a jacket) and the physiological responses — vasoconstriction, sweating, shivering that kick in when behavior isn't enough.From there, the conversation moves into what's actually being built: heated and cooled seats, radiant panels, under-desk heating, and the "microclimate" approach Gentherm pioneered in vehicles; letting each person dial in their own comfort instead of conditioning an entire room. They cover the real engineering headaches (power delivery to a chair nobody wants tethered to a wall), the surprising ways thermal discomfort quietly wrecks focus and typing accuracy, how cooling has been used to keep drowsy drivers alert (and could do the same for you after lunch), and what Nicola took away from her first trip to NeoCon as a scientist walking into the design world. It's a conversation that will change how you think about your own chair.

    The Science Behind Thermostat Wars | Nicola Gerrett, Ph.D.

  5. Aug 9

    Why Open Offices Fail — and What Actually Works | Adam Morgan

    A consulting firm spent 18 months designing the perfect workspace. Six months after move-in, they tore it out. That one moment launched Adam Morgan on a mission to rethink everything about how offices get built — and why most of them are still getting it wrong.Adam is co-founder of Bureau, a company that designs and builds soundproof booths for modern workplaces. But his perspective goes far beyond the product. Coming from a finance background, Adam thinks about the office as a performance system — and the data he's seeing tells a clear story: focus spaces are running at 56–57% utilization while open collaborative areas sit at 25–30%. Workers aren't broken. The spaces are.In this conversation, Bob and Adam dig into:- Why the open office was built for a way of working that no longer exists- What CO2 levels are quietly doing to your afternoon productivity- How AI companies are reshaping office demand — and what the rush to spec suites signals- Return-to-office mandates: what actually works, and what quietly backfires- The real reason people come to the office (hint: it's not the ping pong table)

    Why Open Offices Fail — and What Actually Works | Adam Morgan

  6. Jul 28

    It's a Time Problem: How AI Could Save Apprenticeship in Design | Valerie Trent

    Somewhere right now, a talented designer is copy-pasting details, finishes, and door schedules into a set of CDs — instead of designing the inspiring workplace needed to bring a fragmented team back to the office. That's not a people problem. That's a time problem.In this episode, Bob Fox sits down with Valerie Trent, a licensed designer (NCIDQ, LEED AP ID+C) who spent about a decade practicing before starting a technology company. She realized firms were burning most of their hours on documentation — coordination, redlines, cut-and-paste work — instead of the design thinking that actually shapes how a space feels to work in. That observation led her to start building AI tools aimed at reducing the repetitive production work, so the people trained to solve physical, spatial, and human problems can spend their time solving them.They dig into what's really driving the industry's shrinking margins, why production work has quietly replaced real apprenticeship for a generation of designers, and two firsthand stories of firms using freed-up time to rebuild mentorship from the ground up — one through a rotating shadow-a-principal program, another through a weekly group redlining session that's become the most valuable hour of the week. Valerie also makes the case that AI doesn't create a firm's culture — it amplifies whatever culture is already there, for better or worse.

    It's a Time Problem: How AI Could Save Apprenticeship in Design | Valerie Trent

  7. Jul 11

    Nature Inside: What the Best Workplaces Already Know | Bill Browning & Catie Ryan

    What if the single most powerful thing you could do to bring people back to the office had nothing to do with perks, mandates, or the latest collaboration tech and everything to do with trees, light, and the patterns found in nature?In this episode, Bill Browning and Catie Ryan of Terrapin Bright Green, authors of Nature Inside and 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design, make the case that biophilic design and biophilia in the workplace are no longer optional extras but essential workplace strategy for anyone serious about the future of work. From fractal lighting and fractal fluency to daylighting office environments and dynamic lighting that shifts brain states from calm to engaged, they reveal how a nature-inspired office and green office design can transform workplace productivity, drive return to office, and create a workplace experience that no ping pong table can replicate. Drawing on cutting-edge biophilia science, including new research on epigenetics and nature, biophilic design research, and neurodiversity in the workplace; Bill and Catie show how human centered design and biophilic architecture are reshaping the office environment to support employee wellbeing and workplace wellbeing across every setting, from hybrid work environments to corporate real estate portfolios. With real case studies this is the conversation on nature at work and what sustainable workplace design actually looks like when the science drives every decision.About the guests:Bill Browning is a founding partner of Terrapin Bright Green and one of the world's leading experts on biophilic design and sustainable economics.Catie Ryan is a principal at Terrapin Bright Green and co-author of 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design.Purchase the book here: https://amzn.to/4vVIlMU

    Nature Inside: What the Best Workplaces Already Know | Bill Browning & Catie Ryan

  8. Jun 15

    The Smart Office Revolution: What Buildings Know | Melissa Marsh

    What if your office could tell you who to sit next to based on what you're working on? What if the building knew you were stressed before you did?In this episode, Bob Fox sits down with Melissa Marsh, founder and CEO of PLASTARC. With 25+ years in the field and clients like Microsoft, Google, Lululemon, and Logitech, Melissa is an expert on where the workplace is headed and why most organizations are still behind.They cover the shift from designing space to designing experience, the rise of smart buildings and occupancy sensors, why digital twins are changing how we operate and plan buildings, and the uncomfortable question: are return-to-office mandates about people or about protecting the value of real estate?Melissa also unpacks why HR, IT, and Real Estate speak entirely different languages, what new metrics like experience density actually measure, and why real estate is, in her words, "profoundly unprepared" for the organizational impact of AI.This is one of those conversations that makes you rethink what a building is, what an office is for, and who should be designing both.Subscribe for new episodes with the experts shaping the future of work.Leave a comment — what's your biggest challenge with the workplace right now?Download our State of the Workplace Report → https://workdesign.beehiiv.com/industry-report

    The Smart Office Revolution: What Buildings Know | Melissa Marsh
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What the F* is Happening to the Office? The workplace is being reinvented—and we're talking to the people leading the charge. From architects to real estate strategists, tech innovators to culture experts, this podcast dives into the seismic shifts reshaping where and how we work. If you’re building, designing, managing, or just trying to make sense of the new office landscape, this is your front-row seat to the ideas, experiments, and people redefining the future of work.

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