What’s a better life? What’s a better office? Those two questions are inherently connected. Your workspace’s biggest challenge is to stay relevant, and it’s impossible to do so without obsessively making being in the physical workspace an incredible life experience. This is IKEA’s workspace development philosophy and in this episode, Momo Pavlovic shares how IKEA brings it to life through an infinitely iterative process. Developing an incredible workspace is work that is never finished....

What’s it like to design, build and operationalize a Workplace project during 2020 a Netflix office? What’s the workplace culture like? How does Netflix stay genuine? Nasreen Potter from Netflix tells all about what it’s like to work there. She shares the Netflix workplace philosophy, how they justify their office space investments, how they engage employees with relevant communication and the secrets behind their vibrant work environment. Nasreen Potter is a Workplace Direc...

What if you could have a ‘destination office’ rather than a bland office that people dread coming into? How do you create spaces at work that energize people? How do you make people look forward to their days in the office? It’s not just hitting KPIs that creates value at work. Connection, community, and collaboration create immeasurable value. Tom Kegode and Kursty discuss how to use office spaces to grow social capital and why social capital is a necessary form of producti...

Resilience - why doesn’t it work? Most people get resilience wrong. In this episode, we’ll reframe what resilience really is and how to tap into it for yourself and your organization. Bruce Daisley and Kursty discuss the 3 pillars of resilience that people don’t usually take into account, the connection between childhood trauma and resilience, how your sense of identity can predict your well-being, and why many resilience training programs are ineffective. Bruce Daisley is the author o...

How Does Your Office Space Manifest Your Culture? With David McKay How do spaces change the way we talk to each other? The way we feel about work? And the way we behave at work? David McKay from Innocent Drinks joins Kursty to discuss how their spaces manifest their company culture. They explore how spaces can bring people in, why they invested in a sustainable factory that’s filled with plants, how they experimented space configurations that work best for their teams, and why you’d want to b...

Solving hybrid work challenges requires us to talk less about desks and more about how we work. Emma Morley and Kursty discuss what it’s like to solve hybrid work, all the things that get in the way, and how to be more intentional in solving for it. Different stakeholders around the office often have conflicting and ever-changing requirements for what the office should be like and what it should be for. Tune in for insights about how to decide what problems are worth figuring out and what pro...

Plants can change your mood, so should offices have more of them around? Kali and Katie from The Glasshouse project join Kursty to discuss how plants can boost mental wellness, productivity, and creativity. They also chat about how having plants in the office can encourage staff to want to work from there rather than from home. Rediscover why you need more plants in your life throughout this episode. The Glasshouse Project is a social enterprise in the UK that helps female inmates fin h...

Sonya Simmonds joins Kursty to discuss how to meaningfully bring out your brand through workplace and office design. They explore how office design impacts employee morale, productivity, and work ethic, why the ‘wow factor’ of designing office spaces shouldn’t stop at gimmicks and fragmented Instagramable spots, and Spotify’s Work From Anywhere program that allows staff to choose between a ‘home mix’ and an ‘office mix’ work experience. Sonya Simmonds is an interior architect with 20 years of...

In the final part of this series, listen in to the last two hot topic discussions from the LEGO workplace symposium on (1) designing spaces and (2) orchestrating purposeful meetings. During the discussion on designing office spaces, we discuss how to create spaces that break traditional norms and influence positive behaviours. You’ll discover insights on whether activity-based office space design is effective, why one size fits no one when it comes to space design, how to interrupt traditio...

Be a fly on the wall in two hot topic discussions that took place in the LEGO Workplace Symposium: What is the purpose of the workplace? Hybrid headaches over the past year You’ll listen in on groups of executives from many large companies like Microsoft, Netflix, Unilever, Spotify, Ikea, and Booking.com discuss a range of topics about finding a compelling purpose for returning to the office and how to minimize the speedbumps that come with hybrid work. A recurrent theme...

In the first part of this three-part special, Kursty and Sabine recap their experience at the LEGO Workplace Symposium in Billund, Denmark. The symposium focused on key issues in workplace design and experience. It was organized by the Ways of Working team and was attended by several corporate giants including Microsoft, Netflix, Unilever, Spotify, Ikea, and Booking.com. Kursty and Sabine share what it was like to visit LEGO’s brand new campus for the first time, how the symposium was structu...

Scott Witthoft joins Kursty to discuss how we are becoming more intentional with how we use and divide physical and digital spaces. They explore many thought-provoking questions like: why do some things work in some places and not work in others? Are in-person meetings and activities catalysts for progress? And why are some office spaces abandoned? Scott and Kursty explore how the pandemic helped us refine our improvisational skills; we've effectively become designers who create experiences b...

Jason Fried joins Kursty to share wisdom on how he runs a fully remote company by simplifying things and focusing on what matters. They explore where deep work happens, how to create space for it, why rigid workplace rules can kill passion and create distractions, and why companies that want to run remotely need to adopt a new mindset. Jason Fried is the co-founder of Basecamp and has been running the company for 23 years. He is a monthly columnist at Inc. Magazine and has authored seve...

Trend forecaster Li Edelkoort joins Kursty to discuss the anatomy of trends, the ecology of fashion, and the post-pandemic workplace. Reflecting on the state of the world, Li discusses how to redesign the modern workplace to respond to new and upcoming trends. She explores how the pandemic has made us more in tune with nature and the good things that have come of it. Throughout the discussion, Li shares nuggets of wisdom, showing us how trends that haven’t yet reached the main stage are curre...

Interview with Ian Ellison and Chris Moriarty, two brilliant workplace thinkers 'on a mission to find and celebrate the most exciting and inspiring workplace research in the world'. A fascinating geek-out into Kursty's second book, Spaces for Innovation, which dives into the science and design of inspiring environments that support creativity and collaboration. Some of the topics covered include: 📖 How the book itself is designed with the user in mind 💡 The core themes for defining space...

Summary Expert author Rachel Botsman joins Kursty to discuss the relationship between trust and space. They talk about how significant it is for organisations to empower individuals to have a rhythm of work that sends them into immersion mode, why getting through to-do lists shouldn’t be the most prized priority in the workplace, and what negative capability is. Rachel is the author of Who Can You Trust and the host of the Rethink Podcast. Throughout her career, she has delivered ...

Summary Workplace strategist Neil Usher joins Kursty to discuss the nuances of navigating hybrid work, brain states that trigger creativity, and the research opportunities we missed in the pre-pandemic world. In their conversation, they accentuate that what makes hybrid working complicated is not just the space aspect but the time aspect as well. They chat about self-imposing discipline, internally inspiring creativity, and managing time and space when you work from home. Ne...

Summary Best-selling author Julia Hobsbawm joins Kursty to discuss her new book The Nowhere Office. In their discussion, they discuss how workplaces need to shift to embrace social health, how they can be a source of wellness, what managers need to do to overcome the 'Great Resignation', and the biggest powershift in the workplace. Since Covid, people have strongly insisted on a genuine work-life balance. Organizations that don’t understand this desire are losing out to the great ...

Adding to the inspiring leaders in well-known organizations who share what they're doing and how they're implementing new ways of working, including hybrid, we'll look beyond physical space. We'll explore my hypothesis is that there are three further types of space that impact how we think, feel, behave and interact in order to do our best work: digital space, social space and cognitive space. Embarking on a year-long journey of exploration, Kursty will be speaking with experts ...

Interview with Sabine Ehm of Locatee, and host of The Workplace Leader. We dig into what makes inspiring work environments and touch upon some of the misconceptions around creativity and collaboration: ❗Collaboration does not equal everybody together all the time. ❗Creativity does not equal bright colours and post its everywhere. A thing will not make you or your people creative. So, for instance you cannot install a foosball table and then expect creativity to happen. It...