Offices are getting technological upgrades. Hear how technology is driving increase sustainability in the office.
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00:00 Hi everybody, my name is Jason Pfeiffer. I'm the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
00:05 I'm already seeing people say hi in the comments. We're watching them. It's always great to see you to say hi.
00:10 So say hello. Tell us where you are in the world.
00:13 We always have an audience that is super far-ranging and it's really exciting to bring people together
00:18 for important and interesting conversations, which is exactly what we're doing today.
00:22 Today we're talking about the future of the office and the office experience.
00:27 And I'm not just talking about those old questions about whether we go back to the office or not or whatever.
00:32 No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about what the office actually looks like and functions.
00:37 How the office works for you and for the companies that occupy the space.
00:43 How the office can be more sustainable.
00:46 There are really exciting developments in this space.
00:49 Incredible new technologies that are being developed.
00:51 And I am joined right now by Donny Stern, who is the Senior Director of Offering Management with Honeywell Business Technologies,
00:59 who is deep into this exact work. Donny, welcome. I'm so excited to talk to you about this.
01:06 Thank you. Thank you, Jason. Thank you for having me.
01:09 Also, I just got my weekly edition, my monthly edition of Entrepreneur Magazine.
01:14 Yeah.
01:15 So pleasure to be here and honored to be here. And I'm looking forward to the conversation today.
01:19 Awesome. I'm delighted that you're here and I'm seeing a lot of shout outs from everywhere, from Pittsburgh to Romania.
01:25 So we've got a very, very broad and interesting audience here.
01:29 And folks, we will be taking your questions throughout.
01:32 So as Donny and I are talking, drop those into the comments and we may bring them in.
01:36 Donny, let's start with this.
01:38 You know, we talked before this about the new technologies that are being developed to make the office more functional, more useful and also more sustainable.
01:48 And you told me that the starting point for that kind of research and development is to ask this question, which is,
01:54 what are employees doing every day and what are the pain points?
01:59 Can you tell us a little bit more about that work to understand where the pain points are for employees in offices and how that leads to new technologies?
02:07 Yeah, absolutely. It's actually honestly really fun because if you think about how much office has changed and how much the way we work has changed,
02:15 we all went back to work fully from office and then went to go back to work from office in some capacity.
02:22 And part of it of understanding how that work is doing deep research are the day on the life.
02:28 We talk about interviewing and researching and observing all type of personas within an office.
02:34 That could be employees of all levels, executives. That could be the people that work and clean and maintain the building.
02:42 What do they do when they wake up? What do they do when they don't go to the office?
02:45 How do they decide when they go and why will they go?
02:49 And that kind of mapping out of what do they do and what do they think and what do they feel,
02:56 what's painful for them and what's joyful for them is the key for a lot of the innovations and technologies that we will talk about today.
03:06 For those just joining, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
03:10 I'm joined by Donny Stern, senior director of Honeywell Building Technologies.
03:14 We're talking about the office of the future, how it's being developed and what it's going to look like and how it's going to work for you.
03:20 Donny, you were just telling me about the research that's being done into understanding people's pain points as it relates to the office.
03:27 Can, before we start to talk about the actual technologies, which are really exciting,
03:31 I'm curious about the kinds of pain points that come up during this research
03:36 and how you guys at Honeywell start to think about how to respond to them.
03:40 Yeah, that's great. And you know what? I think a lot of people that join us today will really identify with that.
03:47 When an average office employee, let's take it back, knowledge walker,
03:53 a lot of us are highly educated, working in a broad range of industries and they need to get their work and their achievements done.
04:03 They also have a lot of their personal needs, right? They want to create social connections with their peers.
04:09 They want to create better and more meaningful work achievements.
04:15 Some of these they can do remotely when they can do it from home because it's something that they can do on their own and they need that quiet time.
04:22 But a lot of times they also understand and they tell us, hey, I need to go whiteboard something with my team and I need to see their body language.
04:31 And that is really where we start to understand what the incentives for people to come in versus having really awesome remote tools.
04:39 Pain points. Pain points can be a lot and we can talk about them. Pain points and gain points.
04:44 One of them is my commute to the office or if I have an EV car, how can I charge it in the office?
04:51 When I get to work, will I have a space to collaborate in?
04:56 Will I have a space to do my own work? Will I have a space to work with my coworkers?
05:01 Will that space be comfortable because I'm coming from two years of work from home?
05:06 Is it going to be too hot? Is it going to be too dim? Not to my liking?
05:12 So pain points could be anywhere from how long it will take me to get in, how difficult it will be that experience.
05:18 How easy it is to be to collaborate with my coworkers because that's one of the main reasons that I'm coming into the office.
05:27 Those are the kind of questions that employees are facing when they think, should I go in?
05:33 Should I go into the office and what's in it for me?
05:37 Well, let's get there then. What is at this office once you start taking those pain points into consideration?
05:46 Take us into some of the exciting new technologies that are being developed and that are live in offices right now
05:53 and that are coming in the future so that people can really understand how those pain points that you just described,
05:59 whether it's about collaboration or it's about charging your electric vehicle or whatever it is,
06:05 how we're actually taking those ideas and turning them into really useful, usable technologies.
06:11 Absolutely. And we're at Honeywell. We are leaders in that field. We have opened, I think, a year or so ago, a year and a half ago,
06:19 our new corporate headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. And that's an example of one of the smartest buildings
06:25 I think everyone here would ever be able to go to, can go to right now.
06:30 Employees go to the office and the elevator just recognizes them, right?
06:38 They have full biometric access attached to their profile. They walk in, the elevator just comes to get them to where they need to be for the day.
06:47 Fully frictionless, automated experience. To get to their meeting room, for example, they open our occupant application.
06:57 They can set, actually similar to how they can do at home, they can go and set the temperature for their liking.
07:03 Really like a temperature control dial, similar to how you know from your own app, whichever one you use,
07:11 to make basically the comfort of the office fit to you.
07:16 So if you talk about occupant experience and frictionless experience, it's very, very delightful.
07:21 And you can see that live in Honeywell's own offices.
07:25 But you can also see that with our customers that we work with globally.
07:29 But then, which I'm really interested to go into further more today, is definitely that has to do with indoor air quality and sustainability and comfort levels.
07:40 Because they all very much tied together and they connect the person, the occupant, the employee, the person that live and breathe in the office,
07:49 to those kind of like systems we usually don't think about, those building management systems, the controls, the sensors, the systems,
07:58 that basically make that all happen.
08:01 And I'm sure we'll get to that a little bit later.
08:03 Oh, yeah. Well, we'll get to that just after this.
08:05 I want to remind folks or welcome anyone who's just come in.
08:08 My name is Jason Pfeiffer. I'm the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
08:11 And I am here with Donny Stern, a senior director at Honeywell Business Technologies.
08:16 And we're talking about the office of the future.
08:18 Right now, Donny is at the heart of developing technologies that are driving what the future of the office experience is,
08:26 based on the needs of the people who are working there and the tenants who are occupying those spaces.
08:31 We've talked a bunch already about some interesting new technologies like elevators that recognize who you are and where you're going,
08:38 which sounds crazy cool.
08:40 But, Donny, also, you just teed up sustainability and thinking about things like air quality and how offices can have less of an environmental impact.
08:50 So I'd love to hear more of that.
08:51 And then also, as you're talking, folks, if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see in the office of the future,
08:56 I think it would be fascinating to see it in the comments.
08:58 So drop it in and maybe we'll bring it into the conversation as we talk.
09:01 But, Donny, pick up that thread about sustainability in the office.
09:05 Sure. So if you think about sustainability, there's maybe two sources that feed into that.
09:11 One is the environment, the environment and the need to help the emissions and reduce emissions to a spot of the environment,
09:20 responsibility and employees and companies alike are in that mission together.
09:26 So we also all of the Fortune 500 companies or most of them and many, many companies around the world announced carbon neutrality and net zero in an effort to really help reduce our impact and their impact on the on the environment.
09:40 And you have the government from government regulations and government incentives.
09:45 And then you also have the employees, people like you and I and everybody here that they want to work for a brand and for a company that advance those materials and those initiatives.
09:58 But also make sure when they go to the office and they participate and they consume that outputs of that company, they are sustainable as well.
10:09 So within those trends, you get into how sustainability are basically impacting the office, because remember, in offices, impact alone is 37 percent of the entire world direct CO2 emissions.
10:22 That's a lot just from the office environment.
10:25 So technologies that basically the honeywell is in the front of developing and implementing right now are doing with very, very sufficient measures that I'm happy to get into ways to reduce emissions to make the office more sustainable.
10:42 But and that's the most important part, not only without sacrificing comfort, but while increasing comfort, which usually will be either that or that.
10:51 You increase sustainability and you decrease people's comfort, the hotter, the colder.
10:56 And we have systems that able to do that.
10:59 And we could get into that. But that's where the true sustainability pools are coming from.
11:08 Yeah, well, I'd love for you to pick that up more and tell us about some of the specific technologies and maybe even let's let's do a kind of sustainable day in the life, if you will.
11:18 If I walk into a office that's well equipped with all of the sustainable technology that's been built because it's thinking about environmental impact and it's also thinking about my needs as an employee.
11:31 What am I experiencing? What am I doing?
11:33 And for those who just joined us again, we're talking about what is inside the office of the future. And Donny Stern is a senior director at Honeywell Business Technologies is helping us see what it is like to walk into an office that is equipped for sustainability using the most forward thinking technologies.
11:52 Jason, that's a great question.
11:54 And honestly, if you walk into an office outfitted with those two with those all those technologies, which I'll just say, hopefully what you feel is comfortable to feel that they're in direct quality.
12:04 You'll feel that it's well lit and you're very comfortable to do your work and to go about your business.
12:11 And you're also going to see if the customer choose to a host of digital signage and applications that let you know what is the impact of that building system that Honeywell and the customer implemented together in the building.
12:25 But other than that, what's really interesting is what happened in the background.
12:29 So what happened is the back one is what what happened in the background is that advanced sensors from weather occupancy, live occupancy, predicted occupancy, CO2, PM 2.5, which is a measure for participle in indoor air quality.
12:51 All of those work together into the most advanced building management systems and basically feed into live and forecasted kind of way into a cloud based system that basically create autonomous controls.
13:10 So it's really interesting. And we recently launched a forge for buildings platform, which recently basically what it does, you're going to go into the office where people are not there right now because it's a hybrid workplace.
13:24 That space will be automatically reduced footprint, reduced age, reduced indoor air quality.
13:31 Well, the place is not in use and not forecasted in use. And then when the machine, when machine learning and prediction algorithms and live occupancy see that those spaces, booking systems, all of those work together are about to be in use.
13:46 Those controls coming together to optimize and Honeywell has been a leader in building optimization for more than 100 years.
13:53 Now they come together to optimize the best levels of comfort and sustainability to make people basically feel that's in the right temperature and the right indoor air quality without sacrificing their, without sacrificing sustainability goals.
14:08 So all of that is happening in concert in the background and basically fed into that facility manager and building owner.
14:14 Donnie, that's incredible stuff because one, it's just so thoughtful, but also I think that sometimes people think, oh, to be sustainable is to reduce comfort or reduce something that I'm familiar with, or just sit in a hot room for a while.
14:32 And you're saying, no, no, no, it's not any of that. It's actually just being incredibly intentional about how space is used.
14:39 And that requires really great technology that is monitoring, not just how the space is used, but when the space is used and for what purpose the space is used.
14:49 And to really build that all into an office is pretty incredible.
14:53 I'd love for you to share maybe a few other things that people can think about or expect, or maybe some things that are being developed into the future, though.
15:02 I just want to say, bat on me. I keep messing up your title.
15:06 This is Donnie Stern, Senior Director of Honeywell Building Technologies, not Business Technologies.
15:11 But I'm Jason Pfeiffer. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
15:15 We're having a fascinating conversation with Donnie Stern of Honeywell Building Technologies about the office of the future.
15:21 And we're currently talking about sustainability and how these offices are built, are being designed, and the technology is being developed to make sure that sustainability isn't just some add-on so that there can be a box checked,
15:34 but is really being woven into the very way in which we're using about and thinking about the office. Right, Donnie?
15:40 Yeah, absolutely. And we're mentioning building being designed.
15:44 It's really interesting, and it's very exciting times to be at Honeywell because we're really at the front of implementing, designing, and implementing those technologies.
15:53 But when you think about it, it's not just about the shiny brand new building that is open and we're designing from scratch.
15:59 Yeah, those buildings are fully electrified. They're going to be the most sustainable buildings.
16:04 But most of the built environment is already here.
16:07 And the World Economic Forum says that most buildings, 80% of today's buildings, will still be here in 2050.
16:13 All of that existing buildings right now are in need to transform because of sustainability and the new expectation for indoor air quality and comfort.
16:23 But at the same time, hybrid workplaces here, employees, occupants, they expect more from the office environment, frictionless and occupant experience solutions.
16:33 So the current built environment has to change.
16:37 Current built environment is rapidly evolving and the need for those technologies we're developing.
16:42 And what I'm mostly proud of that we can do in Honeywell is not just take the fully brand new electrified building and connect it to the best platform,
16:50 but actually take that current built environment with systems that are there for 50, 20.
16:55 We're just working with a building that was opened 50 years ago and is working with us to transform their building controls and systems.
17:04 We do that in a way to get systems like our Forge for Buildings platform,
17:09 like our recent platform that we just launched with Forge Carbon and Energy Management,
17:15 that basically tap into existing building systems.
17:18 It doesn't even matter if your building management system is Honeywell or it's other building management systems that exist in the market.
17:24 We go on top of them, connect them into our platform,
17:27 allow you to bring all of those autonomous controls that create not only building level,
17:33 but also portfolio wide level and not just monitoring, but autonomous controls that optimize it for you day and night with thousands of micro-adoptions all the time.
17:44 So think about how powerful that is, especially when a lot of the workforce that used to manage those buildings is retiring.
17:50 And it's just the right time to get those systems that allows all of that knowledge that is living to be transferred to the new generation that is coming and can utilize such systems to do all of those controls.
18:05 We pull them up, we put it to the building manager, to the portfolio level, to the building owners, to the tenants for the sustainability goals.
18:13 So it's really all about what you can do, but how can you do it in the most cost efficient way, the fastest way to impact the environment today.
18:23 And Honeywell is ready for those solutions.
18:26 And it's honestly a very exciting area to be in.
18:29 Donny, we've got a really interesting question from a viewer that I want to read to you.
18:33 Anita wrote, I wonder if it's possible to elevate people's emotional well-being by adjusting comfort of the workplace.
18:40 How interesting.
18:41 I bet that sustainability actually plays some role there because people would feel that they're participating in something that's incredibly thoughtful and has a better impact on the world.
18:55 But I wonder what else has come up in either the research or the technology development that can speak to emotional well-being in the office.
19:02 Is there anything you want to point out?
19:04 Absolutely.
19:05 And thank you, Anita.
19:06 And thank you for that great question.
19:08 It's right.
19:09 It's not just about what is the sustainability impact or the occupant experience.
19:14 In fact, it's people well-being.
19:16 Honeywell actually has a very strong partnership with the Well Foundation that is doing the well certification for buildings.
19:23 Honeywell is actually part of that initiative because the well-being of employees in the office is so important.
19:30 So absolutely using technologies to impact the lighting is correlated to your well-being.
19:38 Not just the type of lighting you have, but also how the color of the light, the temperature of the light, all of that can now be adjusted compared to indoor, outdoor weather conditions into the individual preference of that specific employee.
20:01 So yeah, absolutely using adjusting comfort for the well-being of employees is absolutely a goal and is, I will say, equally important to the other goals.
20:11 So thank you for that.
20:12 And definitely something not only within our line of thinking, we actually within our occupant applications feed live feedback on well-being and happiness of employees directly into building systems and directly into the algorithms of our software.
20:29 Oh, that's incredible.
20:30 I love the idea of the controlling individually for lighting.
20:34 It redefines the experience so that people aren't just sitting underneath fluorescent lights all day, which is just such a soul-sucking experience.
20:43 Donny, before we wrap, I wanted to make sure to ask you about electric vehicle charging, because I know that's something that you guys are thinking a lot about over there.
20:51 And of course, it plugs into the bigger subject of sustainability.
20:55 So what does that look like now and into the future?
21:00 Yeah, I personally drive an EV and I know many others that do.
21:04 EV is exploding.
21:05 The reason that EV is exploding is the cost of gas, sustainability, and impact to the environment.
21:11 And what you see is more and more employees are now switching to EV.
21:15 And we also saw the US president and the incentives put together by the government to switch to EV if it's infrastructure or if it's even for vehicle owners to switch to EV.
21:28 What happens with that for building owners is they're in a tough place, right?
21:32 Because for occupants to come to the building, they a lot of times need to know that they can charge their electric vehicle.
21:40 It's part of those pain points or gain points by going to the building that I mentioned.
21:44 But that creates a real problem for building owners and managers, because now you have what kind of investment do I make in what kind of EV charges to make me ready for the next 10, 15, 20 years?
21:57 How do I manage all of that with the rest of the controls and my demand from the grid?
22:02 I don't want to make too much investment in more and more grid capacity.
22:09 And also the government might not let me because there's a lot of pressure on that grid.
22:13 So Honeywell recently launched a host of EV solutions for our customers that go directly within the building management systems to balance the loads of EV, to plan the charging.
22:28 We'll work with you anywhere from your charging needs to how they work well with your building management controls, with your sustainability goals, with the grid requirements, the power needs of the building.
22:39 And basically at the end of the day, you want to be sustainable, but you also want to make sure that you have a business case, that you could have something that is there for the long run.
22:51 So again, EV is coming and it's the city that I live, the airport just installed 100 or 150 EV chargers just in the airport parking.
23:02 So we're going to see more and more of that in office buildings, in commercial properties, as employees and a lot of switching into EV.
23:11 So again, those solutions are available today and a lot of them are continuing to develop by Honeywell and the rest of the industry as well.
23:19 Donny, your question or your answer to Anita's question a moment ago, asking about elevating people's emotional well-being was great.
23:29 And I just wanted to read her response as a way to wrap here, because what Anita wrote was, thank you.
23:33 That's most important for people to feel good and to elevate the mood of an employee.
23:38 And Anita, I want to thank you for that, because as we've been having this conversation, Donny, about the future of the office, it is, of course, really a conversation about technology.
23:47 But underneath all that, it has to be a conversation about people and about people's experiences.
23:52 And the technology is just there to make the to create the best environment for people to do great work and to feel good about it.
24:02 And so as we think about the technological future of the office, of course, what we're really doing is talking about people,
24:09 which brings us back to how we started, where the first thing that you guys are doing over at Honeywell is trying to understand people's needs and pain points so that you can develop technologies that are going to alleviate them.
24:21 So this has been a fascinating conversation. And Donny, I really appreciate it.
24:25 Where can people learn more before we go about the future of the office and maybe the work that you guys at Honeywell are doing?
24:34 Yeah, people should Honeywell has a breadth of resources on our websites on Honeywell.com.
24:42 There's a whole building commercial buildings area here in any other industry.
24:45 You can go to any building technologies if you're interested in airport technologies, commercial properties, education facilities.
24:54 Honeywell is basically verticalized in a way that we offer the most advanced sustainability solutions, comfort, EV charging, everything we talked about today, occupant experience,
25:07 the force for buildings platform that we recently just launched with additional exciting features.
25:15 But that is all offering across different verticals with the right adoptions to the right customers.
25:20 And finally, I just want to say you mentioned people. It is really about the people.
25:24 And it's not only that we develop those technologies for each of the people that in the office across different personas.
25:32 But that's exactly what employers are thinking about. The reason is, how do we make it better for our employees?
25:38 That's how building owners think about how to make it better for their tenants, which is all of their employees.
25:43 So, again, thank you for having me, Jason, today. That's been such an interesting conversation for me as well.
25:49 Absolutely. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. I'm the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
25:54 I've been joined by Donny Stern, senior director of offering management within Honeywell Building Technologies.
25:59 Donny, thank you and the team at Honeywell for doing the great work you're doing.
26:03 And I look forward to seeing all these technologies and offices today and in the future.
26:07 Absolutely. Thank you so much.
26:09 Thank you.
26:11 (Music)